by Kanan Makiya
War of the Holy Cities
The peace of the sword did not leave the sword in peace for long, as Yazid, Mu’awiya’s son, quickly found out. The nomination of an heir did not sit well with supporters of the House of Ali in Iraq; it smacked of kingship. Nor did it sit well in Mecca and Medina. No one outside Mu’awiya’s clan wanted the Caliphate to be a plaything of his progeny; by right, it belonged to the family of the Prophet. Many Meccans, become rich overnight because of Umar’s conquests, watched as their wealth slipped away along with their power into the hands of newly converted tribes, settlers, and even Christians from the rich northern provinces. “These upstarts do not grasp Muhammad’s message,” they said to themselves. Yazid derived support from them. Worse, he encouraged games of chance and riotous feasting, and was the first to employ eunuchs in the women’s quarters of his palace. All that people talked about in his court was women and food. “Look! How they veil their beards and sell their arrows for spindles,” men said of the Caliph and his court.
It came as no surprise, therefore, that as the Arabs of Damascus played musical instruments and drank openly in the streets, the holy cities of Arabia refused to give Yazid their allegiance.
Yazid’s murder of Husayn, the son of Ali, the Prophet’s favorite grandson, had been the final straw. Husayn had inherited the mantle of leadership from his brother Hasan, who had conceded it to Mu’awiya. “So long as Mu’awiya is alive,” Husayn had said at the time of his brother’s poisoning, “let every man stay in his own house and draw his cloak over his head.” But Yazid did not carry his father’s weight. And Husayn would not keep his head cloaked for a drunkard with an appetite for revelry shared by all those he set in power.
The son of Ali came to Kufa in Iraq, where the people were swearing allegiance to him and cursing the House of Umayya. But Yazid’s army intercepted his small party of followers and friends, and denied them water on the parched fringes of the Iraqi desert. With his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, Husayn drank the bitter draught of death instead of the sweet water of the Euphrates. Two sons, four brothers, five nephews, and five cousins died with him on the plain of Kerbala. Only after they had fallen did Husayn take to horse against his foes. He smote until he fell, having been struck seventy-two times. Only two of his sons were left alive—a babe in arms, and a lad sick in bed.
“Short work!” Yazid’s men told their commander. “Time enough to butcher and dress a camel, or to take a little sleep.” When the severed head, still in the flower of youth, was put into Yazid’s hands, he turned it round and round. With an air of indomitable insolence, he struck it on the mouth.
“Enough!” cried out a man in his court, unable to control himself at the horror of the deed. “I have seen God’s Apostle kiss those lips.”
The manner of Husayn’s death sparked the bloodiest unrest yet among the Arabs. The bitterness spilled into a war lasting eleven years. We escaped unscathed in Jerusalem. Still, it felt like the end of the world. The sunlight glared saffron yellow on the walls of the city the day a messenger arrived with the why and wherefore of the massacre of the scions of the House of Hashim on the banks of the Euphrates outside Kerbala. Men went out into the streets, lashing out with their swords like frenzied camels in heat making directionless tracks in the sand. Not a stone was turned in the Holy City on the day that Husayn rose to his Maker but that fresh blood was found underneath. The very earth trembled at the slaying.
Truly, we are an aggregate of elements that emanate from the deep well of our beginnings. Yazid, that accursed son of an accursed father, whose father God’s Prophet himself did curse, had spilled innocent blood as if it were water. Mu’awiya had spilled it for a reason; his son didn’t need reasons, thinking himself freed by power to shape the lives of Muhammad’s followers in ignorance of who he was and where he came from. In that act of forgetting, the license to wild impulses and the illusion of freedom was born, dragging vanity and vaulting ambition in their train.
On their hearts is the stain of the ill which they do.
