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

by Kanan Makiya

The Turmoil of Ka’b

  The idea of knowledge being only with God is a theme in the Quran 46:23. Umar’s refusal to put aside revenues or make monetary provisions for the future is in Tabari’s History, vol. 12. Umar is known as “the man upon whose tongue God had struck the Truth,” as used by Ibn Manzur and others. Ibn Sa’d records a tradition that has the Prophet saying, “God put the truth on the tongue and heart of Umar and he is the faruq by whom God made the distinction between truth and falsity”; see Bashear, “The Title ‘Faruq.’ “

  The Sins of David

  The valley before which Ka’b and Umar were standing is Wadi Jahannam, the Valley of Hell, coming from which the eleventh-century traveller Nasir Khusraw reported: “you may hear the cries of those in Hell”; see Le Strange. The story of James’s death is adapted from the account of the sixth-century pilgrim Theodosius. Ka’b and Umar’s reflections on the stoniness of Jerusalem borrow from Herman Melville’s obsession with the same. See the account in his Journal up the Straits: October 11, 1856—May 5, 1857. David’s songs are from Psalm 18 and 22, respectively. See also Psalm 61.

  The tradition of Muhammad having men recite to him from the Quran is found in Hujwiri’s eleventh-century Kashf al-Mahjub li Arbab al-Qulub (The Unveiling of That Which Is Hidden for People of Hearts). The conclusions regarding David’s sins and the building of the Temple are made by Tabari in his History, vol. 3, The Children of Israel.

  The story of David that Ka’b tells is from 2 Samuel. The account of the blind and the lame defending Jerusalem from the conquering army of David is from 2 Samuel 5. The wrath of God on Jerusalem is found in 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21: 14–17. Isaac Kalimi discusses the Angels of Pestilence and Death, and the presence of ashes from Abraham’s ram, in “The Land of Moriah, Mount Moriah, and the Site of Solomon’s Temple in Biblical Historiography,” Harvard Theological Review 83:14 (1990). The procession up the mountain and dealings with Araunah can be found in 2 Samuel 24: 10–25. The passage of years have not lessened the importance of the transaction between David and Araunah. In August 1967 Zerach Warhaftig, the ultra-Orthodox Israeli minister for religious affairs, said that, seeing as how David had paid the full price to Araunah all those years ago, the Israeli government legally owned the Temple Mount and all the Muslim structures on it. “The minister went on to say that while there was no doubt that Jewish rights on the Temple Mount overrode those of the Moslems, and while Jews even had a right to raze the mosques there, they had no intention at the moment of actually doing so.” Amos Elon, Jerusalem: City of Mirrors (Little, Brown and Company, 1989).

  Umar’s words to Ka’b on Solomon’s being kept safe from bloodshed in order to build the Temple are adapted from Tabari’s History, vol. 3. Ka’b’s response, that God never wanted a Temple to be built for Him in the first place, are based on Nathan’s prophecy to David warning him against building the Temple, in 2 Samuel 7 (a prophecy which suggests that building a Temple was as controversial among the Israelites in the time of David as the Dome of the Rock was controversial among Muslims in the time of Abd al-Malik). Tabari attributes to the Prophet the analogy with a horseman who lingers in the shade and departs. See Schroeder, Muhammad’s People. The Quran offers many images of Paradise as a garden; see, for instance, 56:28–33.

  The story of Umar sacrificing his daughter is of obscure Shi’ite origin. I grew up with it, as have Lebanese and Iranian Shi’ites. It is rejected by Sunni Muslims, but it is in the tradition and so is fair game from this book’s point of view. Reference to the tale and discussion of the practice can be found in Mahmud al-Qimmni’s Al-’Ustoora wa al-Turath (Cairo, 1993); he argues that the practice of female infanticide was not economic in origin as has been claimed. Ibn al-Kalbi’s Kitab al-Asnam supports this. The description of Umar’s tears can be found in Abu Nu’aim al-Isfahani’s Hilyat al-Awliya as cited in Heribert Busse, “Omar b. al-Hattab in Jerusalem,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 5 (1984). I am indebted to Chris Berdik for translating this article for me from the German. Umar’s language of mourning is taken from the Quran (53:2) and from the Sufi mystic al-Hallaj (857–922), who was tortured to death for his heretical views, and who is said to have described the mournful strains of a flute in the night as “Satan weeping for the loss of the world.”

