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

by Kanan Makiya

  “What, then?”

  “His flight to Mecca.”

  “To build the Ka’ba …”

  “And achieve atonement. He took to the road in search of his firstborn, the long-lost Ishmael, dispatched upon Sara’s whim into the desert after the birth of Isaac.”

  (photo credit 25.1)

  God hears the voice of the boy, wherever he may be.

  “Who said those words?”

  “The Almighty said them to Moses long after Abraham’s time, as he had said them to Abraham before, which is what sent him to the desert where Ishmael and Hagar now lived.”

  “Separation breeds strange habits of the heart.”

  “Attraction grows with distance, like a distant bridegroom pining for his faraway bride. Abraham was drawn to Ishmael just as the Black Stone will be drawn to the Rock from which it was long ago separated; he was fated to atone for what he had done on the Rock by repairing that which his abandonment of Ishmael had torn asunder.”

  “It is fitting, I suppose, that the father of the Hebrews and the Arabs should be destined to return to his firstborn. But why were the two rocks separated in the first place?”

  “Why was Ishmael cast out in the desert and the hands of men turned against him? God intended it that way. Perhaps He wanted to test His children, as Jews friendly to Muhammad say. Or perhaps He intended a curse on both peoples’ heads, like the mark that branded Cain for killing his brother. Knowing in such matters belongs to God alone.”

  Abd al-Malik went quiet. The Caliph was lost in a private world. Breaking out of his reverie, he said: “What are you suggesting with all this, Ishaq?”

  “To the origins of the two holy cities, O Abd al-Malik, to Mecca and Jerusalem, to what separated them in the first place, and to that which must one day bring them back together.”

  “But was there a Mecca at the time of which you are speaking? All was desolation and destruction, relics of the Deluge.”

  “There was the Black Stone.”

  “Abraham fled one Rock to run up against another …”

  “He took the same route as Adam when he met up with Eve. And surely enough, a month’s camel-ride away from Mount Zion, he found Ishmael and the prize that the First Man had brought with him from the Garden.”

  “The Black Stone.”

  “The very same. Tarnished by time, but recognizable. Abraham found the Stone in the valley at the foot of Mount Abu Qubays, where the winds and wild beasts had pushed it. The father who had nearly lost a son on one Rock now set to work building a Temple with the other. The Stone had to be protected. The house that Adam built around it had long since gone. Only its memory survived. The prophets, including Muhammad, knew of it, the Jewish sages of Arabia knew of it, and Ka’b knew of it.”

  “What did Adam’s house look like?”

  “It was made of black cloth and wooden pegs, Ka’b taught, which is why weaving is the first craft and lies at the origin of the art of shelter. All the rules of geometry were suggested by the straight lines, from which a square piece of cloth is still made. Bookbinders make their papyrus sheets the way Adam made his cloth. Adam’s tent, called a tabernacle by the Jews, opened onto an enclosure marked out as a sanctuary. The doorway faced the gateway into the outer enclosure of the sanctuary, which, in turn, faced the direction from which Adam had come—Moriah’s summit. Thus was created the first direction toward which the prophets turned in prayer, and the prototype of the tent used by the Children of Israel during their wanderings.”

  “The Mother of All Books teaches that Abraham and Ishmael built the Ka’ba, carefully setting the Stone into its southeast corner because there it would be protected from flooding. But they used stone, not cloth.”

  “They draped the walls in black cloth, annually renewed by men ever since to remind them of the house that Adam had built. The Stone, whose color was on its way to blackness when Abraham found it, had been exposed to the ravages of flash floods, sandstorms, and the blazing heat of the sun. Abraham had to improve upon what Adam had done. Thus did the first shelter made of cloth become the first building made of stone clad in cloth. Around this primordial square grew Mecca, a city that received both its form and its meaning from the Stone.”

  (photo credit 25.2)

  “Abraham the priest had become Abraham the builder.”

