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

by Kanan Makiya

  Finding the Rock

  If the Patriarch’s strategy was to feast the Caliph’s eyes on the sumptuous buildings of the Holy City to gain a foothold inside the mind of his adversary, Sophronius realized the strategy had not worked after Umar refused to pray inside the Church of the Resurrection. Umar occupied another world, different even from that of his own followers. Had he been Abu Ubayda, the commander-in-chief, or that brave son of Walid who wreaked havoc on the Byzantine army and had a weakness for silk and red turbans with arrows stuck in them after the fashion of great warriors, it might have been a different story. “Heaven is as close to me as my sandal-straps, and so is Hell,” I heard Umar say. The Caliph lived every hour of every day as though that were the literal truth.

  Umar, impatient now, repeated the request that he had first made on the Mount of Olives, saying, “I would have you take us to the Sanctuary of David. Do you know where it is?”

  “It must be somewhere amidst the ruins of the Temple,” replied Sophronius. “But why do you want to go there? The place has been abandoned for years.”

  “I wish to pray there.”

  “There is so much more that I can show you,” said Sophronius. “The New Church of the Virgin Mary, for instance, which is a truly splendid building, and the Church of Zion.”

  “I don’t want to see any more buildings,” Umar answered. “I want to be taken to the place where David sought God’s forgiveness.”

  Gaining access to the site of the Temple was not as straightforward as Umar had imagined. Sophronius insisted that the hour was too late to go right away.

  “If you must,” said Sophronius, resigned, “I will take you there tomorrow, at the crowing of the cock.”

  Umar and Ka’b were given comfortable quarters for the night in an annex of the church. To decline the duty of hospitality might give offense, even to a Christian. Moreover, the Patriarch’s invitation conferred upon the Caliph a measure of protection that the desert Arab immediately understood; and, conversely, Umar thought, the Christian was putting himself under an obligation to the Muslim that might come in handy later on.

  The Patriarch was careful to show Umar his own quarters, which were part of a grouping of monastic cells organized around a courtyard north of the Rotunda. The room was tiny and bare, much less comfortable than those of his guests less than twenty paces away. Even my father was struck by its austere furnishings, which so contrasted with the Patriarch’s silk and gold-tasselled attire.

  Just before daybreak, when the only sounds on the streets are those of roosters and padlocks, sliding bars and rattling door boards, the party set out. Sophronius was in the lead. For some unknown reason, a dozen local peasants had been rounded up. There was a new spring to the Patriarch’s step as he picked his way across cobbled streets less elegant than the ones they had taken the previous day. It was as though the old man, having slept on the dilemma that Umar represented for Christendom’s holy places, had woken up with a new resolve.

  The party worked their way south and east of the Church of the Resurrection arriving before a gate on the southern wall of the esplanade. Believers today call the entrance through which Umar first entered the noble sanctuary the Gate of the Prophet, because it looks as if it had been an important entrance to the Temple Mount in its time. But the entrance gate was blocked with piles of refuse. Now it became clear why Sophronius had brought the peasants along; they set to work clearing a path to the giant doors. As soon as these had been forced open, more rubbish came bursting out, raining down upon the heads of the workers and spilling onto the road that pointed in the holy direction of the Ka’ba.

  The interior was a warehouse of filth, which had settled in huge piles on the floor. In some places it reached the ceiling. Umar and Ka’b found themselves standing outside what had once been an elegant sequence of paired square spaces—the pair closest to the wall being surmounted by two domes that gave the appearance of floating away from the walls, supported as they were by adjoining pairs of arched brackets.

