FOR the three great monotheistic religions of the Middle East, Jerusalem is more than a holy city. It symbolises their hopes, their dreams and their fears, their visions, their past, present and future.

Jerusalem is not just a strong, fortress built on a rocky outcrop in a barren desert. For 3,000 years - at least - it has been that holy place where heaven meets earth and earth meets heaven.

For Jews, it is more than the capital built by David 3,000 years ago. It is the Rock of Paradise. Here Adam was buried; here Abraham came to sacrifice Isaac; here is the site of not just one but three Temples; and for the most orthodox of Jews today it is still the place where the Shekinah, the presence of God, still hovers above the Temple Mount. It is every Jew's fervent prayer to pray, if not this year, then "next year in Jerusalem".

For Christians, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre still stands over the spot where Christ was crucified, where He was buried, and where He rose again. For Muslims, it is here that the Prophet Muhammad left his footprint on earth when he ascended to the Seventh Heaven.

For medievalists, Jerusalem was the ornphalos, the navel stone of the universe. But if the Peace of Jerusalem has been at the heart of the prayers of all three religions, it has also been at the heart of their cruel and murderous struggles with each other.

Andrew Sinclair's book comes not just as the Israelis mark the 3,000th anniversary of the city's foundation, but as western Europeans remember the 900th anniversary of the First Crusade which was proclaimed by Pope Urban in 1095, and saw the capture of Jerusalem four years later in 1099.

When the Crusaders entered the city, 70,000 Muslims sought refuge in the al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. Sinclair quotes vividly from Raymond of Aguilers, and his notorious account of the slaughter that day:

"What happened there? If I tell the truth it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it be enough to say this much, at least, that in the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins.

The Crusaders' first proclaimed object was to secure the free passage of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem. Except for brief interludes, the city's Muslim rulers had respected both Christians and Jews, who were singled out in the Qu'ran as "People of the Book".

But when the Crusaders arrived in Jerusalem there were no such constraints. They massacred the Muslims, and the Jews, and deposed the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who had his seat in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Jerusalem was not for Muslims, who had tolerated Christians within the walls; Jerusalem was not for Jews, who had built the Temple and much of the city; Jerusalem was not even for Orthodox Christians, the descendants of the disciples; it was to be a Latin city, the capital of a Frankish kingdom.

Sinclair gives prosaic and poetic accounts of the place Jerusalem holds in the hearts of Jew, Christian and Muslim. He takes us through legend, dream, and a little history and some scripture, and sob it is a pity that the illustrations were not better chosen.

But this is not a guide book or an archaeological account of the city: that is best left to Biblical archaeologists such as the Cork born Dominican, Father Jerome Murphy O'Connor of the Ecole Biblique. Nor is this a history of the city or the Crusades: Sinclair concedes that the masters in Crusader history are Stephen Runciman, Karen Armstrong and Jonathan Riley Smith.

If this book suffers, then it suffers from too much myth and not enough politics. There are lengthy accounts of Masonic myth and ritual, but the last few decades and the last few years of politics in the Middle East are passed over too quickly.

Sinclair is only too aware of the dangers to regional stability posed by the new militancy in Islam. But while he appreciates many of the values of liberal Zionism, he has not wrestled with the concepts or allure of modern Islamists, and is too easy in his dismissal of the right wing in Israel.

Modern Israel is as much a product of Europe and North America as it is of religious hope and fervour. But as Israelis found out at the end of last year with the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, the threat from Islamic fundamentalism is not the only threat to the peace of Jerusalem and to peaceful co existence in the Middle East.