by Kanan Makiya
The five-day journey up the Syrian coast exhausted Ka’b. The weather was unusually humid that summer. Upon arrival in Homs, he looked ashen and complained of dizziness and fatigue. I prepared a straw pallet at the inn and laid him down to rest. That is when I began to notice that his nose was more pointed than normal, and that the sockets of his eyes were slightly caved in. The tips of his ears were cold and flaccid to the touch. The most striking change was apparent in his complexion; it went dark and pallid. I thought little of these signs at the time. Now I realize that he was about to yield up the leasehold of his days.
I fretted, wiping his face and trying to arrange for help. Ka’b would have none of it. He wrapped his fingers feebly around my wrist to calm me down.
“When destiny digs in its claws, amulets of any kind are useless,” he said, grimacing with each breath. “To every man and purpose under Heaven there is a time—a time to be born, and a time to die. For some years now, I have seen Izrail lurking in the sagging of my flesh. Today, my stomach and entrails burn and throb; he has his hands clasped tight like a band around my heart. I can hardly breathe. My rope is about to be cut.”
“Father! What would you have me do?”
“Anoint my head with oil. Put kohl around my eyes.”
I made his sunken cheeks and bald dome shine, while the tip of his nose was turning a light shade of blue and his nostrils flared up with each breath.
“Prop me up,” he rasped. “I want people to say that Ka’b met his Maker the healthiest of men.” With the innkeeper’s help, I pulled him up, pressing cushions into the small of his back and all around his sides, until he sat upright.
No sooner had we finished than his breathing got louder and more erratic. A rattling noise was emanating from somewhere deep inside his throat. He tried to speak. His face was pointed toward me as he spoke his last words, but his eyes were looking through me as though into a void. How long we remained in that state, I no longer remember. All I remember is the unspeakable ugliness of this last stage of our lives, even in the absence of violence or disease.
Ka’b did not die well. Perhaps he had escaped life’s woes for too long, like a man marked not by fate but by God’s grace. It is harder to give ground after twice as many seasons as is afforded other men. Ka’b left unwillingly to his allotted place in the beyond, letting out a bellowing roar as his head jerked backwards into the pillows. He gasped as though he were choking and being strangled to death, and then he threw his hands up to clutch at his throat. The calm and repose with which he had prepared for this moment were gone. His eyes bulged out of his head and looked terrifying. Somehow the kohl had smudged and spread around the sockets in big smears. Panic-stricken, he tried to call out, but the only sound to emerge from his lips was a hoarse rattling. As death’s flood brimmed up in his heart, his last breath was a long, gurgling exhalation.
A good soul slips out of a body easily, like water jetting out of a water skin. Four angel helpers of Izrail, on the other hand, descend on bad and profligate spirits, pulling the soul out through the toes and fingers of all four limbs after tying up the dying man’s tongue. That kind of death is hard and painful; the soul squeals and squeaks out of the body like a skewer drawn through metal mesh. My father had his failings, but he was a good man. He should not have died like that.
I took his face in my hands, shut his eyelids, and kissed the different parts of his face again and again. I cleaned up the smudges of kohl, relined his eyebrows, and applied more oil to his forehead, cheeks and neck. Only then did I turn his face sideways to face the Holy City in which he had always wanted to be buried.
When the Angel of Death paid his visit in Homs, it seemed as if I were Ka’b’s only legacy on this earth. His death went unnoticed in the world that had so celebrated him two decades earlier in Medina. Storytellers like him shaped the first generation of Muhammad’s followers. They borrowed their authority from death, which was the sanction of everything they had to say. Ka’b’s own death, however, did not carry the sanction it deserved.
My father died on the edge of bad times. His withdrawal after the assassination of Umar coincided with a decline in the importance of Jerusalem in the affairs of the Community. Is this why the Companions of the Prophet, whom Ka’b had taught, did not come to pay homage? Is this why the Caliphs and their sons and advisors, who had so often sought his advice, also did not come? No one came to honor the man who had done so much for the religion of Muhammad. Mu’awiya ordered a small tomb to be built in Homs. But no one goes there, because the rewriters and inventors of traditions want Believers to forget my father. Whispering tongues took to attacking him after civil wars had taken their toll; they feared the Jew that he was more than the idolaters they used to be. Meanwhile, Ka’b lies in his grave, forgotten, a flagstone at the feet of Time.
