The Rock

by Kanan Makiya

  Shalt thou build me an house for me to dwell in?

  Whereas I have not dwelt in any house,

  even to this day,

  but have walked

  in a tent and in a tabernacle.

  In all the places wherein I have walked,

  spake I a word with any of the

  tribes of Israel,

  saying, Why build ye not me an house of cedar?

  The hour was getting late. A cold west wind was blowing. Ka’b examined the Caliph’s face; it was strangely expressionless and withdrawn. Umar looked tired, not like a conqueror who was about to take over Christendom’s crown jewel, not like a hard-hearted man whose piety made him contemptuous of all frivolity. The flesh hung loosely from his sallow, sunken cheeks. It was not clear what, if anything, would be the consequences on the morrow of David’s actions all those years ago. Umar, the Separator of Right from Wrong, as Muhammad had named him, whose shadow alone sent indolence and idleness scuttling like beetles in a campfire, looked unsure of himself.

  And he said: “Would that Muhammad take me to that bountiful Garden where he must now be lying, underneath the spreading shade of a thornless lote-tree.”

  “That is surely your destination,” said Ka’b.

  “Not unless I die in God’s cause.”

  “God forbid!”

  “What have I to do with this world, O Father of Ishaq?” Umar said. “I am like a horseman who halts a little while in the shade and departs. A curse is upon his journey and all things along the way, save those signs that help him remember God. Perhaps the Lord mingled sin with the clay he used for the peopling of the Earth. Think you that David sinned in his life more than we have done in ours?”

  There was silence. And when Ka’b finally spoke, his voice was gentle. “David’s sins were many and grave. But what do you, whom the Prophet always praised, have to be ashamed of?”

  “One thing, old man, which still haunts my nights.”

  “Unburden yourself then, by this hallowed valley watered by the tears of the living and the dead. There is no better place.”

  And Umar unburdened himself. He told Ka’b of how he had made an offering of his six-year-old daughter to a stone in the days before Muhammad had come to light up the world, of how he had buried her alive under a pile of stones, of how the sounds of her fading screams turned into strangled grunts as the earth stopped her mouth, of how she had reached up tenderly to touch his face and brush earth from his beard even as he was digging her grave.

  “This,” said Ka’b, “is the music of Satan lamenting the loss of the world.”

  Whereupon Umar suddenly groaned, dropped his head, folded it in his arms, and began to weep uncontrollably. The Caliph wept so hard that day that his tears etched two lines on his face that remained until the day he died.

  (photo credit 9.1)

  The Rock of Sacrifice

  To console his Caliph and stiffen his resolve before the delegation from the Holy City arrived, Ka’b reminded Umar that, in the Age of Ignorance, the father of Muhammad himself had come within a hair’s width of being sacrificed. The kind and generous Abd al-Muttalib, who would protect his grandson in later years from the wrath of those who would not believe in him, wanted ten sons at a time when he had none. He vowed to sacrifice one of them to the gods of the Ka’ba should he be granted his heart’s desire. The wish was granted. It fell upon the future father of Muhammad to pay the old man’s debt.

  “By God! If you do a thing like this there will be no stopping men from sacrificing their sons,” said a shaikh from the boy’s tribe. Abd al-Mutallib was pressed into finding an expiatory sacrifice to save the boy.

  The hand of God took the shape of an old Jewess from Khaybar. She told Abd al-Muttalib what he had to do. His son’s life would be spared in exchange for one hundred camels slaughtered between Isaf and Naila, two lovers who had come to Mecca on a pilgrimage from Jurham in the land of the Yemen and could not control their passion for one another. After fornicating in the Ka’ba, they were discovered the next morning turned into upright rocks. These the Arabs of Quraysh relocated one hundred paces in front of the main door to their shrine, reserving the space between them for sacrifices like that which spared the life of the Prophet’s father.

  The story did not console Umar.

  “Where is the hand of God in what I did to my daughter? Tell me that, Father of Ishaq.”