Exploiting men’s horror of Yazid’s deed, Abdallah, the son of Zubayr, proclaimed himself Caliph in Mecca. His father had been the fifth Believer in Muhammad. Abdallah himself was thought blessed for being the first child born into Muhammad’s religion after the Exodus. His mother was the daughter of Abu Bakr, and sister to the Prophet’s favorite wife. No man in Medina was better tied to the House of Hashim on all sides. His father, Zubayr, had become a very wealthy man, accumulating valuables worth fifty thousand gold pieces, along with vast numbers of horses, slaves of both sexes, and estates. With this wealth, Zubayr’s sons built themselves town mansions in Medina made of plaster-work, brick, and teakwood imported from India. But the flow of revenues from the conquered provinces that had made all this possible had recently dried up. The new seat of the Caliphate in Damascus was drawing everything to itself. If Husayn’s death was not the only reason for war between the holy cities of Syria and Arabia, it was, nevertheless, the excuse used by men intent on fighting to the finish.
Abdallah denounced the practice of ruling from Syria instigated by Mu’awiya. Muhammad’s People, he said, must be ruled from the cradle of prophecy, the land of the Hijaz. The Prophet was a son of Mecca, not Jerusalem. And Yazid was descended from the House that had led the struggle against him in the Age of Ignorance. Abdallah chose Mecca, not Medina, as his seat of government, because it housed God’s most ancient Temple built around the Black Stone.
Thus did a rift between the Believers turn into a festering wound. While Abdallah consolidated his hold over Mecca and the Hijaz, garnering support from his guardianship of the Holy Places and playing Yazid’s tyranny to his advantage, dissension and strife escalated. Had not the governor of Basra executed eight thousand in promulgation of Yazid’s new rules of punishment? men asked as they, in turn, entrusted the reins of their restlessness to passion and desire. Revulsion at the House of Umayya grew to the point that Yazid had difficulty raising an army willing to attack his foe in Mecca. When he finally did, it was swallowed up in the desert and disappeared from the face of the earth. Yazid then took to paying poets and scribblers to hurl taunts rather than spears on his behalf:
“If Abdallah were a Caliph, as he says, he would show himself. He would fight like a man. Instead he plants his tail in the shadow of the Black Stone like a female locust laying its eggs.”
Yazid died waiting for Abdallah to budge from his desert fortress. He had ruled for three years and left no successor. The father of Abd al-Malik, Marwan, of the same House, wrested the Caliphate from rivals but ruled in name for less than one year; he died as ingloriously as he had lived after enraging one of his wives for refusing to name her son his successor. She was a corpulent lady, who, shortly after copulation, took her revenge by spreading the cheeks of her buttocks and squatting on her husband’s face until he suffocated. Or so at least men say.
Verily, only to the Omniscient One belongs knowledge of such abominations.
While such goings-on ruled the men and women of Damascus, Abdallah rested secure in Mecca. He was as hard as he was inflexible. He had his own brother executed and stuck on a gibbet outside Mecca for having disagreed with him. In this obdurate nature were sown the seeds of his demise.
Abdallah found his match in Marwan’s son, Abd al-Malik, he who had witnessed the murder of Uthman as a boy of ten. Abd al-Malik had been driven out of Medina a second time by Abdallah at the start of his revolt, becoming governor of Jerusalem at the time of his father’s death. He had been groomed for leadership by Mu’awiya, who recognized the young man’s prodigious talent from when he tended to his father’s affairs. “This man will one day rule the Arabs,” Mu’awiya said, by which he meant unite them. Abd al-Malik happened to be seated with the Holy Book in his lap when he heard of his father’s ignominious demise and was pressed, for his House’s sake, into accepting the mantle of leadership. He closed the Book and said, “This is our last time together.” He was thirty-nine.
In t
he son of Marwan, the Arabs found an embodiment of the saying, “He who takes revenge after forty years is in a hurry.” Abd al-Malik was as flexible and patient as Zubayr’s son was intractable and stubborn. He understood that the success of Muhammad—the fact that his followers now ruled half the world—meant that they could no longer be ruled from Arabia. Believers had to be at the center of things; the locus of authority had to change. But it would take time for Mecca to give way to Jerusalem. And so Abd al-Malik first secured Egypt and its revenues. Then he amassed his forces to attack Abdallah’s allies in nearby Iraq, leaving his nemesis to grit his teeth in the desert.
