by Kanan Makiya
I don’t know what happened in Najran on the day of his visit. But afterward, he began to believe that the distance between Judaism and Islam was not very great.
My father despised the state of weakness that the Jews had fallen into after the vanishing of Dhu Nuwas. “Like goats they take to the rocks for fear of the wolves,” he would say of his own kin. He spoke wistfully of the succession of hopeless rebellions against Byzantine overlords, always followed by unrelenting repression. It was a time when false Messiahs declared themselves all over southern Arabia, and Ka’b’s tale of the madman who proclaimed himself a second Moses left a deep impression on me as a boy.
The tale was brief. The would-be savior promised his disciples a miraculous journey to the Promised Land. He told them that redemption was imminent, and then he walked them over a cliff to a horrible death on the rocks below.
“At least he ventured forth,” Ka’b said.
But my father ached to leave a land whose self-esteem had sunk so low, and nothing angered him as much as hearing a fellow Jew justify his downtrodden position by reference to the curse of Ezra. Travelling all the way from Palestine to the Yemen, Ezra the Scribe had come to plead with his brethren to return to Jerusalem and help in the rebuilding of the Temple.
“Why should we suffer afflictions once again?” Ka’b’s ancestors had said in response. “It is better for us to stay where we are and worship God.” An angry exchange had taken place, after which Ezra had put a curse on all Jewish heads in the Yemen, forever depriving them of peace.
Ka’b yearned for a savior in the warrior tradition of his uncles, someone like Jabbar, the noble Jewish opponent of the Arab hero Antar. Jabbar is said to have foretold that a Savior would appear to the Jews of Arabia from across a river of sand. He would come riding a white ass followed by a sea of warriors seated on camels and lions. Every fortress besieged by them would collapse; every army would be annihilated. He would make all other religions disappear and renew the Law that God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. Thus would the glory of the Sons of Israel become more dazzling than ever before.
Hope is a medicine that needs continual administration. God, in His infinite wisdom, presses down on us when we breathe. Then He expands and fills our chests by releasing us from pressure. His mystery is present in both motions.
“A prophet has appeared among the Arabs,” Ka’b said, testing the waters with an old friend. “They say that he is proclaiming the coming of the anointed one. What say you, dear Abraham?”
“That he is an impostor,” Abraham replied, groaning at the prospect of the conversation he knew was about to transpire. “Do the prophets come with sword and chariot? There is no truth to be found in this so-called prophet, only bloodshed. It is written of his ancestor, Ishmael, that his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him. Mark my words, Ka’b: Should those sons of locusts become a swarm covering the surface of the earth, their only purpose will be plunder.”
“What if the Holy One is raising them up in order to save us from the Kingdom of the Cross? Have you thought of that, Abraham? God puts a prophet in their midst to bring them to greatness, following which a great terror will be unleashed between this prophet’s followers and the Christians.”
“How can we know that these happenings in Arabia are our salvation and not harbingers of even greater hardship?” replied Abraham. “You are talking about a people who give the large and oddly shaped rocks they see around them names! They are rock-worshippers, my friend!”
“Hardship,” said Ka’b, “is the nurse of salvation. Did not Isaiah hear in a vision, come to him while his loins were racked with pain, that the deliverance of Israel would come from a man mounted on a camel followed by a man mounted on an ass?”
“He did.”
“And was it not the habit of the prophet Elijah to appear in the guise of a desert Arab?”
“It was.”
“The rider on the camel is a prophet whose coming heralds that of the rider on the ass, the Messiah. Did not Isaiah hear our Lord Yahweh say,
Now I shall lay a stone in Zion,
a granite-stone, a precious corner-stone,
a firm foundation-stone:
No one who relies on this will stumble.
And I will make fair judgment the measure,
and uprightness the plumb-line.
“Enough, Ka’b! My patience is at an end. You will bring a terrible retribution on all our heads. Do not force me to repudiate you. I will hear no more of this talk.” And with that, Abraham turned his back on my father and stalked out of the room.
Medina
On a night that had dropped over the Yemen like a stone, my father, with my unhappy mother in tow, left for the city of Medina. They arrived shortly after the unification of Arabia, in what became known as the Year of the Delegations, a momentous year in the annals of Believers. As tribes from all over Arabia were streaming in to swear allegiance to Muhammad, an air of excitement and unfulfilled promise hung over the dusty streets. It had taken Ka’b a long time to overcome his fears and leave; time had crawled like a worm. In Medina, it began to fly like a flushed bird.
The beardless, fiery Syrians who live on my street and grew up under Caliphs from Abd al-Malik’s House think they know everything about those early years in Medina. They are like experts on the desert who have never seen a valley bare as an ass’s belly, much less lived in one. They cannot imagine that a man might bear witness to Muhammad’s prophecy and remain a Jew at the same time. But that was the practice in Medina when Ka’b, then known as Jacob, first arrived. He remained a Jew in that he prayed, observed the Sabbath, dressed, and in all other respects behaved and looked like a Jew. His friends thought him one. And even the rabbis I have consulted, however much they disapprove of calling Muhammad a prophet, say there is nothing un-Jewish about thinking it.
