by Kanan Makiya
Like so many turning points in Ka’b’s life, his presence in Umar’s circle was confirmed with a story.
“What do we owe to Adam?” Umar asked Ka’b shortly after my father had changed his name.
“Our salvation,” Ka’b answered in the blink of an eye. “If we have been afforded even a glimpse into the secrets of Heaven, in spite of the silt of time that has covered us in doubt, it is because we are descended from Adam’s body. All the people who have ever lived, including all those still alive today, and those yet to be born tomorrow, owe, not only their existence, but their reason for existence, their validation as created beings, to him who was created first.”
“But Adam was stripped of his Garment of Light and saw his nakedness.”
“His imperfections have also chased us over the ages like a demon. If we are forever striving to defeat Adam’s demons, it is in order to restore us to the state of perfection that was initially breathed into him.”
“And the rest of the prophets? Were they also being chased by Adam’s demons?”
“Certainly. And none more so than David, conqueror of the City of the Temple.”
“What did the great warrior-Prophet do?”
“He upset the peace by attempting to dislodge the keystone of creation.”
“Tell us the story, O Ka’b,” said Umar, not knowing that the story he was about to hear was destined to become the kindling of his zeal for another Holy City.
(photo credit 3.2)
The Fundaments of the Universe
Wisdom and pain, the fundaments of the universe, Ka’b told Umar, are memories of Heaven and Hell. “Think,” he said, “of two symmetrical cones balanced apex to apex. God’s design is such that the ever-expanding cone of wisdom meets the bottomless abyss of pain at a singular point, the fulcrum of the cosmos. The Rock keeps the peace by holding the burden of memory in balance. Which is why David positively ached to build a Palace of Peace upon it.”
“A peace that was disturbed.”
“Yes, many times, beginning with Solomon’s father.”
“What did David do?”
“He tried to move the Rock.”
“Move the Rock! How could anyone dream of such a thing?”
“It had become covered in refuse and dirt. The king was hopelessly entangled in the family troubles that plagued his last years. He spent all his time in prayer and neglected the affairs of state. The people of Israel began to complain that he was not doing anything for them. David was obliged to come out of seclusion. How could he do so and repent for his sins at the same time? Suddenly, he remembered the Rock he had purchased from Araunah the Jebusite as a young man, and he went in search of it.”
“What did he want to do with it?”
“Turn it into the cornerstone of God’s House. But Mount Zion had been soiled by the idolatry of the Jebusites and, it must be said, by David’s own sins. Accompanied by Ahithophel, a prophet blessed with unnatural wisdom, David set out to seek repentance by clearing the summit of all that had sullied its sanctity over the ages.”
“The king removed the refuse with his own hands?”
“He dug up the top layers of dirt that had accumulated around Moriah’s summit. Then he threw the soiled earth over the side of the mountain. David kept on digging away at the dirt until he hit the Rock. A piece broke off, and, not knowing what it was, he started to throw it away.
But the Rock said, “You cannot lift me.”
“Why not?” David asked.
“Because I am here to hold back the Waters of the Deep.”
“Since when?”
“Since the hour in which the voice of God was heard to utter the words, ‘I am the Lord thy God.’ As the earth trembled, split asunder, and began to sink into the abyss, I was put here to hold it back!”
David persisted in his efforts to remove the piece of Rock. When it finally broke off, the Waters of the Deep, the enemies of order, began to rise, threatening a deluge far worse than that which had engulfed the Earth in the time of Noah, a deluge so powerful as to completely undo the work of creation and sink the world into primordial chaos.
Terrified by what he saw, David cried out: “Whosoever knows how to stem the tide of waters and does not do so will one day throttle himself!”
Ahithophel acted swiftly. He inscribed the divine name upon the piece of the Rock that David had dislodged, and pushed it back into place, chanting:
This is the spell and the seal
By which the Earth is bound
By which the Heavens are bound
The Earth flees from it
All tremble before it
It opens the mouth of the sea
And closes the waters
It opens the firmament
It waters the world
It uproots the earth
And confounds the Universe.
The raging seas were stilled, the waters subsided, their rebellion suppressed through the agency of the terrible, glorious, ineffable Name. The Rock had been saved, and was thenceforth called the House of the Lord God.
But the waters had sunk so low that David feared that the earth was about to lose all her moisture. So he began singing and strumming his harp, a magical instrument whose strings were made from the guts of the ram sacrificed by Abraham years before. And the Waters of the Deep rose again to their rightful place.
The Conquest Foretold
One day Abu Bakr went into a beautiful garden and saw a ringdove in the shady leafage of a tree. “You must be as happy as Adam in such a garden!” he sighed, “to find your shelter inside the green leaves of such a bountiful tree, and your food close at hand, and never to be called to account. Ah! Would to God that I had lived such a life!” Then he came down with a fever and died, but not before writing a testament appointing Umar, the son of Khattab, Caliph after him.
On the morning after Abu Bakr’s burial, Umar mounted the Prophet’s pulpit, around which the Believers had assembled. The pulpit had three steps. The Apostle of God always stood on the top one, but when Abu Bakr was Caliph, he had taken to addressing the congregation from the second step. Everyone waited to see what Umar would do.