The only man in Syria who had no qualms about laying siege to the Holy City was Hajjaj. Lean as a gray wolf who breakfasts poorly, he was put in command of an army of Syrians and dispatched to Mecca. Hajjaj did what no man had done before; he set up giant catapults on the slopes of Mount Qubays and shot stones and flaming torches into the sacred sanctuary where Abdallah and his men had taken refuge.
The Meccans had never thought to build a wall around their city. The depth of the desert was more secure than the highest wall. When the city became overcrowded, however, Umar had walled in the sacred enclosure of the Ka’ba for the first time. The ends of the alleyways, which used to open onto a large open central space, were turned into gates. From inside this wall, the son of Zubayr waged his defense.
Abdallah repulsed the Umayyads at first, but not before severe damage had been inflicted on the building of the Ka’ba. A passing traveler, eyewitness to the destruction, described the scene to us in Jerusalem:
“I saw a dog hurled by a catapault, its corpse toppling a pot in which Abdallah’s men were cooking bulgar. Half-starved by the siege, they ate the dog instead of the bulgar. I saw stones as big as boulders rain on the Ka’ba until its clothes of black brocade became rent like the cleavage of a woman’s blouse.”
Abd al-Malik was distressed when news reached him of the damage. He was, after all, a son of the Hijaz, born there eight years after the conquest of Jerusalem. No one could have held its holy cities in greater esteem. So he wrote to Hajjaj:
“Do not bombard the Black Stone or tear asunder the veils of the Ka’ba, or even startle its birds. Rather, corner that scorpion in Mecca’s ravines and tunnels. And wait until he dies there of hunger.”
But the knife had cut through to the bone, and Hajjaj would have none of it. This was no ordinary city on whose conquest he had staked his honor. His family’s name was at stake. “Permit me to do battle with this man as I see fit,” he dared to write back. “For if you do not, his numbers will grow, and he will become impossible to dislodge.”
Abd al-Malik rescinded his order and let Hajjaj have his way. Whereupon he arranged a deception, ordering his men to prepare to make the pilgrimage to the sacred precinct. As keeper of the House, Abdallah was unable to refuse this request. The siege was lifted so that both sides might perform the sacred obligation. Hajjaj led the pilgrimage, wearing his helmet and a coat of chain mail, while his reinforcements secretly infiltrated the city. When the fighting resumed, the stones of the catapults on Mount Qubays rained down on the Ka’ba even heavier than before.
Eyewitnesses say the Ka’ba was hit so often that it became fragile. At some point a thunderstorm appeared, and a bolt of lightning hit one of the catapults, burning it and killing twelve operators. That terrified Hajjaj’s men. They stopped fighting until he said:
“Generations before you made offerings, and always a fire was sent down to consume them. This happened to the prophet David when he took Jerusalem; it happened to Abraham when he offered his son and God took a ram in his place. God has given you a sign that your offering has been accepted. So finish what He has ordained.”
Tucking the skirt of his tunic into his belt, Hajjaj then rolled up another catapult with his own hands. He loaded it with stone. “Shoot!” he commanded. The bombardment continued more ferociously than before. When the Syrians finally rushed down from the mountains, they trapped the son of Zubayr inside the hollow of Mecca’s valley where the holy sanctuary lay. He fought like a lion, even after he was abandoned by two of his sons.
Those who finally got to shake their swords in Abdallah’s ribcage swear that he met his fate laughing; they say they saw his back teeth as they pulled out their swords. Hajjaj hung Abdallah’s headless body from the same gibbet that Abdallah had hung his brother’s. Tariq, the son of Amr, who had led the final assault into the sanctuary, was outraged. “Women have borne none manlier than he,” he said.
“Will you praise one who disobeyed the Commander of the Faithful?” Hajjaj retorted angrily.
“Yes,” replied Tariq. “He freed us from blame. Were it not for this man’s valor, we would have no excuse for what we have done to God’s House. He had no trench, knee-high walls, no stronghold. Yet he held his own against us for seven months.”
Abd al-Malik declared Tariq right. Still, he allowed Hajjaj to treat the people of the holy cities harshly. Companions of the Messenger of God who had supported the claims of the House of Hashim against Umayya had to wear lead seals around their necks. Those who had not stood by Uthman during the siege of his house in Medina thirty-five years earlier were executed. Criers went through the streets of Mecca singing songs of praise to Abd al-Malik, rubbing his victory in the faces of all of the city’s residents.
