The Rock

by Kanan Makiya

  “But when the camels, which were of the grazing type and had never been ridden before, saw the rock and smelt the dried blood shed on it over the years, they shied away and fled in all directions. This so angered the tribesman that he seized a stone and threw it at the idol, saying, ‘God curse you! You have scared away my camels and that of all my kin. I came to you to improve the fortune of the sons of Mudar, but you have dissipated it. We will have nothing more to do with you, O Sa’d. You are nothing but a rock! You cannot make a right or correct a wrong.’’ Only then did the sons of Mudar abandon the worship of desert rocks.”

  “To change religion is not an easy thing,” I ventured.

  “Like herding camels on a rainy night,” said Ka’b.

  The last rays of the setting sun were lighting the summit of Mount Abu Qubays, which shone like a torch as darkness fell.

  “Look at it carefully,” Ka’b said, pointing to the Black Stone.

  “Do you mean the Stone?”

  “You call it a stone!”

  “But of course I do. Is it not a stone?”

  “In the beginning,” said Ka’b, “it was a jewel that Adam brought down with him—just like the jewel that God plucked from underneath His throne and plunged into the abyss in order to fashion the ground upon which He stood while He went about creation. Later, the first man used it to cut a channel for his tears, which flowed for nine hundred years after the Fall.”

  “The same jewel that the tribesmen of Quraysh found on top of Mount Abu Qubays?” I asked, astounded.

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of a jewel was it?”

  “A sapphire,” said Ka’b, “just like its sister on Mount Moriah.”

  “Then how did it turn black?”

  “Menstruating women touched it in the Age of Ignorance.”

  (photo credit 7.2)

  Mecca and Jerusalem, Ka’b went on to say, grew outward from their two Rocks in much the same way as a eucalyptus tree springs from a tiny seed. In fact, Ka’b claimed, the Rocks originally were not separate Rocks, but one Rock, parts of His throne. On both were found inscriptions—the ineffable name of God was chiseled in Hebrew letters on the Rock of Moriah; and on the Black Stone, words in a strange script that could be read only by a Jew. Or so a Meccan seer had told Ka’b.

  The message on the Black Stone was this: “God is the Lord of Mecca.”

  Unlike the words written on Jerusalem’s Rock by Ahithophel, King David’s counselor, no one knows who wrote these words, or why. But for Ka’b, the messages of the Rocks confirmed the order behind all things.

  None is like unto Him Who is the Hearer and the Seer.

  “He intended the universe,” Ka’b continued, “as a consonance of different parts, similar in ways and dissimilar in others,” and then, in the clearest formulation of his great passion, he would add: “My work is to fit them back together again in the right way so that they return to harmony.”

  “But what is left that is harmonious between peoples who face different Rocks in prayer?” I asked. “What if dissonance, rather than consonance, is what we ought to learn to live with and work our way around?”

  Ka’b would not entertain such a thought. God abhors the manifold forms of nature worship, he said. He wants us to search for His One transcendent essence.

  But what if our feebleness is such that, in proportion to God’s exaltation, to the fact that He is not a force of nature but Creator of all of nature’s forces, He becomes cold and aloof, unapproachable to those who would worship him? Out of despair we turn first to this witless rock and then to that, knowing that the rock’s soul is a mindless void. A mystery is its hatred, or its grace. Surely it is wiser not to care—to accept His variety without anger, and without love.

  Such talk made Ka’b entirely lose control. “There has to be a connection,” he thundered. “Never doubt it! It cannot be otherwise!”

  In the end, I came to accept that, just as the idea of a flower is more enduring than the flower itself, the idea of the Rock was a more enduring reality for my father than the Rock itself. By endlessly contemplating it and instructing himself on its history, he was reaching to grasp that fleeting essence. Reality was not the Rock for Ka’b; it is through the Rock that He became real. Meanwhile, time was working, on him and the followers of Muhammad, a fatal substitution: Even as the Rock of my father’s dreams was daily acquiring a life in the mind of Believers, was slowly but surely becoming real and strong for them, his knowledge of their passion for a different Rock was growing in clarity.

