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

by Kanan Makiya

  Facing Whose Rock?

  In 670, Bishop Arculfus, a pilgrim to the Holy City, left this description of the mosque that Umar built in the location today occupied by the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Haram: “On the famous place where once stood the temple, the Saracens worship at a square house of prayer, which they have built with little art, of boards and large beams on the remains of some ruins.” The travels of Arculf were recorded by Adomnan, the seventh-century Abbot of Iona, as included in Wilkinson (1977). On Umar’s policies and bias toward non-Arabs, see Wilfred Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The continued expansion of Islam ended the possibility of Umar’s desire for a pure, untainted Arab state. S. D. Goitein notes the shift from purely Arab dominance to the growing influence of other nationalities, especially Iranians, in his “A Turning Point in the History of the Muslim State,” in Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966). A fragment of Ibn Ishaq’s Life includes Umar’s quote that, “Two religions cannot subsist together.” A passage in Muhammad al-Dhahabi’s Ta’rikh al-Islam (The History of Islam), tells us that Ka’b al-Ahbar helped convert forty-two Jewish scholars, ahbar, to Islam during the days of Mu’awiya who were granted subsidies and grants (Gil, 1992).

  Umar’s debate with Ka’b concerning the direction of prayer draws on many Quranic verses (20:112; 42:5; 2:144; 13:37). The decisive verses recited by the Prophet, making the change, are in Quran 2: 138–139. Ibn Ishaq’s Life records that the change took place in the seventeenth month after Muhammad’s arrival in Medina, and that it posed an existential problem for Believers as expressed in the inquiry into the condition of those who had died before the change took place. My account ignores the detail preserved by tradition that has the revelation descending on the Prophet near Medina, in a small outlying village called al-Quba. I have translated the phrase ahl al-qibla wa ‘l-jamma’a into “the People of the Sacred Direction”; see EI2 under “Ahl al-kibla.” The verses just preceding the story of Bara’’ come from the Quran 2:136. I have taken the story of Bara’ from Ibn Ishaq, although I have changed the characters and eliminated a few details. Muhammad’s ambiguous response when asked to rule against Bara’ is included as it appears in Ibn Ishaq’s Life. It is interesting to note Tabari’s observation in his commentary on the Quran on the reasons for the change: “The first injunction which was abrogated in the Quran was that concerning the qibla. This is because the Prophet used to prefer the Rock of the Holy House of Jerusalem, which was the qibla of the Jews. The Prophet faced it for seventeen months after the Exodus in the hope that they would believe in him.” This the Jews of Medina did not do.

  The early debate in Islam over the direction of prayer is part of a larger competition between Mecca and Jerusalem as sites of veneration and pilgrimage. In the late seventh century many Muslims thought of the two cities as equally holy. The poet al-Farazdaq (d. 728), for example, places them on a par in a poem. Writing in the fourteenth century, Ibn al-Hajj al-Abdari in Madkhal al-shar’ al-Sharif points out that there were still Muslims who prayed from behind the rock in order to combine the qibla of the rock and the qibla of Mecca. M. J. Kister discusses these debates in his important article, “ ‘You Shall Only Set Out for Three Mosques’: A Study of an Early Tradition,” in Studies in Jahiliyya and Early Islam (London: Variorum Reprints, 1980).

  Other details: Ka’b’s statement, “those who can see lift their eyes to the heavens.… Those who cannot see look at the onions in the ground,” is attributed to the first-century Hellenized Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus, as cited by E. M. Forster in Alexandria: A History and a Guide (London: Michael Haag, 1986). The lashing of Umar’s son, on his father’s orders, for having a taste of wine is in Ibn Asakir’s Tarikh Dimashq.

  Growing Up in Jerusalem

  The death of Umar at the hands of Abu Lu’lu’a is from Tabari’s History. The image of oaths as screens for misdeeds is from the Quran 58: 15–18. Ka’b’s “prophecy” of Umar’s assassination in Tabari’s History reads: “Ka’b al-Ahbar came and said to [Umar], ‘O Commander of the Faithful, make your will, for in three days you will be dead.’ ‘What tells you this?’ asked Umar. ‘I find it in the book of the Almighty God, in the Torah.’ ‘What, do you find Umar ibn al-Khattab in the Torah?’ ‘By God, no, but I find your description and features, and behold your span is ended.’ ” Whereupon follows the tale of his murder.