  Umar fell to the ground in horror, like a man suddenly paralyzed at the knees. Then he soberly and calmly prostrated himself before the rubbish-filled doorway, in a posture of deep and humbling submission, becoming as one with the earth. Slowly, he rose to his feet and stood upright. Raising his hands level with his ears, palms toward the cheeks, he said, “God is most Great!” Then he crossed his hands over his chest, the right palm over the left as prescribed by the Prophet, and inclined toward the Lord, his hands on his knees, said three times, “Glory to the Great One”; then he drew himself up slowly, saying, “God hears him who praises Him.” Drawing himself upright for the second time, the Caliph said, “To You be the praise, our Lord,” and then prostrated himself yet another time, resting his body on his forehead, knees, and the palms of his hands, his nose lightly brushing the earth.

  Umar prayed and prayed. He prayed like a man washing himself over and over again in a running stream of clear water. Each time, he would repeat the same sequence of movements. He prayed not to an audience, as he had done at the Gate of the Sheep’s Pool. He prayed as though his very soul were on fire and in need of quenching in the cool waters of God’s praise. Solomon had done the same upon finding that the doors of the Temple were barred to him. The son of David had then repeated his father’s prayers, imploring God to grant forgiveness. Solomon had prayed as much on his father’s behalf as his own. Umar now prayed on behalf of all of them.

  Rubbish was piled high on the steps leading up to the Temple Mount. So dense and packed was the dirt that not a single ray of the early morning sun could make its way through, not even after the doors had been opened. Once again, the peasants brought along by Sophronius were set to work. Only two men could work in the densely packed gateway at a time. After much delay, they managed to clear out the beginnings of a tunnel. Still, no light came through.

  “It is impossible to proceed,” Sophronius said, “except by crawling on one’s hands and knees.”

  “So be it,” Umar replied.

  Whereupon the Patriarch, in spite of his age, went down on his hands and knees, oblivious of the consequences to his finely tailored garments. Before following Sophronius into the tunnel, Umar tightened his loosely wrapped outer mantle around his body, and tucked the extra material into his belt. My father took up the rear. Everyone else stayed behind on Umar’s instructions until they had fully dug out the entrance and carted all the rubbish away.

  What was it like, tunnelling through the refuse of centuries? Ka’b remembers bumping into massive pillars a man’s length in diameter. Sophronius had dug out a space around them, pushing the rubbish to one corner so that Umar could see his way forward. The pillars rested on the bedrock of the mountain and had once held up a gigantic portico, which Ka’b said King Solomon had built; Sophronius gave the Romans all the credit. A part of that portico, on the southern boundary of the sanctuary, was still standing when the armies of Islam arrived.

  Rare are the moments when the play and chatter of life in this world, the pageantry and the boasting, the competitive grasping after wealth and children, are all suspended—and suspended by dint of sheer necessity, not because of thoughts of the grim doom that awaits all God’s creatures. Such was the bond between the three men inside the tunnel that held the forces of competition, prejudice, and hatred in abeyance for however short a while.

  After considerable exertion, they worked their way up a flight of steps, emerging into what looked like a gigantic court. They looked around in all directions and pondered the scene for a long time.

  Ka’b was the first to break the silence: “By Him in whose hands is my soul, this must be it! This is David’s Sanctuary.”

  Then he removed his sandals, a custom of both the followers of Muhammad and Moses, signifying that they make no claim to the hallowed ground upon which they are about to walk. The ground was thick with filth under Ka’b’s feet; still, he felt a holiness seep through the bare flesh of his soles. Umar did the same, but Sophronius woul
d not follow their example. Instead, the old Patriarch turned east and genuflected, as though to ward off some evil wind that was turning his way.

  Young Muslims cannot imagine what the noble sanctuary looked like then—just as they cannot imagine a butterfly wrapped inside the wrinkled carcass of its chrysalis.

  Time, and the vindictiveness of men, had taken its toll. One-fifth of the city was a warehouse of ruins—the very fifth that had sustained its former splendor. The destruction of the Temple Mount had begun in the time of Titus, the capital of whose kingdom lay in the land of the Franks. When Titus came to the Holy House in the first year of his reign, he fell upon the Jews, massacred thousands, and enslaved the rest. He gave their city over to plunder. He put the Temple and all its sacred scrolls to the torch.

