When Jerusalem was conquered in 635 AD, the second caliph Omar Ibn Al-Kattab refused to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, despite an invitation from the Christian patriarch Sophronius, for fear that his men invoke the precedent to turn the place of worship into a mosque and thus deprive the Christians of their right to freely practice their religion.

Although 1,400 years have passed, people were sometimes more civilised and more tolerant then than in our modern world, where passions and tensions seem to have translated into a return of fanaticism and religious intolerance.