  “The two roles later combined in Solomon, as they were to combine for the last time in Muhammad when he rebuilt the Ka’ba. Solomon built a Temple around the Rock that had so unsettled Abraham. As Mecca grew around Abraham’s Ka’ba, so did Jerusalem grow around Solomon’s Temple. Guarded by fearsome cherubim, Solomon placed the Ark on top of the Rock, inside a room known as the Holy of Holies. That room, the heart and soul of Solomon’s grand design, was built of stone in the same shape as Abraham’s Ka’ba.”

  “A cube!”

  “Precisely, O Caliph. Duplication is here a sign of God’s majesty; it is the affirmation of the as yet unwritten covenant between the two holiest cities in creation. Memory was hard at work.”

  “Solomon’s Temple, I am told, far exceeded the Ka’ba in beauty and magnificence.”

  “It certainly did. Yet the Ka’ba is the most ancient house, in God’s words, the first sanctuary to be established on earth. Age is to the Ka’ba what beauty was to the Temple.”

  “What did Solomon do after the completion of his Temple?”

  “He prayed and offered sacrifice to God in Jerusalem, just as our father Abraham had done before him in Mecca. His words, Ka’b always said, were Abraham’s own. Solomon finished his work on the tenth day of the first month of the year, Yom Kippur, the very day that the Ka’ba annually receives its new clothing of black.”

  “Praise be to God!”

  “Like nature’s cycles, such temporal recurrences are proofs of His Design.”

  “I inherit a deeply divided kingdom. What happened to break the covenant between Mecca and Jerusalem?”

  “Time passed. Memories dimmed. Desires multiplied. Cities grew larger in concentric circles around the two Rocks. Distance from the center forged new memories and desires inside new forms. Men disagreed over what had happened in the past, and why. Desires and memories washed over both holy cities until the descendants of Abraham could not tell the one apart from the other. All that they remembered was what they wanted to remember. The present prevailed as the frailties of the First Man were passed on to his heirs. The inhabitants of Mecca and Jerusalem even forgot one another’s existence. Sons of the same father began to conspire against their own souls, forgetting God, not even knowing that that was what they were doing. He, however, did not forget them. He sent Messengers to bring men back to his bosom. Muhammad was the last among these. He came after the Temple of Jerusalem had been destroyed, its Rock desecrated with statues and Christian dung.”

  “So Ishmael’s descendants in Mecca were singled out by the coming of Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him.”

  “Because there was nowhere else for His Messenger to go. The hand of fate carried him there. To every nation He raises a witness against itself. His coming meant that the time of those who were born to die for His Name by the sword had arrived: the Sons of Hagar would no longer stay in the desert. They had to join with the Sons of Sara and come to Jerusalem. We must not forget both sacred Rocks were jewels in the beginning. Adam landed on one and carried the other. Both featured in Creation. Both have a divine origin. They were even defiled in the same way. Did not Ka’b and Umar find menstrual cloths and filth on the first day of the Muslim conquest …?”

  “The day on which Jerusalem and Mecca were reunited.”

  “Long-lost lovers brought back into an uneasy embrace. But an embrace nonetheless.”

  “The signs of that shared destiny are not in evidence today. One last question remains, Ishaq. In His wisdom, the Holy One chose to complicate our lives by changing the axis of prayer in the second year of the Exodus from one Rock to the other. What did your father have to say about that?”

  “H
e said that everything has its origin as its destination. God does not command an abomination. The strife that the religion of Abraham forbids is not part of His design. The Rocks, on the other hand, are. Their story is. Through them, for better or for worse, the destiny of the peoples of Moses and Muhammad are inextricably intertwined.”

  “And what if the story has a bad ending?”

  “It is still one story.”

  The second conversation followed late in the afternoon of the same day, after Abd al-Malik had recited his mid-afternoon prayers. Normally, he retired then, receiving no one. On this occasion, however, I was brought to his private quarters overlooking the courtyard in the palace.