Umar stood on the first step, gave praise and thanks to God, and swore to do justice. His first act after he stepped down was to write a letter appointing a new chief commander of the host in Syria. His second act was to appoint Ka’b his counselor and to call upon him to explain the extraordinary visitation which had come upon Ka’b in his sleep.
The outline of my father’s vision or dream, I know not what to call it, was recorded immediately upon waking, while still fresh in his mind. I treasure his record of it, written in his own hand on a small brown papyrus sheet whose edges had gone ragged.
It is devoid of ornament if you discount the long upstrokes lilting to the right, even though he wrote from right to left, and you can see how meticulously Ka’b has scripted the letters ain, ghain, fa’ and qaf. Why, the ink has not run into a single eye. That takes painstakingly careful execution of each letter’s head, no mean achievement for a man who wrote so little, preferring to commit things to memory.
What is on this sheet of papyrus, I hasten to add, is not everything my father saw that night, for a vision is a sudden wider view of past and present realities, a form of illumination issued by God in the shape of images, not words. Impetuously, it drives the soul upon which it has been visited to fuse with the larger sweep of His intentions, moving toward a grander goal than the mere contingencies of an individual life. The words I have before me are Ka’b’s poor substitute for all that, hastily scribbled down after the searing clarity of what he saw in the darkness had already begun to recede with the light of dawn:
On that day when the Redeemer will come
To the downtrodden,
Signs will be seen in the world:
Earth and heaven will wither,
The sun and the moon will be struck,
The dwellers in the Holy City will fall silent.
T
he kings of Byzantium and Persia
Will be ground against one another,
Until only the armies of Byzantium hold firm.
Then will a rising star go forth from Arabia
Whose followers will seize the Holy City,
And the dwellers of the world will be judged.
The heavens will rain dust on the earth.
Terrible winds will spread throughout the Land.
Gog and Magog will incite one another,
Kindling fear in the hearts of the Christians.
Christians and Arabs will fight in the valley of the Jordan;
They will fight until their horses sink in blood and panic.
Some people will make peace
While others will be terror-stricken.
Some people will be shown mercy
While others will have their daughters stoned,
Until the Kings of Christendom will be no more.
Then shall the sons of Sara and Hagar be freed of all sins.
No more shall they be kept from David’s Sanctuary.
Blessings will shower on Abraham’s children,
Whose deeds will live forever, engraved in the Book of Life.
After his conversation with Umar, Ka’b was invited to tell Believers what he had seen that night. Word of it spread through the city like a spring wind.
I would give ten years of my life to have witnessed my father’s performance that day. But I was still a growing seed in my mother’s belly. Ka’b, I am told, was dressed in a long black cloak that sat well on him in spite of its rough homespun cloth. In his right hand he carried a staff upon which he appeared to lean and sway from time to time. Inside a square enclosure, whose sun-dried brick walls had been assembled by the Prophet himself, God’s Blessings Be Upon Him, my father stood beside a column cut from the trunk of a palm tree, under the shade of a roof made from palm fronds. He stood not twenty paces from where God’s Messenger lay buried, his grave covered with freshly cut fronds. In that blessed house, the first mosque of Muhammad’s People, forty or so of the Prophet’s closest Companions were present, along with many of the young men who were shortly to bridle their horses and set off on the road to glory.
The Arabs did not know it at the time, but they were standing on the threshold of great conquests. Place and timing were crucial to understanding the extraordinary reception my father received that day. Heraclius, the Byzantine emperor, had just evicted his Persian rival, Khusraw, from Jerusalem and restored the cross of Jesus stolen by the Persians. That part of what my father had to say was already known to his audience. But Ka’b was saying much more: with cool, refreshed eyes that could see that for which they longed, he was telling the followers of Muhammad that the City of the Temple, held hostage by Byzantium, was a pomegranate ripe for the picking, and that they were going to be thanked for taking it by the People of the Torah.
Overnight his words reached Muhammad’s followers all over the Hijaz. It helped that he was among the finest speakers of Arabic of his generation. Young men lined up in droves just to talk with the new seer of Arabia. Established traditionists like Abu Hurayra, whose knowledge of the Torah was not in doubt, came all the way from Mecca just to meet with my father.
Dreams are the measure of a man’s age. Like the wind, they are in the air that everyone breathes. Just as men don’t know anything is in the air until it brushes past their face, so they don’t know what is in their dreams until it is pointed out to them.
Ka’b’s words meant something to everyone. But they meant one thing to Believers who were there when he spoke them, and they meant something else entirely to those who heard them exaggerated a hundredfold off the lips of other men. Then they meant yet a different thing to those who heard them after the Holy City had fallen to the armies of Khattab’s son, he whom men, following in Ka’b’s lead, now took to calling “the Redeemer.”
The greatest excitement was caused by Ka’b’s prediction that the first holy axis of Islam, the city that David had brought to True Belief, was going to fall into the hands of the sons of Ishmael. Fighting bands of stalwarts raised in the desert had been probing the Byzantine defenses for years. Raiding parties had sacked many a village and town. But Ka’b was predicting the fall of Syria and the defeat of the most powerful empire the world had ever known. He was saying these things at a time when not a soul in the length and breadth of Arabia had yet dared to dream them.
