by Kanan Makiya
My father left out the merit of the son in the story of the great sacrifice that he told Umar on the Mount of Olives. Nor did Umar raise the question with him, perhaps because that is not what a man beside himself with grief at the sacrifice of his own daughter needed to hear at the time. For him, as for Umar, that was not where the true meaning of what happened on the Rock resided. But Ka’b was wrong to leave out the merit of he whose name is on the dying breath of every martyr in God’s cause.
The monks of the Holy City contend that the People of Muhammad follow too blindly in the footsteps of the Jews. What happened to Abraham and Ishaq they say, was but a preamble, a dress rehearsal, for the supreme sacrificial act of all time carried out by Jesus in the place where they have erected their Church. Because of what Jesus did, the whole tradition of bloodletting practiced in the old Temple was rendered null and void. Abraham did not offer himself. And Ishaq was just a boy who was offered by someone else; he too did not offer himself. Worst of all, he did not die; he was not even hurt. Not one drop of Ishaq’s blood was shed, they argue most persuasively to the young Arab scholars who search them out. How could either Abraham or Ishaq, venerable prophets that they were, be compared with the Son who was Himself God, and who died so nobly on behalf of all of us?
The true meaning of what happened on the Rock during the great trial, therefore, needs to be re-examined. Mine is a moderate view, rooted in the teachings of the Holy Book; it starts, not by denying what Ka’b said to Umar on the Mount of Olives, but by adding to the story all those things that my father did not say. Is there equal if not greater merit in him who was to be sacrificed than in him who did the sacrificing?
After Moriah had been pointed out by God, Abraham and his son left their asses at its foot and climbed the mountain. On the summit, Abraham sharpened his knife. He built the altar, and he trimmed and arranged the wood in the right order for a burnt offering. Then he embraced the boy, who only now, even as he was being bound hand and foot, began to realize that something was amiss.
Like a soft-spoken dove, Ishaq whispered:
“Father!”
“I am here, my son.”
“I behold the fire and the wood. But where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?”
“The Lord will look to His lamb, and draw it to His bosom.”
Between the question and the answer, Abraham would have had to look into his son’s eyes. He would have had to look into his eyes yet again as he raised the knife to dispatch him. Tradition demands that, in the case of an unblemished offering, the killing must be done in a single stroke. If, in the act of slaughtering, there occurs a pause long enough for a whole other stroke to take place, the sacrifice must be disqualified.
But according to the Jewish sages whom I have consulted, that is when the exchange of words took place. There would not have been enough time for the sacrifice to be done correctly. Abraham’s ordeal would have been for naught.
Suppose, however, the exchange of words took place before the binding. Or suppose there was enough time to make the cut precisely as it should be made. How could this be a true sacrifice if the offering’s own blood was not shed? All the wise men that I have consulted teach that sin can be expiated only with blood. Tradition demands it, and only the blood of the victim himself counts for true atonement. The blood of a substitute will sometimes be accepted, as Muhammad’s father, Abd al-Muttalib, found out to his relief, but it is never as good. We know why God accepted a substitute on that particular occasion. Because He wanted His Messenger to be born. But how could He accept a substitute in the case of the supreme sacrifice, Abraham’s sacrifice of his son on the Rock? The Christians have an unimpeachable point here that needs to be accounted for.
Perhaps the Patriarch inflicted some kind of wound that released blood that washed over the Rock but left the boy alive. Would that consummate Abraham’s offering?
No, say the sages of blessed memory. It would not be enough. Where are the ashes? Tradition demands ashes. To be properly sacrificed, an offering must release blood and leave behind ashes. What happened to the ashes of him who was the perpetual offering? If they were not there, then Ishaq was not killed. What precisely happened on the Rock to confer merit on both Abraham and his son?