  The Turmoil of Ka’b

  Why do the Peoples of Moses and Muhammad face different Rocks in prayer? Men talked about the question in the early days. Some said they knew why: God had changed the sacred direction because the Jews did not accept Muhammad as a Messenger. Woe unto them, they would say, who have cried lies to the signs of God.

  Why, thought others, should the perfidy of the Jews make God change His sacred axis? Surely, no sin is big enough to change the fundaments of creation, which He willed into existence before the first man was fashioned out of the Rock’s dust. The Rock stands as an admonition to our inconstancy; either it carried the Truth yesterday and still carries it today or it never carried it. Truth is profound; it is foundational. That much reason Ka’b succeeded in instilling in me.

  I don’t know why there are two sacred axes, not one. Can anyone know that which God’s Messenger himself, Peace Be Upon Him, never claimed to know?

  To know belongs to God alone.

  Certain things, on the other hand, it is given to us to know. I know, for instance, that the prayer on the Mount of Olives terrified Ka’b because it forced him to turn his back on the Rock. To be compelled by force of circumstance to thus direct himself, and on the very threshold of the Holy City, was hard. And the effort magnified the task that lay before him, driving home the chances of failure—the price of which, he realized, would be borne by him alone.

  The Arabs had done their part, as he had foretold. The armies of the uncircumcised had been routed. There remained only the conclusion of the vision that had made Ka’b so famous throughout Arabia—the return of all of Abraham’s children, followers of Moses and Muhammad alike.

  “No more shall they be kept from David’s Sanctuary,” Ka’b had said in Medina. And he would remind his listeners of God’s words to Muhammad in the loneliness of his Exodus:

  Surely He who gave thee the Book to be thy Law

  will bring thee home again

  At the time, that choice of words rang as clear and true as a bell. People woke up. But what did they sound like now that the Arabs were camped upon the place of Christ’s ascent to Heaven, separated from the City of the Temple by a mere valley, all the while praying in the direction of the Black Stone with their backs to the Rock? How could a lowly southerner from the fallen star of the Yemen hope to convince these proud sons of the desert, upon whose good will he was dependent, to align themselves with a Rock different from the one they considered their own?

  The initial flush of excitement at being so close to the City of the Prophets had long since passed, and Ka’b had recovered from the agitation he had felt when he first laid eyes on the ruins of the Temple. Then the waters had risen to the very seat of his breath. Now he was beginning to drown in a new kind of inner turmoil.

  Would Umar allow the Jews back into liberated Jerusalem? For that matter, would they want to go back? Ka’b’s kith and kin had rejected the appeal of the prophet Ezra to do so, finding the whole business of uprooting themselves and moving into the unknown too arduous. “Happiness is not all movement and change,” my mother had said to Ka’b. “Even rushing water must settle down before it can be cleared of silt.”

  And who would pay for a new Temple? Not Umar. He forbade the accumulation of monies in the treasury for any purpose, preferring instead to assign the wealth of the Believers in the form of annuities to the Companions and family of the Prophet and to the fighters and families of those who had fallen in Go
d’s cause.

  “I will not lead those who come after me into temptation,” Umar had said, in response to urgings that he put aside revenues against times unforeseen. “Come what may, the only provision I will make against the time to come shall be obedience to God and His Apostle! That obedience is provision enough; it brought us here.”

  To such a man, a sumptuously decorated Temple was the Devil’s own work.

  On the other hand, my father must have thought to himself, might the man upon whose tongue God had struck the Truth think differently once he had come to grips with his responsibilities as the new master of the City of the Temple?

  His own past was no longer a precedent for anything that Umar now found himself having to do.

  Ka’b may have had a vision, but he had no plan. Calculation was not in his nature. He had taken things as they came, making adjustments according to circumstance. But the obstacles to the realization of his vision in Medina were now looming in his mind, like the stunning but unfriendly layers of rock spread out before his eyes.