  The Rock of Sacrifice

  The story of Abd al-Muttalib’s sacrifice is recorded in Ibn Ishaq’s Life, in words that suggest it was a religious offering. The would-be sacrifice is recorded as having taken place near the two idols Isaf and Na’ila until the Quraysh came out of their assemblies and stopped it. The Arabs gave the large or oddly shaped rocks that they worshipped until the advent of Islam names. The story of two such rocks, Isaf and Na’ila, is found in both Ibn Kalbi’s Kitab al-Asnam and Ibn Ishaq’s Life. The Prophet’s favorite wife Aisha seems to have been particularly taken with the tale. Ibn Ishaq reports her as saying: “Isaf and Na’ila were a man and a woman of Jurham who copulated in the Ka’ba. That is why God transformed them into two stones.”

  Ka’b recites Exodus, 22: 28–29 regarding the sacrifice of firstborn sons. Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac is from Genesis 22. I have benefited from, and followed in broad outline, Jon Levenson’s masterly treatment of the subject in The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (Yale University Press, 1993). From this book, I have also cited at the end of the chapter a poignant midrashic conversation between Rabbis Phinehas and Benaiah, in which Phinehas says that Abraham prayed asking God to regard his sacrifice of the ram, “as though I had sacrificed my son first and only afterwards sacrificed this ram.”

  Sacrifices on the rock of Mount Moriah, perhaps even the early tradition of child sacrifice, have been connected to the worship of Melchisedek, a legendary Canaanite priest-king of Jerusalem who is thought to have anticipated monotheism. Hebrew scripture depicts Melchisedek standing on the sacred stone of Jerusalem, consecrating an altar to El-Elyon, the “god most high,” whom the Israelites would name Elohim, “Lord;” Thomas Idinopulos discusses this in Jerusalem Blessed, Jerusalem Cursed: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Holy City from David’s Time to Our Own (Ivan R. Dee, 1991).

  The Quranic account of Abraham’s sacrifice, found in Sura 37: 102–107, does not mention the name of the son, and his identity was debated by Muslim scholars in the early centuries of Islam. Among the earliest Muslims, however, the dhabih, or sacrificed one, was more often than not portrayed as Isaac (Ishaq), not Ishmael (Isma’il or Ishmael). The scholar Qutb al-Din explicitly states that this was the view of Umar ibn al-Khattab and Ali ibn Abi Talib. Ibn Qutayba and Tabari shared the view that Isaac was the son almost sacrificed by Abraham. Later Muslim opinion, however, converged on Isma’il (Ishmael), the son of Hagar and the ancestor of the Arabs, as having been the son in question. Al-Kisa’i, in his Qisas al-Anbiya’, cites Ka’b al-Ahbar as his source for Isaac, the son of Sara, as the son in question. Kisa’i alludes to the debate that was still alive in the eleventh century; he attributes to Ibn Abbas the view that it was Isma’il (Ishmael), and to Ibn Umar ibn al-Khattab, Hasan ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib, and Husayn ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib his own view that it was Isaac.

  Sophronius

  Al-Waqidi, in his ninth-century Futuh al-Sham, writes that the formal opening of Jerusalem to the army of Umar ibn al-Khattab took place on Palm Sunday and began on the Mount of Olives, where Umar and his army had made camp and where the Christian community gathered with their Patriarch to carry out their procession into the city on the following day; on this issue, see Busse, “Omar b. Al-Hattab in Jerusalem” (1984). The observance of rituals following the order of events of Christ’s passion during the Great Week of festivities described by my narrator, Ishaq, first evolved in Jerusalem in the fourth century. See the account by Egeria, a nun probably from a western province of the Roman Empire on the Atlantic coast, who visited Jerusalem between 381 and 384; Wilkinson translates her diaries in his Egeria’s Travels (Ariel Publishing House, 19
71). See also Wilkinson’s Jerusalem Pilgrims (1977). Incidentally, there is no evidence that Ka’b ever met Sophronius. But it is plausible that he did.

  The guarantee of security and property to Christians is part of the so-called Covenant of Umar, a treaty of capitulation between the Muslims and Christians concerning Jerusalem. The text of this agreement appears in one of its fullest forms in Tabari’s History, vol. 12. One clause of the document—that continuing the Roman and Byzantine policy of excluding Jews from Jerusalem—is contradicted by all other evidence, and modern scholars have generally tended to discount it as a later forgery; F. E. Peters addresses this issue in Jerusalem (Princeton University Press, 1985). The terms of surrender for Jerusalem as set out in Tabari emphasize the poll tax; they do not include the details concerning comportment, dress, weaponry, and spying that I have added. Such restrictions are found in other deeds of surrender from the same period, reported in Baladhuri and Ibn ’Asakir. These were negotiated with the locals of Damascus and other Syrian cities. See Schroeder and Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine 634–1099 (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