  “What else brought you here before the altar of the ancients,” replied Ka’b, “if not His guiding hand? Is it a coincidence that He brought you in the first month of spring, the month of the creation of the world and the birth of the prophets? When the blood of a firstborn is sacrificed on this threshold, the new year is purged of all the calamities of the old. Did not God say to the People of the Torah,”

  Thou shalt not put off

  the skimming of the first yield of your vats.

  Thou shalt give Me the first-born among your sons.

  Thou shalt do the same with your cattle and your flocks:

  seven days it shall remain with its mother;

  on the eighth day thou shalt give it to Me.

  “The Lord placed such an onerous burden upon the Jews?”

  “He did,” said Ka’b. “Just as He commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son, Ishaq, in this very same month in which you stand before the gates of the Holy City. And you ask me about the whereabouts of His hand!”

  Ka’b’s eyes flashed their excitement.

  “A son is the pearl of his father’s eye,” he went on, lowering his voice. “Abraham stood to lose everything by making a burnt-offering of the child of his old age. Not a daughter, mind you, but Sara’s firstborn. Nor was God holding out the promise of a reward as he had at the beginning of Abraham’s prophecy, or asking him to kill his son in order to keep his word. That would at least have turned Abraham into a hero like Abd al-Mutallib. No! That would have been too easy. At the time of the ordeal, not a soul was present; there was no one to witness, much less spread word of, Abraham’s piety! Who would have believed Abraham’s own account? Who could have believed that God would ask him to kill in silence, in utter isolation, out of the purest feelings of love, without hope of being understood by those nearest and dearest to him? Abraham was asked to kill, knowing that no one could possibly benefit from what he was about to do. Not even you, O Prince of True Believers, had to kill this way. Of all the different ways of killing, Abraham’s was by far the hardest. All other sacrifices pale in comparison with what he did. And what are those sacrifices but constant reminders of the enormous merit of what Abraham did?”

  Ka’b’s outburst had the desired effect of calming Umar.

  “What passed between Abraham and his son on that day, as you know the story?” asked Umar, his curiosity aroused.

  “Instructed to enact the priest,” said Ka’b, “Abraham set to work piling the faggots for the offering. These he gave to the boy, carrying in his own hands the fire and the knife. Father and son loaded their asses and traveled in the direction that God had indicated. For three days, they rode in silence, unhurried, at a leisurely pace. While the boy tended to the asses, Abraham cast his eyes to the horizon, looking for a sign. He did not know exactly where or when the offering was to take place. Then, on the morning of the fourth day, he saw a pillar of cloud rising from a mountain in the distance.

  “There before you,” Ka’b said, pointing to the ruins of the Temple across the valley, “somewhere in that mound of desecration, lies hidden the meeting place of Heaven and Earth upon which David so assiduously sought forgiveness, and where all the great sacrifices of the prophets have been offered.”

  “Am I to be tested like Abraham?” Umar asked.

  “Since the time of Adam,” Ka’b said, “the primary lure of the Rock has been as a testing ground for faith. Abraham set the standard for us all when he offered up the soul of him he loved the most. His ordeal was the ultimate proof of holiness, binding him to God by knots of love that outweigh all dignity. It was Abra
ham who rebuilt the altar of Adam, which had been demolished by the waters of the great flood. Noah tried and failed. Ever since, men and women of faith have been trying to measure belief by what the Father of Faith did. David tried by conquering Jerusalem. Solomon tried by consecrating his Temple through animal sacrifice. If the Jews still blow the ram’s horn, it is to remember what Abraham did. If the followers of Muhammad cut the throat of a sheep during the forenoon of the first day of the Feast of Sacrifice, it is to remember that which Abraham did is what it means to have faith.”

  “Do the Books of the Ancients tell you anything, Ka’b, about what happened after the deed was done?” asked Umar. “Did he harbor any regrets?”

