by Kanan Makiya
“You see that old man?” Abd al-Malik said, pointing to an Arab praying in the Dome on the day of its opening. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he mumbled verses from the Holy Book to himself. “We were like him once, but our hearts have grown harder since.”
“His tears watch over us,” I replied, noting to myself that the old man was performing his prostrations so as to face the Rock and the Black Stone at the same time. “On the day they stop, we should worry.”
The Dome changed people’s hearts in many ways. If some of Abd al-Malik’s subjects were crying, the eyes of others were popping out of their heads in astonishment. You could see visitors silenced, with dropped jaws, standing beside others incanting incessantly, like the hoopoe bird, “What is this that our Caliph has built?”
You heard pious folk to whom the Dome had become a kind of salvation saying to one another, “This is not a building! It is a sweet-smelling vision descended from another world. Thanks be to God who has seen fit to bless the stricken followers of Muhammad.”
In truth, no Believer had laid eyes on so marvelous an artifact before—and built to cover the Lord’s own footprint, in a place that had witnessed a father and his son’s supreme test of faith. The same marks on the face of the Rock once used to drain the blood of my namesake were now used to drain water, the buckets and buckets of it needed to wash the Rock on the Monday and Thursday of every week. And not any kind of water—only the sweetest-smelling, further perfumed by a secret concoction of crushed roses, mistaqi, and saffron.
All kinds of new smells were enveloping and soothing suffering souls. On the morning of the same Monday and Thursday on which the Rock was washed, the Jewish Guardians would prepare a mixture of ambergris, rose water, and saffron, and from these would make a special kind of incense intended only for the Dome. The rose water was pressed from the best red roses of Persia, left to mature and put in censers of gold and silver inside which lay an odoriferous Indian wood rubbed over with musk and myrrh extracted from Arabian trees considered divine. Then the Guardians would lower curtains made of variegated and decorated silk until they hung down among the pillars. Now the incense would encircle the Rock entirely, condensing and clinging to all its surfaces. When the curtains were raised, the subtle odor, bearing a hint of the fragrance of cloves and sweet as a zephyr’s breath, wafted out to fill the city.
“Come one, come all!” the public herald would call out. “Abd al-Malik’s star-studded Dome, intimating in its perfection the world to come, is open. Come and perform your visit.”
And the people would hasten to pray in the Dome as if pious and serene thoughts, not smells, had begun to exude out of every joint and pore of stone; they would depart saying that they had been reminded of Paradise, whose fragrance is of musk, camphor, and ginger. On whomever the odor of the incense was found, it was said of this person that he was “in the Rock.”
Myself, I tried not to enter the Dome after it was opened. It was too full of visitors, streams of people coming from the four corners of the empire, who wanted nothing more than to be able to say that they had the air of Paradise on their clothes. I would see them going to and fro from the rooftop of my old house, hear them telling one another, with rapt faces, how on the same two mornings of every week, the Guardians of the Sanctuary would enter the bathhouse to wash and purify themselves. They would go to a room in which there was stored the special perfume intended for washing down the Rock. There, they would take off their clothes and put on garments of silk brocade adorned with figures made for the occasion. A girdle embellished with gold would be fastened tightly around their waists. After dressing themselves, they would rub down the rock-face in front of all the visitors. When these visitors returned where they had come from, expressions of awe travelled back with them, rippling over the anxieties and fears of the age like a smooth, sweet-smelling balm.
Travellers from far-flung provinces described half-shut eyes, wearied by decades of sedition and civil strife, opening like full moons upon hearing the heavenly vision described to them. Drowning men and women clutched in desperation at news of the wonder, as though the Dome were a plank bobbing in the ocean of their sorrows and fears. Terrible memories were erased overnight because of what Abd al-Malik had accomplished. Not in their wildest dreams would Muhammad’s People have imagined that such beauty and ceremony could belong to them without having been confiscated from Christians. Perhaps now they had something to live for, not just be against. Is it any wonder that Muhammad’s People forgot Abdallah and flocked to pay allegiance to the man who had brought about such a transformation?