  The discussion of separation as ordained by God and defining what is holy draws upon Mary Douglas’s argument in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). The collection of sayings and stories of the saints compiled by Sophronius is entitled Spiritual Meadows; it was jointly authored with John Moschus, Sophronius’s mentor and companion on his travels through Egypt. Moshe Gil contends that Sophronius arrived in Palestine in 619, while the country was still in Persian hands, and became Patriarch in the autumn of 633. The description of seventh-century Alexandria, as discussed by Umar and Ka’b, is based on a variety of Muslim descriptions of the city. The term “Greek” is used in the story for the benefit of the modern Western reader. Practically the only Arabic term used in Muslim sources to describe the people of the Byzantine Empire is al-Rum, the Romans. The description of the ordinary people of Alexandria and their obsession with theological debate is adapted from the words of the late-fourth-century church father Gregory of Nyssa, who described the population of Constantinople in the words that Sophronius uses; see Speros Vryonis, Byzantium and Europe (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), and Idinopulos.

  The description of Umar’s clothing when meeting Sophronius is recorded in many sources. The details vary, but the gist is as Ishaq has it in his account. See Idinopulos (1991), Schroeder (1955), and Busse (1968). Tabari tells a nice tale, not included in Ishaq’s narrative, of how Umar began to stone his commanders in Syria upon arriving from Medina and finding them dressed in brocade and silk. Grabar, in The Shape of the Holy, argues that a man like Sophronius would have been able to speak the local Arabic or Aramaic dialect of Jerusalem. However, in the beginning of such a formal occasion as the meeting of the Patriarch and Umar, Sophronius would probably have spoken through a translator. Sophronius’s formal greeting to Umar is adapted from the text of a letter sent in the third century by Rome to the Churches of Africa, as recorded in The See of Peter, ed. J. T. Shotwell and L. R. Loomis (Columbia University Press, 1927). Umar’s expression of concern over whether he is a caliph or a king occurs in a conversation with Salman al-Farisi, not Abu Ubayda. See Schroeder.

  The politics of dress in the encounter between Umar and Sophronius is apparent in the Chronographia of the eighth-century Greek historian Theophanes, whose version of events is historically the closest to the actual Muslim takeover of Jerusalem. As translated by Le Strange (1890), Theophanes writes that “Umar entered the Holy City clothed in camel-hair garments all soiled and torn, and making a show of piety as a cloak for his diabolical hypocrisy, demanded to be taken to what in former times had been the Temple built by Solomon. This he straightaway converted into an oratory for blasphemy and impiety. When Sophronius saw this, he exclaimed: ‘Verily, this is the abomination of desolation spoken by of Daniel the Prophet, and it now stands in the Holy Place’; And the Patriarch shed many tears.”

  In the Formation of Islamic Art (Yale University Press, 1987), Oleg Grabar makes the observation that Eastern Christianity “had always liked to use the emotional impact of music and the visual arts to convert ‘barbarians.’ That such attempts may have been effective with the Arabs is shown in the very interesting, although little studied, group of accounts dealing with the more or less legendary trips of Arabs to the Byzantine court in early Islamic times, or sometimes even before Islam. In most cases the ‘highlight’ of the ‘guided tours’ to which they submitted was a visit either to a church … or to a court reception.” I have lent this important insight to Sophronius, who, after all, invited Umar to come to Jerusalem, according to the sources.

  That Umar deeply desired to visit the place of David’s repentance (Quran 38:15–24) is well attested to; see Peters’s account, based on the authority of al-Walid ibn Muslim. On the many parallels between Umar and David in the sources, see Busse (1984). Sophronius’s response to Umar’s request, describing Jerusalem as “the happy Church on which Our Lord, the Son of David, poured forth all his teaching,” includes language adapted from the African theologian Tertullian, as cited in Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (Yale University Press, 1997). Sophronius’s reflections on his monastic past are based on the words of Pope Gregory (540–604), as included by Duffy.