  “Most certainly not,” replied Ka’b, “but, worrying that his offering was not enough, he said these words in prayer: ‘Master of the Universe, regard it as though I had sacrificed my son first and only afterwards sacrificed this ram.’ ”

  Sophronius

  The meeting of Sophronius and the Caliph was to take place on the day before Palm Sunday. It was a brilliant ploy on the part of Sophronius, unanticipated by Umar and his advisors, for it meant that the Arab takeover of Jerusalem would be lost in a show of Christian pomp and pageantry headed by the Patriarch himself. On that day, the Patriarch would gather with the faithful on the Mount of Olives to open the Great Week of festivities commemorating Jesus’s entry into the Holy City.

  With the crowing of the cock, Ka’b spotted a trickle of people leaving the city from its eastern gate toward the Mount of Olives. He began to have visions of being “lost in a sea of Christians unfurling their crosses like banners,” as he put it to me years later. He hurried to Umar’s tent to bring the situation to the Caliph’s attention.

  “You worry too much, Father of Ishaq.” Umar was in too good a mood to bother with Ka’b’s fears as he sat relishing the details of the city’s surrender that had been worked out by his commander-in-chief, Abu Ubayda.

  The Caliph had guaranteed the security of all Christian inhabitants of the Holy City—their families, property, churches, and crosses. That was his practice throughout the territories taken from the Byzantines. He had promised that no constraints would be put on individual Christians in matters of religion. He had promised that no site belonging to the Church or to an individual Christian would be expropriated, and no building demolished or forcibly converted into a mosque. That left the Christian character of the city dangerously entrenched, in Ka’b’s opinion. Where would the Believers settle? Where would they build their mosques? But Umar was not looking into the future when he made all his promises.

  In return for security, Umar demanded a ban on the building of new churches, cloisters, monasteries, and hermitages that were not expressly authorized by the Caliph. No Christian, were he or she so inclined, was to be dissuaded by his kin or by the Church from making submission to Muhammad, Messenger of the One and Only God. Church bells were to be tolled slowly at all times, and voices lowered during services. Voices were not to be raised during funeral processions, nor lights carried, especially not through streets inhabited by the Believers. Christian books should not be hawked for sale in any street frequented by Muhammad’s people, nor in their bazaars.

  In matters of attire and comportment, Christians should refrain from wearing caps or turbans similar to those worn by Muhammad’s people; they had to keep to their existing style of dress, wearing belts about their waists at all times. Nor could they dress their hair in the fashion of the Arabs or assume Arabic names. They could not cut Arabic inscriptions upon their signet rings; swords were not to be worn in public or new weapons purchased. Above all, Christians should not seek to discover the private affairs of Muslims through their slaves. Spying upon Believers in any way would not be tolerated. To all of this, including a poll tax, Sophronius had already indicated his agreement.

  “Our covenant with the Christians has been guided by your principle, O Ka’b,” Umar said, “that of the separation of categories.”

  “Separateness in all things has been ordained by God,” Ka’b replied. “It was present in the order of creation. Can a woman lie with a beast? Or a man eat flesh that is unclean? No. Because holiness is not abomination; it is separation. That is the reason, O Caliph, why I am urging you not to enter the Holy City in the company of Christians carrying palm leaves and idols.”

  “What do we know about this Sophronius?” Umar asked, ignoring my father’s desperate admonishment. The Caliph was more interested in his adversary’s bold step of demanding Umar’s presence as a condition of handing over Jerusalem without bloodshed. This was, after all, no common transfer of sovereignty. And Sophronius was the head of his Church, ruling from a city that had been the crown jewel of Christendom for three hundred years. It was the Christian who had asked to meet the Muslim face-to-face. The Caliph of God’s Apostle had therefore been honored by the Patriarch. Such a thing had never happened before, not even to the Prophet. Umar, normally so unyielding to ceremony, was flattered.

  But what kind of a man was his flatterer? Honorable or sly? Of genuine religious conviction, or a politician buying time while his emperor plotted in Constantinople to bail him out?

  Ka’b’s informant was an old trading partner of his uncle’s, a Copt who had lived for many years in Alexandria. Sophronius, the Copt had said, had been born in Damascus a Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian. He had been brought up an emperor’s man, contemptuous of the local Christians he had grown up with. His eyes on the glories of Christ’s Empire, he felt hemmed in by the city of his birth. Alexandria, that staging post for all things Christian and Greek on the coast of Egypt, exerted a far greater attraction. The fame of the city had long before penetrated to Syria. His head swollen with thoughts of adventure, the young Sophronius had set out to discover its charms.

