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

by Kanan Makiya

  Behold, thy king cometh unto thee,

  vindicated and victorious,

  meek and sitting upon an ass.

  Sophronius and his priests maintained a discreet silence as the Believers argued among themselves, seated cross-legged in a circle on the mountain summit.

  The Patriarch’s great liability in his endeavor to pull the wool over Umar’s eyes was ignorance. As discerning a man as he obviously was, the information he had about the Arabs on his doorstep came from wild rumors that had been circulating in Jerusalem in recent years. The Arabs, he would have heard, were not interested in production, commerce, or religion, only in plundering and wars. Why, they did not even have sacred texts through which a learned man might know them! The Quran had, after all, not yet been collected into a book. Local gossip likened the Arabs to bloodthirsty wild animals. “They behave like beasts of prey, though they look like human beings,” I heard a Syrian Christian say in the market only the other day.

  Nonetheless, the measure of this Patriarch was that such talk did not deter him from acting as a guide to one who was insistent upon acting the fool, as he must have thought, an impostor making a show of piety designed to impress the common folk by entering Jerusalem the way Jesus had done.

  After an excruciating delay, the Caliph had his way as he always did in such matters. With the sun already high in the sky, the party began its descent. Abu Ubayda’s squadrons of thirty-five thousand soldiers stayed behind, keeping the city encircled; they were in full combat readiness, prepared to pounce like lions should any mischief befall their comrades.

  At the foot of the Mount of Olives lies the garden of Gethsemane. Here, by a rock in the vineyard, Judas betrayed the son of Mary and Joseph, and was arrested. The Christian faithful are most diligent in offering prayer at this spot, holding that it is the place where Jesus first took upon his shoulders the evils of the world. Around the rock on which Jesus knelt to pray, the Church of the Agony has been built. Sophronius had to make a stop here. He invited Umar to join him in prayer. Wisely, Umar refused, not wanting to set a precedent in these circumstances and at this particular location.

  (photo credit 12.1)

  After Sophronius’s prayers, the procession continued across the valley, winding its way down and then up again past the tomb of the mother of Jesus, toward the Gate of the Sheep’s Pool on the eastern wall, which opens the Holy City onto the desert and the River Jordan. To the right of this gate, an olive grove was beginning to fill with people. Men and women were pouring down the mountain now that it was clear that there would be no hostilities. The Caliph and the Patriarch stopped beside the only fig tree in the olive grove. On this tree, said Sophronius, Judas hanged himself after betraying Jesus. It so happened, he said, that Jesus had cursed this very tree upon his triumphal entry into the city on Palm Sunday, because he was disappointed to find it fruitless. The tree stands there to this day, protected by a circle of stones, as barren as when Jesus first saw it.

  In the olive grove around the fig tree, our warriors had meanwhile assembled, edging their way toward their Caliph while nervously fingering the hilts of their swords. Intermingled among them, and obstructing their passage, were an even larger crowd of unarmed Christian men, women, and children, carrying palm and olive branches and singing hymns. The very little ones, already overcome by boredom and fatigue, were carried on men’s shoulders. A crowd of Bedouins and local peasants looked on from the rear and sides.

  Clearly visible to the crowd, eighty paces southward along the city wall on the other side of the road, was the Gate of Repentance, last used by the emperor Heraclius during his triumphal entry into the city a mere six years before the arrival of Umar’s army. He was returning to Jerusalem victorious from his defeat of the Persians, who had sacked the Holy City a few years earlier with the help of local Jews. The Persians had returned to Ctesiphon, their capital in Iraq, carrying what the Christians claimed was a piece of the cross upon which Jesus had been crucified. Heraclius seized this piece of wood after defeating their army and brought it back in triumph to the Holy City, passing through the Gate of Repentance. Men whose wisdom is not in doubt say that the threshold and entablature of this finely carved stone gate, which opens directly onto the Temple Mount, is all that is left of Solomon’s Temple. But Umar and my father did not know that at the time; they found the gate mysteriously sealed, as it remains to this day.