The first time I heard the story was the day that we settled into our new house situated eighty-six paces away from the story’s setting. No sooner had our baggage been set down than Ka’b took my hand and hurried to the esplanade, which was still covered in filth. Beside the Rock that he and Umar had uncovered, he told me the story of the origins of my name. I wanted to know whether or not the boy had been afraid. Ka’b said,
“Perhaps, but the fear went away after his father spoke.”
“Why did he submit to being tied up?”
“He trusted his father.”
“Did he struggle to release himself?”
“No.”
“But then his faith was being tested as much as his father’s.”
“It was.”
“What would be the point of binding him, depriving him of the possibility of failing God’s test?”
Ka’b was silent. He did not know what to say. That silence led me to search in new directions. And this is what I have concluded.
Of course Abraham’s sacrifice was a true offering, and as such, the boy had to have died. Otherwise, how can the sacrifice of a would-be victim, taken down from the altar sound of limb, be greater than that of an actual victim, like Umar’s daughter, whose body became food for worms? The Christians have a point: He who does not act out a plan, whatever his intentions, is not like one who carries it out. How, then, did the boy die and go on to spread his seed until his descendants were as numerous as the sands on the seashore?
Abraham would have pinned Ishaq down with his knees. Had the arm clenching the knife in its fist faltered, as it might, Abraham would have steeled himself and made it strong. That was his nature. With steadied hands, according to the rite, he slaughtered the boy. But did he kill him? The boy may have died of fright before the blade struck, as some people say. Still Abraham had to slit Ishaq’s throat because a full quarter of the boy’s blood had to spill on the Rock. Whether it was the blade that did the deed, or Ishaq’s own terror, there is no escaping the conclusion that Abraham’s son was the first true lamb of God.
No sooner had the deed been done, and the body consumed by fire, than a resurrecting dew fell upon those ashes of righteousness. The boy revived. God, who commands the wind, showers the rain, and nourishes the living, also quickens the dead. In the blink of an eye, salvation sprouts, bringing life where before there was only death. There and then on the Rock, the son of Abraham was resurrected as proof of his great virtue. Thus it had to be with him whose binding was intended to be more than just a test of Abraham’s submission, and whose blood has watered the gardens of the pure ever since.
What did the father do now? No doubt he seized the newly arisen boy by the shoulders to slaughter him again, as God had commanded. Only just before the ministering angels intervened with Him on high to save the son by substituting the ram in his place, the boy himself asked to be bound. He feared for his father’s sake; his offering would be found wanting if, in a moment of weakness, he cringed and the knife were deflected from its purpose.
“O my father,” Ishaq said, “if you desire my sacrifice, nothing is imposed on you by me. Your punishment for shedding my blood is by this diminished. Only make my bonds fast, for if the death is hard I do not believe I will be able to endure it when I feel death’s touch. Hone your knife so that you can finish me off quickly and release me from my agony. When you lay me down for sacrifice, lay me down on my face, not on my side. For I fear that, if you look at my face, you will soften and abandon God’s command. If you wish, return my shirt to my mother; it might be a consolation to her. Now, proceed. Do it!”
The Importance of Eight
For weeks I walked like a man in a daze up and down the cobbled streets of Jerusalem, visiting my old haunt
s. I sat for hours in the convoluted halls of the Church of the Resurrection, looking at how Calvary’s rock had been fitted to its church. The building meandered from the great steps of the Cardo, to the Basilica, to the central court, to the Rotunda, with Adam and Helena’s tomb tucked away underneath. The giant envelope of a form fitted these different places connected with the death and burial of Jesus arbitrarily. Calvary was all but lost in the confusion. One stumbled upon it by accident. It was not in the center, because the Church of the Resurrection had so many of those. A center has to be there all at once, all the time, and from every direction; it has to be suggested by the large and the small in the whole edifice. Every surface and detail has to strive toward it.
