The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem (Vintage International)

by Kanan Makiya

  My stepmother was a widow of noble Bedouin stock with two sons from her former marriage. Her husband had been an early Believer who was martyred in the Battle of the Trench, the failed counteroffensive of the Meccans against Muhammad and his followers. Part of her fascination for me as a young boy was that halo of a fallen man’s approval that she carried through her widowhood, and which she composed into a famous lament:

  A mote in your eye, dust blown on the wind?

  Or a place deserted, its people gone?

  To the pool that all men shun in awe

  You have gone, my husband, free of blame

  As the panther goes to his fight, his last,

  Bare fangs and claws his only defense.

  What have we done to you, death,

  That you treat us so?

  I would not complain if you were just,

  But you take the worthy,

  Leaving fools for us.

  As a consequence of her husband’s martyrdom and her eloquence, my stepmother was granted a handsome annuity from the spoils of holy war. But she felt hemmed in by the expectations of widowhood and yearned to move more freely in the new space that marriage opened up for her. In time, she grew very fond of Ka’b, and, I think, he of her.

  Ka’b’s motive was strategic. My mother was right about that. He had become a public figure by then, one to be reckoned with, especially if he was bonded through marriage to an important tribe of the Hijaz. My stepmother-to-be lived in the same quarter of Medina as Umar. Ka’b, never one to overlook his opportunities, had made his approach through his new friend. No one was going to refuse the Prophet’s esteemed Companion, and no one was going to forget that Umar had been the intermediary in the making of the new alliance.

  Umar handled all the arrangements; it was he who suggested that my care be entrusted to Ka’b’s new wife. Thus was my father bound closer to Umar, even as he became irrevocably estranged from my mother. But the cruelest cut came when my father decided to take his new wife, her two sons, and me with him to Jerusalem, leaving my poor mother behind.

  Ka’b was resolute. His first wife had become a burden. She reminded him of all that he wanted to leave behind; she seemed the very incarnation of Ezra’s curse, forever deprived of repose and peace. He would not be dragged down with her, to wallow in guilt because of an ancient transgression. Ka’b was no longer lowly and impoverished like his kinfolk in the Yemen. He was on his way to the city of his dreams, the Holy House he had once thought resided only in Heaven. Through chance and circumstance, he had become a respected counselor to the Caliph. Nothing was going to stop him from walking with the son of Khattab “in the footsteps of the prophets,” as he liked to put it.

  As for my mother, when Ka’b returned to Arabia the following year leading a caravan load of Muslims on pilgrimage and looking for Jewish families to take back with him to resettle in Jerusalem, she was gone. “She joined a caravan headed for San’a,” Ka’b was told. I was about six years old at the time. I never saw my mother again.

  She left behind a letter for my father, dictated to a friend who had scrawled it on a scrap of leather. I have it still, kept in the same chest that Ka’b used to preserve the scrolls he had brought with him from the Yemen:

  “As long as this wheel of fortune turns, nothing remains in its accustomed state, except for the one to whom God grants a respite. May the Creator spare you and me the hostilities of time and its vicissitudes. May you never taste, or even witness, anything like that which I have gone through. May He accept what I have suffered as an atonement for your sins.”

  Coming to Jerusalem

  Umar’s age was come, and with him a faith unknown before that was sweeping empires off their feet.

  Inside the great hall of the Persian King of Kings, where a golden crown studded with rubies and emeralds had once hung, a pulpit stood. Meanwhile, Heraclius, the Emperor of the Christians, was being tormented by a dream in which he saw his defeat at the hands of a circumcised man who called out to his men: “Ride, ye horsemen of God! Lo, the Garden lies yonder before you! Paradise rests in the shadow of your swords!” A multitude rode with him, their numbers stretching into the flatness of the desert, welding it to the sky. Stricken by the clarity of the dream, powerlessness seeped from the dreamer into his armies. By the banks of the Yarmuk, four hundred thousand Byzantines broke ignominiously under the blows of the men of Khalid—that brave son of Walid who would not stop until the going down of the sun. Fifty thousand of the emperor’s men lost their lives to an army one-fifth their number. Awestruck, non-Believers took to whispering to one another in every town and village of Syria.

