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

by Kanan Makiya

  Ka’b is said to have died in Syria, at the extremely unlikely age of one hundred and four, during the reign of the third Muslim Caliph, Uthman ibn Affan (644–656).4 On the basis of traditions transmitted orally for at least a century before being recorded, Ka’b was an Arabic-speaking Yemenite who arrived in Medina around the time of the Prophet’s death. According to one version of events, he is said to have accepted the prophecy of Muhammad during the Caliphate of Abu Bakr (632–634). Allegiance to Muhammad as God’s Messenger was all that conversion to Islam entailed during those years.5

  But what kind of a Muslim did that make Ka’b? After all, all Muslims were converts of one sort or another in those early days. Was Ka’b a Believer in Allah and in His Messenger with all that later generations of Muslims read into that statement? Or was he a dissembler, a fraud, and an opportunist, as has been claimed by Western scholars and modern Islamists alike?6 The difference between such characterizations is not in the sources; it is in the eye of the beholder. I have tried to straddle both views to some extent, leaving it to readers to make up their minds as they interpret the facts laid out by the narrator of this book—Ishaq, Ka’b’s son, a practicing Muslim and true Believer by anyone’s standard (and about whom nothing exists in the sources other than a reference to Ka’b as “Abu Ishaq,” the father of Isaac).

  The license to invent or to imaginatively fill in gaps is in part justified by the impossibility of separating the historical figure of Ka’b from the legends that have been woven around him. Nonetheless, he does seem to have inspired confidence in those who met him and greatly esteemed Muslim writers of later centuries. Al-Jahiz, for instance, in his Kitab al-Hayawan, considered him trustworthy and rose to his defense on the question of interpreting the Pentateuch. Al-Kisa’i, as well, in his Qisas Al-Anbiya’, attributes many legends to Ka’b, including those surrounding the prophet Joseph, among the most colorful and erotic in Muslim tradition.7

  What exactly did Ka’b do? It is probably safe to conclude that he was a qassas, or popular storyteller and preacher, a forerunner in the genre of storytelling that later produced such great works as One Thousand and One Nights. Ka’b’s vocation, its fortune and reputation, fluctuated over the centuries, combining as it did exegesis of sacred writings, soaring flights of imagination, and outright charlatanism. There is every reason to think that Ka’b took his storytelling as seriously as his listeners, for whom it was a way of dealing with the great metaphysical questions of existence. Ka’b, after all, had the reputation of being a very wise man. But so have many scoundrels in the past.

  Ka’b dealt in a genre of stories known as Isra’iliyat (Judaica), which eventually fell into disrepute and were frowned upon by Muslim scholars. Even though Ka’b had been dead for at least a century by the time such distrust became widespread, traces of it probably existed during his lifetime. Indeed, it would be surprising if this were not the case.

  Ka’b’s storytelling methods have to be gleaned from partial references in a wide variety of Muslim sources. I imagine our hero cobbling together the Bible, the Quran, rabbinical literature, Southern Arabian oral and folk lore, his personal likes and dislikes, and, above all, what he felt his audience wanted to hear. I think of the historical Ka’b as an entertaining rogue, a man with an agenda but also one who liked playing to the gallery. His modus operandi, not his truthfulness, is what makes his contribution to the raucous and imaginatively wide-open world of early Islam so invaluable. In its early years, Islam needed men like him to flesh out its appeal, because such men knew how to ground the Prophet’s message in a larger cultural framework than that of Mecca and Bedouin Arabia. This contribution of marginals like Ka’b, Wahb ibn Munabbih, and others, has largely gone unappreciated by modern Muslims in part out of a fear that such acknowledgment might undermine the authenticity of their faith. Acting on that same misplaced impulse, a senior Palestinian negotiator asked his Israeli counterpart in the summer of 2000 how he knew that his Temple had been located on the Haram. Not only are such fears belied by the whole premodern corpus of Muslim tradition, they make total nonsense of it.