  “Our Syrian Rock is bigger than Abdallah’s Black Stone. What did your father have to say about the importance of size?”

  “Adam had to land on one and carry the other. Size in itself does not bestow greater or lesser sanctity.”

  “I was not suggesting otherwise, son of Ka’b. Surely, however, size has some implication for the Temples housing the two stones.”

  “As does the future reunion of that which the First Man estranged through his travels.”

  “Would that be a physical act that you are talking about?”

  “It would.”

  “Truly, this would be a wondrous sign! What said Ka’b about it?”

  “It was he who foretold that it would happen. He said that it will be one of the signs of the Hour; that the Stones will not be annihilated like the rest of Creation on Judgment Day but will conjoin like a man does with a woman.”

  “How will my heart rejoice over that which my eye will never see?”

  “God’s signs are there for those who know how to draw consolation from them.”

  “No man can be consoled from the annihilation of all things.”

  “No. But he can from the knowledge that the Rock and the Stone are the last things to be annihilated. Their nature is to consume Time, rather than be consumed by it.”

  “What exactly did Ka’b say will happen to the two Stones on the Day?”

  “The Black Stone will say to the Rock: Are you ready to receive me? You who are the first creation of the Holy One, Blessed Be He, and I who am His envoy? And the Rock will reply, Yes, come to me. The Black Stone will then rise in the air, uprooting the Ka’ba from its foundations, and carrying with it all those who have over the generations made the pilgrimage to Mecca. It will come to Jerusalem to be received by the Rock. The Rock will open like a woman opens herself to receive a man. The Stones will mate in a final cataclysmic embrace, an implosion of passion and desire such as has not been witnessed during Creation, the wildest rutting season of all. So powerful will be the urge, it will fuse back together again that which He once separated.”

  The third conversation took place in the Caliph’s audience hall. It was the morning of the following day. Officers, ministers, and secretaries were present. But instead of addressing them as was his wont, he turned to me, saying, “Do you like your profession?”

  “Bookbinding is the source of great solace. I would not exchange it for another under any circumstances.”

  “Describe what you do.”

  “I turn wisdom into an artifact that men engage with and attend to.”

  “How do you begin?”

  “The wisdom has to be there, like the plan according to which God laid out Heaven and Earth and all that lies in between.”

  “Wisdom precedes, in other words, what you do.”

  “Precisely. As the idea of a circle precedes its drawing.”

  “If I recall, those were your father’s words.”

  “You have a prodigious memory, O Abd al-Malik. They are his very words used to describe the place of the Rock in Creation.”

  “Go on. Describe how you make something out of this wisdom.”

  “I take pieces of papyrus cut directly from the plant. These are dried, woven in layers at right angles to one another, then wetted, hammered together, pressed, and smoothed in the workshop. Upon such sheets, using reed and ink, words are passed on to posterity. I deal in all that has to do with making it possible to fix and house such words between two covers.”

  “Even when the Words are God’s own?”

  “Especially if they are His. For then I know that the Book I am about to make is Divine, as will become the method, manner, and even the materials of its making.”

  “I want to build such an artifact as you describe to house that place in the City of the Temple that sits on the very threshold of Heaven. There the prophet David sought refuge. I want to cover God’s Rock as his son Solomon did, and as you would His words. Only I want my Book to be in the shape of a Dome, a Dome built directly over the Rock, a Dome larger, and more beautiful, and more richly adorned than any other.”

  A Moment of Decision

  The Rock was all that was left of God’s work on the first day. It was the height of hubris to imagine that I could connect that visible trace with His invisible Presence, the always absent Purpose of everything. My entire upbringing weighed against the idea of trying to do so.

  Had not Solomon himself entertained regret after building his Temple? “The Heaven and Heaven of Heavens cannot contain thee,” he cried out upon seeing his magnificent monument. “How much less this house that I have built!”

