by Kanan Makiya
We have seen thee turning thy face about
in the heaven; now We will surely turn thee
to a direction that shall satisfy thee.
Turn thy face toward the Holy Mosque of Mecca;
wherever you are, turn your faces toward it.
Those who have been given the Book know it is
the truth from their Lord; God is not heedless of
the things that they do.
Muhammad had inaugurated an earthquake on that day in Medina when he changed the Sacred Axis. His community was deeply troubled. “O Messenger of God,” they asked of him, “what is the condition of our brothers who died before this change?” But the Prophet would say nothing, which troubled them even more.
If Umar had been frightened by this turn away from the Rock of Moses, what about his counselor? Ka’b had prayed in the mosque where the change had taken place. Standing inside its walls he had foretold the conquest of the City of the Temple. In the course of the great oration that had brought Ka’b such fame throughout Arabia, his eyes must have lingered on the old niche in the middle of the northern wall facing Jerusalem. Two stones used to sit on either side of it. After the new verses were revealed, the stones were relocated to a new niche in the southern wall. The old niche was blocked up, but its impression remained. So men took to calling the place the Mosque of the Two Sacred Directions. After his speech, Ka’b would have had to turn to the new niche, his back to the Rock. How else to pray in a city that sits between Mecca and Jerusalem?
Ka’b’s distress had led the normally taciturn Umar to make one of his longest speeches. The Caliph of the Arabs found his tongue whenever he needed to suppress doubt.
“His word was sent down as an Arabic judgment,” thundered Umar. “Face the facts, old man—the torch has passed over the heads of those who were favored of old; it has been passed to the sons of Ishmael, not Ishaq. The Black Stone has replaced the Rock, just as Arabic has replaced Hebrew. Abraham’s descendants by Hagar, not Sara, are the newly chosen ones. You will find peace only after you accept God’s will.”
Ka’b could not accept it. Not because he was a descendant of Abraham through Sara. Nor because he was from the land of the Yemen, and a southerner with an inferior line of descent, according to his northern cousins. And certainly not because he was inclined toward the Jews, as Umar had implied (an implication that handed to Ka’b’s detractors the barbs and insults that would henceforth be used against him).
Perhaps Ka’b had lived a fantasy—call it the final delusion of an old man—that Medina had been a detour, and that Umar’s coming to the resting place of the pure would be a new dawn visible to anyone with eyes. Only now the Arab Redeemer, as he had dubbed him, had turned out to have feet of clay. Ka’b found that hard to accept in a man he thought of as his friend.
My father couldn’t accept Umar’s decision because he never understood it.
“Those who can see lift their eyes to the Heavens and contemplate its manna. Those who cannot see look at the onions in the ground,” he said to me by way of expressing his disappointment.
Umar’s piety was homespun and unrefined, his tolerance limited. Ka’b’s knowledge, his expertise in the Torah, had elevated him above other Believers at a critical juncture in the life of Muhammad’s fledgling community. Every Companion of the Prophet had his scripture expert, and circumstances brought Umar together with one of the best. Ka’b defended his sponsor’s coarseness, provided biblical justifications for his harsh treatment of his wives, and when Umar had his eldest son lashed to within a hair’s breadth of his life for having tasted wine, Ka’b stood against the approbation that descended like a sandstorm and vanished as quickly.
Umar was not an imaginer of genius like Muhammad. He could not cut through time and circumstance like a knife through cheese. He was a follower, a deputy of the Messenger of God, as he called himself. The Believers in Medina needed to believe in someone if they were to hold together as a community after the death of their Prophet. Abu Bakr had passed away after only two years. So they followed Umar, who turned following into a state enterprise; he incarnated the principle of following. Umar knew how to turn people into followers, how to rank and reward them in accordance with how good they were at it. Ka’b understood that this was not easy; his friend and protector had a gift. How else to capture half the world and its crown jewel in six short years after the Prophet’s death! It took a genius for following and for being followed.
