The Fada'il Bayt al-Maqdis was a popular genre of religious literature before the Crusades. This literature extols Jerusalem’s religious symbolism and sanctity from the Muslims’ perspective, starting with major Biblical episodes and events (e.g. binding of Isaac, building of the Temple, association of Mary and Jesus with the Temple), and ending with Muhammad’s Night Journey and Ascension and the Islamic conquest of the city. Two main works from the eleventh century have survived (by al-Wasiti and Abu al-Ma`ali)—though we also have evidence pointing to the existence of at least one more work on the subject which was known in the medieval period but is now lost. Moreover, most of the narratives found in these works are also encountered in other genres of Islamic religious scholarship (e.g. tafsir, geographical dictionaries, prosopographies, historical annals, etc.). Jerusalem’s fall to the Crusades in 1099 only fueled the interest in its Fada'il traditions, as evidenced by the increase in the number of compilations on the topic during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods. But in some of these works, we encounter a new attitude regarding Jerusalem’s sanctity that eliminates the biblical dimension and focuses instead on exclusively “Islamic” narratives: verses from the Qur'an and traditions from Muhammad’s life that relate to Jerusalem. This paper analyzes why in some Crusader-era works Jerusalem’s pre-Islamic biblical legacy is eliminated, which incidentally was familiar to the authors of these works due to their exposure to the pre-Crusader Fada'il works. It is my contention that this attitude originated with important Hanbali scholars from Jerusalem, whose families escaped in 1099 to Damascus (such as Diya' al-Din al-Maqdisi’s (d. 1245) Fada'il Bayt al-Maqdis). The Crusaders’ sack of Jerusalem and massacre of the Muslim population as well as their continuous occupation gave rise to this tendency among exiled Hanbalis, who were also instrumental in the Counter-Crusade movement under Nur al-Din, Saladin, and the Ayyubids. This approach to the Fada'il of Jerusalem became well established in Hanbali circles in Syria and Egypt; for instance, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), in Qa`ida fi Ziyarat Bayt al-Maqdis, was influenced by these works when he condemned “excessive” and “un-Islamic” customs and rituals by Muslim pilgrims in association with Biblical sites in and around Jerusalem. In contrast, Fada'il of Jerusalem works by Shafi`i scholars, who were not from Jerusalem, do not share this Hanbali anxiety; they included the biblical traditions and were tolerant of pilgrimage practices there.