  Tour of the City

  Jamal al-Din Ahmad, in his fourteenth-century Muthir al-Gharam, puts a very different spin on the events of Umar’s entry into Jerusalem than does Theophanes. Tracking down a long chain of transmission, the author arrives at what purports to be an eyewitness description of the Caliph’s entry: “Umar, as soon as he was at leisure from the writing of the Treaty of Capitulation … said to the Patriarch of Jerusalem: ‘Conduct us to the Mosque of David.’ And the Patriarch agreed thereto. Then Umar went forth girt with his sword, and with him four thousand of the Companions who had come to Jerusalem with him, all begirt likewise with their swords, and a crowd of us Arabs who had come up to the Holy City followed them, none of us bearing any weapons except our swords. And the Patriarch walked before Umar among the Companions, and we all came behind the Caliph. Thus we entered the Holy City. And the Patriarch took us to the Church which goes by the name of the Qumama [Dungheap, a play on the Arabic word Qiyama, Resurrection], and said he: ‘This is David’s Mosque.’ And Umar looked around and pondered, then he answered the Patriarch: ‘Thou liest, for the Apostle described to me the Mosque of David, and by his description this is not it.’ Then the Patriarch went on with us to the Church of Sihyun (Zion), and again he said: ‘This is the Mosque of David.’ But the Caliph replied to him: ‘Thou liest.’ So the Patriarch went on with him till he came to the noble Sanctuary of the Holy City, and reached the gate thereof, called [afterwards] the Gate of Muhammad” (Le Strange, 1890).

  The prophecy that Ka’b recites regarding Umar’s decision to enter Jerusalem on an ass comes from Zechariah 9:9. R. J. McKelvey in The New Temple: The Church in the New Testament (Oxford University Press, 1969) argues that the use of an ass is a sign of messiahship, an acting out of the parable of the coming of the kingdom of God. Umar’s entry into Jerusalem recalls that of Jesus in more ways than one. Mark 11:11 records that Jesus, upon entering into Jerusalem, had proceeded to the Temple as Umar did; and Umar’s throwing himself on the ground in prayer before the Gate of the Sheep’s Pool is reminiscent of Jesus’ passionate prayer in Gethsemane. In Arabic the pilgrimage prayer spoken by Umar is: “labyka, allahumma, labayka bi ma huwa ahabbu ilayka.” Its use in the context is discussed by Busse (1984). Typically, it is recited during the hajj at the early stages of ihram and then repeatedly during the rest of the pilgrimage. The Arabic traditions that cite this prayer by Umar at the gates of Jerusalem are obviously those that tend to equate the religious status of Jerusalem with that of Mecca, not those that elevate Mecca over Jerusalem (which, much later, come to the fore and dominate the tradition). Busse also compares Umar’s prayer before the gates of the Holy City
with that of Solomon upon his completion of the Temple. Solomon had the keys but could not open the doors of the new Temple until he had uttered David’s prayer asking God to forgive him. The text of the Muslim prayer featuring David asking for God’s forgiveness that appears later in the chapter is from the Quran 38:15–24.

  The negative opinions and rumors circulating in Jerusalem regarding the Arabs are based on those of several ancient Christian sources. Moshe Gil writes that Nilus described Arabs as uninterested in anything but plundering and war, and I have cited the words of Antonius of Chozeba, who called Arabs “beasts of prey” that happen to “look like human beings.”

  Several pilgrims described Gethsemane as Ishaq does. See Eusebius, fourth century, and Hesychius of Jerusalem, fifth century, in Wilkinson’s Pilgrims (1977). Also see John Wilkinson’s Jerusalem as Jesus Knew It: Archaeology as Evidence (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978). The fig tree cursed by Jesus, which subsequently withered to its roots, is discussed by McKelvey. The unprofitable fig tree was turned into a Christian symbol of Israel’s unfaithfulness and wretchedness before God. The Gate of the Sheep’s Pool went by other names in the seventh century: the Gate of Benjamin, perhaps even the Gate of the Paralyzed Man (Wilkinson, 1977). Descriptions of the Christian crowds present during Umar and Sophronius’s entry into the city are from an account by the pilgrim Silvia, as cited in George Jeffery’s A Brief Description of the Holy Sepulchre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919).

  The Gate of Repentance, Bab al-Tawba, is more commonly known as the Golden Gate or the Gate Beautiful. The earliest Arabic sources refer to it as Bab al-Rahma, the Gate of Mercy, and the Gate of Repentance. Myriam Rosen-Ayalon, The Early Islamic Monuments of Al-Haram al-Sharif: An Iconographic Study (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1989) suggests that both names were used as a way of distinguishing between the two doorways. Rosen-Ayalon also notes that these names may relate to the elaborate traditions concerning the Day of Judgment and the Mount of Olives, which is opposite the Gate of Repentance. Muslim sources note that the gate was sealed when Umar arrived (as it is to this day), to be reopened only on Judgment Day. The description of the Gate of Repentance is taken from the pilgrim of Piacenza who visited Jerusalem around 570 (Wilkinson, 1977). Muslims of the seventh century would not have known that the gate is Byzantine in design and sits above a Herodian gate of the same dimensions; the Jerusalem that lived in their imaginations was that of David and Solomon—hence Ishaq’s error in describing it as a remnant of the Temple.