  The unambiguous evidence is that early Muslims were ardent seekers of Jewish lore and scriptural interpretations. Long before the advent of Islam, Christian writers were commenting on the affinity between the beliefs of the Arabs and the Jews. We know from Bukhari that, in Muhammad’s time, Jews used to read the Torah in Hebrew and interpret it to the Prophet’s followers in Arabic.8 However, starting in the eighth century, the doctrine that the Old and New Testaments had been corrupted by Jews and Christians, respectively, was developed. Muslims were discouraged from reading them. This later Muslim doctrine crops up in different versions of the story of Ka’b’s conversion, confirming their implausibility. Over time it developed into the idea that the “People of the Book” should not even be taught the Quran (for fear, presumably, that they would corrupt God’s words in the way that they had corrupted their own Holy Books).

  The apogee of this school of thought is the modern idea that some converts, like Ka’b, were subverters of Islam from within. In 1946 an article was published entitled “Ka’b al-Ahbar, the First Zionist.” The author, Abu Rayya, a disciple of the Islamo-Arabist leader Rashid Rida (1865–1935), set out to prove that Ka’b had been involved in a conspiracy to murder the caliph Umar.9 The article was heavily criticized by fellow Egyptians and is by no means representative of all Muslim theologians and scholars. But it is suggestive of the new wounded and defensive mindset that was to surface with the creation of the State of Israel and the escalation of the Arab–Israeli conflict.10

  The most delightful thing about Ka’b, from my point of view, is that, in telling stories about the summit of Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, he did not favor one source or religious tradition over another. Like Ka’b, I ardently hope that my readers have a difficult time discerning whether a given tale in this book, or a particular detail of one, is Jewish, Muslim, or Christian in origin. Nor would Ka’b have dreamt of telling the story of Jerusalem’s most famous rock by adherence only to what was undoubtedly authentic about it. Authenticity, as far as he and this book are concerned, has nothing to do with historical fact, or quarrelling about “who came first”; it is a quality established by age and by a certain deference to age. In any case, fact-finding scholarship already exists, scattered in hundreds of excellent books. Ka’b, as I have portrayed him, was engaged in a different kind of enterprise.

  He was seeking to interpret the human significance acquired over time by a piece of the natural world. Perhaps, from our modern point of view, the mysteries of the godhead are an odd angle from which to pursue such a search. At least he was doing so in search of a foundation, a common ground, upon which to stand and engage the whole world, and not just one little parochial part of it.

  But why would he do so on a rock, and what could he have known about a seemingly innocuous piece of the Jerusalem landscape, living as he did in the Yemen, an arduous month’s journey away?

  It is plausible to think that Ka’b knew and perhaps even taught a passage like the following from the Midrash Tanhuma, written in the third century:

  Just as the navel is found at the center of a human being, so the land of Israel is found at the center of the world. Jerusalem is at the center of the land of Israel, and the Temple is at the center of Jerusalem, the Holy of Holies is at the center of the Temple, the Ark is at the center of the Holy of Holies, and the Foundation Stone is in front of the Ark, which is the point of Foundation of the world.11

  At any rate, somebody like him, perhaps even one of his students, had to have passed it on to Abu Khalid, whom I cited at the outset of this essay, and who died in Jerusalem in the third quarter of the eighth century.

  The name “Rock (or Stone) of Foundation” also appears in the form of this early midrashic recollection of the duties of the high priest inside the Holy of Holies during the days of the Herodian Temple:

  When he [the high priest of the Temple] reached the Ark he put the fire-p
an between the two bars. He heaped up the incense on the coals and the whole place became filled up with smoke. He came out the way he went in, and in the outer space he prayed a short prayer. He did not prolong his prayer lest he put Israel in terror. After the Ark was taken away a stone remained there from the time of the early prophets and it was called Shetiyah (Foundation). On this he used to put [the fire-pan].12

  The rock appears to have grown in importance from the simple, physical description of the Midrash Yoma to the thunderous cosmic implications of the Midrash Tanhuma. If so, why?

