The Rock

by Kanan Makiya

  “Why were there no windows in the Holy of Holies?”

  “Because Solomon’s advisors said God resided there, and, thus, they believed His light physically radiated from that place. And because Solomon copied the pagan temples he saw around him, all of which had dark, inaccessible centers. In place of their idols, he put the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies. When the Ark was lost, the chamber was left a dark and empty cube, like the Ka’ba, qualities the Israelites associated with the brooding presence of the Lord. The Romans, who were used to brightly decorated temples reeking of incense and filled with the golden effigies of their idols, thought them mad.”

  “How could you possibly know what the Holy of Holies looked like?” interjected Raja’, son of Heyweh, a theologian and collector of traditions about the Prophet, whose advice was highly regarded in Abd al-Malik’s court. “There is no description of it in God’s Book, and the Prophet said nothing about it.”

  “I know it from the Book of Moses, which my father was taught in the land of the Yemen.”

  “A Book thick with praise, but thin on the matters of shape and form that you are talking about.” Raja’ considered himself an expert on the City of the Temple and its holy places.

  “I think the son of Ka’b has arrived at a commendable plan, O Commander of the Faithful,” Raja’ said, turning away from me to address the Caliph. “But I am troubled by the distance that his building takes from God’s Words. These represent Revelation’s most palpable miracle; wrought by Him, they were made manifest in our Arabic tongue. Christians choose to ignore and falsify their scripture with pictures. But we are a People of the Book, the final link in the chain of those who have been admitted to the secrets of the Celestial Register, the Mother of all Books. Was not the very first word of God to His chosen Messenger, ‘Recite’? And did God not say that men will suffer no injustice on Judgment Day because He had given us words that set forth the Truth? If our own Book, that which paved our way to the Holy Land, is not somehow in the Dome that will carry your name, men will say that Abd al-Malik has built just another Christian monument.”

  “Well spoken, Raja’. What say you, Ishaq? You are, after all, a bookbinder. Your vocation is to value His words. What were you proposing to make out of jewels of different colors and precious stones?”

  “Follow the words of scripture, which say, He is the Light of the Heavens and the Earth. I was proposing to illuminate. Was not light His first creation? And did the first ray not shine outward from this interior to illuminate the world? Physical brightness illuminates spiritually. It points to a journey from the material to the immaterial. Cast the bright light of day on His footprint, and the eyes of visitors to the Rock will be directed toward His Light up above, which is what they will confront on the Day of Doom. If His image is absent during our sojourn in this life, it is because light is the mark of His presence. He is Omniscience and Omnipresence,” I said to the Caliph in one great outburst, “and that is Light, the Light of the Heavens and the Earth, the likeness of which

  is as a niche

  wherein is a lamp

  (the lamp in a glass,

  the glass as it were a glittering star)

  kindled from a Blessed Tree,

  an olive that is neither of the East nor of the West,

  whose oil well-nigh would shine, even if no fire touched it;

  Light upon Light;

  God guides to His Light whom He will.

  God, who knows all things, had set these verses as a parable for men, I told Abd al-Malik. The Dome is the niche, within which sits a lamp. The lamp is the glass through which His light passes. The Rock is the Truth without which the niche is nothing. Thus does His Truth come to all Believers through the agency of light, which we can see, and be uplifted by, and love.

  “Parables will not sell my Dome to ordinary people,” Abd al-Malik said to me. The son of Haywa had elicited in the Caliph a desire for more directness. I had to come up with a simpler solution.

  Since there was so much light—the design allowed for fifty-six windows piercing the walls and drum of the Dome—did it not make sense to give men something to read? I decided to decorate the walls in the exemplary miracle of His Arabic script.

  The knowledge of a True Believer exists in his heart, or it does not exist at all. The sinuous lines of brightly colored calligraphy linking different surfaces together are not intended to teach the good Book, but to corroborate and reinforce what everyone already knows; they represent memories without falling into the trap of making likenesses of them. When Believers enter a mosque, they begin to recite aloud, swaying their bodies from side to side with eyes half closed, their voices like the roaring ocean. In the Dome, my calligraphy enacts those bodily movements before they have been set in motion; it envelops Believers in His praise before they have had a chance to begin praising Him.