  (photo credit 8.1)

  The Sins of David

  Standing alone on the Mount of Olives, the Caliph and his counselor admired the walled hilltop city with its twenty-six towers, six gates, and towering stone walls that rose out of the narrow gorge known as the Valley of Hell.

  “There are more stones on this mountain than there are people in Arabia,” Umar mused, looking onto the sheer drop before him. He was standing next to a round church and the tomb of James, the brother of Jesus, which he shared with two Jewish prophets, Zacharias and Simeon. Across from him, on the other side of the valley, was the pinnacle of the southeastern boundary of what used to be the Temple. James had been tossed into the valley from on top of that meeting point of the southern and eastern walls, his body ripped to shreds on the stones below.

  “The stones of Jerusalem impress themselves on all who wander among them,” Ka’b replied.

  Umar and Ka’b were looking for the pit into which the prophet Jeremiah had been dispatched. It could not be seen from where the two men were standing, the view being obstructed by a cascade of massive boulders down the slopes of the valley.

  The stoniness of the landscape exceeded anything that even men accustomed to the desert had seen before—homes, roads, tombs, everything was either rock or made of rock. Heaps of stones were piled up here and there—in fact, wherever one looked. Many walls and fences looked as though they had been thrown together for no reason other than to get stones out of the way. Such disciplining of the landscape was always in vain, the removal of one stone serving only to reveal others lying just below the surface.

  “To each rock, large or small, rough or smooth, there corresponds a list of things we choose either to remember or to forget,” Ka’b said. “Patterns made by boulders that have held up armies, pebbles that have felled giants, tell stories that in other places are told by tea leaves. Did you know, O Caliph, that blue-eyed David was enamored of rocks?”

  “How did his infatuation begin?” the Caliph inquired.

  The seeds were planted early, Ka’b said, when God concealed the stripling from Saul’s jealousy inside the hollows of mountains, amidst the swarming sea of stones that was Jerusalem’s landscape.

  “I take refuge in him, my rock, my shield, my stronghold, my place of refuge,” David, future king of Israel, had sung in gratitude.

  Who is a rock but our God?

  Blessed be my Lord, the Rock, who girds me with strength,

  who gives me vengeance,

  who makes my way free from blame,

  who set me on a rock too high to reach,

  who subjects whole peoples to me.

  “Music is the Devil’s own work, Ka’b!” cried Umar. “Beware, lest it turn your head.”

  “Did not Muhammad choose men to recite to him from the Holy Book because he liked the sounds of their voices?” Ka’b said. “The Lord of the Worlds,” he continued, looking toward the Temple Mount, “gave David arts of sweetness to sing the primordial waters under those ruins back to their right level. He blessed His servant, wanting to transport him out of the grime of this world, and to have his actions be guided by a higher purpose, one made accessible through beautiful sounds.”

  “And yet in the end,” replied Umar, “David, Peace be Upon Him, was denied the Temple, however much he ached to build it.”

  “He was denied it, O Umar,” said Ka’b, “because of his sins, which were written on his hands until they rode roughshod over his art. When he was brought a goblet to drink, he could drink only half its contents because the action of raising a vessel to his lips exposed the wrongs held against him in the Heavenly Register. God’s chosen wept, they say, until his joints were dislocated and the goblet had refilled with tears. On that occasion, he uttered these words:

  My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

  Why art thou so far from the words of my roaring?

  Our fathers trusted in Thee;

  and Thou didst deliver them.

  But I am a worm, and no man;

  a reproach of men,

  and despised of the people.

  Umar was now as visibly agitated as his counselor. He stood up abruptly and started pacing up and down alongside a boundary wall that overlooked the gravestones of seventy thousand prophets. “A worm? He spoke of himself as a worm! Tell us the story, Ka’b. Leave nothing out.” And so Ka’b began.

