Destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

At Easter in 1008, Al-Hakim started tightening controls on religious freedoms in Jerusalem, forbidding Christians from making their annual Palm Sunday procession from Bethany.

[5] On 29 September 1009, Al-Hakim ordered a governor of Ramla called Yarukh to demolish the area around Constantine's original Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Yarukh, along with his son Yusuf, Al-Husayn ibn Zahir al-Wazzan and Abu'l-Farawis Al-Dayf, were among those who started destroying various buildings.

Some Christians believe the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is built on the site of Calvary or Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified, near a rock-cut room that Helena and Macarius identified as the location of the resurrection.

[1] The destruction was chronicled by Yahya ibn Sa'id of Antioch who noted it "cast down as far as the foundations" and the rock cut tomb was demolished in the attempt to "cause all trace of it to disappear".

[10] Although the crusades happened almost a century after the desecration (and were motivated by various other complex political intrigues), with the church rebuilt and pilgrimages from Europe resuming during that period, it was still very much in the public mind as a cause.

[12] Adémar de Chabannes wrote about the events, drawing associations between Al-Hakim (who is considered important to the Druze faith and self-proclaimed himself to be the representative of the Mahdi[13]) and the Antichrist, blaming the Jews for inspiring his desecration of the Holy Sepulchre.

[8] Bar Hebraeus and Severas ibn Muqaffa report accounts of a Christian monk named John who had become disenchanted with the patriarch of Jerusalem informed the caliph of the fraud to disparage him.