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

by Kanan Makiya

Abraham’s distrust of the Arabs, the sons of Ishmael, are in part based on a Geniza letter written about the arrival of Bedouins in Jerusalem; see Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol. 5. More fundamentally, however, Ishmael’s outcast nature is based on Genesis 16, which has an angel of God saying to Hagar of her son: “A wild donkey of a man he will be, his hand against every hand, and every man’s hand against him, living his life in defiance of all his kinsmen.” At the same time, the angel predicts that the descendants of Ishmael will be “too numerous to be counted.” Isaiah 21:7 tells of the prophet’s vision of deliverance. The passage from Isaiah was interpreted as Ka’b has interpreted it in a Jewish apocalyptic work of the mid-eighth century, the “Secrets of Rabbi Simon ben Yohay,” which preserves a messianic interpretation of the Arab conquest. Bernard Lewis discusses this work in “An Apocalyptic Vision of Islamic History,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 13:2 (1950), pp. 308–338. Under “Elijah,” the Jewish Encyclopedia notes the prophet’s habit of dressing as an Arab and offers a midrashic tale by way of illustration. I am indebted to Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s thought-provoking discussion of the phenomenon of Jews accepting the credentials of an Arabian prophet in Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge University Press, 1977); the figure of Abraham was suggested by an early-seventh-century Greek tract cited at the outset of their book in which a certain Abraham asks an old man: “ ‘What is your view, master and teacher, of the prophet who has appeared among the Saracens?’ He replied, groaning mightily: ‘He is an impostor. Do the prophets come with sword and chariot?’ ” The verses on the stone in Zion come from Isaiah 28:16; the allusion is to the Messiah, argues Kemper Fullerton in “The Stone of Foundation,” in The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 37:1 (October, 1920), pp. 1–50. Abraham’s reaction to Ka’b, it seems to me, would have been typical of the majority of Arab Jews in southern and central Arabia. Muhammad, however, was shocked to be received this way, and his bitter disappointment with the Jews of Medina in the second year of the hijra is suggested in the Quran; see verse 2:95, cited in the following chapter.

  Medina

  The phrases “on a night that like sea swarming had dropped its curtain” and “as bare as an ass’s belly” come from the Mu’allaqa of the sixth-century pre-Islamic Arab poet Imru’ al-Qays. See the translation in Robert Irwin’s Night and Horses and the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (Penguin Press, 1999). That some Jews acknowledged Muhammad as a prophet and still retained their Judaism is discussed by Norman Stillman in The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979) and by Wasserstrom. Ka’b’s romanticization of the Bedouin way of life was to become a pronounced feature of life under the Umayyads, as observed by Ishaq in his later dealings with Abd al-Malik. Maysun, the wife of Mu’awiya and mother of Yazid, for instance, hated her courtly life in Damascus. Of her husband, the caliph Mu’awiya, she composed these lines: “The crust I eat beside my tent is more than any fine bread to me; And more than any lubbard tub of fat, I love a lean Bedouin cavalier.” Translated by R. A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (Cambridge University Press, 1953).

  Ka’b’s reply to his wife’s complaint is taken from Jeremiah 29:7. There are numerous accounts of Muhammad’s death, differing in matters of detail; I have drawn upon Tabari’s History, vol. 9, The Last Years of the Prophet. The description of depression as a “noonday demon” was used by desert monks, according to Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk (Riverhead Books, 1996). Abu Bakr’s repudiation of the renegades is cited by Eric Schroeder in Muhammad’s People: A Tale by Anthology, A Mosaic Translation (Portland, Me.: Bond Wheelwright Co., 1955). I am grateful to Roy Mottahedeh for pointing out this marvelous book to me, from whose rendition of Arabic phrases and wonderful selection of material I have benefited greatly. Schroeder’s sources, however, leave a lot to be desired; in this particular instance, I was unable to track down the original Arabic. The saying “Better than holy war is war against self” is traditionally attributed to the Prophet. Wasserstrom, in Between Muslim and Jew, attributes to the Prophet the phrase “Believe in the Torah, in the Psalms and the Gospel, even though the Quran should suffice you.” Ka’b’s assertion that the coming of Muhammad had been foretold in scripture is based on Isaiah 42:1–5. In al-Waqidi’s Kitab al-Maghazi, Ka’b asks the Prophet’s envoy to the Yemen to describe Muhammad. After Ali ibn Abi Talib does so, Ka’b (who is supposedly still a Jew) says, “He is in our books as you describe!” H.A.R. Gibb recounts the tale of Muhammad’s gentle shaming of his closest companion, Abu Bakr, for overreacting during a pilgrimage, in Mohammedanism (Oxford University Press, 1970). The northern Arabs of the Hijaz and the southern Arabs of the Yemen evolved different and competing genealogies. I have avoided the complicating factor of the politics of these genealogies in my story, which is not to say that they were not very important. The seminal book in this regard is by Jawad Ali, Al-Mufassal fi Tarikh al-’Arab Qabla al’Islam (Beirut, 1976).