The red-white camels, snorting through their nose-rings,
Brought you a noble man from Umayya, impeccable,
Like a great white hawk,
His countenance gleaming like a polished sword.
Abd al-Malik ordered the demolition of what remained of the Ka’ba. He flattened God’s most ancient house, and then he rebuilt it. But he did not rebuild the Ka’ba as it was when Abdallah was lord and master of Mecca. The Temple was rebuilt “according to the dimensions of Muhammad’s day,” the crafty Caliph ordered.
The construction took but two weeks. The Ka’ba was, after all, a simple building, four straight sides of a square. In Muhammad’s day, the walls had been built of loose stones and were low enough for nimble goats to jump over. There was no roof. Abd al-Malik used mortared stone for the walls and put on a timber roof. The Ka’ba was in accordance with its original dimensions in name only. In the southeastern corner, the one farthest from Jerusalem, he had the broken pieces of the Black Stone framed and fitted into the wall chest-high above ground, as first Abraham, and then Muhammad, had done before him.
The war of the holy cities had at last ended. The Black Stone was in Syrian hands. The son of Zubayr was dead. But it was the new Ka’ba that marked the real end of Abd al-Malik’s struggle against Abdallah. Old memories had been erased by the new construction, and like a grave that men have abandoned and ceased to cherish, Abdallah’s spirit was lost in the rubble.
Meeting Abd al-Malik
Abd al-Malik had been Caliph for less than a month when his soldiers, a group of fierce-looking Syrian Bedouins in full battle gear, appeared before my house amidst a gawking crowd of onlookers to escort me to Damascus. I was given a day to get my things together and settle my affairs.
Abd al-Malik and I had met once before, briefly, while he was serving as deputy to his father in Palestine. For a while, he was based in Jerusalem, and when I went to pay my respects, he spoke highly of Ka’b.
Iraq was in open rebellion over the excesses of Mu’awiya’s son, Yazid. The emperor in Constantinople was retaking Syrian towns from which he had been evicted four decades earlier. Christians and Jews were at loggerheads in Jerusalem yet again. Abdallah’s fortunes were at their peak; he was gaining adherents in Syria and crowing over his victory in the Hijaz. On the streets, men were saying that the desert had swallowed up Yazid’s army because of God’s displeasure with a House that dared to denigrate His holy cities. The talk of Damascus was of how Marwan had died at the hands of his wife. The stench of defeat lay like a heavy blanket over the House of Umayya.
“Our cousin Mu’awiya, God Rest His Soul, said you identified the foo
tprint on the Foundation Stone of Solomon’s Temple.” These were the first words Abd al-Malik spoke to me.
“I did, O Commander of the Faithful.”
“And what do you say about that footprint today?”
“That it was left by the King of Absolute Sovereignty, who is the light of Heaven and Earth, and not by any of His Messengers.”
“How do you know He has a footprint, or for that matter any kind of a shape? The Holy Book says: Naught is as His Likeness.”
“The source of all shape must Himself have a shape. The verse you have cited assumes it, even if that shape is like no other. Formlessness as an attribute of God is the refuge of lazy minds. He is the thing that He is named. What do we know about this thing? The Good Book says He has a throne, which encompasses the heavens and earth. God sits, in other words. And He moves. Did He not rise to Heaven after Creation? Does He not have two Houses, one in Mecca, the other in Jerusalem? Did He not travel to Mount Sinai and reveal Himself by voice to Moses? The Holy Book specifies that the Heavens shall be rolled up on the Day of Resurrection with His right hand. If He has a right hand, then why not a left? If He has a hand, then why not a foot?”
“Do you know what He looks like?”
“No, my Caliph. My examples are merely aspects of what God must look like just as His ninety-nine names are merely attributes of His nature.”
“Do these aspects and attributes encompass Him?”
“Nothing can do that. It is not given to us to know what He looks like. But it is given to us to aspire to know. In fact, it is demanded. Were we ever to cease striving to know Him, our faith would be of an ill-fated and lowly sort.”