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

by Kanan Makiya

  Hasan, the son of Ali and the Prophet’s own grandson, conceded leadership to the House of Umayya in that year of ill omen, the forty-first year after the Exodus. He was Caliph for a matter of months. Hasan had not wanted his followers to be butchered for a kingdom’s sake. Arabia grumbled at the deeds of Hasan, he who of the Prophet’s family most resembled the Messenger of God. Idle tattlers called him a weakling, even after he was poisoned in Medina. But no one can upset the hour when words fall silent and destiny springs its trap. Wrong had triumphed over Right. God clearly had no intention of uniting Prophethood and the Caliphate in the same House—not in the House of Hashim.

  In the gathering gloom of Muslim affairs that followed my father’s death, I turned to business, opening a stall on the Cardo. I conducted a general trade in books. Buying, selling, transcribing, all now fell within my purview. I even dabbled in calligraphy. But my real vocation remained bookmaking and its associated arts: cover and border design, leather tooling, floral and geometrical inlay in which I pioneered various new combinations of ivory, bone, multicolored wood, and gilding.

  But the visitation of those fearsome angels kept on recurring in my dreams. Little by little, their skulking presence made headway during sleep, when my senses and defenses were at rest. In that state, echoes from times past and shadows of things to come are able to crowd upon the troubled mind unimpeded. Slowed down by the inaction of the senses, the mind is unable to sort out the meaning of what it sees. Memory is confused, and foreknowledge, though also confused by the veils of memory, is imaged in shadows from our waking moments and pursuits. The mind smolders like a fire heaped over with chaff.

  The Footprint

  Mu’awiya was interested in all things related to the Holy City. His authority rested upon Syria, a province still overwhelmingly Christian. He had learned to navigate his way through all the factions and sects of the city during his inauguration as Caliph, which had taken place in Jerusalem. As the Christians like to put it, Mu’awiya was “crowned” in their midst.

  Mu’awiya had arranged a most elaborate ceremony immediately following the news of the murder of Ali, his archenemy and the leader of the House of Hashim. The charged atmosphere of the moment was dissipated into pomp and circumstance! The strategy worked. All the tribes that had come from Arabia and settled in Syria trooped in to the Holy City, competing with one another to be the first to attach their banners to his pole. Within months of his inauguration, Hasan, son of Ali, had conceded the Caliphate to him. No other Caliph since Umar had so singled out Palestine, and made of it a substitute for the Hijaz, a fact that was held against the House of Umayya throughout Arabia. But in Syria and Jerusalem, it worked in his favor.

  I was in attendance when he toured the holy sites on the day of his inauguration and I heard him assume a title previously bestowed by God on Adam and David alone. In the outer courtyard of the Church of the Resurrection, Mu’awiya declared: “The earth belongs to God and I am His Deputy.”

  All of Muhammad’s Rightly Guided successors had spurned this title. God had given the Prophet Companions for whom humility was a watchword; they loved his person more than their own. Such men did not seek the world, however much it sought them. When a fawning petitioner tried to curry favor with Umar by calling him God’s Deputy, he was pushed to the ground and rebuked sternly. Reminded of this incident, Mu’awiya smiled and said:

  “What’s approved today was reproved once. Things now abominated will someday be embraced.”

  He was right. The title stuck. Every Caliph since Mu’awiya, including his protégé and admirer, our own Abd al-Malik, has adopted the same heresy of a direct line of communication between himself and God—a heresy whose legitimacy his own Arab constituency interpreted as being confirmed by God after Mu’awiya was approached by both Peoples of the Book to arbitrate their dispute over a footprint.

  (photo credit 22.1)

  In the waning years of Mu’awiya’s rule, a Jewish leather worker, Joseph by name, observed an impression on the surface of the Rock that no one had observed before—a footprint. Greatly oversized, but a footprint nonetheless. Everyone was convinced of the authenticity of his finding. But to whom did it belong?