Warfare is the art of biding one’s time while reading the future from the habits of men’s hearts. Only after Abd al-Malik had reaped the grand harvest of the Dome’s reception by the Believers did he turn his attention to Abdallah, stewing away in his desert fortress. Such was the virtue of patience in Abd al-Malik that, by the time that fighting actually broke out in Arabia, the Dome was all that anyone was talking about throughout the length and breadth of Syria.
Wars and military victories were no longer enough for the followers of Muhammad. Victory had to be converted into a currency other than territory or gold. Abd al-Malik had converted it into stone. His achievement had the appearance of a spontaneous eruption, coming out of nowhere, like the Israelites bursting out of the desert and substituting a Temple for a tent. Phoenicians, not Jews, were supposed to be Temple builders. Christians, not Muslims, liked to paint and decorate their holy places. But if David could make Jerusalem his capital, and if his son Solomon could consecrate that achievement with a Temple destined to be remembered until the end of time, so could Abd al-Malik.
The seventy-second year after the Exodus is the Year of the Dome. Abd al-Malik had his name and the year inscribed as a mosaic frieze inside the monument, thus ensuring that he would stand out in the annals of Islam because of his Dome, and not because of Abdallah’s corpse stuck on a gibbet outside Mecca.
Preparations and planning had gone on for four years; construction took an additional three. The crowning glory of Abd al-Malik’s reign was not slapped together in two weeks like the Ka’ba it supplanted, or like that embarrassing shack of a mosque that Umar had built south of the Rock, which the Caliph ordered torn down. As the pomegranate tree takes years of cultivation to swell up with red spring flowers and fruit worthy of a king’s banquet, so too a Temple that is able to so uplift the soul of its community.
As a rule, men live to be admired by others of their own station. I, for instance, a bookbinder, live to have my work admired by other bookbinders. Warriors live to be admired by other warriors. And rulers live to be admired by fellow rulers. A handful of rulers, however, are unique. They occupy a different space from the rest of us. These are the builders of dreams—ordinary men’s dreams, builders who are in some ineffable way able to account for every human impulse imaginable, seekers after the universals that cater not just to one but to every religious taste. Such rulers can be the hardest of taskmasters, the most unpleasant of men. Nothing is too small in their eyes, too small to be taken care of by someone else. Every detail has its place in a scheme that, by its very nature and not through the inclination of their own hearts, is grander than their own persons.
Abd al-Malik traveled a road paved in blood to become such a king. He bribed infidel emperors, cut off heads, and humiliated those Companions of the Messenger of God who had supported the claims of the House of Hashim. And yet he made the future live in the shadow of his Dome.
How will this Caliph be judged on the Day? Will he be judged by the merits of his building, or by his vain desire to be remembered for having built it? And what are we to make of the fact that, as it was being opened, Abd al-Malik’s army was gathering to besiege and attack the Ka’ba? Are these two acts of construction and destruction bound together by grim fate? Who decreed that the Stones Umar had so sweetly brought together should so horribly be ripped apart by factious war, and then just as horribly yoked back together again by the har
sh terms of Abd al-Malik’s victory over Abdallah? Perhaps the Ka’ba that Abd al-Malik ended up destroying will never be redeemed by the Dome that he built. The passage of time does not change the nature of a sin. But that is a judgment for the next world, not this one. Is it by dint of our feebleness that we admire Abd al-Malik for what he did, forgetting how he did it, we who know only how to laugh or weep, or is it in accordance with the design of Him whose deeds are without blemish and all of whose ways are justice, He who made laughter and tears?
The eyes attain Him not, but He attains the eyes;
He is the All-Subtle, the All-Aware.
The Rock of Judgment
When the Egyptians took a stand in relation to their world, they faced south. The word for “south” was the same as the word for “face.” “North” was the same as “back of the head.” A whole world in which east was left and west was right was described in accordance with the idea that the Nile, flowing from the south and cutting a green gash teeming with life through the desert, was God.