  Fear of the Arabs had fallen upon the land.

  Heraclius acknowleged defeat as he embarked for Constantinople, saying, “Farewell, Syria, and forever! Ah! that so fair a land should become my enemy’s.” To those left behind, he cried out, “O men of Byzantium, you are going to be slain on a dungheap because you have desecrated the sanctity of the Holy City. It will be with you just as it was with the Children of Israel, who were slain for shedding the blood of John the Baptist.”

  In the City of the Prophets that the emperor had now deserted, the commander in charge of defenses, a nasty Greek with a reputation for flogging deserters until they expired on the post, ran away like his master. The lords and princes to whom he was beholden abandoned their villas and rural retreats, all of which fell to our zealous warriors without a casualty. Communication and supply lines were in Muslim hands. The city was ripe for the taking on almost any terms that Umar, Prince of True Believers, cared to name. In the previous two years, an army of Believers had cut through the hosts of Persia and Byzantium like a sickle through a sheaf of wheat. The towns of Iraq and Syria, and those along the coastal plains of Palestine, had one by one accepted Muslim sovereignty.

  Ka’b’s prophecy was being realized. And, indeed, everything that Ka’b had prophesied four years earlier in the Prophet’s mosque in Medina would have come true exactly as he had foretold, had it not been for the stubbornness of an old man.

  Four days shy of his seventy-fifth birthday, Sophronius was elected Patriarch of Jerusalem by local monks, against Heraclius’s wishes. He had only a few months to adjust to the burdens of the office he assumed, in the autumn of the year that the Arabs swore allegiance to Umar, before the armies of Believers came knocking at the city’s gates.

  With the flight of his cowardly commander, he was forced to assume military duties on top of his religious ones. Hearing of the favorable terms that had been granted to Christians in Damascus and Homs, he held out the prospect of a peaceful transfer of power to the commander of the Muslim forces, Abu Ubayda—a transfer that would be least injurious to Christian interests in the Holy City while offering the Arabs the kind of legitimacy that no army can win at the point of a sword.

  Abu Ubayda was tempted. The old Patriarch could be charming when he needed to be, and their meetings had gone quite well. Or so Abu Ubayda thought. At the very end, however, after everything had been agreed upon, Sophronius threw in one last condition: The dignity of his office required that he hand over the keys of the city to the person of the Caliph. No one else would do.

  “That honey-tongued defender of the heresy that Christ is the Son of God and Mary!” Ka’b used to exclaim. “He pulled the wool over Abu Ubayda’s eyes.” The Patriarch was a sworn enemy of Muhammad. Satan himself nested in his head. It had been a grievous error, my father believed, for Abu Ubayda to accord him so much respect. Did not his public utterances exude hate of all things Muslim? And on Christmas Eve, after the town of Bethlehem had fallen to our zealous desert warriors, had not the old man delivered a sermon to his flock in which he said:

  “For now the slime of the godless Saracens, like that of the gentiles at the time of David, has overrun Bethlehem and does not yield passage. They insult our cross. They feed human bodies to the birds of the sky. The abomination of desolation foretold by the prophets has descended upon us. What is to be done? For the love of
Christ I call on you to stop committing acts that are hateful to Him. If we are beloved of God, we will live to laugh at the fall of our Saracen adversaries. We will witness their destruction. We will see their blood-loving blades enter their own hearts. Their end will furnish a new way for us, clear of hills and thorns. ‘Glory to God the Highest, Peace and Good Will on Earth.’ ”

  Unlike my father, Umar held Abu Ubayda in the highest regard. The Caliph often spoke of his courage during the Battle of Badr, of how he was one of the Ten Praised Ones who had been promised Paradise by the Prophet. He approved Abu Ubayda’s instructions to his men not to kill a woman, or a nursing infant, or an old man in battle, nor to cut down trees, or strip palms, or destroy buildings, and to leave men found living alone in caves unharmed. Abu Ubayda lived, the Caliph said, by the code of a holy warrior. Thus it came to be that, on Abu Ubayda’s advice, the normally fiery Caliph, so quick to explode with anger at the suggestion of a slight, disregarded the Patriarch’s words and came to Jerusalem.