The one thing that my father forgot, however, is that a follower is not, and can never be, the Messiah.
In the winter of the year in which he presided over the surrender of Jerusalem to those whom he deemed barbarians, Sophronius died. From his deathbed, the old Patriarch had struggled to defend Christian sites in the Holy City. This leader of men, whose life had been an affair of places not of the heart, died unhappy and broken, still in anguish over the concessions he had been forced to make. Even my father had come around to a grudging admiration of the stubborn priest into whose company he had been thrust by chance and circumstance.
The quarrel between Umar and Ka’b was also an affair of place.
So long as the Holy City remained in Christian hands and the problem was how to wrest it from them, the quarrel lay dormant, like a sleeping giant whom no one even suspected was there. When Umar said, “We are the People of the Sacred Direction,” Ka’b would agree. As soon as Umar chose to build south not north of the Rock, however, the giant woke up.
Shortly after Ka’b had been pressured into turning his back on the Rock, first on the Mount of Olives and then on Mount Moriah, I asked him a question, the kind only a boy can dare to ask.
“Why does God, who is the One, have two holy Rocks? And why did He change the sacred axis of prayer from one to the other, so that Jews face one Rock while we Muslims face the other?”
He replied by citing these lines of scripture:
To God belong the East and the West;
He guides whomsoever He will to a straight path.
Ka’b was talking around my question. He went on to say that, since there were three holy cities, not one, men were prone to make mistakes in ordering them by merit. What kind of mistake? He would not elaborate. Then he went on to say that the Messenger of God, unlike his Companions, was lenient in matters of direction. By way of illustration, he told me the story of Bara’ the son of Ma’rur, a Meccan with whom he used to be on good terms. Bara’ was a Believer long before the Exodus to Medina. He liked everything Muhammad had to say about God—with one exception. Bara’ was unable to pray with his back to the Ka’ba because all the idols of his ancestors were housed there.
“I decided,” he told Ka’b, “that I was going to be a follower of Muhammad in all things except this. I had to pray as my ancestors had done, facing the Stone that I was most comfortable with.”
Muhammad’s Companions, especially Umar, were outraged. Those were the days when everyone prayed facing the Rock of Moses, which they had never seen. Being God’s Messenger, Muhammad was asked to rule against Bara’. But he would not do so. All he would say was: “You would have had a Sacred Direction if you had kept to it.”
Every man interpreted these words in his own way. The lesson that Bara’ drew from the Prophet’s reply was to position himself south of the Ka’ba during prayer. In this way, he told Ka’b, his face would be aligned with the Black Stone and the Rock of Jerusalem at the same time. That is where my father got the idea that he put to Umar in the City of the Temple.
God had something in mind when he changed the direction of prayer, Ka’b kept on saying. But he could not give a satisfactory account of how the two Rocks came into being, or of the relation between them. Nor did he like talking about the subject. For upon the choice of which Rock to align one’s toes with during prayer, the most important friendship of my father’s life had foundered.
Ka’b never answered my question. Instead, he followed the example of Bara’, which meant avoiding at all cost praying insid
e the mosque that Umar had built. He located himself out in the open at prayer time, on the sanctuary esplanade, north of David’s Rock. Like Bara’, Ka’b had both holy Rocks in alignment with one another. He felt at peace, not because he knew he was doing the right thing but because he did not have to think about choosing between the two Rocks.
Growing Up in Jerusalem
My childhood ended six years after the conquest of Jerusalem, with the murder of the son of Khattab at the hands of a disgruntled Christian slave who blamed Umar for the amount of tax he had to pay. When Abu Lu’lu’a’s double-bladed dagger pierced the Prince of True Believers in the twenty-first year after the Exodus, its ugly tip found its way into my father’s heart. Suddenly he aged. “Your father has gone into his dotage,” my stepmother said as she fussed and rearranged and took over his daily routines in a way she had never done before.