I climbed the Mount of Olives, approaching the Church of the Ascension on its summit from different angles, considering afresh the question of its rotund shape, so unlike that of any other edifice that I have ever seen. This unroofed building that was all wall and columns never failed to lift my spirits. The sky was its canopy—its only decoration, constellations of stars blended into the firmament like smoke from a sacrifice. What arresting stroke of genius had conceived of that for the place that Jesus had been called upon to return to Him on High? Like the Muslims that I grew up with—and unlike my father—I never excluded the possibility that Jesus the Prophet, not the Son of God, God forbid! might have ascended from here into Heaven, as the church’s caretakers tirelessly tell their visitors. Perhaps those were his footprints embedded in the sandstone in the center of the church.
But the Churches of Jerusalem had not been founded on the Prophet’s truth. The willingness to suspend disbelief, which is what I do when I walk up the Mount of Olives or go into a beautiful church, is not True Belief—not, at any rate, as we followers of Muhammad understand it. True Belief is the certainty that God returned to His heavenly place of abode from the plain, gray, ordinary-looking piece of Rock that nestles in the sanctuary beside my house. My task, therefore, was to celebrate the wordless equivalent of that certainty, to sate the hunger of all men to believe from a place of deep humility.
I consulted Nicholas, a Greek master-builder responsible for many of the finest churches in Syria. Knowing that the secrets of his trade were handed down from father to son and could be imparted only under the strictest of vows and never to a man of alien faith, he refused to talk to me about his craft at first, fearing both the admonition of his Church and the ire of his family. By appealing to our years of friendship—we had enjoyed an interlude of companionship as young men—and the pride he took in his considerable skills, I eventually won Nicholas over, and enticed him into a conversation on the setting out of domes.
“Give me a point, and a square,” he said after crossing himself repeatedly to ward off the possibility that he might be commiting a grave sin, “and I can erect any dome you want.”
The point sat at the center of the square, where its two diagonals intersected. From the same intersection, another square could be drawn at right angles to the first. Thus were created eight equidistant points.
(photo credit 28.1)
“Now think of these as describing the circumference of a circle. That is the drum of your Dome, and that is how I would mark it out with pegs on the ground.”
I took to playing with this geometry, using a stick in the sand—as I often did when deciding upon a frame for chapters of the Holy Book, which I would then execute in gold on parchment and surround with twisting tracery superimposed on patterns of straight lines.
In so tracing lines on a prepared patch of fine sand, I stumbled upon a remarkable consequence of Nicholas’s rules. By taking the original superimposed set of squares and extending all eight of their sides, a new set of intersections was harmoniously generated. I had made a new octagon, bigger than the first, but as perfectly derived from its archetype as the ripples made by a stone thrown into the stillness of a pond.
Extending the sides of the octagon in the sand generated yet another pair of superimposed squares, larger than their predecessors. One could go on and on, I realized. The pattern emerging was like a living crystal, infinitely extendable around a point of origin and always with perfect symmetry in every direction. Connecting the outer eight points gave me an outer enclosure, the boundary wall enveloping two interior ambulatories, which, in turn, enclosed a circle out of which was going to rise the highest and most splendid Dome imaginable. There before my eyes in the sand was what I had been looking for—a graded passage from this world to the next by way of the Rock.
Eight is the number of Paradise just as surely as Arabic is its language. God provided His creatures with eight paradises and only seven hells, Ka’b used to say.
“Why the difference?” I asked.
“Because His mercy is greater than His wrath. Is not the covenant between a newborn and his Maker made on the eighth day, the day his foreskin is cut? And did not the Prophet say that the Garden of Refuge for the Companions of the Right, virtue’s ultimate reward, is the eighth level of Paradise?”
Four rivers—of water unstaling, of milk uncurdling, of honey purified, and of wine delightful—irrigate this highest level. The Garden is near the Lote-Tree of the Boundary under the Throne of God, itself carried by eight angels, all hovering in the Heavens directly above the Rock. Fountains gush everywhere. Shade trees, date palms, pomegranate trees, and other fruit trees abound. The air is redolent of musk, camphor, and ginger. In such a place the God-fearing shall dwell in the presence of their King Omnipotent, and find out that all their Lord had promised them was true.