  (photo credit 29.1)

  Building on the Rock

  Abd al-Malik loved the idea of applying calligraphy to the surfaces of the Dome. But he never gave me full credit for it. He saw my contribution as a mere fleshing out of his original concept of a Dome and what the son of Haywa had said. In recognition of the latter’s contribution—and out of consideration of the respect he enjoyed as a man of religion even in the holy cities of Arabia—Raja’ was appointed supervisor of the project, directly responsible to the Caliph for matters pertaining to the Dome. He chose the verses from the Holy Book to adorn the surfaces of the Dome, even though it was I who would execute the fundamental correlation between Architecture and His ineffable nature. Raja’ was as blind as a bat in matters of form and color. Thankfully, he was intelligent enough to leave these realms to me in the knowledge that the glory was going to him. He was the kind of man who enjoyed exercising control through the strings of a purse. All expenditures, changes, and major decisions had to be authorized by him. My days of easy access to the Caliph had come to an end.

  Shortly after the appointment of Raja’, son of Haywa, I convinced Nicholas to serve as master-builder for Abd al-Malik’s Dome. The Church held the threat of excommunication over his head even though it had no new buildings upon which he could deploy his talents. But his reasons for accepting were not entirely pecuniary, seeing as how friendship and respect had flourished between us in the course of our collaboration over the plan of the Dome.

  Work on the Dome began in earnest in the sixty-ninth year after the Exodus, while Abd al-Malik was still preoccupied with the rebellion of Abdallah’s brother in Iraq. We had raised the square platform around the Rock by this time. Four sets of steps led up to the platform, to the four doors of the Dome facing the four cardinal points of the cosmos.

  The height of the platform’s retaining wall was determined by the amount of rubble we had to dispose of. Much of that rubble had been shovelled northwards in the days of Umar and Mu’awiya, clearing the southern two-thirds of the esplanade and turning the northern third into an even bigger blot on the city. But the esplanade had to be big—a massive expanse if possible. So we had the whole area cleared, using some of the rubble as fill inside the new retaining walls that Nicholas had built. Large pieces of stone—cut and uncut—along with usable bits of columns, were kept aside. Everything else—Roman, Jewish, Christian, or pagan—went underneath the raised platform upon which the Dome was going to sit. The greater the amount of rubble at our disposal—the greater, in other words, had been Roman and Christian desecration of the site of Solomon’s Temple—the higher would our platform rise, and the more triumphantly would Abd al-Malik’s Dome tower above the city skyline. Was this God’s way of punishing those who had so abused His Rock? Thus did I wonder at Destiny’s Design while watching the Rock I had known as a young boy get buried until only its tip was left exposed.

  All that is left of the Rock today when one walks into the Dome is a dark, primitive, and yet gently tilted mass, inclining toward its counterpart in Mecca, the Black Stone. I measured out sixteen-by-twenty paces of it to be our building’s inner sanctum,
and the new floor was cut around the irregular shape and simply recessed at the edge where the raw limestone slides under polished marble. The exposed surface in the middle looks weatherbeaten, ravaged by time, colored in grim grays and gray-blues flecked with spots of brown and black. Identifiably human markings gouged into its worn-out countenance have become even more pronounced, holes and lines that must have been cut into the stone for the drainage of water or blood—sacrificial blood, animal and human. In spite of these markings, the surface feels parchment-like, with a texture and polish that comes from years of touching and kissing and stroking, so smooth it suggests the aged but well-preserved skin of a beached whale. Thus have we accentuated the disjunction of the Rock from its mountain carcass; to visitors, it seems to float like some unnatural distant apparition.

  Nicholas marked out the building with plaster in time for the Caliph’s visit. In spite of troubles brewing in Iraq where Abdallah’s brother was governor, Abd al-Malik decided to come to inspect the works. Upon learning that we had used plaster to set out the lines, he ordered it swept away and replaced with flour, “the emblem of fertility,” as he put it to me. Nicholas returned the next day and wordlessly began to mark off the piers, columns, and outer walls, which revolved around the Rock like the spokes of a wheel.