  The question is even more interesting when one considers that there is no unambiguous linkage between the Even Shetiyah of Jewish tradition—soon to become the Sakhra of Muslim tradition—and the Bible. Ka’b could not have relied on the Bible alone to arrive at his conviction that the rock that Umar and he had uncovered on the Temple Mount was the place of Adam’s fall and burial, the site of Abraham’s sacrifice, the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite, and the place where David prayed to avert God’s wrath, as well as being a part of Solomon’s Temple.13 He needed to know the work of the rabbis in the first centuries of the Common Era, for they are the ones who first established the link between the rock and these stories. Because of them, the rock was elevated to prominence, and only then was its role rationalized backward into the whole corpus of stories with which Ka’b regales his son and Umar ibn al-Khattab. And how could that not be the case? After all, why should anyone want to magnify the significance of a piece of rock when a perfectly magnificent temple was sitting right on top of it (until it was destroyed in the year 135, it hid the rock from view)?

  Describing the outcome of that final act of destruction in 135, the third-century Greek historian Dio Cassius wrote:

  Very few Jews survived; Julius Severus took fifty of their most notable forts, 985 of their villages were laid in ruins, and 580,000 men were slain in skirmishes and battles, while the number of those who perished by starvation, plague, or fire cannot be reckoned. Thus almost the whole of Judea was laid to waste, even as had been foretold to its people before the war. For Solomon’s tomb, which they regard as one of their holy places, fell to pieces and was scattered abroad of its own accord, and many wolves and hyenas came howling into their cities. Many of the Romans also perished in this war.… 14

  How were the rabbis, who, along with the Temple, were in danger of losing their reason for existence, to deal with such a catastrophe? They were living in an age in which the channel of prophecy, as Alan Mintz puts it, was closed. “The only possible response was reading.”15

  A curious example of how biblical texts were read and reread in that period is found in a midrashic story pertaining to the site of the Temple after its destruction (which does not mention the rock directly):

  Long ago as Rabban Gamliel, R. Eleazar b. ’Azariah, R. Joshua and R. Akiba were … coming up to Jerusalem together, and just as they came to Mount Scopus they saw a fox emerging from the Holy of Holies. They fell a-weeping [; only] R. Akiba seemed merry. “Wherefore,” said they to him, “are you merry?” Said he: “Wherefore are you weeping?” Said they to him: “A place of which it was once said, And the common man that draweth nigh shall be put to death, is now become the haunt of foxes, and should we not weep?” Said he to them: “Therefore am I merry; for … so long as Uriah’s prophecy [of doom] had not had its fulfillment, I had misgivings lest Zechariah’s prophecy [of happiness] might not be fulfilled; now that Uriah’s prophecy has been fulfilled [by the destruction of the Temple], it is quite certain that Zechariah’s prophecy also is to find its fulfillment.” Said they to him: “Akiba, you have comforted us! Akiba you have comforted us!”16

  Akiba’s laughter would not have comforted for long, and certainly not to less learned men and women,17 who needed a less abstract and more tangible response to the loss of their most precious symbol.

  I conjecture that the edification and glorification of the rock in traditions passed on to the Arabs by men like Ka’b began as such a response to total catastrophe. There it was, after all, the last remnant of what the rabbis believed had been the Temple, poking out of the ruins as a kind of proof that at least one indomitable thing remained of Israel’s former glory. Perhaps the rock actually dominated the platform once the walls of the Temple had been torn down, being the highest point of Mount Moriah and rising above the ground floor of the highest level in the Temple, the Holy of Holies, according to the evidence of Yoma.