  Ka’b taught that the soul is most beautiful when it is naked. Building, through the extent of its artifice, its freezing into place the melting flux of nature, bodes ill for the Rock in its natural setting. Under the cool half-light of the moon, the spectacle of bare Rock against the starlit canvas of the sky draws the breath right out of a person. Time comes to a stop; the only sound is silence, a silence that takes the mind out of itself to meditate on other worlds. Truly, this is the first rung on Heaven’s ladder, I used to think to myself. To be transported, all one needs is to be there at night and look—look at God’s Rock set against His upturned bowl of a sky.

  Imprisoning His Rock in a gilded cage, dressing it up in ceramics, marble, precious stones, gold lettering—”a whore’s glitter,” Ka’b would have said—was anathema. Had the ghost of Sophronius reached out from the grave and bewitched Abd al-Malik? Was he about to do to my father’s Rock what the Patriarch’s queen had done to Calvary? Strip out the sheltering tent of the sky, and what are you left with? A relic like Golgotha. A cross laid out in a coffin made of silver and gold.

  Can memory and conscience take shape against these as a backdrop?

  The craft of bookbinding teaches that it can.

  What is a book if not an artifact unfixed in time and space? A mobile receptacle for memories that would otherwise be lost? Ka’b adored the few scrolls and leaved books he had brought with him from the Yemen. The little wooden chest in which they sat partook of a kind of holiness. I was brought up to treat it like a reliquary, as inviolable as the holy Ark itself. No one was allowed to sit, or put anything, on top of it. No one was allowed to drink or eat when it was being opened. My first lesson in the value of books began with the chest that housed them.

  Perhaps Abd al-Malik intuited this, and used it to turn me around to his way of seeing things—just as his Dome was going to turn the whole Community of Muhammad against his rival, Abdallah, holed up in Mecca.

  Perhaps I was being seduced in the way a moth is seduced by the flame that will consume it? Even if I could bring myself to disturb the Rock in its natural setting, to forgo my former pleasure in the hope of wresting out an even greater one, could I trust this Caliph? I disliked and mistrusted his House, however much I had come to respect the discernment of the Caliph himself. Intelligence, after all, can be put in servitude to a man’s organs as easily as it can to the glory of He who made those organs in order to serve Him.

  The Caliph needed me to justify forms selected on the basis of stories that he wanted to be like the mortar that bonds materials together, invisible to the eye but indispensable to the larger structure of things. The prospect both thrilled and terrified me.

  The
success of Muhammad, the very speed with which his followers had become rulers of half the world, demanded an answer to the question of where they ought to be ruled from. Arabia was too remote. Mu’awiya, and even Ali, understood this. But only Abd al-Malik was able to translate the understanding into realities on the ground. Only Jerusalem, he had intuited, could put Muhammad’s People at the center of things, where they belonged.

  Was not the City of the Temple the Holy Land to which all the prophets had emigrated? It had, therefore, greater merit than Mecca. Was that not the truth that my father taught and which I myself had passed on to Abd al-Malik? This Caliph was no innovator; he was simply restoring a balance that had been confirmed by God during the week in which He fashioned the world. Muhammad, God’s Grace Be Upon Him and His Household, was the seal of the prophets. God willed that his followers should crown the epic encounter between Him and all His creations—an encounter that reached its apogee on the day that the first Believer and his son underwent their great ordeal at the place that Abd al-Malik now wished to pay homage.

  Thus did I reason myself into the whirlpool of my father’s obsession and Abd al-Malik’s desires. I was appointed advisor on matters of the Dome’s form and appearance. My task was to find a Syrian master-builder and justify a shape that would support and enhance Abd al-Malik’s Dome—a Dome that had to be bigger than the biggest Christian Dome in the city, that of the Church of Resurrection.

  The Father and the Son

  In Medina, on the day of my birth, long before he knew he would come to Jerusalem, Umar placed upon me a terrible burden—my name. Truly, the coming of the Redeemer to this land, and Abd al-Malik’s decision to build over the Holy Rock, was foreshadowed in that choice.