  Joseph, renowned for his piety and trustworthiness among both circumcised and uncircumcised alike, said it belonged to the prophet Jacob during his communication with God while asleep on the Rock. A footprint was left behind as a sign that God’s Holy House would one day be erected here. The Jews of the city were inclined to agree with Joseph. A pigeon’s neck was wrung as an offering over the impression, and its blood sprinkled over the rest of the Rock’s surface.

  The monks of the Church of the Resurrection disagreed. The matter was taken up by their leadership council, which, since the death of Sophronius, had been in charge of Christian affairs in the city. The council had been unable to agree upon a Patriarch to replace Sophronius. Now it found something to agree upon. Amidst great publicity, the council announced that the footstep belonged to Jesus, and that it was made when he used to teach in the old Temple before the coming of the abominations which he foretold would destroy it.

  The decree caused an uproar. It looked like the Christians were trying to claim ownership of the very place that they had treated with such contempt. A group of rabbis, newly settled from Arabia, issued a counter-declaration. Couched in abrasive language, it caused spirits to grow even more heated. The argument spread throughout the towns and villages of Palestine. Everywhere, men feuded over the identity of the footprint. Words spilled over into blows. Christians and Jews died. The Holy City was turned into a tinderbox. To avert total disaster, both parties appealed to the Caliph to adjudicate. He agreed and called upon me to help him resolve the dispute.

  “Son of Ka’b, know that I do not use my sword when my whip will do. Nor my whip when my tongue will do. Nor my tongue when another man’s tongue will do. Let a single hair bind me to my people, and I’ll not let it snap; when they slack, I pull; but when they pull, I slack. Know these things, and tell me what your father had to say about this footprint.”

  Ka’b never mentioned a footprint. Had he suspected there was such an impression, I would have known about it. I was naive enough to tell this to the Caliph.

  Mu’awiya would have none of it. Ideas on the footprint were cropping up daily. An alliance of Muslim and Jewish scholars had started to claim that the footprint was left behind by Abraham, as he was preparing to strike his son with the knife. When challenged as to how a mere mortal could leave an impression on stone, they replied that in the days of Abraham the Rock was soft, like clay, as evidenced by the shells and sea animals impressed on similar types of rock in the vicinity. Why then was there only one footprint? retorted the incredulous. Why did the son’s feet not leave an impression next to his father’s? The scholars replied that after the Rock had hardened, God erased all the other footprints. No one was convinced.

  Mu’awiya’s real problem was not this alliance but Yasar, a former slave turned tailor from Medina, who was making a name for himself because as a young boy he had heard the Prophet preach.

  Yasar was going around Damascus claiming that the Rock was the spot from which the Messenger of God had ascended to Heaven. The footprint bore witness, Yasar said, to a miraculous journey he had heard Muhammad describe, from Mecca to Jerusalem and back again in one night, during which, he alleged, the ascent occurred.

  Yasar was busy showing crowds of people gathered around one corner of the Rock what it felt like to touch the precise imprint of the Prophet’s heel who, he said, was not wearing sandals at the time.

  Lifted up on his father’s shoulders, the young Yasar had supposedly heard the Prophet tell throngs of people:

  “While I was sleeping near the Black Stone of the Ka’ba one day, the Angel Gabriel came and stirred me with his foot. I sat up but saw nothing and lay down again. He came a second time and stirred me with his foot. I sat up but saw nothing and lay down again. He came to me the third time and stirred me with h
is foot. I sat up and he took hold of my arm and I stood beside him and he brought me out to the door of the mosque and there was a white animal, half mule, half donkey, with wings on its sides with which it could propel its feet very fast.”

  When the Prophet tried to mount this extraordinary creature, it shied away from him. This made Gabriel upset. He grabbed the creature’s mane, and shouted,

  “Are you not ashamed to behave in this way? By God, none more honorable before God than Muhammad has ever ridden you before.”

  The creature was so ashamed that it broke out into a sweat and stood still until Muhammad mounted. With the help of this steed, Muhammad and Gabriel were able to cover the distance between Mecca and Jerusalem in the blink of an eye, stopping at Mount Sinai on the way.

  (photo credit 22.2)

  Upon arriving at David’s Sanctuary, the Prophet found himself welcomed by an assembly made up of all the prophets from the past.

  “I have never seen a man more like myself than Abraham,” Yasar reports Muhammad as saying of this encounter. “Moses was a ruddy-faced man, tall, thinly fleshed, curly-haired with a hooked nose. Jesus, Son of Mary, was a reddish man of medium height with many freckles on his face and lank hair as though he had just stepped out of a bath. One would suppose that his head was dripping with water, though there was no water on it.”

  The assembled prophets asked Muhammad to lead them in prayer. Gabriel told Muhammad that this meant he had been guided to the most primordial of all the religions of the Book. Following the prayer, the Prophet was led by Gabriel to climb onto the Rock’s hard, flat surface. As he reached its summit, the Heavens began to open up in preparation for his ascent. The Rock even tried to rise with him, which it might very well have done were it not for the quick-thinking Gabriel. He grabbed hold of the massive platform from two of its sides, and pulled down on it with all of his strength, crying out:

  “Your place, O Stone, is on earth. You have no further part in what the Prophet must do.”

  The long ridges along the edges of the Rock of Ascension, as Yasar had taken to calling it, are the traces of Gabriel’s fingers as he clutched at the formidable hardness, terminating its rise, and eventually fixing it back in place on top of Mount Moriah. Muhammad’s ascent, it turned out, was to be by means of a ladder of light, just like Jacob’s. The ladder came down from the Heavens and rested on the Rock. Muhammad described the ladder as “that to which the dying man looks as death approaches.” The footprint was left behind as Muhammad pressed down hard to spring up with the other foot.

  The two companions travelled through the Heavens, meeting and conversing with various angels and prophets. Gabriel informed the Guardian of each heavenly gate that his companion had been sent for. The Guardian was always helpful. Eventually the pair reached the highest Heaven and were in the presence of God. The encounter turned out to be something of an anticlimax the way Yasar spun out the story, because its only outcome was the imposition of an obligation of fifty prayers a day upon the followers of Muhammad.

  At this point in Yasar’s telling of the tale, someone in his rapt audience wanted to know how the fifty had been reduced to the customary five. Whereupon Yasar claimed to remember word by word Muhammad’s reply:

  “On my return from the highest Heaven I passed by Moses. He asked me how many prayers had been laid upon me. When I told him fifty, he said, ‘Prayer is a weighty matter and your people are weak. Go back to your Lord and ask him to reduce the obligation on your community.’ I did as he recommended and God reduced the number by ten. Again, I passed by Moses who still thought the number was too high; so I went back, and God reduced the number by another ten prayers a day. So it went on until only five prayers for the whole day were left. Again, Moses gave me the same advice. But this time I told him that I was ashamed to go back to my Lord and ask him to reduce the number again.”

  (photo credit 22.3)

  Nothing good would come of Yasar’s story, Mu’awiya said; the man was inspired by the Devil. Lines of anxiety creased his face when he spoke of him. No one could predict the alliances that might unfold amid such allegations. Yasar had no learning. But, Mu’awiya realized, he had animal cunning and a sense of timing which more than compensated for it.

  By turning a Messenger from God—a mere warning that the beginning of the end was nigh—who himself rejected every superstition regarding his person, into a miracle-worker, Yasar was challenging both the Jews and the Christians in their city, and laying down a new, purely Muslim, claim to the Holy Rock. The uproar that had already claimed lives could get worse. Nothing a Christian could say about Christ’s ascension into the Heavens from a different spot on the Mount of Olives could compete with a Muslim’s description of Muhammad’s visit to Paradise and Hell, and his return in body and spirit to tell everyone about it.

  Yasar had the tailor’s gift of weaving entirely separate pieces of cloth into a whole so seamless that the customer did not even notice that his beautiful new tunic was made of rags. And he was hard to suppress, given that he claimed no prophetic powers.

  But what was the Caliph to do? Seal off the Rock from the throngs that were daily gathering around it to see and hear the famous tailor of Damascus—even as he deployed the rest of his soldiers to keep Jews and Christians from scratching each other’s eyes out? That would only add to Yasar’s credibility. The Caliph would be seen as afraid of him.

  A story is as good as its chain of transmission, I suggested to Mu’awiya. Not all transmitters can be trusted. There was nothing wrong with hearsay, when passed on by a transmitter of good character and reputation. My father, I said, had never mentioned anything about a night-journey and ascension in spite of spending the last years of his life seeking out the great storytellers of his generation. Perhaps Yasar was simply a fraud trying to further his own interests. Mu’awiya should investigate his background and motives, and then expose him.

  The Caliph was not convinced.

  “We have fattened a dog, and now he comes to eat us. What else is there to know about the man? He lived in Medina as he claims. There he almost certainly heard the Prophet preach before large groups. Everyone did in the old days. Perhaps he actually heard the Prophet describe a vision like Jacob’s that came over him during sleep. Am I to be seen haggling with a former slave over whether the ascension was a dream or an actual event while the Holy City goes up in flames all around me? Yasar has nothing to lose from attaching the Rock to the person of the Prophet. It is a clever move bound to gain him supporters. I am surprised no one thought of it before. The man does not seek to win an argument but rather to acquire a reputation. No, we will have to outwit him on his own territory: the footprint. Return to the footprint, son of Ka’b. Think! Search for an explanation of its origin, one worthy of your father.”

  That night, for the first time in years, I tried to recall all of my father’s stories. I put them in chronological order from Creation to the destruction of the Temple. I listed every prophet who had had anything to do with the Rock, and then painstakingly eliminated them, one by one from the roster of possible owners of the foot behind the print. Jesus, David, Solomon, Jacob, and all the lesser prophets were either not old enough, or had not had an appropriate opportunity to leave an imprint that would go unnoticed all these years. Adam was too frivolous. Ishmael lived in Jerusalem only as a young boy; the impression was too big to be his. How about my namesake, Ishaq? Unlikely. It would be his father’s before his. I struggled particularly hard over Abraham. Even Yasar stressed the physical resemblance between Abraham and Muhammad. How, then, could he distinguish between their footprints? For that matter how could an imprint have been left on solid rock by a mere man?

  Suddenly, while considering this argument, the slate of my uncertainties was wiped clean, and from my father’s stories, the truth dawned like one of those universal forms of the Divine that owed no allegiance to time or place but had to be a sign of our salvation. The name of the Truth was God.

  In the twelfth hour of the s
ixth day of Creation, on Friday the sixth of Nisan, after the First Man had been cast out of the Garden, stripped of his Garment of Light and admonished for his transgression, God put His foot on the Rock to ascend back to Heaven. Ka’b had said so. Therefore, the footprint had to be God’s own impression, left behind just before He took himself outside His own creation, angry at the degraded thing that Adam had made of himself. He became forever transcendent because of the First Man’s transgression and had left His mark behind as a reminder of all that we had lost.

  Mu’awiya was delighted. The very next day, citing the authority of Ka’b and a number of other luminaries he had lined up for the occasion, he announced that the impression on the Rock belonged to the Lord of All the Worlds. No mention of Yasar or the story of the Prophet’s ascension was made.

  The monks felt vindicated because in their eyes God was Jesus Christ. The Jews were happy because it was their story of Creation that Mu’awiya had just ratified. The Rock of Foundation, not Calvary, was the navel of the universe. And Yasar had been checked because the stakes had been raised. He now had to deny the Caliph’s assertion that it was God’s footprint on the Rock, and this looked like blasphemy. Like a piece of limestone dropped in acid, the dispute dissolved.