The solitude of the grave is hard enough on those who mourn. But it passes. The silence of a whole generation does not; it lies like a blot on the future. It was not only Ka’b who was being forgotten; the story of our beginnings was being rewritten.
Truly the world is as soft to the touch as the adder is sudden in its venomousness.
After I turned Ka’b’s face toward the Holy City, it looked rested, as though finally he had found comfort and was without a worry in the world. The loneliness of his declining years, exacerbated by my youthful indiscretions, rubbed out the lines of his face. His choices and decisions now lay in the past; only their consequences remained, and these lay in other hands. At the time, I was aware only of how much this dead face meant to me. Lying there, stretched out on the ground, his hands folded on his chest, facing the sacred Rock that he had venerated more than any other man, he seemed to me an angel of the Lord.
Verily, to God do we belong, and to Him shall we return.
The Wait in the Grave
He is like a bridegroom sleeping off the ardors of his wedding night,” my stepmother said of Ka’b in his grave just before she herself expired of fever. She looked upon his death as though it were a painted sleep, the purest kind of release from the mire and dung of this world. Left without the man who, in exile, had brought the world to her feet, she spent the intervening years between his death and her own picking and choosing among his memories as though in a flower garden. She passed away imagining his coming resurrection on the Day as a joyous reunion of spirit and body, like that experienced awakening from a night under the dome of Heaven, gloriously bathed in the rising light of God’s candle.
“They are the most frail and vulnerable of God’s creatures,” she said of her husband’s critics and slanderers. “At the same time, they are the most arrogant. They see themselves as exiled to the lowest part of the universe, farthest from the vault of Heaven, but put them in a position of ascendency over defenseless men, and they will turn themselves around and forget everything, planting themselves above the circle of the moon and dragging the very sky down beneath their feet.”
What could I say to such sweetness? She had not been there in Homs. The awakening she wished for Ka’b is reserved for a mere handful of prophets and martyrs. For the rest of us, the grim shape of things to come is a noose in which we have already been ensnared, long before we reach the height of our powers. My father died before Muhammad’s People wore themselves out with strife, and before his son had come to terms with him. Perhaps that is why he died such a terrible death.
“Your father was a man of worth,” my stepmother said by way of showing her disapproval of my disrespect toward Ka’b in the declining years of his life. “And in a man of worth, the claims of fatherhood cannot be denied.”
The night after I washed my father’s body, wrapped him in his winding-sheet, and lowered him into his grave on the outskirts of Homs, his spirit paid mine a visit.
I was tossing and turning in bed. In the throes of a terrible dream, I saw myself getting out of bed and walking aimlessly, without realizing what I was doing. At some point I must have become aware that the light of the sun had disappeared. I was in
a deep, dark shadow. Looking up, I saw the gargantuan mass of the Rock hovering above my head, suspended between the earth and the sky. I woke up in a cold sweat, terrified.
Standing over me, watching, was the spirit of my father, which had dressed itself in the shape of his body but looked as thin and white as the muslin cloth in which I had wrapped him. How small and shrunken he looked, compared to the pulsing, lean strength of the man who had been the lodestone of my childhood! It is the spirit that breathes length and breadth into a man’s torso and limbs. Dead as he was, I nevertheless had the feeling that he had seen me preparing him for burial earlier in the day. Or was it his spirit that was doing the seeing? It takes time, men say, before the spirit can irrevocably break with the body that has housed it for so long; it clings like a faithful animal to the old flesh and bones, lingering and inhabiting the same grave when there is room, or sitting nearby stricken with grief if there is none.