  At the foot of the flight of steps leading up to the Gate of the Sheep’s Pool, Umar and Ka’b held a private conference, following which the Caliph strode up the steps alone in his camel-hair dress and in full view of the crowd of people. Without looking at them, he threw himself to the ground and lay prostrate in homage before the wide-open doors. Loudly he said the special greeting all pilgrims make when they visit the Holy City of Mecca: “Here am I, at your service, O God! I am here to serve, whatever be your will.”

  Then, on knees that had been hardened like a camel’s from the frequency of prayer, Umar prayed until he had outdone Sophronius’s demonstration of piety many times over. Watched over by hosts of incredulous and sullen Christians, the Believers threw caution to the winds and followed his example.

  “Bear patiently what people say, and remember Our servant David, the man of might,” Umar recited:

  David was a penitent.

  With him We subjected the mountains to give glory

  at evening and sunrise,

  and the birds, duly mustered, every one

  to him reverting;

  We strengthened his kingdom and gave him wisdom

  and speech decisive.

  Has the tiding of the dispute come to thee?

  When they scaled the Sanctuary,

  and David thought that We had only

  tried him, therefore he sought forgiveness

  of his Lord, and he fell down, bowing,

  and he repented.

  Accordingly, We forgave him that.

  The hour was late. The crowd was getting fidgety because of the time it had taken to go down the mountain, and Sophronius had services to attend. He now took the lead. Hardly had he passed through the Gate of the Sheep’s Pool than he took a sharp turn to the right toward the healing pools for which Jerusalem was famous. There he stopped to point out the Church of the Paralyzed Man, which overhangs a double pool with splendid porticoes on all four sides and another across the middle dividing it into two equal squares.

  Here the sick and the melancholy come to sleep under the porticoes. Often they are awaiting a dream or the coming of an angel who will reveal himself to them by a sign, after which they wash themselves in the waters and are healed. Usually, people of every religious faith can be seen lying about at all times of the day and night. But not on this occasion. Apart from a handful of cripples, everyone had already joined the crowd following the Patriarch and the Caliph into Jerusalem.

  Sophronius explained that, although the Church marked the place of Mary’s birth, it was named after her son’s miraculous healing of a man paralyzed from birth. “Arise, take up your bed, and walk,” Jesus had said to him, and the paralytic had. His bed is kept in the Church. But Umar did not care to go and see it.

  As a young man growing up in the Holy City, I often found myself visiting the pools, watching peasants who, after a hard day’s work selling their produce, lingered by the cool waters to gape at the intricately carved marble inlay on the columns of the porticoes. There is much to delight in the passage from reflected light dancing on the water, to the cool shade of the portico, to the dark and enveloping enclosure of the old church. Perhaps it sparked memories in the old Patriarch. According to Ka’b, he did not move on right away in spite of Umar’s impatience and the religious services that awaited him at our destination. Instead, in an inspired moment, and in a gently lilting voice, he began to recite a poem composed in his youth. Don’t ask me how or why, but the poem written so long ago retraced the journey from the Mount of Olives to the Church of the Paralyzed Man:

  Let me enter the ch
urch,

  church of the all-pure Mother of God,

  there in veneration to embrace

  those walls, so dear to me.

  Far be it from me, as I pass through the forum,

  to neglect the place

  where the Virgin Queen was born.

  A most noble palace!

  May I behold that floor

  where the paralytic went

  at the behest of the Healing Word

  to lift his bed from the ground.

  Spiritual bliss will fill me

  when I hymn the glorious sanctuary

  of Gethsemane, which has received the body,

  the body of Mary,

  who gave birth to God.

  There they have built the tomb for the Mother of God.

  How surpassing sweet thou art, O lofty Mountain,

  from which Christ the Lord looked into heaven!