An age of chivalry and noble religious purpose had come to an end. Along with Sophronius, dead of a broken heart, Abu Ubayda of the plague, and, most importantly, Umar, murdered by means so foul, died the kind of wisdom that had allowed so peaceful a transfer of sovereignty in the City of Peace. People began to turn their oaths into screens for their misdeeds. Recrimination filled rooms like foul-smelling smoke. Politics was stripped of its noble purpose to become the pure distillation of rumor.
“The luck of Islam was shrouded in Umar’s winding-sheet,” Ka’b took to saying.
My father had been too close to power to avoid getting entangled in the veils that were now being cast over men’s hearts. His warning to Umar, for instance, about the dangers facing him in the conquered territories, was taken for a prophecy of the Caliph’s assassination. The conversation that gave rise to this interpretation took place three days before Abu Lu’lu’a did his terrible deed in the presence of Abu Dharr, my father’s bitterest foe and a Companion of the Prophet from the earliest days. No sooner was Umar killed than word spread like wildfire that my father had foretold the precise manner and timing of his benefactor’s demise!
Ka’b knew the power of wagging tongues. Had he not been lifted by them from the status of a bedraggled and vanquished Jew to that of an Arabian seer within a short time of his arrival in Medina? He was visibly shaken at having acquired the dubious reputation of being the first person to have predicted the assassination of a Muslim Caliph. With my stepmother’s encouragement, he cut himself loose from public affairs, refusing all public engagements, including an invitation from Mu’awiya to become his counselor. All he wanted now was to be allowed to live out the rest of his years peacefully in Jerusalem.
I was apprenticed to a local bookbinder who had learned his craft in the Yemen. The craft was new to Muhammad’s People and in great demand. At first, my duties were to glue sheets of papyrus to the inside of two wooden boards that held the book together. As soon as I proved adept at this, I was upgraded to the outer covering—leather pasted onto the board and embellished in accordance with the book’s importance. I took to this task like a sparrow to flight. In no time I was sewing ornamental leather strips onto the outer leather cover and rubbing or scratching patterns into the surface. By the end of my formal apprenticeship, to Ka’b’s great pleasure, I was tooling leather and doing inlay work that was as good as that of any Greek or Christian craftsman in Jerusalem.
Umar’s successor, Uthman, was the first son of the House of Umayya to govern Muhammad’s People. Eight years had now passed since the conquest. Uthman was loyal to the Prophet. But the House to which he belonged had been of recognized nobility in the days of ignorance and had led the struggle against Muhammad from Mecca until its defeat in the year that my father and mother arrived in the Hijaz. The House of Hashim, from which the Prophet descended and which brought Mecca into the Muslim fold, had come into its ascendency at the expense of the princes, merchants, and noblemen of Umayya, who had to swallow their pride and mark time.
In the power struggle that now raged between the House of Hashim and the House of Umayya in Arabia, my father chose to ally himself with the latter. He supported the victor, Uthman, against Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet.
Under the rule of Uthman, the very Islam that had been such a thorn in the Umayyads’ side turned into their greatest opportunity. The time had come, they judged, to restore their House to glory. They were on their way to becoming a power to be reckoned with in Syria, especially after Uthman undid all of Umar’s strict edicts against Arab accumulation of wealth and ownership of land outside Arabia. An appetite for reckless spending and lavish display was unleashed upon Syria and the Holy Land.
The problem worsened when Uthman confirmed Mu’awiya as governor—he whose accursed father had fought pitched battles against the Prophet, and whose mother was called Hind the Liver-Eater, because she had eaten the liver of the Prophet’s uncle in front of all the knights of Arabia after the Believers had killed her father in battle. Such was the stuff of which Umayya’s sons were made, among whom I must not forget to include Abd al-Malik, the Caliph I now serve.
