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

by Kanan Makiya

  The last bit of the Rock that can be seen today, having weathered all these storms, exudes the aura of an ancient face. A face that does not talk about what it has seen, a face that does not even know it has seen anything.

  Nothing competed with that face’s impassive presence after all the rubble and refuse that had accumulated upon the sanctuary was cleared away. As children, we used to scramble and play on it. That stopped after a little girl fell down from its highest point and cracked open her skull.

  Surface and texture gave no sign that the Rock had been levelled to create a usable surface, or cut into and chipped away at by builders, pilgrims, men who wished it ill. The natural slopes and furrows, I recall, were well preserved. Traces of yellow earth could be found tucked away inside cracks and crevices; they must have sat there undisturbed for centuries, resistant even to the regular washing down to which the Rock has been subjected from the time of the conquest. The ring of stone hidden beneath the polished marble floor is naturally flat, until the point at which the outer walls supporting the new building begin. Here, the stone’s profile takes a sharp dip, sloping downward. The mountain, key to the Rock’s secrets, has begun its descent.

  Before the Christians and the Romans, before even King Solomon and his miracle of engineering, when the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, the Rock and the mountain were one. Or so my father used to say. Zion would then have looked no different from the other mountains upon which this city is built; it was not distinguished from its neighbors by size or height. In fact, Zion is not a mountain at all; it is more of a hill, a bump in the landscape. Neighboring Golgotha is higher.

  Today, the mountain and its summit look separate, and people say that the Rock is suspended by an invisible force between Heaven and Earth. But that is an illusion created by the fact that the Rock is attached to the mountain in only one place. Below the Rock, underneath its highest point, is a low-ceilinged cave. The cave is small, less than five paces square, and barely a man’s height. Eleven crudely carved steps lead to the cave from the summit. Why eleven? I remember asking my father. Because, he said, eleven is the first act of transgression over ten, the number of God’s Commandments.

  The cave is pierced by two holes. The first bores through solid stone for the length of a man and is round and smooth, just large enough for a child on a rope to slither through and drop down on the floor below. Not even my father knew who cut this hole or why.

  The smaller second hole pierces the floor of the cave below. For as long as I can remember, it has been covered with a large, round slab that has a hoop set into it, which I was never able to shift. Ka’b said that on the slab’s underside there is another hoop protruding downward with a chain attached onto which Solomon used to hang the keys of his Temple. The slab conceals an underground cavern that drops like a giant waterskin into the belly of the mountain. People call it the Well of Souls. They say that, if you listen very carefully at certain times of the year, you will hear muffled mumblings emanating from deep within the mountain.

  We shall show them Our signs

  in the horizons and in themselves. (photo credit 1.4)

  Those who know what a great seducer the desert is understand how the faith of its sons gets tested daily simply by their being condemned to live in it. Amid sands and dunes that shift and undulate like loose women, rocks stand out, omnipotent and steadfast, commanders of presence, demarcators of boundaries, bearers of witness—visible presences in place of invisible ones, the known in place of the unknown and the unknowable. And when such signs of God’s work cannot be found because the terrain is too flat, too muddy, too monotonous, and unresistant, they have to be made up. A building then takes the place of a mountain.

  In the Holy Land, such signs did not have to be invented as they were in Babylon and Egypt with their sacred assemblages of brick and stone aping the kind of permanence that nature itself had eschewed. They were already there. But they had to be identified and their relation to God interpreted correctly. Sinai, Horeb, Zaphon, Carmel, Hermon, Tabor, all pointed to the attributes of Him who created them—the Fixed and the Unalterable, the Great and the Illimitable. These are among His names. Not that mountains are God. They are merely signs of Him from whom revelation and knowledge pour into the mind like water into a valley.

  Only He whom the eye cannot attain knows why Zion was chosen above all other mountains, and why its summit was blessed with a share in His majesty.

  Is a stone thus singled out still a stone? The Rock will always be itself, a plain and humble piece of limestone no different from the other stones upon which this Holy City is built, but in what ways does it partake in the nature and mystery of God? Rediscovering those ways, which began long before they could be told, and which sprang from the source from which all religion springs, was Ka’b al-Ahbar’s most important contribution to the religion of Muhammad.

  The Rock of Foundation

  A name, my father used to say, “is the thing it names. Did not God teach Adam the names of all things so that he might know them?” Ka’b refused to call the Rock by anything other than its oldest name, the Rock of Foundation.

  “You are like a superstitious midwife,” my stepmother would joke, “who blesses the child she has just delivered with a name at exactly the moment she cuts its umbilical cord, and is then afraid to call him by any other name.”

  Precious Stone. Rock of Atonement. Adam’s Sepulchre. Navel of the Universe. Stone of Stumbling. Rock of Sacrifice. David’s Rock. Holy Rock. Rock of the Holy of Holies. Zion’s Rock. Rock of Calvary. Rock of the Ages. Jacob’s Rock. Peter’s Rock. Rock of the Church. Rock of Salvation. Stone of Consolation. Rock of Fear and Trembling. Rock of Judgment. The Rock has many names.

