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Seal of the Sheiq ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Tamimi

Posted at: 2018-10-14 by admin

The events in the past decades prove that Muslim authorities on the Temple Mount, which are officially controlled by Jordan but controlled by the Palestinian authority and Hamas in practice, have no concern of preserving even their own archaeological heritage, or advancing education, science, and culture at the site.

In 1999, the Muslim authorities excavated a gigantic pit in the south-eastern area of the Temple Mount using bulldozers and removing 400 truckloads of dirt. This was done without any archaeological control or supervision, and, as a result, we established the Temple Mount Sifting Project in order to save, preserve, and study the vast amount of archaeological artifacts buried in the soil that was discarded. We retrieved hundreds of thousands of artifacts from this soil dating to the First and Second Jewish Temple periods and onwards, including the Christian and Muslim era.

A very interesting Muslim artifact that was found is a seal, dating from the 18th century, of the promstampinent Muslim Qadi (Judge), who also served as the Jerusalem deputy Mufti. His name was Sheiq ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Tamimi. The current Waqf administrator, Sheiq Mohammed Azzam al-khatib al-Tamimi, the current director of the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, is from the same family, and may be one of his descendants. It is ironic that Jewish archaeologists are the ones who preserve the Islamic Waqf heritage that was neglected and discarded by the Waqf itself.

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