The Prophet himself looked for Jewish recruits after the Exodus. He needed them. Disappointment showed on his face when so few of them believed in the revelation that descended upon him. In the end, Muhammad understood their unbelief as God’s will:
When there has come to them a Messenger from God
confirming what was with them, a party of them
that was given the Book of God rejects it.
The Jews of Medina said Muhammad didn’t know enough to be a prophet. Since when has knowledge of scripture become a precondition for knowing God? Why, Ka’b may even have been attracted to the Arabs of the Hijaz because they knew nothing. These rough warriors of the desert were everything Ka’b’s downtrodden compatriots in the Yemen were not. Perhaps they leapt too fast to their swords. But the tumult and messiness of their lives was compensated by the openness of their hearts and the directness of their ways. The poetic impulse ran deep in their veins. And Ka’b, too, was a certain kind of poet, but his poetic streak, unlike that of the Arabs, derived from an anguish he was unwilling to talk about during his sojourn in Medina.
Ka’b made a living teaching stories about the Creation and the Prophets. My mother would complain there was no one to talk to her. “Death is better than this,” she would say to her husband, complaining also of the harshness of the sun and the smells in the streets.
“Seek the welfare of the city to which God has exiled you, and pray to Him on its behalf, for in its prosperity you shall prosper,” he would reply before going out to other people’s houses, where he would tell the same stories over and over again.
At the time of Ka’b’s arrival in Medina, Muhammad was too weak to climb the pulpit or even stand upright. Yet even in sickness, he was handsome. He had beautiful curly hair, neither short nor woolly; and his white face radiated sweetness and was as luminous as the moon. Ka’b was present at his last sermon, which Muhammad delivered seated; it was the closest he ever got to the person of the Prophet.
(photo credit 3.1)
Muhammad began with greetings to all the prophets who had gone before him. Then he said:
“There is after death
a Day of Doom and Reparation, and there will be no more favor shown of me on that Day than of any man. Therefore, if I have struck any man among you an unrequited blow, let him strike me now. If I have offended any man, let him do as much now to me. If I have taken any man’s goods, let him now receive them again. Make me clean of guilt, so that I may come before God guiltless to man.”
“No, God’s Apostle!” the crowd cried out, weeping and tearing their hair in grief, “your wrongs are wiped clean. We are the guilty ones before you!”
One man, Ka’b recalled, stood up and reminded Muhammad of a trifling sum he had given to some beggar at his bidding.
“Better to blush in this world than the Other!” the Prophet said, and paid him what he owed. Then he got up on his feet, shuffled to his favorite wife’s hut, and lay down on his pallet, where he died with the heat of noon on the following day.
Anxiety oppressed Ka’b in the weeks that followed Muhammad’s death. He had left everything behind and travelled far. Was it to no avail? Joy shriveled up in him like drought-stricken grass. He moved around, I am told, like a drunken man, overpowered by the desire to sleep, afflicted by a listlessness that the monks of the desert call “the noonday demon.”
All Medina had become afflicted with the same.
Certain clans of the city reacted to the Prophet’s death by pulling away from the faith, confusing it with its Messenger. To the collectors of the poor-tax, they said: “Pray we will, but pay this tax we will not.”
The congregation had sworn allegiance to Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s closest Companion, as Muhammad’s successor, he of the deep-set eyes and fleshless hands who dyed his hair with henna.
Abu Bakr would not court the renegades, and said: “God’s Apostle is dead, and Revelation comes down no more. But while I can grip a sword in my fist, I’ll fight them, as long as they deny me even so little as the price of a camel halter. He who makes a distinction between prayer and the poor-tax, him will I surely fight, for the poor-tax is a duty of faith.”
Ka’b blamed himself for coming, for subjecting my mother to the indignities of being uprooted from home and children. He had, after all, been trained to seek in every setback reasons for his own guilt.
“Better than holy war is war against self,” he said to her by way of expressing his remorse and how deeply he had been summoned into the consequences of his own confusion. The words were a saying of the Prophet, but he did not tell her that; it would not have helped. She searched his face eagerly to see if he were remorseful enough. Not that anything my father could have said would have softened my mother toward him. She would not forgive him for dragging her along on a journey that she never wanted to make.
My father came out of his inwardness after Abu Bakr prevailed against the renegades and returned the Holy Cities of Arabia to Muhammad’s religion. Medina had begun to recover from the news of the Prophet’s death. It was a miraculous recovery, a new beginning that showed how far Ka’b had already travelled from the ways of his ancestors. He started to read holy scripture as it had not been read before. Dimly recalled passages were culled from the less-penetrable recesses of his great storehouse of memories. Jumbled images were magically teased up to the surface; they were coming at Ka’b like waves, just as God wanted them to, fresh from the depths.
“What inspired you?” I asked my father in later years.
“The words of the Prophet: Believe in the Torah, in the Psalms and the Gospel, even though the Quran should suffice you.”