  But this is speculation. One cannot be sure. We do not even know if the rock had actually ever been part of the Temple structure. But something happened to elevate the importance of this particular bit of Jerusalem’s stony landscape. Of that there can be no doubt, because in the year 333 primitive little rituals had grown around the rock, as observed by an anonymous visitor known only as “the Pilgrim of Bordeaux”:

  In the sanctuary itself, where the Temple stood which Solomon built, there is marble in front of the altar which has on it the blood of Zacharias—you would think it had only been shed today. All around you can see the marks of the hobnails of the soldiers who killed him, as plainly as if they had been pressed into wax. Two statues of Hadrian stand there, and, not far from them, a pierced stone which the Jews come and anoint each year. They mourn and rend their garments, and then depart.18

  Hadrian had banned any kind of Jewish presence in Jerusalem. The ban was renewed by Constantine. Jerome, the biblical scholar who lived in Palestine and wrote toward the end of the fourth century, noted that an exception was made for one day of the year:

  Silently they come and silently they go, weeping they come and weeping they go, in the dark night they come and in the dark night they go.… Not even weeping is free to them. You see on the day of the destruction of Jerusalem a sad people coming, decrepit little women and old men encumbered with rags and years, exhibiting both in their bodies and their dress the wrath of the Lord. A crowd of pitiable creatures assembles and under the gleaming gibbet of the Lord and his sparkling resurrection, and before a brilliant banner with a cross waving from the Mount of Olives, they weep over the ruins of the Temple; and yet they are not worthy of pity. Thus they lament on their knees with livid arms and disheveled hair, while the guards demand their reward for permitting them to shed some more tears.19

  This is how things remained at the site of the former Temple until the arrival of about four thousand Bedouins headed by the caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, accompanied by his learned councilor and expert on the holy sites of Jerusalem, Ka’b al-Ahbar, formerly a Jew from the Yemen named Jacob or perhaps Akiba, son of Mati.20

  1 Cited by Ibn Asakir in his Ta’rikh Madinat Dimashq, and al-Wasiti in his Fada’il al-Bayt al-Muqaddas. I have used the citation by Joseph van Ess in his invaluable article “Abd al-Malik and the Dome of the Rock,” in Bayt al-Maqdis: Abd al-Malik’s Jerusalem, edited by Julian Raby and Jeremy Johns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

  2 Cited in G. H. A. Juynboll, The Authenticity of the Tradition Literature: Discussions in Modern Egypt (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969), p. 123.

  3 See Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari’s Ta’rikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk (History of the Prophets and Kings), vol. 3, The Children of Israel (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 2474–5.

  4 On Ka’b’s age, see EI2 and Moshe Perlmann, “Another Ka’b al-Ahbar Story,” in The Jewish Quarterly Review 45–46 (1954–1956), pp. 48–58.

  5 See W. Montgomery Watt, “Conversion in Islam at the Time of the Prophet,” in Early Islam: Collected Articles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990). The elastic nature of Jewish—Muslim allegiances during this period can also be adduced from early Jewish apocalyptic writings, an example of which I attribute to Ka’b in “The Conquest Foretold.”

  6 Guy Le Strange is among the pioneering scholars of Islam who, without explanation, writes that Ka’b was “a great liar” who “considerably gulled the simple-minded Arabs of the first century.” See Palestine Under the Moslems: A Description of Syria and th
e Holy Land from 650 to 1500 (Original edition is 1890. Reprinted by Khayats, Beirut, 1965), p. 142.

  7 Muhammad ibn Abdallah al-Kisa’i, in his Qisas al-Anbiya’ (Tales of the Prophets), probably written around the end of the eleventh century; see the translation by Wheeler M. Thackston (Chicago, Ill.: Great Books of the Islamic World, 1997).

  8 Cited in the “Introduction” to Gordon D. Newby, The Making of the Last Prophet: A Reconstruction of the Earliest Biography of Muhammad (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), p. 12.

  9 For a full discussion of Abu Rayya’s argument, see G. H. A. Juynboll, The Authenticity of the Tradition Literature: Discussions in Modern Egypt (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969), pp. 129–133.

  10 A modern Muslim work of scholarship on Jerusalem that illustrates this wounded mindset is Bayt Al-Maqdis wa Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa, by Muhammad Muhammad Hasan Shurab (Damascus, 1994).

  11 Cited in John M. Lundquist, The Temple: Meeting Place of Heaven and Earth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), p. 7. With adjustments, and with no particular source to base myself upon, this passage has been put into the mouth of Ka’b al-Ahbar at the conclusion of “The Rock of Foundation.”