  My father remembered this incident because he could see that, in spite of the blasphemous references to Jesus and his mother, and the clumsiness of the translation, Umar was moved. Sophronius may not have known it, but sweet words more than beautiful things moved the first generation of Believers. Umar, like my father, believed that the only reason for building anything was utility; he shrank from one who intentionally sought to add a gratifying effect to an object or a thing. Were one to give him a cheap building over a beautiful one, he would receive praise for being thrifty with the goods of the Lord. Building rudely was religiously justified, he said. How, asked his Companions? Because it meant elevating worship over place, Him over things, content over form, the next world over this one—and this surely was what the Lord intended.

  Serve God, and associate naught with Him.

  God is not heedless of the things you do.

  (photo credit 12.2)

  The stone-cobbled street down which Sophronius had chosen to travel headed due west from the healing pools, turned north, and led to a large open space inside the city walls opposite Saint Stephen’s Gate. Since the conquest, Muslims and Jews had called this gate the Gate of the Column.

  The name is derived from a great column that stands in the center of the semicircular forum around the gate. At one time, circuses and games were staged there. Some people say the column is a leftover from those pagan times. A cross sat on top of the column when Umar visited the city, reminding people, Sophronius explained, of how much the Roman empire had changed, and, more importantly, that this was where the Jews had tried to seize the body of Mary as it was being carried by the eleven Apostles for burial in Gethsemane. They didn’t succeed. Later, Ka’b would agitate for the removal of that offensive cross. But no Caliph ever thought it politic to do so in such a Christian city, and it is still there to this day, lording it over the most important gateway into the city.

  It was at the Gate of the Column, Sophronius was quick to point out to Umar, that Christianity had given up its first martyr to the faith.

  “What happened?” Umar asked, genuinely interested.

  “Filled with the Holy Spirit, and gazing intently up at Heaven, Saint Stephen saw the glory of God,” said Sophronius, “and he cried out to the people, ‘Look, there is a rift in the sky. Behold the Son of Man standing at God’s right hand!’ His words made the Jewish elders in the crowd grind their teeth in fury. They uttered a great cry and called upon the people around them to stop up their ears. Then as one man they rushed upon the blessed Stephen, flinging him out of the gate and down the steps, whereupon they set about stoning him. As the stones rained upon him, Stephen fell to his knees, and with his last breath, said, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. Do not hold this sin against them.’ ”

  But Sophronius did hold it against them, as could be seen from the way he told the story. He had already surmised that Umar’s advisor was a Jew. And he must have discerned Ka’b’s mounting anger and discomfort. But this was not the time or place for Ka’b to intervene. His senses were still reeling from the Christian stamp that had been affixed to every street and building of the City of David and Solomon. He had never imagined there could be so many crosses.

  Grateful for my father’s restraint, Umar turned to him and whispered, “What drives these Christians! They are like women. No sooner do they have a memory than they turn it into an ornament.”

  From the Gate of the Column, the party turned sharply south for the final stretch of Sophronius’s tour. They were now heading down the most important commercial street in Jerusalem—the Cardo—and into the wealthiest section of the city. The buildings were solidly constructed and finely finished; the markets were the cleanest in Syria and overflowed with cheeses, figs, olives of every variety, tanks of pressed oil destined for export, celebrated raisins of diverse kinds, apples, bananas, and pine nuts, whose equal was not to be found. To each craft, there was a separate bazaar, where one could purchase the finest quality leather and silver work, mirrors, lamps, jars, and needles, cotton from Egypt spilling from brightly colored baskets onto the large smooth paving stones of the street, all in such abundance that it was enough to take a man’s breath away.

  But this is not what my father and Umar saw on that most extraordinary of days. The stores were tightly shut, and the crosses that one tended to lose sight of in the hustle and bustle of people and goods stood starkly at attention.

  Sophronius was silent. Everyone was now on foot, having handed over their horses, and Umar’s ass, to attendants at the Gate of the Column. Umar broke the silence:

  “How in God’s name do you manage to keep your streets so clean?”