  Following Nicholas’s lines, peasant laborers dug the foundations, into which a graduated mixture of broken stone and mortar would be poured. They dug until they hit the Rock that they had just covered up. The ring of Rock we had covered with new flagstones was flat until the point at which the outer face of our octagon-shaped walls ended. At this edge, the supporting rock slopes sharply downward. Had our building been any bigger, or smaller, it would not have fitted its mountain as perfectly. I had not foreseen or adjusted for the contours of the Rock when drawing the plan. God willed everything to fall in place. The first great work of architecture to be commissioned by Muhammad’s followers in the name of their faith had been tailored by Him on High to crown Mount Zion perfectly.

  I took this as a sign and stopped all work for the day. Each man, after the fashion of his religion, was called upon to give thanks to the Lord.

  It took Nicholas six months to put up the piers and external walls. He used rough blocks of stone, crudely hewn, with very thick joints, knowing that they were never going to be seen without their finished coat of glazed tiles. Each of the eight outer walls was subdivided into seven tall panels ending at the top in a semicircular recessed arch. Nicholas wanted to make them all blind; he said that it was not fitting for a house of worship to have so many windows. But I insisted on the light.

  The compromise we finally worked out was to leave the lower half blind, while putting windows in the upper half of five of the seven panels. As a consequence, there are forty windows in the external walls of the octagon, which, along with the sixteen windows of the drum, make a total of fifty-six.

  I selected the columns for the interior from what we had salvaged from the esplanade. The careful observer will notice that no two columns are alike in the Dome. The striated marble shafts vary slightly in diameter as well as in coloring. The capitals in particular diverge from one another. A handful do not even belong to the shafts to which they are currently attached. One had a cross chiselled into it. How it got there, I don’t know. But cross or no cross, the quality of the carving was excellent, and I was loath to discard it. Raja’ was away in Damascus, and I decided to let it pass. Perhaps he wouldn’t notice; by the time he came back, it would be too late to make a fuss.

  The different heights of the columns caused many problems. Adjustments had to be made through trial and error. If a column was too short, we used thick layers of lead at the base to raise it. This material forms a good bedding because of how it allows the weight to distribute itself evenly over the junction with the shaft. The messy result was then concealed under paneled boxes of white marble. In spite of Nicholas’s best efforts, further fine-tuning was often required at the top. To make these with the greatest flexibility, he added a plain block of slightly recessed stone above the capital, upon which rested the wooden tie-beams running through each arcade. Adjustments in the thickness of the stone would compensate for any differences in level from one column to the next.

  As the neck is carried on the torso, the drum of our dome is carried by the four piers and eight columns of the circular arcade. A long neck is a mark of graciousness in a person; I aspired to a very high drum. Nicholas built it of squared blocks of stone following the lines of the arches below. In order to support the enormous weight, he strengthened the four piers so that they acted as buttresses rising through the roof. The height from the ground to the spring of the Dome—the drum’s top edge—was equal to the diameter of the Dome. In other words, we had generated a cubical interior around the Rock, perfectly squared to accommodate the Ka’ba on the Last Day.

  Attached to the drum in a fanlike fashion are a series of wooden trusses sloping down to the walls of the outer octagon. These carry the roof over the two ambulatories. Rafters rest on the trusses parallel to the sides of the octagon. Upon them, we laid an exterior finish of sheets of lead.

  The crown of any such edifice is its dome. Domes test the true art and mettle of a builder like no other element. Ours began going up a year or so after Abd al-Malik’s visit to the site.

  Nicholas insisted on constructing it out of two shells, independently fitted to one another like inverted cups. The curved ribs of each dome were bent, not cut, and held in place with cross-braced wooden struts as in a ship’s hull. It was stronger that way, Nicholas said. More importantly, the height I aspired to on the outside would not be marred by a tunnelled effect on the inside. Praise be to God who put proportion in that good man’s mind where all true works of architecture are carried, enabling him to see the consequences of geometry and arithmetic before they materialize on the ground.