  Sophronius used Alexandria as a base from which to explore the monasteries of Egypt, gathering material for a collection of sayings and stories of the saints. No sooner had he returned to Damascus than he had to flee his city, forced into exile by the wars of an illiterate centurion elevated into the highest office by disaffected units of the Roman army. He had settled in Alexandria, spending the years reading and studying in what remained of its great library after it had been burned by monks like himself who were trying to save Egypt from paganism. When the Persians invaded, Sophronius had fled Egypt like all Byzantines. Passing through Cyprus, he had sailed among the islands of the Aegean and visited Rome and Constantinople, but decided finally to spend the winter of his life in Jerusalem. He arrived in the Holy City for the first time on the eve of the Prophet’s flight from his persecutors in Mecca.

  “What made him become a monk?” Umar wanted to know.

  “Alexandria,” Ka’b replied. “The city attracts them and turns out new ones all the time. Its streets are bursting with black-robed monks, scuttling past colonnades, holding secret little conclaves, and conducting arcane debates.”

  “Travelers passing through Medina,” said Umar, “tell fantastic tales about this city. They say that its streets shine so bright, awnings of green silk have to be hung over them to relieve the glare.”

  “Every wall and pavement is clad in white marble,” Ka’b replied. “So white it is painful to the eyes.”

  “A white city,” pondered Umar, “born of the whim of a soldier who was in a hurry to conquer the world, and peopled by Greek-speaking Jews and Christians who dress in black—a striking combination. I wonder if it is the glare of the marble that made the monks wear black?”

  “The city is an unnatural mix of incompatible elements, each of which pulls in a different direction,” said Ka’b. “Hence its susceptibility to licentiousness and abominations of the flesh. Caught between the sea and a desert that stretches into the heart of Africa, Alexandria chose to face seawards, toward Constantinople and all things Greek, turning its back upon its own people. In that orientation lie the seeds of the city’s ruin.”

  “Such a fickle place, yet you say it has formed our man and s
haped his thoughts, not Jerusalem,” Umar said.

  “Jerusalem faces the desert,” Ka’b replied, “and just as Alexandria never really belonged to its desert interior, so does our man Sophronius not really belong to Jerusalem. His allegiances lie elsewhere.”

  “You are speaking in riddles, my friend.”

  “The arms of the cross span this man’s life,” explained Ka’b. “He has spent the better part of his life combating heresy in Egypt. There Christians have been at loggerheads with one another for as long as anyone can remember. He believed Egypt to be in dire threat of succumbing to the wrong kind of Christianity, and he stayed to heal the growing divide within Christendom. The danger was greatest in Alexandria. Sophronius believed he could change things. But he had no idea what he was getting himself into. Rivers of blood had been spilled over the Christian soul of Egypt—and nowhere as much as in Alexandria, a city of foreigners that hated all things foreign. And what was Sophronius if not a foreigner!”

  “What is the argument between the Christians all about?” asked Umar.

  Ka’b tried to explain that it all boiled down to the true nature of Christ. Did the Son of Mary have a single divine Nature, one that subsumed the human, as the local Copts believed? Or did He have two natures, divine and human, as the Orthodox, led by Sophronius, taught.

  “How can any man have more than one nature?” an incredulous Umar wanted to know.

  “Because all Christians uphold the heresy that Christ is both the Son of God and the Son of Mary,” my father explained. “From this foolishness, many problems ensue. To extoll His divinity, as the Copts do, diminishes His humanity. As far as Sophronius is concerned, this belief renders meaningless the actual, physical sacrifice of Jesus on behalf of mankind, the pain that Sophronius says Jesus literally and truly experienced on the cross. The Copts, on the other hand, believe that placing undue emphasis on the humanity of Jesus is a heresy in the opposite direction that diminishes the transcendent nature of God.”