by Kanan Makiya
(photo credit 19.1)
A bright light emitted from lamps placed behind windows set below the tower’s parapet shines fiercely at night, lifting the steps leading into the valley and to the city out of the shadows. Their brilliance would lift my soul along with the shadows, bringing a sense of reverence that was both attractive and alarming. Headstrong as I was, I sought out priests and monks to talk to about these things.
Walking back home after long and stimulating discussion with my Christian peers, I could not help but see the Rock, which I passed on my way, as plain—no different from hundreds of other rocks in a city that was in any case endowed with more than its fair share of them. Its stories, which I all too often had heard regaled, appeared flat and featureless. My father’s zeal for it, I began to think in the waning years of my adolescence, was worthless, the most worthless human activity imaginable.
Ka’b and I had our most bitter exchange after one such ramble through the city. Amid the chickens that my stepmother reared, we were sitting on the roof of our house overlooking the esplanade. The evening sun had intensified the color and size of the surrounding mountains, giving them the appearance of heaving up toward the Holy City, presenting to her the threshold of the Arabian desert immediately above the hills of her own wilderness. The platform in the foreground had been cleared of all of its debris; it lay rolled out flat as a carpet before our eyes, empty and ghostlike, its paving broken by the looming presence of the Rock.
“Father,” I began, “I have been considering what you once said about how the color of the Rock and the Black Stone changed.”
“Oh,” he said. “… Are you referring to their defilement?”
“Well, yes,” I replied. “Defilement or veneration, I don’t suppose it makes much difference.”
“I don’t follow you,” he said, letting his voice and head drop as though preparing himself for the worst.
“An old man I was talking to in the city said that, if the Black Stone lost its brightness during the Age of Ignorance, it was not because menstruating women touched it, but because the people of Quraysh were in the habit of smearing the Stone with the intestines, excretory organs, and genitals of the animals they sacrificed. Inside these organs, they believed, reside the emotions most closely bound up with religion—remorse, grief, compassion, sex.”
“You make too much of old wives’ tales,” he replied, looking directly at me even as I tried to avoid his gaze. “And what of it?”
“These organs exude large quantities of blood when cut out of a carcass. It was this blood, rather than impure bodily fluids or dirt, that stained the Stone and turned it black. Think of how much blood our own Rock must have seen. Every day I see Jews wringing the neck off chickens and sprinkling the blood all over its surface. But long before we came here, before even the time of David, strange gods were worshipped on the Rock. Baal, god of all that was renewable about nature, was ritually killed and resurrected on its surface. The prophet Jeremiah confirmed that this was done through a surrogate, the most precious imaginable—a firstborn child. Have you ever considered that all that spilled blood is behind the change in the color of the Stone?”
“I don’t see why you are bringing yourself to a boil about this,” my father said.
“I want you to consider the possibility that the stones were always dark gray and mottled black.”
“Nonsense,” exclaimed Ka’b. “Those are not God’s colors. Somehow, sometime, the color changed. That is what is important.”
“This old man said something else,” I said, determined to press my point to the bitter end.
“I see you are going to tell me whether I want to hear it or not.”
“He said that slitting the throat of a sheep and smearing its blood to make a sacrifice is as primitive and barbarous as the practices of a Baal worshipper.”
“He did, did he …”
“Yes,” I said, “and he made much of the fact that neither the head nor the heart of an animal features in the sacrifices of Muslims and Jews.”
“Being the seat of reason and love, they have nothing to do with God,” said my father.
“His point,” I continued, “was that idolatry, which was not allowed in the front door of Jewish and Muslim worship, crept in the back. Stories such as those you have vigorously pressed upon me exude the same odor as those of the worshippers of Baal and the long-gone stone idols of Arabia. They invoke false worship and strange gods, he said—not the God of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad.”
“I never equate either the Rock or the Black Stone with God,” Ka’b said defensively. “I simply teach that, like the angels, they have a divine origin. And they stand alone, absolutely uniquely in the world, with no rivals and no equals. They are complete unto themselves, signs from Him for those who would see.”
“In other words,” I ventured, “they share in His attributes.”
“God preserve us from such a thought!” my father exclaimed.
“You said it, not I,” I replied, and pressed on, unable to stop myself. “In a certain class of human minds, the principle of idolatry is never truly eradicated. It is, after all, a principle that has given form to the faith of many different kinds of people throughout the ages. This principle requires that, for the exercise of faith, some tangible object should be available to the bodily senses—whether in the form of a relic, a holy spot with which an act may be associated, or an image that will represent what their minds are too lazy to conceive; it matters little whether this thing be the true one or not, so long as it answers their purpose. You have chosen to spend your life first searching, and then living beside, that Rock that you are convinced is the navel of creation. But who is it that speaks: Ka’b the Jew, or Ka’b the Muslim? Because the People of Muhammad are still unsure of themselves. I have met some who will tell you that the Black Stone, not that Rock, is the center of the world. Both can’t be right. It seems that neither the Jew that you were born, nor the Muslim that you became, have eradicated a principle from your soul that you know to be false.”
“A monk has got his claws in you!” Ka’b exclaimed in hurt and anger. “Is this why they walk upon the pathways that Jesus walked, embrace the Rock upon which he died, gaze starry-eyed at the lance that pierced his body, and stand on the Mount of Olives, where they say he ascended!”