Uthman lavished the goods of the Believers on his own kin during the twelve years that he ruled. He gave his great-nephew Marwan, the father of Abd al-Malik, a fifth of Africa’s revenue. Those riches paved his family’s road to power. The Caliph was generous with himself as well; he died a wealthy man with estates valued at over one hundred thousand gold pieces, and large herds of horses and camels. By the end of his reign, he had earned the reproach of good men. To justify his nepotism, Uthman used to say, “Does not the Quran enjoin us to show kindness unto our near kindred?”
Uthman continued Umar’s practice of ruling from Medina. Apart from setting aside the gardens of Silwan for the city’s poor, he did not intervene in the affairs of Palestine. His new governor in Syria, however, more than compensated for this neglect. He encouraged Arabs from Medina claiming descent from the Yemen to settle in the City of the Temple. He also urged his kinsmen to buy land from Christians, especially in the areas adjacent to the sacred precinct. Mu’awiya had the esplanade cleared of what remained of the rubble. He rebuilt some of the walls and repaved the northern part of the platform. There was even talk of ambitious new building plans for the area. Nothing came of them during Mu’awiya’s years, first as governor and then as Caliph. Ka’b eagerly followed these plans, but he was counting on self-interest to drive the House of Umayya to do what was right by the Rock—seeing as how the House of Hashim was too firmly entrenched in Mecca and Medina, and too preoccupied with prophecy and matters of the next world. Ka’b, you could say, adopted a pragmatic stance toward Uthman’s reign, never having experienced himself its pecuniary and grasping nature, which my generation found so odious.
Before my peers and friends, many of whom had been born to followers of Jesus, my father’s hatred of all things Christian was embarrassing. Their illustrated manuscripts, which often came my way in the course of my work, were the models of our vocation. It was from such books that I learned to enclose the chapter headings of God’s Book in a gold frame surrounded by tracery, twisting lines, and geometrical patterns. On one occasion, I returned from work flushed with excitement because I had seen my first picture in a Coptic work, which I was rebinding. It was of a tree with branches curling upward into the sky and different, exquisitely painted birds sitting on each branch.
Ka’b went livid with rage, saying that the copying of living things is strictly forbidden; it is one of the great sins that will be severely punished on the Day of Judgment. “Even if it is a tree without spirit, or a bird that is not made in His image?” I protested.
“Yes,” he thundered, “because it is an imitation of the Creator’s activity! On the Day of Judgment, the makers of such images will be eternally condemned to try to breathe life into their pictures, and fail. They are like dogs, classed among the worst of creatures. Angels will not enter their houses.” Ka’b was angrier than I had ever seen him. He rued the day that he had put me in harm’s way by apprenticing me to one who dealt in such “Satanic filth,” as he cal
led the book.
We took to arguing. I would needle him with my escapades into the cavernous interiors of the great Church, whose builders, I imagined, must have burned with overpowering love for their work, the kind of love that only the young of heart understand. If the monks would not let me in through the main doors off the Cardo, I crept in through the back to find a spot all to myself, near a pillar or in the shade of an arcade.
I began to explore every nook and cranny of the Christian city around me. The dazzling monuments and churches worked a kind of magic on us children of the first generation of Muhammad’s followers to settle in the Holy City. When I sneaked into the Church of the Resurrection with my friends during High Mass, for instance, the music and liturgies in praise of God made my knees buckle under with emotion.
The Church of the Ascension, crowning the summit of the Mount of Olives and open to the sky to commemorate the place of Jesus’s passage into Heaven, was another favorite haunt. At the center of the tall tower lies a set of Jesus’ footprints, marking the precise point of his ascent. Besides these, carved out of the rock, stands an altar around which Christians gather for their rituals, under the blue dome of the sky. Against the round walls of this remarkable church rise columns; two in particular remind visitors of the men who said “Ye men of Galilee, why gaze ye into the sky?” The monks tell people that, if a man can squeeze between the wall and the column, he will be freed from his sins. There is not a pilgrim who will not attempt this feat after a fast lasting three days.