Sheikh Radwan
|
Sheikh Radwan الشيخ رضوان |
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|---|---|
| Neighborhood | |
| Shaykh Ridwan | |
 Sheikh Radwan
|
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| Coordinates: 31°32′10.67″N 34°27′56.98″E / 31.5362972°N 34.4658278°E | |
| Country |
 Palestine
|
| Governorate | Gaza Governorate |
| City | Gaza |
| Time zone | EET (UTC+2) |
| • Summer (DST) | +3 (UTC) |
Sheikh Radwan (Arabic: الشيخ رضوان) is a district of Gaza City located nearly 3 kilometers (1.9 mi) northwest of the city center. It borders al-Shati camp to the southwest, Rimal to the south, and Jabalia to the east. The Sheikh Radwan Cemetery is located in the district. It contains hundreds of graves for Palestinians killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including Hamas leaders Ahmed Yassin, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, and Said Siam.
The district is named after Sheikh Radwan whose mazar ("mausoleum") is situated on a hilltop in the district with an elevation of 65 meters (213 ft) above sea level. The mausoleum formerly served as a mosque, but is currently inactive. Its walls are constructed from ancient building stones and fragments of marble slabs in secondary use. In the 19th century, it was surrounded by ancient trees. The French explorer Victor Guérin who visited it in 1863, speculated that it could have been an ancient convent, and the gardens around it the remains of its garden.
There are a number of traditions regarding the identity of Sheikh Radwan.Christian scholars identify him as Peter the Iberian and the tomb as Peter's monastery, One local tradition has it that the tomb belongs to the 14th-century wali (Sufi saint) Radwan ibn Raslan, a son of the prominent local sheikh, Muhammad al-Batahi. Another tradition claims that Radwan was the brother of al-Batahi and Sheikh Ijlin who were all descendants of the second Muslim caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab. Prior to the construction of the Sayed al-Hashim Mosque in the al-Daraj Quarter and the modern biographies of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the 19th-century, local Muslim tradition had it that the modern-day tomb of Sheikh Radwan was the burial place of Hashim ibn Abd al-Manaf, Muhammad's great-grandfather. Historian Moshe Sharon attributes the varying traditions to the "tendency of believers to hunt for saints' tombs."
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