Believers know these things because they are written. But not all of them know about the importance of eight. A bare handful realize that all the Peoples of the Book are folded under that number’s divine wings.
Christians say that Jesus rose to Heaven on the eighth day of the Passion. The pool in which they circumcise the hearts of their children is shaped like an octagon. Baptism, as they call it, makes the newborn a companion of Jesus on the Day of Resurrection. My Dome was in the shape of this number of the afterlife. The thought of it brought tears to my eyes.
In the course of a lifetime, a man is lucky to be granted two, three at most, insights into what is unmistakably right. Normally, the mind contents itself with shuffling around the dead facts of experience, trying this and then that, invariably settling on a compromise of sorts. But in the rare event of such an insight, the veils are stripped off life’s clutter to reveal the bright forehead of exactitude. The soul has grasped a living truth! The Beautiful, a deeply overpowering sensation that fills the soul with the warmth of Rightness, is revealed.
What is Rightness if not also Truth and Justice? My commission was one of immortalizing in stone the Truth and the Justice of my father’s Rock. Nothing about it was contingent. Like a harmonious chord, the building had materialized in my mind as an emanation of cosmic laws. The architecture was rhythmical and sequenced as it should be; it rejected the confusion of the superficial. Even the circumference of the Dome fell into place by itself, as it were, according to a definite proportion and in perfect harmony with every other dimension—as did the locations of the piers and columns that fell naturally on the points of intersection of my lines. I did not choose those points; they made themselves known to me. Nor did they conceal one another in the plan, but rather permitted, from any point in the interior, a view all the way across to the other side.
Transparency, as all men know, is the rule in Paradise.
Can rotating a square around a point accomplish all this? Can it determine the appropriate correlation between His ineffable nature and built form? To find shapes properly grounded in scripture and the stories of the prophets from so few rules is more reminiscent of Him than months, even years, of knowing Him through words alone. And all of it happened while I was playing like a child in the sand. When His Design was traced out with my stick, I was blessed with a glimpse into the dawn of what was to come. I knew then that, finally, I had awakened from the dream of this life to the reality
of the next.
Two problems had to be resolved—the location of the Rock’s center, the building’s starting point, and the dimensions of the square that Nicholas had talked about.
The Rock sprawled irregularly over a much larger area than is apparent to the eye today. Who dared to vouch on his or her own authority where the all-important center was? Scrambling over the surface, I drove a small wooden stake into the crevice that Ka’b had always said marked the Rock’s center. That stake became the marker from which the whole edifice was laid out.
The second problem was more complicated. Nicholas had said—and it was borne out by my drawing—that everything depended on the dimensions of the square: the diameter of the Dome, the outer perimeter of the octagon, the width of the two ambulatories, to say nothing of the area of the Rock left visible. All of these would fall into place only after the length of the square’s diagonal had been determined. I needed a criterion by which to determine this critical dimension.
The solution came to me like a bolt from on High. The template that I needed for Abd al-Malik’s Dome in Jerusalem must derive from Abraham’s Ka’ba in Mecca. The cube that housed the Black Stone was, after all, destined to return to the Rock on the Day when all things would be annihilated. That is what Ka’b had said. The Black Stone would uproot the Ka’ba from its foundations and travel with it to Jerusalem. The two holy Rocks would then conjoin in a cataclysmic embrace. Abd al-Malik’s Dome had to accommodate its counterpart in Mecca. All three dimensions of the Ka’ba had to fit inside the new Temple that Abd al-Malik was building over the ruins of its predecessors in Jerusalem. The diameter of the Dome had therefore to be equal to the height of its drum from the ground, whose dimensions were, in turn, derived from the diagonal of the Ka’ba, whose four corners are the four piers in the plan of the Dome of the Rock.
