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

by Kanan Makiya

  The blood of the ram would have mingled with that of my namesake; it would have run down the gently tilting face of the Rock, inside the lines and down the perforations of its craggy surface. As it spread, the blood changed that which it was washing over. The blood of my namesake, the first martyr to true Belief, is not about the loss of life; like the Dome I was resolved to build, it is about the birth of new meaning: bright red blood coagulating to dark black, delineating the boundaries of a new holiness.

  But what is left of that new beginning, of that original act of foundation? The wood upon which Abraham was to sacrifice Ishaq was consumed in the fire along with the ram; the rope with which Ishaq was tied up has rotted, the knife long since been lost.

  That leaves only the Rock.

  Only the Rock to remind us of a fragile string of feelings and traditions. The Rock: last surviving trace of horror’s resolution into ecstasy. The Rock: sole surviving witness to the passions that have driven men to become little Abrahams on this mountaintop over and over again.

  What happens to an otherwise benign piece of the landscape when it is converted into an executioner’s bench, and then into an instrument for the working of that great force of change, memory? Its ordinariness is unmade before our eyes, all its prior meanings annihilated.

  Can the children of Abraham, the one taken by God for His Friend, afford to forget such an annihilation, or continue to pray with their backs to the greatest Enigma, an act for which they will surely have to account one day? And if a man does not pray with his back to the Rock, is it enough for him to eat figs in its shade, entrusting himself to God’s will?

  My patrimony came burdened with the problem of direction, the inheritance of a whole generation, all of whom were born to converts in an age of conversions.

  Building taught me that Ka’b was wrong: True Faith is not a precondition for coming to God. Good works are. If there is a difference between other men and women of the Book who advocate commendable attitudes and do good deeds and we who have the True Faith, it is that we are in duty bound to show greater gentleness, forgiveness, and tolerance. Otherwise, in His eyes, we are all the same.

  Say you: We believe in God, and

  in that which has been sent down on us

  and sent down on Abraham, Ishmael,

  Isaac and Jacob, and the Tribes,

  and that which was given to Moses and Jesus

  and the prophets, of their Lord;

  We make no division between any of them, and

  To Him we surrender.

  I, Ishaq son of Ka’b, born Jacob of Judah, believe that we have a duty to remember and honor both the submission of the Father and the submission of the Son on this Rock. Time is irredeemable. The Lord of Creation sees our end in our beginning. Abraham’s deadly seriousness stood a witless world on its head. Fused with my namesake’s merit, it forged mankind’s most sublime act of submission. And submission is at the core of what Muhammad preached.

  I have ensured that the true legacy of the man who happened to be my father will no longer be forgotten. Not that the old curmudgeon will ever thank me for it. The Lord of Creation will do that before he ever will. But it was his unworldliness in the end that brought the Dome of the Rock into the world. It is his lore that allowed me to shape a stone so beautifully it will stand until the End of Time as a reproof to men’s penchant for forgetfulness and smallmindedness.

  The Dome of the Rock was a kind of solution. Through the hands and the eyes, connections often become visible to the heart where, before, words had reaped only confusion and division.

  The decision to build may begin out of anger, spite, vanity, or even sweetness. But to succeed at it requires reaching beyond such motives to a moment of tranquillity when, by the grace of God, one is able to see the forms in which His words can once again be heard.

  Intention sits at the heart of Judgment. Abraham will be judged, not for what he did, but for what he intended to do. I, on the other hand, served a Caliph whose wars and vanities were not mine. Do the merits of what I built outweigh Abd al-Malik’s intentions?

  God knows everything that was in my heart. He culled a building out of me that outweighs those intentions to call upon Time’s two extremes—creation and annihilation. The Rock does not belong to the followers of Moses any more than it belongs to the followers of Muhammad. First and foremost, it is His Rock, to which He will return on the Day when all motives will have dissolved into nothingness and a new reality will have unfolded in which will be exposed the whole slew of intentions that have shaped our destiny from the moment Adam ate of the forbidden fruit.

  In the Name of God the Merciful the Compassionate

  The gentle Muhammad was sent to fold his wings in tenderness over the Believers and warn them that the beginning of the end will come as a terrible breakdown in the proper order and comportment of people and animals. Sedition, defilement, and fornication within genders and across species will be the rule. For seven years there will have been no leader in prayer worthy of a following, and not a soul will have visited the Dome.

  On the morning of the last day of the seventh year, men and women shall rise to discover that the Ka’ba has disappeared without a trace. They will turn to their Holy Books only to discover that the text has evaporated from the page, leaving glistening white parchment. Not a letter will have been left behind. The memory of God’s Book will have been blotted out of all hearts. Not a word shall be remembered. For their amusement, men will have returned to the songs and tales of the Age of Ignorance.

  If they see a sign they turn away and say,

  “A continuous sorcery!”

  Like seeds buried in the earth, all the teachings of the Holy Book have to rot in order to bear fruit once again.

  When people are so far gone that they eat like cows, when piety has given way to pride and truth to lies, when usury, adultery, and fornication on the street are customary, when people’s hearts have become wolflike, then will a Divinely Guided One come to herald the end of the world.