The Christians converted the Egyptians to praying east because, their sages said, east was the direction of the earthly Paradise from whence Adam had come.
Ka’b read all the sins of the monks and the pharaohs into this. In the search for God, he said to Umar shortly after their acclaimed find on the site of the old Temple, one must disregard the four cardinal directions given by the sun and the stars and the rivers and the mountains. God was not in this or that creation; He was pure orientation.
“Which is why,” Ka’b concluded, “when the Peoples of Moses and Muhammad take a stand in relation to their world, they face rocks.”
“But a rock is good for nothing, unlike a great and fertile river like the Nile,” objected Umar. “Had I not seen the Prophet himself kiss the Black Stone, I would never have done it.”
“In its uselessness lies its strength, its eternal correctness, its irreproachability,” my father would reply. “The greater a rock’s uselessness, the less likely it is to be confused with Him who is the only life-giving force. A rock is dumb, mute, and dense; it knows only how to sit, not to move; it is a marker forever singling out one point on the surface of the earth. At such a point, and nowhere else, did the Holy One manifest Himself during the act of Creation—and He will do so again on the Day of Annihilation. However brief His manifestation or however far back in the mists of time, and for whatever reason it took place, the fact that it happened is all that is important. Nothing else about the Rock is of the slightest interest.”
“The father of Ishaq is singling out a thing over its meaning!”
“His meanings are unfathomable. All that is given us to know is that at the moment of His first appearance, the undifferentiated material of the universe began to break out of its formlessness. The things that we can see and touch and smell began to happen, suddenly, out of nothing, as though by magic. Beauty erupted into the world. Not prettiness, mind you, whose nature is trite, but beauty, which sinks to the depths. David stumbled upon it when he unwittingly unleashed the chaos of the Waters. The Rock, the beginning of all Creation, checked the impending catastrophe lying just under the surface of the world. It stood as a reproof to the inconstancy of even the greatest of kings. How much greater an admonition does the Rock offer to our own frailties! Rocks are explosions of form in unformed space. They are authority and strength. Anyone who has seen them looming like parched bones in the desert will understand what I am saying. How else to order and discipline the treacherousness of sand? When the first Rock told the First Man where he was located in Palestine, the world, stretching from the farthest ocean to the Indus valley, was born.”
God’s chosen instrument both in the time of Moses and in the time of Mohammed was a People of the Sacred Direction. For in the beginning there was only one Rock and one Direction. This common orientation created deep ties of knowledge and experience between the peoples of Moses and Muhammad—from astronomy to pilgrimage, from the separateness of the categories of creation to proper rules of sacrifice, from ideas of cleanliness and defilement to architecture and the geography of Heaven and Hell.
True Believers prayed facing the Rock that David and Ahithophel had uncovered. The heads of animals about to be slaughtered were turned toward it. And while the first Muslims were undergoing persecution in Mecca, they took the greatest of care never to spit or to relieve themselves in this holiest of directions—the first sacred axis of Islam, which Umar himself had returned to True Belief.
Ka’b lived through an age of prophecy and unsettled customs, an age in which wisdom did not lie in teaching what had been revealed; it lay in revealing what ought to be taught. He wrestled with his soul as hard as Jacob with the angel before accepting Muhammad. But accept him in the end he did. He attached himself to Muhammad’s mission while his own people were lost in lamentations over their subjugation and the destruction of their Temple. My father did not speak of the Rock, until his visit to the Holy City. Perhaps he thought the Arabs would not know what to make of it. Perhaps he did not know what to say.
Umar was the first to know. But his knowledge remained unpolished. At the moment of his greatest triumph, the great Redeemer allowed religion to become subordinated to politics. He worried about what people might think if the sons of Hagar looked too much like the sons of Sara. And so he chose to define the People of Muhammad by expunging from them what was rightfully owed to the People of Moses.
