Which city did Arabs actually found?

Ramla is the honest exception: founded from open ground around 715 CE by the Umayyad caliph Suleiman ibn Abd al-Malik as the capital of Jund Filastin, it is the only major city in the land that Arabs built rather than inherited, and its Arabic name needed no excavating because there was nothing underneath it. Every other city on this site’s list, Jerusalem, Hebron, Gaza, Jaffa, Acre, Shechem, already stood under an older name when Arab armies arrived in the 630s. Ramla alone was raised from bare sand, which is precisely what makes it useful: it shows what a genuinely Arab-founded city in this land actually looks like, and how rare that is.

Ramla الرملة (Arabic, “sandy”) founded c. 715 CE, no earlier name beneath it, and Hebrew simply adopted the Arabic word: רַמְלָה

Who founded it, and why

Ramla’s founder is not disputed. Sometime between 705 and 717 CE, the Umayyad caliph Suleiman ibn Abd al-Malik, then governor of Jund Filastin and soon to be caliph himself, built a new administrative capital a few kilometers from the older town of Lydda and moved the seat of government, the mint, and much of the population there deliberately. The Arabic name means simply “sandy,” describing the dunes it was built on. It is the cleanest case anywhere in the region’s history of a Muslim ruler founding a city outright rather than renaming one that already existed, which is exactly why it earns its own entry rather than joining the pattern.

What was built: the archaeology

Ramla’s monuments date almost entirely from its two centuries as a caliphal capital. The Abbasids, who inherited the city from the Umayyads, built the Pool of Arches, a vaulted underground cistern traditionally dated to 789 CE under Caliph Harun al-Rashid, still intact and open to visitors, along with a network of barrel-vaulted subterranean reservoirs across the city. An Umayyad-era mosaic floor uncovered at the site shows geometric patterns and what excavators describe as the oldest known prayer-niche imagery in Islamic art. The White Mosque, built in the early 8th century and rebuilt after earthquakes, still stands with its freestanding minaret, the so-called Tower of the Forty, added by the Mamluks in 1318. None of this is contested. It is also the closest thing this land has to purely Islamic-period archaeology with no earlier layer beneath it, and it stands in sharp contrast to the sequence of temples, churches and mosques stacked on top of each other at older sites; see Hebron for what that stacking looks like elsewhere.

Who ruled it, era by era

Ramla’s fortunes tracked its rulers closely. It served as the Umayyad and then Abbasid capital of the district through the 8th and 9th centuries, and repeated earthquakes, most severely in 1033 and 1068, leveled large parts of the city and forced repeated rebuilding. Crusaders captured it in 1099 on their march to Jerusalem, renamed it Rama, and made it the seat of a Latin bishopric; medieval Christian pilgrims, working from little more than the similarity of the name, mistakenly identified it with the biblical Ramah and with Arimathea, hometown of Joseph of Arimathea in the Gospels, a piece of manufactured pedigree grafted onto a city that in reality was less than four centuries old at the time. A Crusader cathedral built for St. John was later converted into the Great Mosque under Mamluk rule, a straightforward church-to-mosque conversion that this site records without flinching, the same honesty it applies to conversions running the other direction elsewhere. Saladin retook the city in 1187, the Mamluks restored it in the 14th century, and it settled under four centuries of Ottoman rule, part of the wider Ottoman administration of the caliphate’s Palestine district, as a modest market town far smaller than its early medieval peak.

Population, Mandate to 1948

Ottoman tax records describe Ramla as a middling Muslim town with a Christian minority and only a scattering of Jewish residents for most of its history. British Mandate censuses tracked its growth in the 20th century: roughly 7,300 residents in 1922, rising to about 15,000 by the mid-1940s, overwhelmingly Muslim Arab with a sizable Christian minority. That changed in July 1948. During Operation Dani, the same offensive that took neighboring Lydda, Israeli forces captured Ramla on 12 July, and most of its remaining Arab residents were expelled alongside Lydda’s, together the single largest displacement of the 1948 war; the full record, including what is genuinely contested about that week and what is not, is at the dedicated article on the Lydda and Ramle expulsion, in a war the Arab side entered by choice. Only a small remnant of the Arab population stayed. Jewish immigrants resettled the city in the years after, part of the broader wave of aliyah that repopulated towns across the coastal plain.

Ramla today

Ramla is today a mixed Israeli city of roughly 80,000, about three-quarters Jewish and one-quarter Arab, mostly Muslim with a Christian minority descended from families who stayed or returned after 1948. It functions as an ordinary Israeli municipality, its residents voting in the same elections and sitting on the same city council, an outcome not obviously compatible with the framing that treats 1948 as a single, unbroken act of erasure. It sits a few minutes from Ben Gurion Airport and hosts one of Israel’s central prisons and district courts, an unglamorous administrative role that, oddly enough, is a direct echo of the job Caliph Suleiman built it to do thirteen centuries ago.

Two false claims, and the test that defeats both

The propaganda this page exists to answer runs in one of two directions. The first claims that every city in the land is, at bottom, an ancient Arab city that Israel colonized: Ramla is the one place where that claim happens to be true, and its genuine Arab founding is the control case that makes the falseness of the same claim everywhere else visible, since Jerusalem, Hebron, Gaza, Jaffa, Acre and Shechem all carried older, non-Arab names centuries or millennia before 715 CE. The second direction runs the opposite way: medieval Christian tradition tried to graft a false ancient pedigree onto Ramla itself, mistaking a young Arab administrative capital for the biblical Ramah. Both errors are corrected the same way, by checking what the record actually says a city’s name was before the people making the claim arrived. Ramla passes that check honestly as young and Arab-founded. Jerusalem, Hebron, Gaza, Jaffa, Acre and Shechem do not pass it the same way, and that is the whole point of putting Ramla on this list at all.

What was Lod before it was Lydda? · 1948 expulsion from Lydda and Ramle · Who attacked first in the 1948 war · Is Hebron a Jewish city or a Palestinian city? · Was the creation of Israel in 1948 ethnic cleansing? · The hardest case, on the main site

Sources

From The cities on the main site.