  The information on Ibn Abbas, considered a pioneer of Quranic exegesis, is in Muhammad ibn Sa’d’s ninth-century Al-Tabaqat al-Kubra (Beirut, 1957–68) and Baladhuri’s Futuh. See EI2 under “Abdallah ibn Abbas.” Ibn Abbas’s question to Ka’b about whether or not the angels got bored praising God is in Wolfensohn’s Ka’b al-Ahbar. I am grateful to Nasser Rabbat for pointing out to me that Ka’b was called a mawla of his former student Ibn Abbas. Mawla is a legal term in Arab—Muslim history, with a long history of meanings. It derives from the verb waliya, which means “to be close to” or “connected with” something or someone. It has also the meaning of “client” or “protégé.” Ka’b, as a Yemeni Jew who aspired to membership in Arab society, would have had to derive protection from someone in the early Islamic period. I think Ibn Abbas would have been too young at the time of Ka’b’s stay in Medina. My story assumes that Ka’b’s sponsor was Umar ibn al-Khattab, with whom he is closely tied in all the sources; Umar is therefore a plausible choice, even though Ka’b is nowhere called his mawla in the sources.

  Umar invariably appears in Muslim sources as the epitome of the stern, uncompromising, and incorruptible ruler—a kind of Khomeini of his times. His disdain for levity, his unpopularity with women, his austere temperament, and the story of his conversion to Islam as told by Ishaq have become the stuff of legend. They even make an appearance in general surveys of Arab—Muslim civilization. See, for instance, Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam, vol. 1, The Classical Age of Islam (University of Chicago Press, 1974). Ka’b has been recorded in Muslim tradition as being the first Jewish convert to Islam, though there were probably earlier Jewish converts; see Sarah Stroumsa, “On Jewish Intellectuals Who Converted in the Early Middle Ages,” in The Jews of Medieval Islam, edited by Daniel Frank (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992). Ka’b personified the Jewish influence on the earliest Muslim community, and the fact that he is most consistently connected with Umar in the sources speaks to the importance of the Jewish—Muslim nexus in the first half of the seventh century. I adapted Ka’b’s argument for salvation through Adam from a passage in Ibn Rumi that I can no longer locate.

  The Fundaments of the Universe

  On the Temple as a “Palace of Peace,” see I Chronicles 28:2–3 and 1 Kings 1:50–53, 2:28–31. The story of David moving a piece of the rock exists in many versions, notably in the Babylonian Talmud; Raphael Patai discusses these in his book, Man and Temple in Ancient Jewish Myth and Ritual (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1947). Patai points out that tales about the rebellion of the primeval waters underneath the foundation stone, Even Shetiyah, are found in rabbinic literature as late as the fifth century. Yet they contain ancient Near Eastern motifs going back to traditions two millennia earlier. Among Muslim traditions of the same family cited by Tabari is one linking the Rock of the Temple with the source of the sweetest water in the world. The story of the sealing of the surging waters of the abyss with God’s name is in the
Jerusalem Talmud. See Daniel Sperber in “On Sealing the Abysses,” Journal of Semitic Studies 11 (1966).

  Jesus was the subject of a curious legend concerning the name on the stone: “Jesus of Nazareth went secretly to Jerusalem and entered into the Temple where he learned the holy letters of the divine Name. He wrote them on parchment, and, uttering the Name to prevent pain, he cut his flesh and hid the parchment therein. Then, again pronouncing the Name, he caused the flesh to grow together. As he left the door, the lions [guarding the gate as in Sumerian Temples] roared and the Name was erased from his mind. When he went outside the city, he cut his flesh again and drew out the parchment, and when he had studied its letters, he learned the Name again” (see Vilnay, Legends).