  “How soon will He come?” the people of Jerusalem ask.

  “Three things catch men unawares,” I reply. “A found article, a scorpion, and the coming of the Divinely Guided One.”

  “How will we know whose staff to follow?”

  “His nose will have an aquiline shape. His head will be bald. He will be from the family of the Prophet with a pedigree in the Yemen on His maternal side.”

  “Where will He come?”

  “To the Rock. You will find Him preaching in the Dome.”

  Redemption will follow His coming like a dawn breaking on the horizon. At first, it will barely be visible; then it will shine forth more brightly. Afterwards, it will break forth in all its glory.

  As the Divinely Guided One gains dominion among Believers, He will rule among the People of the Torah according to their uncorrupted Torah, and among the People of the Gospel according to their uncorrupted Gospel, and among the People of the Quran according to His Last Words spoken in Arabic. He will restore the world to the way it was before the onset of sedition, civil war, and corruption. The earth will bring forth its fruit for everyone. No man will have to hoard or steal. Whenever a man will get up and say, “O Divinely Guided One, give me,” He will answer, “Help yourself!” Then he will die, a sign that

  The Hour has drawn nigh: the moon is split.

  The Hour will be announced by the Master of the Horn.

  “Who is the Master of the Horn?” people want to know.

  “A winged angel carrying a trumpet.”

  “Where will he stand?”

  “On that corner of the Rock,” I reply, pointing to an elevated spot due north of the stone mass, facing which today on the northern arcade is a sumptuously decorated entrance into the Dome called the “Gate of the Master of the Horn.”

  The sound of the horn will be louder and more terrible than thunder; it will pierce the mind and transfix the soul. Upon hearing the horn, every living creature shall taste death’
s bitterness. The angel will blow the trumpet on God’s command, announcing the Hour of Annihilation when all things perish except His face,

  When the sun shall be darkened

  when the stars shall be thrown down,

  when the mountains shall be set moving,

  when the pregnant camels shall be neglected,

  when the savage beasts shall be mustered,

  when the seas shall be set boiling,

  when the scrolls shall be unrolled,

  when Heaven shall be stripped off,

  when Hell shall be set blazing,

  when Paradise shall be brought nigh,

  when the souls shall be coupled,

  and the buried infant shall be asked for what sin she was slain.

  A second time the trumpet will blow, and God will bring forth the living from the dead as He brings death to the living. Flesh, which in this life decays and rots inside the earth, will turn as fresh as that of a newborn’s still dripping from its mother’s fluids.

  Thrown out of their tombs, throngs of corpses as numerous as particles of sand will swarm hither and thither like flies, all quickened in the blink of an eye. Conjoined with their souls, released from their place of confinement inside the mountain, they will race pell-mell toward the place of their gathering, where the most remarkable sight shall unfold:

  Two enormous crowds will gather separately—one destined for Paradise, the other for Hell. Both will have to pass through the Gate of Paradise in the Dome of the Rock on their way to the next life. Opposite this Gate, God will have created a bridge narrower than a hair and sharper than a sword. It will stretch over the roaring flames of Hell. The faces of those destined for Paradise will be smiling, joyful, and brimming with hope; they will cross the bridge in the twinkle of an eye. The faces of the Wicked will be veiled in darkness and covered in dust; they will fall into fire everlasting.

  Two crowds assembled in the knowledge that each can no longer grow, not by one person, not even at the other’s expense as they have been doing since the time of Cain and Abel. Everyone—Jews, Christians, Muslims, prophets, martyrs, saviors, unbelievers—even the angels—will be in one or the other crowd, which, together, will contain the sum of all generations who have been, or ever will be, born.

  Following the motion and commotion of the gathering comes the unbearable silence of the Standing.

  Each person stands for the very first and the very last time in the same seamless white shroud of death. For just as one may not look upon the Black Stone unless dressed in such clothes, so after death one may not look at the Rock unless one’s dress stamps upon its bearer the character of a particle of sand.

  “Where will we be standing?”

  “In circles around the stillness upon which He stood during Creation. The Rock graced by its Dome will be all that is left of a turning world. For the first to be created is the last to be destroyed. The Day of Annihilation will unfold in reverse of Creation. Only the Rock will hold for the duration of the Reckoning. Afterwards, even it will be annihilated.”

  “How long will we stand?”

  “Time past and time future have already collapsed into time present. The Standing lasts an eternity.”

  “Will He come?”

  “Veiled like the overcast sky.”

  “Upon which hallowed spot will He alight?”

  “His foot will descend upon the spot from which it last ascended in anger and disappointment.”

  “What will we be thinking?”

  “Of Him who made and destroyed you. Of the imminence of the danger that looms. You will stand with faces cast down, your souls suspended in astonishment, transfixed by apprehension, not in community or any kind of sympathy with one another, but one by one, alone—utterly and completely alone.”

  Never has there been, or will there ever be again, such loneliness, such single-minded preoccupation with the possibility of eternal pain. Never has there been such a breakdown of every confining partition of the mind so as to keep everyone who has ever been born wholly transfixed on the consequences of his own selfishness.