If Ka’b considered this unworthy, it was not because he thought Umar ought to abide by what the Jews believed. It was because the great Caliph was denigrating the actual place of God’s ascent and Abraham’s sacrifice. He was denigrating all those prophets who predicted the destruction of the world and yet foresaw redemption coming only out of this mountain upon which I am now writing.
“I am laying in Zion a foundation stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone,” Isaiah had said. The Rock of Foundation: Foundation, not only as a story about origins, but as an ongoing holding together of the world. For around this Rock, Isaiah prophesied, all nations would end their warring and gather for a final reconciliation. Such a lodestone could have provided a clarity that was both welcome and necessary in the confused and confusing state of affairs in which Believers found themselves immediately after the conquest.
But Umar turned his back on the Rock. And later generations, for whom Umar’s bones were warmer than their own flesh, continued to build their mosques in the direction the Conqueror of Cities had built his. The Rock was ignored, turning into a thing toward which one gradually became indifferent. The unerring spirit of an age that had begun with such promise, that had conquered half the world in a handful of years, foundered; it was entombed within a stone that lay like a troubled conscience upon the land.
Muhammad would not have recognized the Believers as his followers. They grew idle and soft. The City of the Rock was being turned into a mine for profit in this world, not the next.
The moment Umar made his fateful decision, Ka’b knew that he had failed. Other men might have bent like reeds in the wind. But Ka’b harbored one of those abiding passions that ripens and deepens in adversity. The Rock was his probe; having worn out his sandals searching for it, only to be misunderstood, he gave himself up to the Rock.
A thing belongs to the one who remembers it most obsessively. Only through such remembering can we defend the mystery against the sorcery, worship the incomprehensible while rejecting the absurd, dispel the superstitions that complacency brings swirling around Him, and separate out of the inexplicable what is necessary and true.
“Remember what happened to the king who strove to build the tallest tower! He sought to scale the heavens above the clouds, imitating Him who is Most High. Instead he was ensnared and scattered by a whirlwind, flung aside to lie on a mattress of maggots, swaddled in a blanket of worms. Turn this world into a bridge over which you cross, my son, but on which you must never build. The living are but passersby on their way to Judgment.”
Like a b
lind man proud of his blindness, Ka’b never saw the point of a beautiful building. A permanent one, built of stone, was the gravest sin:
“What! Would you alter the structure of the universe!”
The Rock, which had honed and tested my father’s mettle, left him saddled with a vision that so encompassed the world that he lost touch with everything else around him. Perfection of the life is better than that of the work, taught the man whose own life’s work had dissipated like sand between his fingers.
For years I took for granted that, by not leaving behind anything new, or any kind of imitation of Him, the scroll of my good deeds would outweigh the bad. I lived quietly, honoring through my bookbinding only that which was given to men by God. I tended to my business, just waiting to be ensnared by the Decree from which there is no refuge—until a son of Umayya came along, wanting to be regaled with my father’s stories.
I do not share in Abd al-Malik’s conceit that due consideration of His first Work would admit me into the Almighty’s good graces on the Day. A man does not enter Paradise just because he has painted his own picture of it. But, perhaps by returning to childhood’s stories of Paradise one can enhance his sense of its mystery. Whenever I start to worry about whether or not I did the right thing in serving a Caliph whose intentions were not mine, I recall what David and Solomon built around Abraham’s deed on the ordinary-looking mountain summit above which I placed my Dome. It was not easy translating that story into permanence. I had to work the earth of my heart, in the place where the struggle against weeds is first felt as a pain in the knees and back.
The Father of Faith was asked to kill his favorite on a rugged and distant mountaintop in complete isolation. He was asked to kill with no hope of being understood by those nearest and dearest to him, knowing that no one could possibly benefit from what he was about to do. He did not protest God’s justice as he had done in the case of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Throughout his ordeal, he was silent, resolved, completely resigned. Of all the different places to undergo such an ordeal, Moriah’s Rock was the unlikeliest. And of all the different ways of doing God’s will, Ishaq’s was the hardest.
