Ma'aman Allah (Mamilla) Cemetery () is a historic Muslim cemetery in West Jerusalem that dates back to the Crusades, and lies just to the west of the north-west corner of the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, near the New Gate. The cemetery, at the center of which lies the Mamilla Pool, contains the remains of figures from the early Islamic period, several Sufi shrines and Mamluk-era tombs. The cemetery grounds also contain the bodies of thousands of Christians killed in the pre-Islamic era, as well as several tombs from the time of the Crusades.
Its identity as an Islamic cemetery is noted by Arab and Persian writers as early as the 11th century, and it has been characterized as "the largest and most important Muslim cemetery in all of Palestine". It was used as a burial site up until 1927 when the Supreme Muslim Council decided to preserve it as a historic site. Following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the cemetery and other waqf properties in West Jerusalem fell under the control of Israeli governmental bodies. The Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs stated in 1948 that the cemetery is: "one of the most prominent Muslim cemeteries, where seventy thousand Muslim warriors of [Saladin’s] armies are interred along with many Muslim scholars... Israel, will always know to protect and respect this site."
A number of buildings, a road and other public facilities, such as a park, a parking lot and public lavatories have since been constructed on the cemetery grounds, destroying grave markers and tombs. A plan to build a Museum of Tolerance on part of the cemetery grounds, announced in 2004, aroused much controversy and faced several stop work orders before being given final approval in July 2011.
Name
The cemetery shares its name with the Mamilla Pool, located at its center. A church dedicated to "St Mamilla" was located at the same site in the early Byzantine and Islamic periods.
Vincent and Abel (1922), supported by Pringle (1993), see it as plausible that a Byzantine-period pious woman by the Latin name of Mamilla sponsored the construction of a pool connected to the Patriarch's Pool next to the Church of the Resurrection, and that she became venerated as a saint to whom a church was dedicated next to her pool. They see it as more likely that the church was named after the pool than the other way around.
Muslim popular etymologies
Mamilla is mentioned as an Islamic cemetery as early as the 11th century in Concerning the (religious) status of Jerusalem, a treatise penned by Abu Bakr b. Muhammad b. Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Wasiti, the preacher of Al Aqsa Mosque in 1019–1020 (AH 410). He gives its name as zaytun al-milla, Arabic for "the olive trees of the religion", which Moshe Gil says was "a commonly used distortion of the name Māmillā," along with bab al-milla (meaning, "the door of the religion").
Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi writes in al-Haqiqa, based on his travels to the region in 1693–1694, that, "It is said that its original name is Ma'man Illah and sometimes it was called Bab Illah [Gate to God]. It is also called 'Zeitun il-Milla'. Its name, according to the Jews, is Beit Milo and to the Christians, Babilla. But it is known to the common people as Mamilla." A similar description appears in James Turner Barclay's The City of the Great King (1857) and he gives the meaning of Ma'man Illah (or Ma-min-ullah, as he transcribes it) as "What is from God!"
History
Byzantine period
During the Byzantine period in Palestine (c. 4th–early 7th centuries), a church dedicated to St Mamilla was established on the same site and it appears to have been used for burials at this time as well. A rather biased account of the aftermath of the Persian capture of Jerusalem in 614 by Strategius, a monk of Mar Saba, says that the bodies of thousands of Christians killed as a result of the Persian siege – 4,518 according to Gregorian translations of the lost Greek original, and 24,518 according to Arabic translations of the same – were found in the Mamilla Pool and buried in caves in and around it.