  The association of Moriah with the House of the Lord is found in 2 Chronicles 3:1; Charles Warren expands on this association in “The Comparative Holiness of Mounts Zion and Moriah” in Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement (1869–70). David’s use of music and liturgy to bring the waters of the deep back up to the appropriate level turned into an annual ritual performed in the Hebrew Temple, discussed at length by Patai in his chapter, “The Ritual of Water-Libation,” in Man and the Temple. Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews, vol. 4,

  (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1947), also describes this ritual. Finally, Patai observed in the 1940s that “the inhabitants of Kafr Silwan (Siloam), the Arab village next to Jerusalem, go down in procession in times of drought to the same well of Siloam out of which the water was drawn for the libation of the second Temple.”

  The Conquest Foretold

  This version of Abu Bakr’s death is from Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani’s tenth-century Kitab al-Aghani, and the story of the three-tiered pulpit is from Tabari; see extracts in Schroeder. Ka’b’s poem is an adaptation of the text of an actual seventh-century Jewish apocalyptic poem on the Arab conquests, as published by Bernard Lewis in “On That Day,” in Mélanges D’Islamologie, ed. Pierre Salmon (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974). The original, first published by Louis Ginzberg, is from the Geniza documents held in the Schechter collection at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America; it is preserved as a fragment on a single sheet, 11 by 8 cm. Ginzberg dated the poem back to the Crusades, but Lewis showed that the poem had to have been written “during a period of messianic expectation generated by the apocalyptic events of the Arab conquest.… It must be assumed that the poem was composed during or immediately after the Arab victory. Since the fall of neither Jerusalem nor Caesaria is mentioned, it may well be that the poem antedates the surrender of these two cities.”

  In Muslim tradition, Umar is closely associated with the title al-faruq, one meaning of which, according to al-Biruni’s twelfth-century al-’Athar al-Baqiya, translates as “the great redeemer.” While many sources, including Tabari, contend that the Prophet bestowed this title on Umar, Ibn Sa’d in his Tabaqat writes that “the People of the Book were the first to call Umar al-faruq.” Crone and Cook argue for this view in Hagarism; they suggest that the origins of the title lie in a Jewish messianic idea attached to Umar by Jews early in the seventh century. Suliman Bashear offers a linguistic argument in support of this thesis in “The Title ‘Faruq’ and Its Association with Umar I,” in Studia Islamica 72 (1990). The Patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronius, attributed the same title to Jesus Christ in an undated rendering into Arabic of a manuscript attributed to him found in the Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai. The need of the Prophet and early Muslims to seek out Jewish and Christian traditions is discussed by Newby in The Making of the Last Prophet. The Quranic verses used by Ka’b to clinch his arguments are 47:24–28 (Arberry).

  The reference to God endowing mankind with a love of dalliance comes from the ninth-century Kitab al-Shi’r wa-l-Shu’ara of Ibn Qutayba, as translated by R. A. Nicholson. Ka’b’s dream image of the Holy Land is adapted from Psalm 98. The poem that I attribute to Ishaq’s stepmother was composed by al-Khansa’ (575–645) for her two brothers lost in tribal warfare; see Irwin. The final letter of Ishaq’s mother is adapted from the text of a letter found among the Judeo—Arabic documents of the Cairo Geniza, dating between the tenth and twelfth centuries; see A Mediterranean Society, vol. 5. These discarded writings, which could not be thrown away because they might contain the name of God, were edited by S. D. Goitein and have proved invaluable for my purposes regarding matters of phraseology and forms of address and language.

  Coming to Jerusalem

  The description of the golden jewel-encrusted crown of the Persian King of Kings is taken from the eleventh-century Book of Kings by Firdawsi. The dream of defeat at the hands of a circumcised man is cited in M. Ling’s biography of the Prophet, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983). F. D. Donner presents an account of the Byzantine battle losses in his The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton University Press, 1981). The phrase “Fear of the Arabs had fallen upon the land” is borrowed from a Muslim source in Schroeder’s anthology.