  From Creation to Judgment turns the wheel of all Believers. From time past to time future, it spins around the still axis of the universe. It turns in the direction of what will happen at the moment that He, among whose ninety-nine names are the Avenger, the Dominator, the Abaser, the Exalter, and the Merciful, will alight upon the Rock.

  The face-to-face encounter with the Judge of all Judges will be like tumbling down into a bottomless chasm. It will be like being lost in the vast expanse of a starlit desert, listening to the howling of hungry wolves. Looking to the Rock, every person who has ever been born shall be struck by Terror as though by a thunderbolt from the sky, a terror that is the ruling principle of the Sublime.

  And what shall teach thee

  what is the Day of Judgment?

  A day when no soul shall possess the slightest power to help another;

  a day when all Power is God’s alone.

  A Historical Note on Ka’b and the Rock

  The most holy spot on earth is Syria; the most holy spot in Syria is Palestine; the most holy spot in Palestine is Jerusalem; the most holy spot in Jerusalem is the Mountain; the most holy spot on the Mountain is the place of worship, and the most holy spot on the place of worship is the Dome.1

  The author of this passage, Abu Khalid Thawr ibn Yazid al-Kala’i, lived in Homs, Syria, in the eighth century. The Dome to which he refers was built over a rock on the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, in the year 692. Written in mosaic on the Dome’s interior surfaces, in some of the finest craftsmanship of the period, are the oldest verses of the Quran in existence. In fact, with the exception of some foundations and some coins, little else remains that is indubitably Muslim and of the seventh century to hint at the great encounter that took place between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Jerusalem. To be sure, there were manuscripts and artifacts produced during that remarkable century of turmoil and change. But they are lost or destroyed and survive only through recollections in later documents—works of history, geography, and biography written at least a century after the Arab conquest of Jerusalem, which took place sometime after 634 and before 638.

  As it so happens there were three holy rocks in the seventh century, not one. And to each rock corresponded a Temple: The Rock of Calvary had its Church of the Holy Sepulcher; the Black Stone had its Ka’ba in Mecca; and then there is our own story’s Dome of the Rock, whose builders may have thought they were rebuilding Solomon’s Temple, the first Temple of the Hebrews destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 597 B.C.E.

  Three is a curious number in human relations. Jews and Muslims have an aversion to it. And yet Islam, the third great monotheism, saw its mission as one of healing the damage caused by the previous division into two. During the time frame of our story, 630–692, the fortunes of these three Rocks waxed and waned at one another’s expense. At the heart of this competition were the big questions of life, death, and the shape of the afterlife. The story has attracted many great scholars over the centuries. But, unfortunately, no amount of scholarship will be able to do it justice. We know too little. So much has been irretrievably lost.

  In the preceding pages, fiction has stepped into the breach—a fiction of assembly. A variety of stories culled from the literature of three religious traditions have been put together like a mosaic. With few exceptions, I have not allowed myself the liberty of changing the original sources from which the pieces were taken (the exceptions have to do with language, continuity, and the modification of a detail in order to eliminate repetition and confusion). Still, the outcome is unmistakably fiction, mimicking the assembly of a building to a new plan using the detritus of greatly esteemed predecessors as its raw material—predecessors that were designed to celebrate the same much-revered site.

  This way of making stories corresponds to that of the chief protagonist of this book, a seventh-century learned man and
former Jew (perhaps even an ex-rabbi), Ka’b al-Ahbar, who accompanied the Muslim caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab during his conquest of Jerusalem. Muslim tradition has preserved accounts of the events that occurred during the week or so that Umar spent in Jerusalem, many of which have been integrated into the text and can be found in the sources. Perhaps they are not enough to prove that the historical Ka’b was as taken with the Rock on Mount Moriah as I have made him out to be. But then I make no claim that this is how things actually were—just that they are in accordance with the sources as I have chosen to thread my way through them.

  Jewish and Christian sources tell us nothing about Ka’b. The little that we know comes from Islamic literature in which Ka’b occupies a rather shadowy place (highly respected growing to deeply compromised in later sources). As far as anyone can judge, Ka’b is the oldest authority among Muslims on Jewish scripture. Mu’awiya, the founder of the Umayyad Caliphate and a contemporary of Ka’b, is cited by the highly respected compiler of traditions Bukhari as saying that Ka’b “possessed knowledge like fruit, but we were remiss in relating it from him.” Mu’awiya also said that Ka’b was “the most reliable of those transmitters [of traditions] who relate on the authority of the People of the Book, but in spite of this we used to test him for falsehood.”2

  Notice the circumspection in the second half of the sentence. Was this a later addition to what Mu’awiya said? Or was it present in how Ka’b was viewed by his contemporaries? The highly respected compiler of historical anecdotes, al-Tabari, reports that Ka’b refused to become Mu’awiya’s counselor in Damascus.3 Perhaps there was a personal grievance between the two men. The sources do not allow for certainty in such matters. The task I set myself was to make allowances for both possibilities while sticking to the “fact” that Mu’awiya, and after him his protégé Abd al-Malik, clearly held Ka’b in very high regard.