  On early bookbinding techniques in this and later chapters, I have relied on Johannes Pedersen, The Arabic Book (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984). By the second century the illustrated papyrus scroll was replaced with the codex (book of leaves), made of parchment and later on paper. Nothing is known about Muslim practitioners of the arts of the book in the seventh century; no indisputably seventh-century Muslim manuscript has survived. By the eighth century, however, Pedersen attests, there were Muslim craftsmen of the book like Ishaq skilled enough in the arts of geometry and graphics to be enclosing sura headings in Quranic manuscripts “in a frame with the Kufic script executed in gold, surrounded by tracery, twisting lines, and geometrical patterns.”

  The struggle for control over the fledgling Islamic state between the Hashimites and the Umayyads is described in all the general histories. See, for instance, Madelung (1997), who also recounts the grievances against Uthman. The third Caliph’s use of the Quran to justify favoring his relatives is in Ibn Sa’d’s Tabaqat. Silwan, or Shiloah, borders the Old City of Jerusalem on its southern side. The story of Uthman setting aside the village of Silwan’s gardens for the poor is from al-Muqaddasi. See S. D. Goitein’s “Jerusalem in the Arab Period,” in The Jerusalem Cathedra.

  Mu’awiya, the first Umayyad Caliph, is believed to have had significant building plans for Jerusalem while a governor of Syria. In the course of archaeological excavations south and west of the Haram in the late 1960s, Professor Benjamin Mazar uncovered a group of seventh-century structures, suggesting that considerable building activity took place under the Umayyads; see Mazar, The Mountain of the Lord (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1975). Ka’b’s anger over book illustrations was the kind of sentiment that was later developed in the Shari’a, Muslim holy law, into a prohibition on any kind of a representation of a living thing. An overview of the details of this law, including debate over whether the injunction applies only to animals or to trees as well, can be found in EI2 under “Sura.”

  Arculf, who visited the Church of the Ascension around 680, writes: “Nowhere on the whole of the Mount of Olives is there a higher spot than the one from which it is said that the Lord ascended to heaven. A great round church stands there, which has round it three porticoes with vaulted roofs. But there is no vault or roof over the central part of the church; it is out of doors open to the sky.…” (Peters, 1985).

  The English bishop Willibald, who visited Jerusalem between A.D. 724 and 730, describes the altar: “On the altar is a beautifully engraved brass lantern with a small candle inside. The lantern encloses the candle on all sides so that it will continue to burn, rain or shine, night and day.” Then he goes on to talk about the two columns standing against the north and south walls of the church; see Wilkinson (1977). The bright light of the lamps shining from the church’s upper windows comes from Arculf. The word qindil came to the Arabs from the Latin, candela, via the Aramaeans. Early Arabic poetry suggests that the lamps that illuminated churches fired the imagination of the Arabs, as they do Ishaq’s.

  The traditions of sacrifice mentioned by Ishaq in the course of his bitter exchange with his father are from Rubin’s “The Ka’ba.” Al-Fakihi is Rubin’s source for the statement that the Black Stone was stained due to the blood of sacrifices. Ishaq’s reference to the Torah is to Jeremiah 19:5–6: “They have built shrines to Baal, to put their children to the fire as burnt offerings to Baal—which I never commanded, never decreed, and which never came into My mind. Assuredly a time is coming—declares the Lord—when this place sha
ll no longer be called Topheth or Valley of Hinnom, but valley of Slaughter.” Hence, presumably, the name Wadi Jahannam, The Valley of Hell, previously discussed. The description by Ishaq of a good monk is a combination of the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:16–17 and those of Gregory of Nyssa, who lived in the fourth century. (Idinopulos, 1991). The verses recited by Ishaq, the Christian overtones of which send Ka’b into a fit, are by the blind Syrian poet Abu al-’Alaa al-Ma’arri (d. 1057), as translated by Ameen Rihani; see James Kritzeck’s Anthology of Islamic Literature (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964). Kritzeck’s Anthology is also my source for the verses by Abu al-’Alaa inserted on p. vii. Ecclesiastes 11:10 gives us Ishaq’s woeful lament that “Childhood and youth are vanity.”