  Heraclius’s farewell to Syria is recorded in Baladhuri’s Futuh and in Tabari’s History, vol. 12, The Battle of al-Qadisiyyah and the Conquest of Syria and Palestine. The warning of Heraclius to the men of Byzantium is drawn from the ninth-century historian Theophanes and the fourteenth-century work Muthir al-Ghiram, or The Book of Inciting Desire to Visit the Holy City and Syria, written by Jerusalem native Jamal al-Din Ahmad; extracts are translated in Guy Le Strange’s Palestine under the Moslems: A Description of Syria and the Holy Land from 650 to 1500 (Palestine Exploration Fund, 1890, reprinted by Khayats, Beirut, 1965). Le Strange offers a collection of extracts from medieval Arab geographers. The anti-Muslim sermon delivered by Sophronius is adapted from two of his actual sermons, on Christmas Eve of 634 and Epiphany of 635. The term Saracen, the Anglicization of Sarakenoi, or “empty of Sara,” carried also the pejorative meaning of being an outcast and illegitimate descendant of Abraham’s union with the slave Hagar. Sophronius’s speech, as reported by John of Damascus, is one of the earliest on record conveying the negative connotation of “Saracen,” a word which became common during the Crusades.

  Heribert Busse recounts Umar’s esteem for Abu Ubayda in “The Sanctity of Jerusalem in Islam,” Judaism 17:4 (1968). The military code of conduct described in the narrative is attributed to the Prophet by al-Waqidi in his Kitab al-Maghazi. Other Muslim accounts, including Ibn Asakir’s twelfth-century Tarikh Madinat Dimashq, as well as the Christian historian Eutychius, attribute it to Abu Bakr. The verses on the water of Horeb come from Exodus 7:6. The description of the desert is adapted from the Mu’allaqa of Imru’ al-Qays. Ibn Sa’d writes that the great-grandfather of the Prophet, Hashim, sojourned with the sons of Judham while on his way to Gaza for business. The time frame for the journey from Medina to Jerusalem is in Peters, Mecca. The valley separating the Mount of Olives from the Holy City is known to Muslims as Wadi Jahannam, the Valley of Hell. They took this name from the Hebrew Ge-Ben-Hinnon, which referred to the deep gorge to the west and southwest of Jerusalem. The valley to the east was in Jewish lore the scene of the last gathering on Judgment Day, and so it remained in Muslim tradition. It is described by the tenth-century geographer al-Muqaddasi as follows: “Now, the Wadi Jahannam runs from the south-east angle of the Haram area to the furthest (northern) point, and along the east side. In this valley there are gardens and vineyards, churches, caverns and cells of anchorites, tombs, and other remarkable Spots.… In its midst stands the church which covers the Sepulchre of Mary, and above, overlooking the valley, are many tombs, among which are those of [the Companions of the Prophet] Shaddad ibn Aus ibn Thabit and Ubadah ibn as Samit.”

  The Black Stone

  Many of the early traditions about the Black Stone and Mecca used here and in “Mecca and Jerusalem,” come from Uri Rubin, “The Ka’ba: Aspects of Its Ritual Functions and Position in Pre-Islamic and Early Islamic Times,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 8 (1986), and Ibn al-Kalbi (737–819), Kitab al-Asnam (The Book of Idol
s), edited by Ahmad Zaki (Cairo, 1965). In a different Islamic tradition regarding the origins of the Black Stone, Abraham the first believer (Quran 3:60), not Adam, receives it from God in a state of immaculate whiteness. Abraham then sets it into a wall of the Ka’ba which, according to the Quran (2:122–126), he built. Around this stone, the hajj is instituted. The ritual of circumambulation of the Ka’ba, or circling, has biblical parallels; see Psalm 26. The idea of women making the hajj in order to marry was noted by the poet Umar ibn Abi Rabi (644–721). On the breaking of the Black Stone into three pieces during the war between the Umayyads and Abdallah ibn al-Zubayr, see EI2 under “Ka’ba.” The sources say the three pieces were held together with a silver band, but I have no information on the shape of the frame that was used by either Ibn al-Zubayr, during his reconstruction, or the Umayyads. The photograph depicts the frame in use today. Reference to the Black Stone as God’s hand in the earth comes from Alaa al-Din Ali al-Muttaqi bin Husam al Hindi, Kanz al-Ummal. The story of the two stones found on Abu Qubays is from Abu Abdallah al-Fakihi’s ninth-century Tarikh Makka. The stories of Amr ibn Luhayy, and of the rock called Sa’d near Jedda, are from Ibn Ishaq’s Sira and Ibn al-Kalbi’s Kitab al-Asnam. The description of Abu Qubays is adapted from Nasir Khusraw’s eleventh-century description of Mecca in his Safar-Nameh, translated by Le Strange as Diary of a Journey Through Syria and the Holy Land (New York: AMS Press, 1971). Finally, Ishaq’s reflections upon human frailty and the attractiveness of rocks are an adaptation of lines from Firdawsi’s Book of Kings, as cited in Schroeder.