Culture : Muslim Shrine Will Soon Be Good as Gold : A massive project to gild the Dome of the Rock has weathered riots and political disputes, with help from King Hussein.

Jordan’s King Hussein had to sell off a London villa to do it. And a high-tech Northern Ireland firm had to work through more than a year of riots, curfews and religious clashes to complete what it calls the largest and most complex electroplating job of its kind ever attempted.

But, as 40 Palestinian and foreign workmen put the finishing golden touches on the ancient, 15-foot-high crescent moon that soon will grace again the top of the third-holiest site of Islam, one of the world’s most ambitious religious renovation jobs is nearing completion.

Next Monday, in a ceremony in Amman, the capital of Jordan, far from the 5,000 glittering new gold plates that adorn Jerusalem’s ancient Dome of the Rock, King Hussein is scheduled to inaugurate the refurbished dome over the sacred shrine that Muslims believe marks the place--the very rock--where the Prophet Mohammed departed earth and ascended to Heaven.

The fact that Jordan’s Hashemite king, the official custodian of the Dome of the Rock and financier of its renovation, cannot travel to the site to commemorate or even gaze upon the product of his $8-million investment, says much about the tribulations and politics that have accompanied the restoration, problems rooted in the shrine’s location.

The Dome and the adjacent Al Aqsa Mosque sit in the eye of a political storm that has raged for more than a quarter of a century around the most disputed piece of land in the disputed city of Jerusalem--the place Israelis call the Temple Mount, and the Muslims call Haram-esh-Sherif. Jews hold holy the Western Wall, which delineates one side of the mount, as a remnant of the temple built by King Herod.

The Islamic shrines, which draw millions of Muslim worshipers each year, are, in fact, under Israeli occupation and control in the heart of the walled Old City that Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. It is land that the Israelis have vowed never to relinquish. But the land is also claimed by the Palestinians who lived in the area through a succession of regimes and administrations that ended with Jordan.

Through all the claims and counterclaims, King Hussein, who is believed by most Muslims to be a direct descendant of the Prophet, remains the uncontested custodian of the Rock, the Dome that covers it and Al Aqsa Mosque. And that is a role so important to the king that he sold off part of his family fortune to refurbish the treasures, and flatly refused a counter-bid to repair the leaking and sagging dome by King Fahd, ruler of oil-rich Saudi Arabia and custodian of Islam’s two other holiest sites in Mecca and Medina.

Against this backdrop, Patrick O’Hare, a veteran of complex Middle East engineering projects, has successfully navigated through the politics of a city sacred to three religions. He is now nearing completion of a job he considers “the highlight of my career.”

For O’Hare and his Belfast-based Mivan Overseas Ltd., replating the Dome of the Rock was not just another contract. It was a far greater challenge and far more rewarding, he said, than Mivan’s last construction contract at Euro Disney. And far more meaningful than the construction of a full-sized replica of the Titanic that his company recently began.

Not even the three grand palaces O’Hare and his firm built for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein came close, he said.

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The challenges of the Dome were largely technical. Never before, O’Hare said, has a fixed object as large as the Dome of the Rock ever been gold-plated in place.

“The process has been used before--there were a couple domes done like this in California--but it had never been done on this scale before anywhere in the world,” the engineer said with pride, as workmen in an adjacent pre-fab workshop at the foot of the monument touched up the golden crescent that will be reinstalled atop the dome on Inauguration Day.

To do the job, O’Hare’s company imported two giant cranes, 190 pounds of gold, 1,500 new brass sheets and 5,000 copper joints from Britain. Mivan also brought in timber from the West African country of Gambia to reconstruct the support structure under the dome. Workers imported and assembled on-site the sophisticated electroplating machinery that O’Hare said accomplished the task at the rate of 40-square-meters per day--”I’d like to think it’s a world record,” he said.

“It was in bad shape,” O’Hare said of the dome, which was last restored not with gold plating but anodized aluminum in 1956. “The dome itself was leaking, and the lower structure was falling apart.”

One of the greatest challenges was to make sure the dome wasn’t too shiny. O’Hare said the king wanted a traditional look, a “relatively matte finish.” Furthermore, the engineer explained, “if it were a really bright finish, it would be like a mirror off the sun. From a distance, it would look black.”

As things turned out, the politics inherent in the site presented O’Hare and his workers with surprisingly few complications.

“It hasn’t caused us any major problems,” he said of frequent protest strikes by Palestinian factions that have shut down most of East Jerusalem and the Old City for reasons unrelated to the work on the shrine.

“We normally work on the strike days, especially because of the nature of the project. They treat us very well. They give us special VIP treatment.”

In fact, O’Hare added, for the first time in his life he has been stopped on the street and asked for his autograph, which he routinely signs as “Captain of the Dome Rockers.”

The most memorable moment of the operation, O’Hare recalled, was when his team removed the canvas that veiled the dome during most of the restoration. “People started cheering,” he said, “and it really was very moving.”

Few are moved by the sight of the glowing new dome as regularly and as deeply as Sheikh Mohamed Hussein. He is the grand imam at the Dome of the Rock, and his office is just a few dozen yards from the shrine.

“Definitely, it is a beautiful, positive feeling every morning I see it,” he said. “It reminds me I am in al-Quds (the Arabic name for Jerusalem), and it reminds me that I am of Islam.

“We are very happy with this,” the imam observed. “We are convinced that this particular plating is the very best money can buy.”

And, he said, the work made no significant changes to a shrine that is “the only Islamic landmark that has remained virtually unchanged through all the centuries.” It was completed in 691, about 60 years after the death of the Prophet.

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What has changed, though, are the political developments that have swirled around the shrine in the seven months since Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed their historic declaration calling for Palestinian autonomy in the occupied territories.

The Israelis and PLO leaders agreed to discuss the fate of the Old City, that ancient, walled part of Jerusalem that includes the Temple Mount and the Islamic shrines, over the next five years. In the meantime, the violence spawned by that political process have impacted on the Dome of the Rock.

The imam said security men have been forced to ban all non-Muslims from visiting the site for more than a month after a Jewish settler killed about 30 Palestinians inside Hebron’s Ibrahim Mosque, another holy site shared by both Muslims and Jews.

“On the one hand,” the imam said of the restrictions, “it was to protect the Muslims, so they could pray without getting massacred, and also we were afraid that the anger of the Muslims could endanger the non-Muslims who visit here.”

But now that the dome is nearly finished, the imam said, the Islamic board that oversees the shrine is reconsidering the ban.

“We are hoping to lift the embargo on non-Muslims,” he said, “not because the situation under (Israeli) occupation is getting better, but it is because the visitors who come here from so far away must be able to see this beautiful place as it is now.”

One man who cannot come, the imam conceded, is King Hussein. Jordan has no diplomatic relations with Israel, and King Hussein says he will not set foot in Israel or the occupied territories until the two nations conclude a peace pact.

Imam Hussein said he has no religious objection to the inauguration ceremony that King Hussein plans in Amman next Monday.

“King Hussein, because he paid for this work, has a right to celebrate anywhere he likes,” the imam said.

“But we will celebrate only after Israel ends its occupation of our lands. We will not celebrate this renovation. We will celebrate liberation.”