  The Death of Ka’b

  Ishaq’s description of the onset of old age in Ka’b and his changing physical symptoms as he nears death borrows from Sherwin B. Nuland’s book, How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter (New York: Vintage, 1995), and Ralph Jackson, Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire (London: British Museum Press, 1988). The description of Izrail, the Angel of Death, and his declaration to Ka’b, are adapted from the anonymous Kitab Ahwal al-Qiyama; see Yvonne Y. Haddad and Jane I. Smith’s important book, The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection (New York: State University of New York, 1981). The story featuring Abu Dharr, Uthman, Ka’b, Mu’awiya, and Ali ibn Abi Talib is reported in al-Mas’udi’s tenth-century Muruj al-Dhahab (Meadows of Gold) (Beirut, 1984). Some of the details of Mas’udi’s account have been changed, but the setting, characters and alliances are presented as they appear in the original. Ka’b’s remarks about the uselessness of amulets and his request to be propped up and have kohl put around his eyes, are attributed to Mu’awiya in Tabari’s History, vol. 18, Between Civil Wars: The Caliphate of Mu’awiya. The description of the soul slipping easily or painfully from the body is from al-Ghazali’s al-Durra al-Fakhira. The final sentence is from the Quran 2:152.

  The Wait in the Grave

  A martyr’s death is described in the Quran 3:164: “Count not those who were slain in God’s way as dead, but rather living with their Lord.… No fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow.”

  Medieval Muslims believed that the dead and the living interacted in sleep. See Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s fourteenth-century Kitab al-Ruh. Ishaq’s dream is loosely based on a story taken from Mujir al-Din al-Hanbali, a fifteenth-century native of Jerusalem who wrote a history of sayings and stories about the city of his birth entitled al-’Uns al-Jalil bi Ta’rikh al-Quds wa al-Khalil (Marmarji, 1948). When Ishaq hears Ka’b’s grave mocking him, he is citing Al-Ghazali’s al-Durra al-Fakhira. The great ninth-century critic Al-Jahiz, in his Kitab al-Bayan (The Book of Proof), includes a narrative on the questioning of souls after death by the two angels Munkar and Nakir; I have used an excerpt from Kritzeck’s Anthology. Abu Dharr’s mocking of Ka’b is borrowed from an image in the Quran (62:5) criticizing Jews: “The likeness of those who have been loaded with the Torah, then they have not carried it, is as the likeness of an ass carrying books. Evil is the likeness of the people who have cried lies to God’s signs. God guides never the people of the evildoers.” Other passages from the Quran cited by Ishaq in his reflections on the wait in the grave, and Ka’b’s fixation on Judgment Day, are 2:172 and verses 3, 4, and 36–40 from Sura 75, “The Resurrection.”

  The interregnum between biological death and resurrection, known as the barzakh, has received a great deal of attention in Muslim theological literature. I have relied on its comprehensive treatment in Haddad and Smith (1981). They cite Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti’s fifteenth-century Bushra al-ka’ib bi’liqa’ al-habib, upon which I have drawn. The tale of the Prophet comforting Aisha on the subject of the “torment of the tomb” is found in the jurist Abu Laith al-Samarqandi’s tenth-century Tanbih al-Ghafilin (Arousing the Heedless). See Arthur Jeffery’s anthology, A Reader on Islam: Passages from Standard Arabic Writings Illustrative of the Beliefs and Practices of Muslims (Salem, N.H.: Ayer Co., 1962).

  The account of the first fitna, civil war, that followed the murder of Uthman follows the standard Muslim account. I have relied in particular on Mas’udi’s Muruj. Tabari attributes far less altruistic motives to Hasan’s renouncing of the Caliphate to Mu’awiya in his History, vol. 18. That God did not intend to unite Prophethood and the Caliphate in the House of Hashim was, according to tradition, the opinion of Hasan as expressed on his deathbed to his brother Husayn. Ishaq’s description of the mind in sleep is adapted from a text by Gregory of Nyssa (335–395), “On the Making of Man,” found in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 5, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994).