  Sorted in small companies, with their bearers, womenfolk, and children in train, Umar and Ka’b were accompanied by a party of four thousand. They left Medina riding north, east of the Valley of the Villages. A mere six years separated the death of God’s Messenger from that journey. I was five years old at the time and in the care of my stepmother and her sons. Our caravan strung itself along the crests of the hill chain that parallels the Red Sea. We looked down upon the coastal wilderness where, according to tradition, Solomon had exiled the demons who helped him build the Temple. Driven at a warrior’s pace through the night until dawn, we slept during the heat of the day. Thus we rode until we reached the Desert of the Wanderings in southern Palestine—so named because it was there that Moses travelled to and fro with his children, looking for the Promised Land. A rock from which water once gushed and saved the Israelites served as our first camp, and my father remembered the words of scripture:

  Behold I will stand before thee there,

  upon the rock in Horeb,

  and thou shalt smite the rock,

  and there shall come water out of it,

  that the people may drink.

  (photo credit 6.1)

  Lying between the Red Sea and the Syrian Sea, the desert extends for the distance of a seven days’ march in every direction, and in this land of red sandstone hills and long sandy stretches are found deadly serpents a span long that spring up and hide in the litters of horses and camels, waiting for the right moment to lash out. Here and there the desolate wilderness is interrupted by salt marshes, or dry hollows where the dung of antelopes lies spattered like peppercorns, directing our trackers toward a cluster of palm trees nestled around a spring of fresh water.

  Guided by the sons of Judham—Arabs who claimed descent from Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses—we approached the Holy City from the east on the twenty-sixth day of our departure from Medina. A glorious dawn was beginning to break, the light throwing the hills and ridges into sharp relief, bathing them with color. The only gap in the circle of hills surrounding Jerusalem faced Arabia, beckoning us on.

  Like King David and Nebuchadnezzar before him, the Caliph took his first view of the Holy City from the Mount of Olives just outside the city. And there we set up camp, before a ravine filled with vineyards and caverns, cascading pieces of twisted rock, churches, the cells of anchorites and hermits, and many other remarkable things besides.

  Across the ravine in the distance, a fortified town, vaguely square in shape, its spires and domes glistening in the sunlight, stretched westwards. The walls dictating the shape of the city contradicted the contours of the landscape, introducing another level of order, a higher order, which lorded over its surrounds. Inside the eastern wall sat the grand pile of what used to be the Temple—a mound of undecipherable stones baking in the sun.

  Umar had come to the Holy City intent on seeing the place where David had sought forgiveness of his Lord, and where his son Solomon had later built the Temple. His inscrutable demeanor revealed not a sign of what he was about to do. My father, on the other hand, was overcome with sorrow; he pulled and tore at his clothes and had eyes only for the ruins of the Temple.

  Umar and Abu Ubayda had to intervene forcibly. “You will perish of sorrow,” they told him. “Restrain yourself!”

  This is my earliest memory of the City of the Temple—my distraught father, an old man twisting and turning with grief like a reed in the wind against a backdrop of translucent blue.

  An enormous assembly of the men and women who accompanied Umar on his thirty-day trek had started to form. Men discarded their weapons, laid them carefully aside, and lined up in rows; women took up the rear. A crowd of bare heads and undifferentiated limbs spread itself out slowly like the sea. Umar found himself at its head. Exhaustion and hunger were put aside as the Caliph led the daybreak prayers on the mountain summit.

  And as he did, the crowd silently turned away from the Holy City before whose gates they had just arrived, turned away from the Rock, toward the titanic desolation of the desert across which they had just marched. They turned to face a different Holy City, at whose heart lay the Black Stone.