Ka’b’s spirit said that it had heard my footsteps departing from his grave. It tried to stop me from leaving. Only I did not hear it calling; I heard the earth mocking Ka’b instead:
“You used to enjoy yourself on my surface. But from today you, who are all wound up in shrouds and packed in by earth poured all around, are going to grieve in my interior as you have never grieved before. You used to eat all kinds of delicacies and move freely on my surface. From today the worms will eat you while you are held tightly on all sides, unable to move a muscle.”
Two blue-eyed questioners of the dead arrived. One had a beautiful face, lovely clothing, and a sweet fragrance. He ordered my shriveled-up old father to sit up. Somehow he could. He then told him that his body would not stir from its prison in the earth, and be resurrected, until he accounted for his youth—how he had worn it away—then his life—how he passed it—and finally his wealth—how he had none. Ka’b crossed these hurdles easily. But then the other angel, who emitted a noxious odor and whose face was black, spoke. In a piercing tone that rang in my skull like a whistle in a hollow chamber, he asked: “Who is your Lord?”
“God.”
“What is your religion?”
“Islam.”
“Who is your prophet?”
“Muhammad.”
“What is the direction of your prayer?”
“Toward the Rock.”
“Which Rock?”
“Both Rocks.”
“And what if you are situated between the two holy Rocks?”
“Then it depends.”
“On what?”
“On circumstance.”
“What circumstance?”
“Whether I am with other people or by myself.”
“And if you are among company?”
“Then I pray toward the Black Stone.”
“And if you are alone?”
“Surely the direction in which one prays matters less than how one prays.”
“It matters. Answer the question!”
“If I am alone, I pray facing Jerusalem’s Rock.”
“You know what that means!”
“I am not sure.”
“It means you are a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a Jew and a hypocrite!”
Ka’b had lived his life teetering on a rope that stretched between two holy cities. Keeping the balance for which he had become famous depended on choosing to walk purposely toward one city or the other. That task had become more difficult once both holy cities were under one dominion. Now everywhere the followers of Muhammad were asking: If both Rocks are holy, surely one is holier than the other. One of them had to be preferred by God. Which one? And why? How were the two related in their holiness? Why does Ka’b not speak about these questions, he who claims to hear the silence of God by pressing his ear to the surface of the Rock?
In truth, Ka’b did not know what to say. The wildness in him had long since brimmed over. After becoming a follower of Muhammad, he had tried not to look as if he were choosing between the Rocks. As a result, he appeared foolish. “He is a man weighed down by the Torah,” Abu Dharr said mockingly, “the way an ass is weighed down by the books it is carrying on its back.”
Ka’b was saved from his ignorance by his belief that religion and worldly things were able to join hands. For most men, it was easier to carry two watermelons under one armpit than it was to maintain the thought of such a union. I, for one, failed the test; he never did. Back and forth, like a juggler on a plank, Ka’b was most adroit at balancing the two watermelons of worldliness and the life to come.
How did he do it? Perhaps, it began to dawn on me, the secret was in what Ka’b said when he talked about the span of a man’s life being but a speck in the larger scheme of things.
“Keep the Day, not your own death, daily before your eyes,” he would say, “the Day that follows the work of the maggots and the bleaching of your bones. Never doubt it is coming. If piety means anything, it means to believe that the Day of the Raising of the Dead is drawing near, and on that day every soul shall be afforded its due. And no amount of remorse will avail the unbelievers.
What, does man reckon
We shall not gather his bones?
Yes, indeed: We are able to shape again
even the little bones of his fingers.
Was he not a sperm-drop spilled?
Then a blood-clot,
created and formed.
What, is He who made this
not able to quicken the dead?
I used to scoff at Ka’b for living his life transfixed on Judgment Day, as I scoffed at him for his obsession with the Rock.
Today, however, I too keep an eye out for the Signs that will precede the coming of the Day. I reflect upon the moment of Resurrection, when all the men and women who have ever lived will rise bodily from the grave, complete in soul and thought. Then I measure my few atoms’ worth of good and evil against one another, as I will do for the final time on Judgment Day, and consider what I should do on the morrow.