Inspiration descends upon a prophet from the angels, my father would tell an audience; it is communicated easily, as from one man to another. But to Muhammad inspiration had arrived ringing like a bell, penetrating his very heart and stilling every other sound. My father’s listeners would raptly nod their heads and rock their bodies slowly in assent. Then Ka’b would startle them by saying that the coming of Muhammad had been foretold.
“By whom?” his astounded audience would want to know.
“By the prophet Isaiah,” Ka’b would reply, citing this passage of the Torah:
Behold My servant whom I shall uphold;
My chosen one, whom My soul desired;
I have placed My spirit upon him
So he can bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not shout nor raise his voice,
Nor make his voice heard in the street.
He will not break even a bruised reed,
Nor extinguish even flickering flax;
But he will administer justice in truth.
He will not slacken nor tire until he sets justice in the land,
And islands will long for his teaching.
God’s messenger to the Arabs possessed these qualities prophesied by Isaiah, Ka’b would say. After all, did not everyone who had known Muhammad personally—which was, of course, the whole town—attest to his gentleness and self-control? Had he ever raised his voice or been rude or interrupted anyone in mid-speech? Yes, he was critical of his followers if necessary, but he was always careful not to push them too far, or to expose a man’s faults in public. When a Companion started to beat a man for letting a camel stray from the road during the pilgrimage, what did Muhammad do? Did he berate or stop him? No. He just smiled and said, “Look at what this pilgrim is doing.”
Only a prophet knows how to shame a man by appealing to the best, not the worst, in his nature.
Ka’b was everything the Arabs were not—a scholar; an expert in Scripture and Oral Law; a quiet, apparently moderate man in whom the spirit of blind obedience to authority had been carefully inculcated. By temperament and family history, however, Ka’b was drawn to fiercely opinionated men who unsheathed their swords first and asked questions later. Was it the memory of his uncles who had served a fighting king that made the Arabs attractive to him? Or was it Ka’b’s inspired vision of how things ought to be, nourished by the impulse of all great teachers to project their past upon the future?
My father’s knowledge and mesmeric delivery became the talk of Medina. His command of the Arabic language, the first speaker of which was King Ya’rub of the Yemen, was greatly admired. Young men desirous to learn thronged around him. Many became his disciples and students. Prominent among these was Abdallah, the fourteen-year-old son of the Prophet’s uncle, Abbas, destined to become the most distinguished scholar of his generation.
“Abdallah was forever writing notes while I was talking,” my father would say of the boy who rose to preeminence because of the blood ties that he had renounced. “He wanted to know if the angels who praise God by day and by night ever got bored.”
The son of Abbas would be the first to understand the importance of gathering accurate information about the Prophet. He began the task of questioning Muhammad’s closest Companions, a task made easier by the fact that he was the Prophet’s cousin. By the time I came of age in Jerusalem, Abdallah had grown into the most important teacher and interpreter of scripture among Muhammad’s People. His glittering career he owed entirely to Ka’b and those first years in Medina.
Soon, my father was moving in influential circles. Abdallah’s family connections helped. In the eyes of the Prophet’s closest Companions, he began to look less like a Jew and more like a Muslim. Or at least the men around him didn’t seem to care one way or the other, with one exception: Umar the son of Khattab, he whom the Prophet himself had once called the Separator of Right from Wrong.
Umar was a tall and impulsive man with fiery red hair. Out of zeal for Mecca’s stone idols, he had in his youth set out to kill the very Prophet whom he now revered. On his way to do the terrible deed, he heard his sister reciting to herself from the Holy Book. Awestruck by the beauty of the words, this hard and unbending man changed his religion on the spot. Umar became as zealous a Muslim as he had been an unbeliever. That same passionate intensity led him to criticize Muhammad on occasion. No one else among the Prophet’s Companions would do so, not in public at any rate. Umar’s uprightness and strictness in matters of faith were never
in doubt; they were of a piece with the angularity and hardness of his features, with the long, gaunt body that carried not an iota of extra flesh. This was a man who would not soften, not even when he was lying comfortably on the ground, one leg under the other, a habit he took up after the Prophet, who knew how to enjoy himself. No one could remember when they had last seen Umar smile. Levity and lightness, which were tolerated in the Prophet’s own presence, had to be suppressed whenever Umar was around. It was not as if he was unaware of the seductiveness of the pleasures of the world; if anything, he felt them more keenly than most.
This is the man who now insisted upon a public confession of faith by my father.
Yet not even Umar asked Ka’b to do so by repudiating Judaism. And my father did not. He continued to call the Torah “God’s Book.” And afterward, Khattab’s son honored my father with a new surname: Al-Ahbar, meaning the most learned of the learned. Thus was my father set apart from peddlers of dubious tales by one whose own daughter had been married to Muhammad, to enter Arab society under the sponsorship and protection of the Prophet’s most distinguished and loyal Companion.
It was then that my father changed his name from Jacob to Ka’b, his authority and learning having been publicly affirmed. Umar now took to saying that Ka’b had been reborn the first Jewish follower of the Messenger of God. I am not sure that he was the first. But if there were others, Believers have forgotten them. Certainly Ka’b was the oldest sage in Medina and first in his knowledge of the Holy Books.