Much later, after the death of Umar, my father’s enemies accused him of being just another oracle-mongerer who happened to strike it lucky. All of his prophesying was a ruse, they said; Ka’b was pretending to be a Believer in order to get into Umar’s good graces and accompany the Caliph to Jerusalem. What evidence was there that he was no longer a Jew? If the tribe that provided him protection was Muslim, not Jewish, that only showed how duplicitous the man was. Ka’b knew, they claimed, that the Prophet had expelled two Jewish clans from Medina, and that he had ordered the heads of hundreds of men from the tribe of Qurayza cut off because of their treachery during the Battle of the Trench. How could a Jew come to Medina after such an event without an Arab cover? Especially one who by his own admission was intent on using Arabs to liberate the City of the Temple to absolve Jews of their own sins!
Ka’b’s detractors made no headway in the early years because of the circles into which my father had been drawn. Respect and affection had developed between him and Umar the son of Khattab. But there was another, more important, reason why mud would not stick to Ka’b in the early days. He was performing a service by showing how the Prophet was completing the work of the entire line of prophets who had come before him, beginning with Adam. The story of the salvation of the world had reached its terminus in Muhammad’s revelation. Ka’b was providing Believers with the tools they needed for understanding themselves as inheritors of the mantle of past revelations. Umar, who dared to follow in the path opened by Muhammad, understood that this was what Ka’b was saying.
In those days, there was no agreement about the content of the Holy Book. The first Muslim sages were accustomed to granting authority to the Torah and the Christian Bible as long as those texts did not contradict what, in their opinion, was the revelation made to Muhammad. Many of Muhammad’s closest Companions—great Muslims like Ali the son of Abu Talib, Salman the Persian, the son of Abbas, and Abu Hurayra—ardently sought stories from Jews and Christians that amplified or explained God’s words to Muhammad. Zayd the son of Thabit was instructed to learn Hebrew in order to read scrolls about Abraham to Muhammad. Later, the Prophet himself, often in the company of Abu Bakr and Umar, made visits to the Hebrew Temple in Medina to talk about what he had heard Zayd read with its learned rabbis and caretakers.
My father dropped into all of this as though out of the sky. He spoke eloquently of the connections between Muhammad and David, of how the Arabs were going to bring peace and prosperity to an Arabia torn to shreds by its feuds, of how they were destined to bring the City of the Temple into the fold of True Belief. Always he had answers, even to questions that had not yet been asked. And in no time at all had employed his prodigious powers to memorizing all the revelations that had descended upon the Prophet in the loneliness of Mecca’s mountains, after which he took to clinching every argument with the words of God:
Say to the Bedouins who were left
behind: ‘You shall be called against
a people possessed of great might
to fight them, until they surrender.
If you obey, God will give you a
goodly wage; but if you turn your
backs, as you turned your backs
before, He will chastise you with a
painful chastisement.
In spite of the support of the Prophet’s Companions, Ka’b’s detractors found fresh arrows for their bows in the bitterness of my mother, who never took her husband’s conversion seriously.
“You are an old man!” she would shout in the street so that everyone could hear. “Whoever h
eard of a man in his sixties changing his religion! Leave that for the boys, and stick to the ways of your ancestors.”
I was born in a maelstrom of anger and resentment. To my mother’s irritation, Umar was invited to our house on the day of my birth. “Surround your newborn with the blessings and protection of the prophets,” the future Caliph advised, “for on Doomsday he will be called by his name and the name of his father.” Then he rubbed the roof of my mouth with some dates that he had chewed, invoking God’s blessing, and asked that I be named Ishaq in recognition of my father’s abandonment of the name Jacob. Naturally, Ka’b agreed, whereupon Umar bent down and pronounced the call to prayer in my right ear. From that time onward this was the custom in the naming of Muslim newborns.
The final straw for my mother was Ka’b’s resolve to remarry. I must have been about four years old at the time, because my only memory of my mother dates to the terrible fight that ensued between them.
“Did not all the great patriarchs and prophets have two, three, even four wives?” thundered Ka’b.
But my mother could only see a man who was daily becoming someone else before her eyes. Until now, his Jewish self had remained dimly discernible through the fog of new prophets, customs, forms of speech and dress, even a new name. Had Ka’b been younger, or in need of softer, whiter flesh between his sheets, it might have been a different story. She had been taught that God in His wisdom had put it in the constitution of men to love dalliance and the society of women. And she knew that the taking of several wives was common, as common among the Jews as it was among the Bedouins. Nor did it necessarily imply a diminution of the first wife’s status and power over her husband—especially if the second wife was still young and malleable.
But the anxiety that choked at my mother’s throat lay in her realization that Ka’b was too old for those to be his reasons for wanting a second wife. After all, the woman he had chosen was only ten years younger than herself. She was already spiced with her own flavor of maturity. My mother could see that her husband’s desire to remarry was of a piece with his new role as seer of the Arabs, and with his dream of travelling to the land of milk and honey.