  Sophronius needed to have the question repeated to make sure he had got it right. After a pause, the Patriarch replied, “Whenever too many camels, horses, asses, oxen, and their dung, clog the city streets, a truly wonderful event occurs to free us. An abundance of rain will pour during the night, washing away the dirt off the streets and freeing them of filth. God made the terrain of His city slope down from the mountain upon which His Church is built, toward the lower ground of the former Jewish Temple. In this way the heavy rain never collects in the streets, but rushes downhill. The flood of water from the Heavens flows out through the Eastern Gate by which we entered, taking with it all that disgusting dung and filth. The moment Jerusalem has been thus baptized, the downpour stops.”

  No sooner had he finished speaking than an enormous complex looming from afar suddenly came into full view through an opening in the colonnade. Arriving at that hour when a man can barely distinguish another in the light, a sequence of interconnected buildings marking the journey’s terminus rose gradually in height as they stepped back from the street. The Church of the Resurrection, like the Jewish Temple that had inspired it, was situated on a longitudinal axis facing east, overlooking the desolate ruins of the Temple. Towering above it in the distance, Umar and Ka’b could see the great rotunda built over the tomb of Jesus. Not that the edifice had been constructed to look like a memorial. Far from it. The church was a celebration in stone to Triumph, to the Glory of Christ the Conqueror, he who had overcome death.

  Capping the tall cylindrical tower of the rotunda was the largest dome in Jerusalem, the Dome of the Resurrection. A hole was cut out at the apex of the spherical surface, exposing the rockcut tomb to the sky. The Dome bore a striking resemblance to the round, shaven top of Sophronius’s head.

  (photo credit 12.3)

  A flight of steps led up to an atrium surrounded by a portico held up by pillars bigger than any the Arabs had ever seen before. “Here, under one roof, over the mountain we call Calvary,” Sophronius said, “are gathered all the places, which, together, have witnessed the providential history of salvation first set in motion by our father Abraham.”

  “All?” asked Umar. “But what of the Sanctuary of David, where the king of Israel begged the Lord for forgiveness? I want to go there.”

  “Forgiveness was granted to David by virtue of what Jesus did in this place,” said Sophronius, waving his arm in the direction of the three massive doors that had mysteriously
been thrown open for the party, revealing a long five-aisled Basilica of breathtaking sumptuousness. The walls were encrusted with colored marbles that shone like mirrorwork. The sculpted coffering of the ceiling presented itself as an endless wave. The ceiling coffers crested like a gently rising swell down the middle two-story nave, divided from the neighboring aisles by a forest of columns. A brilliant gold sheen followed in the wake of the coffering, growing denser and more brilliant still down the nave where the light came spilling through clerestory windows, causing the whole temple to sparkle with a thousand reflections.

  “Please.” Sophronius motioned to Umar. “You are my guest. I will explain inside.”

  “Do not go into that Sorceror’s Temple, good Umar!” Ka’b suddenly whispered fiercely. “Do not approach those pillars by the entrance, for they are idols. The prayers of him who passes through them will be as if naught. A curse upon these Christians for not seeing the things to come!”

  “Calm yourself, my friend. You are fencing with shadows. We have nothing to fear from this priest.”

  Sophronius observed them with an artificial smile and, looking down at Umar from his position on top of the steps, said, “You are having to contend with two Jerusalems. His crucified Christ,” he said, pointing at Ka’b, “while ours worship Him in this blessed place. It is our greatest wish that you join me inside for prayer.” And then he turned slowly, deliberately, to genuflect in front of the open doors.

  (photo credit 12.4)

  The New Temple

  My father’s confrontation with Sophronius took place inside the great Basilica. The crowd having finally been shaken off, the Patriarch and the Caliph were looking at a natural outcrop of gray-speckled rock contiguous with the floor of the apse of the great church. The raw rock spread incongruously out of the ornately decorated floor, reaching a span’s height above the floor at its highest point.