  His soldiers carried off the candelabra, trumpets, and holy vessels of the Temple. They carried away the two pillars that had adorned the entrance to Solomon’s Temple, and which carried God’s name. Every year, on the day of the destruction, eyewitnesses say, these pillars pine away in their place of exile until tears stream down their rounded sides.

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  Titus banished the Jews from their city and forbade them from ever re-entering it. The few who had survived his siege emerged from their hiding places to salvage bits and pieces of their lost treasures, but they would never again govern themselves in the same way, much less resurrect on the torn and shredded landscape the monument of their former days of glory.

  The powerlessness of the People of Moses brought out the worst in the Romans. Helena, mother of Constantine the Victorious, had the pillars and capitals that remained intact on the Temple Mount carted away to adorn her New Temple on Calvary. Then she ordered that the site be turned into the city dump. And so the newly Christian city began daily to empty its bowels on what was left of the Jewish one. Excrement and refuse had been gathering for three hundred years when Umar, Ka’b, and Sophronius found themselves picking their way through it.

  Piles of garbage sat alongside heaps of building rubble, broken pots amidst broken columns, pediments, and architraves. Ka’b did not know one part of a monument from the other. He did not have the faintest idea how these parts might once have fitted together. Blades of grass that had been fertilized with human excrement were growing in a strange receptacle. Was it once a kitchen pot, or a broken urn, or even a piece of the great altar of sacrifice itself?

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  The Temple that lived in his imagination, and through him, Umar’s as well, was built of words—and was all the sweeter for it. An unbearably wonderful thing was firmly lodged in his mind’s eye in spite of being unseen, but its physical expression was not only gone, it had been destroyed over and over again until it had been ground back into the dust of the mountain.

  The words, however, he knew by heart; they lived on—in a way that broken artifacts could not. And the words said that, corresponding to His House on Earth, was an absolutely perfect counterpart in Heaven. When Moses ascended to Heaven without having walked the streets of the Holy City, the Lord made it up to him by cleaving the seven firmaments to show him its heavenly equivalent. The two cities faced one other. The same services were performed in both, so that, when the high priest was sacrificing and burning incense on Earth, the Archangel Michael was doing the same in Heaven. What was the Archangel doing now? What had he been doing for the last three hundred years?

  Ka’b stumbled about in a daze; he was looking and not looking at the same time. Thoughts cascaded through his head, yet he did not know what to think about any one in particular. My father was in a strange state for the next several days: utterly distracted, unable to attend to me or any practical matter, seeking every opportunity to go back to the desecrated sanctuary, desirous only of wandering aimlessly among the refuse and the filth. I think the desire to knit together the scattered remembrances of his life around the Rock turned into an obsession on that day.

  How did my father know where he was on the sanctuary? And how did he go on to find the precise spot where David and Ahithophel had long ago found the Rock?

  The desire to offend has a smell to it. Ka’b followed his nose.

  Helena had singled out the Rock. She had ordered that the smelliest scourings be dumped there, including the manure of the city’s stables. Ka’b found the Rock because the dung reeked most foul and was piled highest over the precise spot where the Holy of Holies had once stood in David and Solomon’s Temple. He was assured that he was standing in the right place when he spied the menstrual cloths of Christian women collected there.

  Umar asked Ka’b and Sophronius to step aside, and set to work alone, throwing the dung with his bare hands into his mantle, which he had placed flat on the ground. Taking the four corners of the cloak into his hands, he carried it on his back, doubled over with the weight, to the wall of the noble sanctuary. There he threw his load over the wall into the Valley of Hell, where the kings of Israel had buried the ashes of the idols that had desecrated their Temple in olden times. Before following his example, my father prophesied the fall of Constantinople, and said: “Be joyous, O City of the Temple! For to you has come the Redeemer, who will cleanse you of your contamination.” Sophronius stood aside and watched while all this was going on; he was joined by the rest of the party, who had in the meantime cleared the entrance gate. Umar and Ka’b labored at the pile until enough of it had been cleared to ascertain that they had indeed found the Rock.