  The effect, while walking around inside the structure, before the roof was laid down, was one of striped light shimmering and dazzling the eyes as one passed under the symmetrically aligned trusses. The beauty of expressed structure tells its own story, and I needed no other argument to leave the beams and struts exposed rather than hiding them under coffered ceilings hanging off roof trusses, as had been done in the Basilica of the Church of the Resurrection.

  Thirty-two ribs spring upward from a wall-plate fixed to the top of the drum. These converge at the apex, where all tensions are resolved. I insisted on thirty-two so as to maintain a symmetry based on a factor of four, the number of sides of the Ka’ba: four doors, eight sides, sixteen drum windows, and thirty-two ribs. On the inside of the Dome we had the wall-plate cantilever beyond the wall to support a stucco cornice girdling the drum, which I thought provided a handsome transition from the starkly vertical to the gently sweeping curve of the dome. Similarly, on the outside, a cornice separated the Dome from its drum, which, again, is only fitting, seeing as how a change of material occurs there.

  I wanted the decoration to be as lavish and rich as Nicholas’s structure was spare. Had not Solomon’s Temple been filled with golden trees and sumptuous fruit? That which God has blessed has to have its riches come bursting out of all its surfaces.

  (photo credit 30.1)

  Working from pattern-books that my mosaicists presented to me, I chose according to what my father had taught me of the shapes and colors of the mansions and trees of Paradise. Vinescrolls, five-pointed leaves, pinecones, bunches of grapes looping out of trees or vases, and chains of half-palmettes were carved or painted on plates of wood and attached to the exposed roof beams. I wanted them to be overwhelming in quantity and variety. The tie-beams, being closer to the ground, were clad in metal, upon which craftsmen applied finely painted gilt, sometimes working the metal surface directly in a variety of ways. Likewise, the piers were decorated with vinelike plants rising from acanthus leaves, their stems laden with expensive ornaments and jewelry.

  Golden trees, and treelike forms with multicolored trunks, luxuriant bl
ossoms, and clusters of fruit, spill from the surfaces of the arcade. Sometimes I had sinuously curving vegetal forms growing out of jewelled vases. These I would have necklaced in collars of gold studded with chips of mother-of-pearl. The golden trees bore real fruit, just as Ka’b had told me they had in the lush gardens and courtyards of Solomon’s Temple. On the soffits of the arches, in cubes of mosaic, my craftsmen depicted grapes, dates, figs, pears, apples, prunes, quince, olives, cherries, lemons, and pomegranates.

  While building his skeletal structure, Nicholas scrambled about on the scaffolding as though he were putting together Noah’s Ark. He picked only the finest pieces of oak and cedar for the Dome’s ribs, even though the difference could hardly be seen from the ground. These species of wood are not subject to the attacks of worms, he said, when Raja’ tried to get him to obtain cheaper alternatives.

  It was while he was working on the final stages of the inner dome, nailing boarding that had palm-tree fiber glued on to hold the plaster, that he slipped and fell onto the craggy surface of the Rock below. Nicholas’s back was broken. We carried him to his house on a stretcher, but he was beyond the art of the doctors and died the following day.

  I was distraught. We lost much of our Christian workforce that week, because word spread that Nicholas’s misfortune had been caused by his disobedience to the Church. A priest’s instruction should be heeded, one of the marble-setters said to me, for it is not his words that bind, but those of Jesus:

  What you bind on earth,

  will be bound in the heavens,

  and what you unbind on earth

  will be unbound in the heavens.

  I appealed to Raja’ to dispense one hundred gold pieces to Nicholas’s family in recognition of his service on the Caliph’s behalf. But Nicholas had died uncircumcised, reminding everyone that, in spite of half a century of Muslim governance, Jerusalem was still Christian. In that was considerable loss of face for the followers of Muhammad. Raja’ refused to pay more than Nicholas was due on the day that he died. I decided to appeal directly to Abd al-Malik.