  David was anointed king in Hebron, where Abraham was buried, but he wanted to be king in Jerusalem because its stones had given him refuge and were a byword for impregnability and fortitude. The Jebusites were Jerusalem’s rightful rulers, being the descendants of Heth, to whom Abraham had promised the Holy City in return for his burial place. Within earshot of David’s army, the city’s Jebusite defenders mocked the impudence of the fiery king: “David will never get in here,” they said. “Our blind and our lame are enough to hold him off.” Whereupon David placed a reward upon the head of every Jebusite. Then he took the city. As for the blind and the lame, David hated them for the rest of his life.

  David called Jerusalem by his own name, and began to overreach himself. Temptation sought him out in the shape of a woman. From his rooftop, he spied Bathsheba bathing. She was very beautiful to look upon. And the king was veiled from the Will of God by his desire for her. He lay with her, impregnated her, and then had her husband, Uriah, a holy warrior, sent to the forefront of the hottest battle to be killed. Bathsheba became his wife and bore him a son.

  But what David had done displeased God.

  Seventy thousand of David’s men were cut down by the Angel of Pestilence. He was followed by the Angel of Death, who came to raze Jerusalem to its foundations. The king saw Death coming, colossal and irresistible, his drawn sword stretching over the city. As the angel reached the summit of Mount Zion, David and the elders of Israel, all dressed in sackcloth, fell to their knees. And David cried out: “God, O my God! I was the one who sinned. I was the one who acted wrongly. But these, the flock, what have they done? Let your hand lie heavy on me and on my family, but spare them!”

  The prophet Muhammad, God’s Blessings Be Upon Him, was fond of saying that David’s remorse after that day was not like that of other men. Each one of his tears equaled a tear from all the other creatures that walked upon the earth.

  But no amount of tears would deter the Angel of Death. As he was about to descend upon the city, he saw the ashes of Abraham’s ram lying in a pile at the altar’s base. They had lain there undisturbed for generations. It was at that very moment that a voice from up high thundered, “Enough now! Hold your hand!”

  God stayed the hand of His wrath over the Rock as He had once before, over the same spot, stayed the hand of Abraham over his son.

  Then He asked of David to go and raise an altar to Him on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. In those days Mount Zion lay outside the walls of the Jebusite city, dominating it from the north. A farmer owned the windswept summit, using the wind
to winnow his wheat.

  Dressed only in a loincloth, David obeyed, leading a procession of thirty thousand people up the mountain. They carried the Ark containing the broken stone tablets of God’s words atop an oxcart refurbished for the occasion. The procession made music, and David danced for all he was worth the whole way up the mountain. At every step he sacrificed an animal to God. By the time he reached the top, the king was drunk with ecstasy, drenched in blood.

  Araunah, who had been busy with his threshing, was horrified at the sight and prostrated himself at David’s blood-soaked feet, saying, “Why has my king come to his servant?”

  “To buy your threshing-floor,” said David, “to build an altar to the God who has defeated your God.”

  “O King,” said Araunah, “take my threshing-floor and make what offerings you see fit. Here are the oxen for the burnt offering, the threshing sleds, and the oxen’s yokes for the wood. I am your loyal servant.”

  But David refused, saying, “I will not make an offering to God from a place that has cost me nothing.”

  So Araunah accepted the sum of fifty shekels for the Mountain’s summit, and David placed the Ark of the Covenant on the Rock’s surface. And there he built an altar as had Abraham before him, and fire came down from Heaven and consumed his offering, just as it had Abraham’s.

  “So David was forgiven,” said Umar once Ka’b had finished. “Why then was the gift of the Temple denied him, to go to his son Solomon through Bathsheba, he whom the Lord kept safe from bloodshed and made king after his father?”

  “David was never forgiven completely,” exclaimed Ka’b. “His hands were too stained with blood. Nor did Almighty God want a Temple, O Umar. David set his heart on one because kingship had gone to his head. He wanted to be like the kings he had vanquished in battle, all of whom built Temples to their gods. And God disapproved: