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

by Kanan Makiya

  “Yet you claimed to know that the mark on the Rock is God’s own footprint.”

  “I made no such claim, O Caliph. I merely deduced the likelihood that it was His by way of argument from the lore of my father and the prophets.”

  “You do your father credit, son of Ka’b,” Abd al-Malik replied. “I see that I have not wasted my time inviting you to Damascus.”

  Abd al-Malik used to give five audiences every morning after the Dawn Prayer. These began with the Reporter bringing him news from all over the empire, after which he would read a thirtieth part of the Holy Book in private before entering the audience hall. First to be admitted were his personal officers, with whom he would chat for a while, and then his ministers, who would talk over matters that had arisen during the course of the previous day. At this audience, a breakfast would be served made up of the remains of the previous evening’s supper—cold lamb, chicken, or some such dish.

  “Page, set out the chair!” he would call out once he had finished. Then, he would proceed to the mosque, where, after ablution, he would take his seat on the chair that had been set for him, lean his back against the screen, and allow suitors to approach him as they would. I have met beggars on such occasions, wandering Arabs from the desert, women and children, destitute folk upon whose heads some calamity had fallen. After the customary “How is the Prince of True Believers this morning?” or “God prolong your days!” to which Abd al-Malik would always respond, “By the Grace of God,” they would unload upon him their tales of woe and misfortune.

  Abd al-Malik had the talent of listening. This was a man with no intimates, and yet he was capable of paying attention to trivia and drivel for hours on the grounds that it would one day be useful to him. Occasionally, he would act upon a particular injustice—ordering redress, or sending guardsmen to put a stop to some encroachment, or, when no immediate course of action appeared feasible, initiating an inquiry.

  When no more suitors remained, he would return to his palace paved in green marble and sit an hour by the great fountain in the court, which flows at all hours, watering a garden of flowers, trees, and birds. Occasionally I would be taken into this garden. But more often than not, we would meet in the audience hall, and I would speak before scores of nobles, secretaries, officers, and petitioners.

  “Talk,” he said to me early on when he was setting down the rules of our relationship, “so long as I want to listen, but do not, whatever else you say, give me flatteries or exhort me to righteousness.”

  Talk about what? Of what use could I be to a new Caliph beset with enemies and problems on every side? Abd al-Malik was in dire need of soldiers and strategists who had knowledge of tribal genealogies and rivalries and feuds that stretched back for generations. Perhaps they could suggest alliances that could help prop up the empire that was collapsing all around him. I knew nothing of such matters.

  Abd al-Malik wanted to talk about Ka’b. He wanted to be armed with his wisdom, he said. The truth is that Abd al-Malik had not brought me to Damascus for myself; it was my father’s lore he wanted.

  What really happened between Ka’b and Umar in Jerusalem half a century ago? Abd al-Malik asked. He wanted to know the direction of Ka’b’s prayers, and God’s reasons for not allowing David to build a House for Him over the Rock. Was it because God did not want to be housed in a Temple made of cedar, however magnificent? Or was it because of David’s sins? What exactly were those sins? Should a kingdom be bequeathed to one’s sons if there were the danger that it might not remain intact due to the father’s sins?

  Rubbing knees with so attentive a listener as Abd al-Malik for long stretches at a time was not easy. To be sure, he was a tall and handsome man to look upon, with an aquiline nose that added stateliness to a comeliness that not even an attack of smallpox in childhood had succeeded in marring. What could be wrong with being favored by such a powerful and handsome man?

  Foul breath. Unfortunately, God had endowed his regal countenance with breath so bad that his wives could not fall asleep in his presence and grew sick from lack of sleep. Whispering tongues say that Sukayna, the daughter of Husayn, the son of Ali, would not marry Abd al-Malik because of the foulness of the air whenever he was in her presence. But the marriage was a strategic one from the outset, designed to improve the standing of Abd al-Malik’s father among the Hashemites; it would have become untenable after Abd al-Malik fled Medina at the start of Abdallah’s revolt.

  The Caliph’s breath earned him the nickname Father of Flies. The hateful creatures forever hovered around his face, attracted by the smell and traces of blood that leaked from his mouth. A courtier accused of using the epithet was once hauled before him in my presence. “My arse contemplates those who talk behind my back,” Abd al-Malik said before ordering the fellow beheaded. Flies were certainly in evidence around that hapless head when it was brought on a platter before the Caliph.

  Some people said that the Caliph was afflicted with a disease that gnawed away at his gums, requiring him to have gold bands aligning his teeth. Others said that his bad breath was the price of the curse that the Prophet had laid upon Mu’awiya’s father and his House. More likely than not, Abd al-Malik never picked his teeth with sticks from the tamarisk tree and had too great a fondness for the sugared curd-tarts and pilgrim-cheer pastries which were forever being passed around in his court.

  Abd al-Malik talked about his breath to no one. On all matters, he kept his thoughts sealed tight as a clam. Perhaps his economy with words came from his affliction. It is, of course, the height of folly to initiate a conversation with anyone about anything remotely connected with the faculty of smell. Naturally, therefore, I suffered Abd al-Malik’s breath in silence, for as long as it took him to squeeze from me all the stories of Ka’b, stories which I had once spurned.

  Abd al-Malik’s interest in the City of the Temple exceeded that of all the Caliphs who had preceded him. But storytelling was not all he had in mind. I was being measured and sized up for another purpose. Or was what I was saying being turned around and laid out for inspection in the back rooms of the Caliph’s mind? Looking into his fathomless eyes gleaming above flashes of gold, I felt as uneasy as a moth drawn to a lit candle. What did Abd al-Malik have in store for me? Either he was not yet ready to say or did not know himself.

  (photo credit 24.1)

  “How do you think your father would answer those who claim to see Jewish leanings in his claim that Adam fell in Jerusalem?” he asked toward the end of his first year in office, just before the call to the Sunset Prayer had sounded.

  Before I could reply, he waved his hand dismissively in the direction of a group of older, bearded men. “These pious souls say he fell in India, on a mountain called Wasim in a valley called Bahil between Dahnaj and Mandal, carrying with him seeds from the Garden. These Adam spread around. From them came all good fruit, many varieties of which are still found only in India. Eve fell separately, they say, in the environs of Mecca. There, the first man traveled to meet up with her. Neither fell in Jerusalem. What would Ka’b have said to that?”

  “If Ka’b is a Jew for thinking that Adam fell in Jerusalem, O Abd al-Malik, then he is in the company of the most notable members of your House. Why, Mu’awiya said as much the day he was proclaimed Caliph in Jerusalem. And what if there is a difference of opinion between the followers of Muhammad on such questions? On no other point concerning Creation do these critics disagree with my father. Whether Adam landed in India or on the Rock in the Holy City, everyone is in agreement that he carried the Black Stone and landed on a mountain, one that happens to be the closest to Heaven of all the mountains of the Earth.”

  “Too close,” interjected a tall, elegantly dressed man often seen by Abd al-Malik’s side, “for I am told that his head poked into Paradise and frightened the angels. Some Rock this is that causes such consternation in the heavens!”

  The speaker was a Christian poet from the tribe of Taghlib in Mesopotamia—a court favorite ready to praise or r
evile anyone to have his mouth filled with gold. Famous for his loquaciousness and flabby ears, either one of which could have earned him the name Akhtal, he knew how to please a paymaster even as he steered perilously close to offending him.

  I saw him appear in court one day, drunk and flaunting a huge gold cross on a chain on his chest. Irritated, Abd al-Malik demanded that Akhtal embrace Islam. He offered ten thousand gold pieces in return for an instant public conversion. “If I accept,” Akhtal replied with extraordinary effrontery, “will you allow me to continue drinking wine?” He had a reputation for needing drink to compose.

  “What is the use of your wine,” Abd al-Malik replied. “Its beginning is bitter, its end intoxication.”

  Whereupon Akhtal smacked his lips and said, “That may be so, but all in between is such that, compared with one properly mellowed draught, deepened to amber with time, your whole empire counts as a drop of water from the Euphrates licked off the fingertip.” Abd al-Malik burst into laughter, and the same man who could carry on a discourse on the likeness of God gave Akhtal the money without making him convert.

  I was new to court and kept quiet at Akhtal’s taunt. He was not a man to trifle with. One scathing line of verse could make my life hell. Men’s ears tingled with anticipation of them from Arabia to Egypt. Abd al-Malik, however, was in good humor and egged on the conversation himself.

  “I expect of our poets to show more reverence for the point of creation of the universe and the place where our angel ancestor fell.”

  “I don’t dispute that Adam fell there, O Caliph. Perhaps he even lived on the Rock. But like myself, he did not have in him the ascetic temperament,” Akhtal said, stroking his sumptuous silk attire with the palms of his hands in a clownish gesture.

  “By the way,” he added as though he had just had an afterthought, “have you seen the Rock?”

  “Of course, many times during my governorship.”

  “Well, then, you know what a bare and unwelcoming thing it is. How would you like to have Ka’b’s Rock staring at you day in and day out like the cold, gray eye of an embittered old man? No wonder Adam became so irritable and bitter. Perhaps its unforgiving, diabolical shape suggested to the Jews their ghastly theology. Better, I say, for the Caliph of Muhammad’s People to have nothing to do with it.”

  There is no more intoxicating draught than anger swallowed down for God’s sake. My insides were seething. But I kept silent. Who, I thought, does this Akhtal think he is? At heart he is a descendant of those pagan bards so beloved by the Arabs. From time to time, he divorces his wife, returns to the desert, remarries, and throws himself into a tribal feud. Having replenished his virility, he comes back to court, where the princes of Umayya swaddle him in luxury, loving the way he vents his wild Bedouin nature in poetry. Personal piety had imposed restraints on the first generation of Muhammad’s followers, who were now all gone. Syria’s cities today turn out singers, not fighters, Arab men—and women, God forbid!—who set passages of Bedouin lore to music for dancing girls. Every luxury and new experience is eagerly sought, to be experienced vicariously through court jesters like Abd al-Malik’s poet.

  What does Akhtal know of religion to insult Ka’b? A Christian, he may think he is. Sophronius would certainly not have thought him one. He grovels before a priest one day, and makes fun of another the next. Once, I am told, a priest passed by his house. Akhtal instructed his pregnant wife to run after him and touch his robe. He thought to bring the poor woman luck. But she could not run fast enough and only succeeded in touching the tail of his donkey. “Don’t worry,” Akhtal said to her, shedding his piety as quickly as he had adopted it. “There is not a great deal of difference between him and his donkey’s tail.”

  Can a man seek revenge through his work? Was I going to let myself be driven into the arms of an Umayyad Caliph by Akhtal and everything such so-called poets represent—I, who had carried a deep distrust of the House of Umayya since my youth?

  Abd al-Malik, however, was not the kind of man that Akhtal took him to be—and that Abd al-Malik wanted him to think he was. Nor was he like the other members of his House. He belonged to the first generation brought up from birth in the religion of Muhammad, not in the desert by Bedouin women with reckless instincts. He grew up in the first God-fearing city, Medina, where every person was a deeply devout and committed follower of the Prophet. Until he assumed the Caliphate, he was considered one of the four most trustworthy scholars of law and religion of his day.

  This was a man who was being serious when he bantered with his court jester to people’s amusement. He had the ability to do both things well at the same time. So why did he bring a book illustrator to Damascus from Jerusalem? What was the connection between Ka’b’s stories and his plotting to turn the troubles of a kingdom around? Since no one around the Caliph could see a connection, they assumed he was as flighty and irresponsible as they were. I, too, was attracted and repelled, intrigued and confused—not knowing in which direction to turn or what it was the Caliph was seeking from me. However intimate my knowledge of him eventually became in the course of time, I never made the mistake of thinking that I understood this Caliph’s mind.

  When his soldiers first appeared, making such a commotion outside my house, no one outside Damascus would acknowledge Abd al-Malik as their Caliph. By the end of seven years, however, Believers from Africa to Khurasan were falling over one another to do so. They cheered him on in the very year that he flattened the Ka’ba, toward which every one of his acclaimers prayed five times a day. Why did so few mourn the fate of Abdallah and God’s most ancient House? What arresting stroke of genius on a man’s part can so quickly change the hearts and minds of people toward him?

  His advisors say that he used up all the wealth hoarded by Mu’awiya and decades of successful campaigning in foreign lands to defeat Abdallah and turn people around. In order to devote himself to his internal problems, they say, Abd al-Malik signed a truce with the Byzantine emperor that required him to pay 365,000 gold pieces, one thousand slaves, and one thousand horses annually. The deal untied his hands. Still, how could he afford such an onerous sum and have enough left over to defeat Abdallah hunkered down in Arabia? If Mu’awiya’s frugality and Abd al-Malik’s truce explain his military victory, they do not explain why Abdallah was forgotten in the year that the Ka’ba was destroyed. Habits of the heart are not purchased with gold or changed by the sword.

  Abd al-Malik had intuited that military means alone were not enough. But to which direction would he turn with this intuition? The Caliph was holding back, perhaps even from himself. Suddenly, however, a year after I had been going backward and forward between Jerusalem and Damascus, I saw the Caliph’s purpose flushed out. Three seminal conversations wiped clean the slate of his uncertainties. They flared up on the day following my encounter with that worthless windbag Akhtal.

  Mecca and Jerusalem

  The first conversation took place in private, during Abd al-Malik’s noon meal. There were no secretaries or petitioners. I was called in and invited to help myself to some chicken roasted with garlic. No sooner had I taken a mouthful than Abd al-Malik said:

  “The son of Ka’b should not have let himself be needled by our poet.”

  Mercifully, I had foreseen this rebuke and answered, “I was held back, O Commander of the Faithful, not by Akhtal’s rudeness, but because his words sparked a moment of illumination on to which I needed to cling for a while.”

  Looking into Abd al-Malik’s eyes, I continued: “Our forefather, Abraham, was driven from the City of the Temple to the City of the Black Stone. But what drove him away? Ka’b gave this question much thought. Perhaps it was the Rock’s cold and forbidding nature, to which Akhtal alluded.”

  “What are you talking about, Ishaq?”

  “After his trial on Moriah, Abraham did not want to be buried under the Rock—unlike Adam, who yearned to return to the Garden and sought the place on Earth closest to it as his final resting place. The Knight of Fa
ith had a nightmare in which he imagined that he was the Rock upon which the terrible ordeal had been enacted. He did not know that he had ever been anything but the Rock. Suddenly, he awakened and realized to his astonishment that he was Abraham. But it was hard to be sure whether he was really Abraham and had only dreamt that he was the Rock, or was really the Rock and was only dreaming that he was Abraham. For a split second, the father of the Arabs and the Jews was confused.”

  “What is there to be confused about a rock?”

  “The Rock was no longer just a rock, sitting there at the summit of the mountain, silent and unyielding, indifferent to all that was unfolding around it; it had metamorphosed into the lodestone of Abraham’s worst nightmares, the meeting point of his most hidden desires and fears. Abraham was relearning the meaning of fear. The memory of what he had been about to do weighed upon him. He ached to put distance between himself and the mountains of the Holy City looming over him like giant parched bones. He had to die somewhere else. Not that he knew what would bring him peace; all he knew was that it could not be a thing that took its form from his own deepest fears, from suddenly resurrected memories of bridled impulses and expiated joys. He who had called his own father wretched had spent a lifetime running away from wretchedness. But, like furies, the memories stayed in hot pursuit, catching up with the old man during his nightmare. Furies began to inhabit the frail frame of the man who so willingly would have given up his own son on the Rock, and wherever he turned, he found himself chased by them until they coalesced into the unforgettable shape of an enormous hulk of limestone.”

  “Men are saying he is buried in Hebron.”

  “In a valley treed with sycamores and carobs, filled with orchards of grape, fruit, olives, and figs. He found peace in a land that is as soft and green as the Rock is hard and gray. No more harsh shadows and dramatic vistas. No more infinite horizons and star-filled skies. But it is not his resting place that came to my mind while Akhtal was speaking.”