Before the final Reckoning, however, lies the wait in the grave. In this first station of our afterlives, my father waits. What is it like for such a man to be tucked away under the earth, knowing that his eternal fate has been prefigured even as the worms are fastening on him?
Are there any among us who have not forgotten their prayers at least once, or who have not prayed without performing their ablutions? Is there anyone who can swear that he has never passed a child or a blind woman in need of help without stopping to do what he can? I can’t. Nor could my poor father, who has been waiting in that terrible place for forty years. The wait in the grave is for people like us. Upon the truest of Believers the surrounding earth presses more gently, “like the compassionate mother stroking the head of a son who is complaining of headache,” said the Prophet, trying to console his young wife Aisha, distraught after a Jewish woman had thanked her for some kindness by saying, “May the Lord give thee refuge from the torment of the tomb.”
The punishment of the grave is real. The external peace and quiet of the cemetery is deceiving. No contrast is more striking, no affliction more terrible, than what goes on inside each little house of worms. Martyrs and prophets excepted, each one of us, Believer and un-Believer alike, will undergo some torment, heavy or light, depending on the quality of his faith and works. If we escape the worst, because of how we have lived our lives, then the punishment that will go on eternally, and that comes after the Hour, is light. And yet none of us, between the moment of our deaths and His Judgment on the Hour, can escape the torments of the tomb.
“What are our years on the earth,” Ka’b used to say, “compared to being squeezed like an egg under a boulder for many times their number? And what is being squeezed like an egg under a boulder for a number of years compared to roasting in Hell for all eternity?” Someone should have asked that of Muslims after the murder of Umar. But when Ka’b died, the last person who worried about such questions also died.
Like Umar, Uthman and Ali, the third and fourth Rightly Guided Caliphs, were also
murdered. With them died the practice of nominating a council of wise men to decide matters of succession. A pattern was being undone. By putting family before Community, Umar’s successor, Uthman, undid all that his predecessors had achieved. His death was brought about when he would not deliver to justice his cousin and chief advisor, that son of a blue-eyed woman, Marwan, after he had conspired to have the governor of Egypt killed. Family and feeling were all that it was taking to kindle a sense of intolerable wrong; trivial matters were eliminating things of weight throughout the land.
But did Uthman’s wrong justify the terrible way in which he was killed and the uses men made of his death?
A party of those whom Marwan had plotted against laid siege to Uthman’s house in Medina, demanding that he give up the conspirator. Marwan was inside hiding with his son, Abd al-Malik, then a lad of ten. Father and son, destined to be the eighth and ninth Caliphs of Islam, witnessed the murder that was to bring grief and sedition in its train; it also brought their House of Umayya to the pinnacle of earthly power.
When Uthman refused to give up his cousin, three men climbed into the Caliph’s courtyard unseen by the guards on the roof. They found Uthman reading the Quran with his wife. Grabbing him by the beard, they cut his throat in front of her. Marwan and Abd al-Malik got away; their servant took Uthman’s shirt, gory as it was, and rode off with it to Damascus.
While the holy cities of Arabia were giving their oath of allegiance to Ali of the House of Hashim, Mu’awiya, still governor in Syria and a cousin of Uthman, was pinning up the bloodied shirt of his kinsman in the court of the mosque of Damascus. Barely had Uthman’s grave been filled when fresh ones were being dug all over the empire. A fever for revenge such as the Arabs had not known since the Age of Ignorance devoured the land.
A new age began with Mu’awiya’s cry of vengeance over Uthman’s shirt; it ended with the community tearing itself apart. Deeds that should have been hidden were not. Men were held in thrall to the idea that only through more killing, and more dying, would there be a recovery from it. Everyone wanted the Caliphate for himself. Ali of the House of Hashim, the Prophet’s cousin, was the most deserving. But even he could not lance the boil of desire mixed with loathing that now fixed men’s hearts on hateful things. His short reign was eaten up by the first great wars of sedition. Four years after succeeding Uthman, Ali’s forehead was hewn with a sword as he prayed.