  To every prophecy in an unsettled age there comes a time of fulfillment, a time when one begins to see in the present and toward the shape of things to come. Such a time was now settling upon my father. The Rock, he realized, stood in for a greater reality than was suggested by its appearance. Such a time had also come upon Sophronius, who, having failed to leave an impression on his uncouth visitors, clung to the hope that he could redirect their prodigious energies away from Calvary. And it had come upon Umar, he whom all the Peoples of the Book were now calling the Redeemer.

  “Where should I build my mosque?” Umar asked, speaking to no one in particular.

  “Has not your heart found that which it was looking for, O King of the Arabs?” Sophronius replied. “Honor that which sent it forth on its long and difficult journey. I say you should build on top of this hard, flat piece of rock that your hands have uncovered; it will elevate your house of worship so that it overlooks the desert from whence you came, and provide a solid foundation for the things that you wish to do.”

  “What do you think of the suggestion, my good friend?” asked the Caliph, turning to my father.

  Ka’b did not pause to think. The Commander of the Faithful and liberator of Jerusalem could not be beholden to a Christian monk for the site of his mosque.

  “The Rock is without any redeeming value in this priest’s eyes,” he said. “Quite the opposite. He wants to see it desecrated, so that the so-called prophecies of Jesus will look as though they have come true. Knowing that his religion has lost the power of desecration, he would have you bury the Rock on his behalf, hide it under a building that draws attention to itself like his dungheap of a church. I say, therefore, O Umar, beware his forked tongue. Remember that the Rock uncovered is his Church unmasked. Leave His Sign clean and exposed, for all to admire and see. Build north of the Rock, not on it. In that way God will doubly favor you for giving Him back His foundation stone and for being the one who brought back into alignment the two holiest directions of Moses and Muhammad.”

  “I see you still lean toward the Jews, O Father of Ishaq,” Umar replied with a twinkle in his eye. “I have made up my mind. Our mosque will be south of the Rock.”

  “But then we shall be praying with our backs to the Rock!” exclaimed Ka’b, horrified.

  “So be it,” the Caliph replied.

  Facing Whose Rock?

  Umar’s mosque was cobbled together hastily. Aside from his decision to build south rather than north of the Rock, no consideration was given to the sanctity of its locatio
n. There was neither art of proportion nor technique of construction in the place of prayer that the Prince of the Righteous constructed. Men would have to put their foreheads to the ground inside a square shed assembled from thrown-away boards and beams collected from a Christian dump. The Caliph was in a hurry to return to Medina. His stay in the Holy City lasted only a week.

  The son of Khattab identified the religion of Muhammad with proximity to the Prophet, which he measured by distance from his grave in Medina. In Umar’s eyes, the Prophet’s Companions were the only rightful rulers, and their roots were sunk deeply in the soil of the holy cities of Arabia. Jerusalem was just too far away.

  A multitude of poor Bedouin Arab tribesmen, the first converts to Islam, made the rule of the first four Rightly Guided Ones possible. These were the great fighting men of the desert who had taken Iraq and Syria in the blink of an eye. By heading northward with their families, they became holy warriors like those who had accompanied the Prophet David, Peace Be Upon Him. Umar recorded their names, genealogies, battles, and the year of their conversion to True Belief, in registers. He made them live in closed camp-cities, separated from the non-Arabs of the conquered territories; he held them to stricter standards than anyone else; he tried, not always successfully, to prevent them from holding and cultivating land outside Arabia. Then he compensated them with handsome annuities out of revenues collected by taxing everyone else.

  Umar’s bias against non-Arabs did not affect his fondness for Ka’b. He took pride in the conversion of his friend. When the Caliph expelled the People of the Book from the Hijaz, my father was already his counselor. In fact Ka’b had a role in the resettlement of Jews in Palestine. Forty-two of these, scholars and experts on scripture to a man, he turned to Islam.