  So many names. So many carriers of blessing. So many proofs of excellence. Are they a sign of confusion? Perhaps the Rock has been delivered too many times into the world. Perhaps a thing encumbered with this many names has turned into a kind of fetish.

  The names troubled Ka’b.

  “Is the Rock one thing, or is it many things at once?” he asked me one day by way of a challenge.

  “I have no idea, Father.”

  “God, who makes the tongues of the eloquent fall short of praising His beauty unless they use the means by which He praises Himself, has at least ninety-nine names. Does that mean God is ninety-nine different things, because He has ninety-nine names?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “You suppose! You don’t know! What is that worthless Shaikh teaching you every day?” he exclaimed, referring to the old man who had come with Umar’s army and now held classes for the children of settlers in a room on the sanctuary.

  Ka’b meant to say that, even if a name is the thing it names, it is not that thing’s whole essence. Each name reveals an aspect of essence, one meaning among many. The elucidation of meaning requires a story, the stuff of religion, a story that lies at the origin of a particular name.

  How much is unquestionably authentic about these stories? Justifications of conquests, apologias of defeats, tales of victory and of woe, rituals of worship, all mixtures of lies and truths have become wondrous stories accumulating around Moriah’s weatherbeaten face since men first fixed their eyes upon it. Women weep for themselves beside the Rock, suffering infinitely, only to leave it transformed in heart and soul, light shining from their faces; brash young men lift their faces to Heaven, guffawing, only to leave the Rock they have seated themselves upon terrified, their bodies twisted and trembling. Sifting through all the debris in search of the Rock’s essence is an unreliable exercise at the best of times.

  But not so for the Rock’s first name, Ka’b said, its most important name, following which all the other names came, in the order of the prophets and the strange and wondrous things that happened to them on or near the Rock.

  Father, I asked Shaikh Abdallah at school today where God was during creation.”

  “And what did he say?”

 
“He said that God was in a watery mist without shape or form. There was no Heaven, no Earth, no height, no depth, no name. Just a milky-white mist the pallor of a dead man’s face. He created the sky and the waters out of that mist. He sat his throne upon the water. Still, there were no separate things with or around Him. Then, the Shaikh said, God dried up the original water upon which His throne sat, thus forming the Earth. Mountains were pushed into place by the froth left on the surface of the water as it was drying up.”

  “Something troubles you about what the Shaikh said?”

  “The fact that water comes first, before mountains and rocks. He didn’t mention rocks.” I needed to know how Ka’b accounted for the holiness of the Rock, if Shaikh Abdallah was right.

  Instead of answering the question, Ka’b began solemnly to recite words handed down by Solomon:

  The Lord made me the beginning of his work,

  the first of his acts of old.

  Ages ago I was formed, before the establishment of the Earth.

  When He made the Heavens, I was already there,

  when He drew a circle on the face of the deep.

  “Father, who is speaking?” I said, interrupting him before it was too late.

  “Wisdom.”

  “Are you saying wisdom came first in the order of creation, before water?”

  “Yes,” he replied, “according to the great Solomon himself.”

  “But the Holy Book opens with: In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth. Wisdom is not even mentioned.”

  “The beginning is not necessarily the very beginning. In the very beginning, God did not create things like the Heavens or the Earth, and certainly not men or demons. He created wisdom, by which He founded the Earth.”

  “What is this wisdom?”

  “It is the great underlying plan according to which the Heavens and the Earth and all that lies in between are laid out.”

  “What does that have to do with the Rock?”

  “Everything.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Does not the idea of a circle precede its drawing?”

  “It does.”

  “And to execute that idea on the face of the deep, does one not need a point upon which to stand?”

  “You mean like the stone tied to the end of Shaikh Abdallah’s piece of string when he is drawing a circle for us in class?”

  “Exactly. The Rock was that fixed point in relation to which the Lord laid out the rest of creation. Just as Shaikh Abdallah’s circle would not have appeared without the fixed end of his compass, so wisdom would not have become manifested in the world without the Rock.”

  “But I see his circle. I cannot see wisdom.”

  “Can you see good or evil? The Rock is to wisdom what the body is to knowledge of good and evil.”

  “What did God make the Rock from?”

  “He plucked a jewel from underneath his throne and plunged it into the abyss. One end of it remained fastened there, while the other stood out above. Upon this end He stood while He went about the rest of creation, spreading the earth to the right and to the left and into all directions until it became as you see it today.”

  “I don’t see a jewel,” I said, pointing in the direction of the esplanade. “What happened to the jewel?”

  “It was tarnished by our sins until it metamorphosed into the thing you see before you. The People of the Torah call it the Rock of Foundation, because this was where God began his work on the first day of creation. We call it simply the Rock. But the two are one and the same.”

  “Jerusalem is littered with rocks. How can you tell which one of them is the Rock?”

  “Just as the navel is the center of the human body, so the land of Palestine is the center of the world. Jerusalem is the center of Palestine. The Mountain is the center of Jerusalem. Upon its summit, Solomon built the Temple. The innermost precinct of that Temple, the Holy of Holies, is the center of the Temple, and at the center of the Holy of Holies is the Rock of Foundation.”

