in waterless desert and sent the person to be baptized in water. No longer a residential bishopric, Ascalon is today listed by the Catholic Church as a titular see. Early Islamic period During the Muslim conquest of Palestine begun in 633–634, Ascalon (called Asqalan by the Arabs) became one of the last Byzantine cities in the region to fall. It may have been temporarily occupied by Amr ibn al-As, but definitively surrendered to Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan (who later founded the Umayyad Caliphate) not long after he captured the Byzantine district capital of Caesarea in 640. The Byzantines reoccupied Asqalan during the Second Muslim Civil War (680–692), but the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik () recaptured and fortified it. A son of Caliph Sulayman (), whose family resided in Palestine, was buried in the city. An inscription found in the city indicates that the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi ordered the construction of a mosque with a minaret in Asqalan in 772. Asqalan prospered under the Fatimid Caliphate and contained a mint and secondary naval base. Along with a few other coastal towns in Palestine, it remained in Fatimid hands when most of Islamic Syria was conquered by the Seljuks. However, during this period, Fatimid rule over Asqalan was periodically reduced to nominal authority over the city's governor. In 1091, a couple of years after a campaign by grand vizier Badr al-Jamali to reestablish Fatimid control over the region, the head of Husayn ibn Ali (a grandson of the Islamic prophet Muhammad) was "rediscovered", prompting Badr to order the construction of a new mosque and mashhad (shrine or mausoleum) to hold the relic, known as the Shrine of Husayn's Head. (According to another source, the shrine was built in 1098 by the Fatimid vizier al-Afdal Shahanshah.) The mausoleum was described as the most magnificent building in Ashkelon. In the British Mandate period it was a "large maqam on top of a hill" with no tomb, but a fragment of a pillar showing the place where the head had been buried. In July 1950, the shrine was destroyed at the instructions of Moshe Dayan in accordance with a 1950s Israeli policy of erasing Muslim historical sites within Israel. Around 2000, a modest marble mosque was constructed on the site by Mohammed Burhanuddin, an Indian Islamic leader of the Dawoodi Bohras. Crusaders, Ayyubids, and Mamluks During the Crusades, Asqalan (known to the Crusaders as Ascalon)