  The Black Stone

  When our angel ancestor was cast out of the Garden and landed upon the Rock, he was carrying the Stone toward which Umar and his people now prayed. Eve had fallen separately, in central Arabia. Adam traveled to find her, carrying the Stone with him. A month’s camel-ride away, he caught up with her at the foot of Mount Abu Qubays, the tallest mountain in Arabia. After climbing the mountain, the first man set his precious load on its cone-shaped summit, and not wanting the Stone to remain exposed to the ravages of the weather and wild beasts, he decided to shelter it with cloth. Adam’s tent was the first sanctuary to be established on Earth, and the predecessor of the most ancient house of the Ka’ba, whose origins lie in our father Adam’s desire to protect the Stone from harm.

  Two winters after Umar’s conquest of Jerusalem, during the pilgrimage season, my father and I visited Adam’s Stone.

  Mecca sits flat and low, in a plain girdled by high and rugged mountains, destitute of all trees. Nothing of the city could be seen upon our approach, until suddenly we were on top of an area measuring two arrow-shots square, filled with houses jostled up against one another made of mud mixed with straw, a far cry from the dressed stone I had grown accustomed to in Jerusalem. God’s most important words had been revealed to Muhammad here, Ka’b said, but all I could think of was the suffocating heat and the clouds of flies swarming around my head while the sun was still low in the sky.

  Neither heat nor flies nor the throngs of unveiled women making the pilgrimage in the hope of finding someone to marry perturbed my father. He had eyes only for the Ka’ba, built by Abraham and his son, Ishmael, ancestor of the Arabs, over the Black Stone.

  The Ka’ba is a cube whose walls are made of alternate layers of stone and wood draped in black cloth. Abraham, like Muhammad after him, had carefully placed the Stone in the southeastern corner of the cube, where pilgrims today begin their prescribed progressions around the building. When Muhammad was a young man, the old Ka’ba burned down when a woman was careless lighting incense. It is said to have been roofless with walls no higher than a man. The Ka’ba I saw was twice that height, its roof being made by a Christian carpenter from the planks of a Byzantine ship that had been cast ashore. Its door was placed high above the ground, so that you had to use a ladder to enter. Unwelcome visitors, Ka’b said, were pushed down from the high threshold. While it was being built, the people of Mecca quarrelled among themselves as to who should have the honor of putting the Black Stone in its place. Muhammad took off his cloak and convinced each head of a tribe to take one end. He then placed the Black Stone in the southeast corner because he liked to face that corner in prayer.

  (photo credit 7.1)

  The Stone has been set chest-high above ground where the walls meet, two paces from the only door into the building. The Iraqi Corner, which faces northeast t
oward Iraq, is followed by the Syrian Corner, facing northwest, and the Yemeni Corner, facing southwest.

  The Black Stone is actually reddish black in color, with embedded yellow and red particles. It is much smaller than its counterpart in Jerusalem, never having grown into a proper rock—the size of a large man’s skull when I saw it. But that is, sadly, no longer the case. During the war between Mecca and Jerusalem that has only just ended, the Ka’ba was bombarded with stones from giant catapults placed on the encircling mountain slopes, and the Black Stone broke into three pieces. The pieces, I am reliably informed, have been bound together with a band of silver and mounted in a silver casing shaped like a woman’s vulva.

  “The Black Stone is God’s hand in the earth,” Ka’b said as he bent down to touch and kiss the Stone; “he who touches it declares his allegiance to God.” I reached up and followed suit.

  We began our prescribed circling from this black corner. The seven circuits complete, we performed our early morning prayers facing the Stone, as the Prophet was wont to do. Only now would my father allow himself to sit down, spread his cloak, and relax.

  From where we were sitting, Mount Abu Qubays could be seen in the distance, looming over Mecca. Its summit was as round as a dome and as high as an arrow shot from its foot; in capable hands that arrow might fall beside a stele said to have been erected by Abraham on the mountain’s highest point. The Black Stone was found next to that stele during the Age of Ignorance that preceded the coming of God’s Messenger. In fact, as I heard the story, two distinctive stones had been found on the summit of Mount Abu Qubays by members of the Quraysh, the Meccan tribe from whom the Prophet himself descends.