  (photo credit 1.5)

  Locusts and Christians

  Until he reached puberty, my father once told me, he thought Jerusalem was a place in Heaven, not on Earth. “Rabbi Salih taught me otherwise.”

  Rabbi Salih taught my father that Mount Zion was a real place that had not been destroyed by the Romans. He taught him that the Rock of Foundation was the last remaining vestige of Solomon’s Temple, that it was the highest point of the mountain, and that it used to project three fingerbreadths above the floor of the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple. He taught him that the Ark was situated at the center of the Rock, facing east toward the Mount of Olives.

  These teachings instilled in my father the desire to see that which Rabbi Salih had described.

  Every young Yemeni Jew with aspirations to scholarship yearned to go to the Holy City and see the capstone of creation. But the city was in Christian hands. And Ka’b had to feed and clothe his newly acquired wife, who was but twelve years old and had been betrothed to him since childhood. Under such circumstances, yearnings were not enough.

  It was fear that eventually drove my father out of the Yemen.

  Attacking in swarms like flies on the Day of Resurrection, locusts ate up the fruits and vegetables, and then made their way into unshuttered houses and shops. They left carcasses of men lying scattered in the streets like dung on an open field. My mother, nevertheless, thought of them as a source of food, even a delicacy. She could count eight kinds of kosher locust, and whenever she was in one of her nostalgic moods, I am told, she would say, “A locust in my mouth is better than a fattened lamb. And it is kosher!”

  She ate her fear, but my father never could because he said locusts caused epilepsy. As soon as anyone but mentioned “locust,” he would begin a painstaking description of what the body of a man consumed by famine looked like, his skin shrivelled upon the bones, or swollen and transparent like glass. His words left the impression that he had run away from the Yemen, not because there was nothing to eat, but because of his horror of locusts.

  Ka’b was by then already an old man, and the star of the Yemen had long since been on the wane. The land was tired, its spirit broken; agriculture was in ruins, the population beset by famine. Christian ships sailed the Red Sea. Why had my father waited for the knife to cut through to the bone before tearing up his roots and dragging my unwilling mother along, going to Medina?

  First, there were the locusts. And then there was the fear that, once he left and was far away from the land he knew well, he might become so filled with anxiety about what lay ahead as to want to go back. Travelling was a test that he imposed upon himself—an ordeal not all that different from the one pilgrims undergo as they travel further and further away from all they know in order to get closer to God.

  By contrast with the Yemen, Arabia’s star was on the rise. Mecca had become the religious center of the Hijaz, and people increasingly travelled there for trade. And there was news of a desert prophet who lingered in the surrounding mountains, who heard voices coming forth from the rocks. His name was Muhammad.

  Ka’b began taking an active interest in the Prophet, God’s Blessings Be Upon Him, after he heard that he had sent an envoy to the people of the nearby town of Najran, inviting them to accept Islam and guaranteeing their safety if they did so.

  The pork-eating people of Najran had heard this before when, thirty years prior to the birth of Muhammad, Dhu Nuwas, the last Jewish king to rule the Yemen, sought to convert them. Ka’b’s father and uncles had believed that Dhu Nuwas was the Messiah, and had fought by his side like wild lions. But the Christians of Najran would have nothing to do with Dhu Nuwas. They said that it was Jesus who raised the dead. It was Jesus who healed the sick. It was Jesus who declared the unseen. It was Jesus who was the Son of God. Therefore it had to be Jesus who was the Messiah. This reply angered the Jewish king. He put a choice before the people of Najran: convert or die. The town chose death.

  After
the fighting, Dhu Nuwas had his men dig pits and threw all the survivors into them; some he slew with the sword before tossing their bodies into the fire; others he burnt alive in pits, as the Holy Book bears witness.

  Slain were the Men of the Pit,

  the fire abounding in fuel,

  when they were seated over it

  and were themselves witnesses of what they did with the believers.

  They took revenge on them only because they believed in God

  the All-mighty, the All-laudable,

  to whom belongs the Kingdom of the Heavens and the Earth.

  God is Witness over everything.

  They say the king killed twenty thousand Christians that day. Two of Ka’b’s uncles died in the fighting. But later the Byzantines got their revenge. Dhu Nuwas was last seen fleeing an army of Christians come from Abyssinia. As the enemy approached, he drove his horse into the sea, spurring it on through the shallow waters into the deep, where horse and rider vanished.

  But after Muhammad’s envoy had spoken, the town, convinced that great benefits would accrue to it, accepted Muhammad’s offer, whereupon they were taught how and in which direction to pray to the Lord of Creation.

  What drove Ka’b to visit Najran? After all, he hated the People of the Cross even more than he feared locusts. “If you fatten your dog, will he not eat you?” he would say about their converts. Was it curiosity about the Prophet, whose followers used to pray in the direction of Solomon’s Temple and fast on the Jewish Day of Atonement? Perhaps Ka’b’s visit was an act of defiance, or a family pilgrimage—his way of paying respect to the memory of his dead uncles.