  The Footprint

  Just before his death in 680, Mu’awiya adjudicated a controversy in Jerusalem between Christians and Jews that was witnessed by the European pilgrim Arculf; it concerned a piece of linen cloth that had covered Christ’s head and was allegedly stolen from his tomb by a Jew in whose family it remained for six centuries. Cited in full in Peters, Jerusalem (1985). I have adapted this story into the controversy over the ownership of a footprint discovered on the Rock. There is no firm evidence that the story of the footprint on the Rock—alleged by different pilgrims to be Jacob’s in the twelfth century and Christ’s in the year 1102—dates to the seventh century.

  Mu’awiya’s inauguration in Jerusalem is in both Muslim (Tabari) and Christian sources (the anonymously authored Maronite Chronicle). The latter states, “Many Arabs gathered in Jerusalem and made Mu’awiya king. He went up and sat in Golgotha and prayed in it. He also went to Gethsemane and went down to the Tomb of Blessed Mary and prayed in it.” Cited in Robert Schick, The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1995). On Mu’awiya’s use of the title Khalifat Allah, “The Deputy of God,” see Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, God’s Caliph: Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). On Mu’awiya’s general character, habits, and sayings, I have relied on Mas’udi’s Muruj, Tabari’s History, and Schroeder’s Muhammad’s People. The discussion of the softness of the rock in the time of Abraham is from the ninth-century Kitab al-Hayawan by al-Jahiz.

  In his biography of the Prophet written in the middle of the eighth century, Muhammad ibn Ishaq ibn Yassar tells the story of the Prophet’s night journey and ascent to Heaven that I have adapted and put into the words of one Yassar, a former slave like Ibn Ishaq’s grandfather (see A. Guillaume’s introduction to his translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Life). Ibn Ishaq is the earliest literary source for this much elaborated upon story in Muslim tradition, which was destined to become the basis for current Muslim belief regarding why the Dome of the Rock was built—as a shrine to “the rock on which it is said that the Messenger of God put his foot when he ascended into heaven,” in the words of the ninth-century traveller and geographer, al-Ya’qubi. This widely held belief is grounded in an interpretation of one verse in the Quran (17:1): “Glorified be He Who carried His servant [i.e., the Prophet] by night from the Masjid al-Haram [in Mecca] to the Masjid al-Aqsa [literally, the farthest place of worship, assumed nowadays to be a reference to Jerusalem].” The connection, however, between this verse (which is not among the inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock) and Ibn Ishaq’s story has been shown by scholars to be very tenuous if we are interested in the actual historical reasons the Dome of the Rock was built. I know of no serious scholarly argument in its support. See on this Grabar (1959, 1996); F. E. Peters, “Who Built the Dome of the Rock?”; and Rabbat, “The Meaning of the Umayyad Dome of the Rock.” The conclusion I have worked with in my story is that the legend of Muhammad’s miraculous journey must have followed closely on the heels of the erection of the Dome, just like the legends of Helena’s discovery of the cross followed the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the fantastical accounts of Solomon’s Temple so obviously followed its
construction.

  Ibn Ishaq, author of the earliest biography of the Prophet, confirms in an indirect way just how controversial his story must have been at the time: Did it occur during sleep, in a dream (like Jacob’s)? Or was it an actual event? he asks. The Prophet is recorded as saying, “My eyes sleep while my heart is awake.” Ibn Ishaq recounts the controversy and insists that, whether the Prophet was asleep or awake, the story was true and actually happened. Mu’awiya is alleged to have denied that the trip actually took place, downgrading it to a “vision.” Aisha conjectured that only the Prophet’s soul had risen during the trip, leaving the corporeal substance of her husband’s body behind. Umm Hani, the Prophet’s cousin, disputes that he left from near the Ka’ba because he was in her house: “The apostle went on no night journey except while he was in my house. He prayed the final night prayer, then he slept and we slept. A little before dawn the apostle woke us, and when we had prayed the dawn prayer he said, ‘O Umm Hani, I prayed with you the last evening prayer in this valley as you saw. Then I went to Jerusalem and I prayed there.’ ” These opinions suggest that the story must have been contentious in Ibn Ishaq’s day (the middle of the eighth century) and hardly likely to have been the reason seventh-century Muslims built the first great architectural work of their civilization.