“I despise that kind of monk!” I retorted.
“What kind do you find attractive, then?”
“The kind who believes that God’s Temple is holy, that it is not a specific place but rather in the heart of every true believer. The kind that holds that, when the Lord invites the blessed to their inheritance in Heaven, He does not include amongst their good deeds a pilgrimage to a rock—be it in Jerusalem or Mecca. Change of place brings a man no nearer to God, who comes to us only if the chambers of our soul are so filled with thoughts of Him that He can dwell and walk in them.”
“How can a Believer fill his heart with thoughts of Him,” Ka’b replied indignantly, “if you would deny him the evidence of God’s work? It says in the Book of Wisdom that God created the world according to number, weight, and measure. And it says that God saw all that He had made, and found it very good. There is a meaning, then, in the things with which He furnished the heavens and the earth. Abraham, David, and Solomon understood this meaning, and set out to provide us with proof of it from His works. That is the point of all my stories.”
“True religion is not storytelling,” I replied.
“What is it, then?”
“Love,” I said, “about which I have composed these verses”:
A church, a temple, or a Ka’ba Stone,
Quran or Bible or a martyr’s bone—
All these and more my heart no longer tolerates
Since my religion now is Love alone.
Those lines hit Ka’b like a bowl of cold water in the face. The old man reeled back, as though physically hit. He could not get up from the floor and pushed me away when I rushed to help. He tottered up. For a
moment, I thought he was about to be overcome with emotion. My heart was in my mouth. Somehow he managed to get to the stairs. He left without speaking a word. As my stepmother took over, I was flooded with guilt. God had given the Rock to Ka’b in the way that a cradle and a mother are given to a child; he couldn’t rightly turn toward a different cradle and mother. But there was nothing I could do. For weeks he would not look at me. Others had made the charge of idolatry to his face; my barbs were more subtle. Worst of all, they came from me.
Mine was a hollow victory that day. Can one love that which one cannot see, touch, or provide an account of? I had scored on rhetoric, not on substance. Perhaps I will be forgiven on account of my youth. Youth is vanity.
Shortly after our terrible exchange the Angel of Death, Izrail, began to stalk Ka’b. In imperceptible steps, his walk turned into a shuffle; his handwriting became less legible. He lost most of his teeth and lived on yogurt, rice, and mashed dates. Death was visibly eating little chunks out of his body. My father was already prone to attacks of dizziness and fainting, and, after my shameful performance, they came with greater and greater frequency. His memory appeared and disappeared, as though it were playing games with him.
The Rock, whose numinous presence and endless stories had once filled our evenings with lightness and mystery that bound father to son, was now a millstone around my neck. It was with such evenings in mind that my father had bought our house in the year of the conquest. He not only sought to live as close as possible to the center of the world but to make sure that no one in his family ever forgot that was where they lived. Who could have imagined that it would be at the price of such discord between my city and his?
The Death of Ka’b
Who are you?” were the last words I heard my father speak as Izrail hovered over him.
“I am he who separates loved ones!” the angel replied. “I am he who subdues the power of the sons of Adam. I will inhabit the grave with you until the coming of the Day. Not a creature lives that does not taste me.”
When God created Death and named him Izrail, He forced the other angels to watch. Izrail is so big he can hold the entire Earth in the palm of his hand. His wings stretch from the farthest point in the east to the farthest point in the west. So terrible was the sight of him that the other angels fell into a swoon for a thousand years.
Izrail brings us to Him one by one to await the Hour of our second life. The first began inside our mother’s womb. The second, which goes on eternally, will begin on the Day of Resurrection. In between lies the wait in the grave. The angel appears to each son and daughter of Adam differently—as he or she merits. For Believers, the angel spreads his wings wide; for sinners, he shuts them closed like pincers. It is not given to us to know how Izrail appears to anyone other than ourselves; each death, like each life, is different, if only in small ways.
The power to decide when our first life will end is not accorded to Izrail, however. That has been recorded from the beginning of Creation in the heavenly register, and is unalterably fixed. The Angel of Death is simply informed by a sign. When the time has come to take a soul, forty days before, a leaf on which is written the person’s name falls from a tree located between God’s throne and the holy Rock. As soon as the angel sees the leaf, it knows that a soul’s first life is about to terminate.
Ka’b’s leaf fell on the first day of spring in the thirty-fifth year of the Prophet’s Exodus from Mecca. It fell seventeen years after Umar, Sophronius, and he had been thrown together by chance and circumstance to talk about the places that God had chosen for them to inhabit. It fell in the year that the men of Iraq turned to the House of Hashim, saying to Umar’s successor, Uthman, “We’ll have no more to do with you!”
It fell at the right time. For it would have broken Ka’b’s heart to witness the great rift that was about to open up among the Believers. If he died at odds with his headstrong twenty-two-year-old son on matters religious and political, at least he was at peace with himself.
Praise be to God,
the All-merciful, the All-compassionate,
Master of the Day of Doom.
Ka’b’s leaf did not fall in the City of the Temple, as he had wished; it fell in the Syrian city of Homs. The shaikh who helped me bury him in the cemetery outside the city walls said that a speck of soil from the place that a man is destined to die in is planted in his mother’s womb. Ka’b’s demise in Homs had been written with the celestial reed in the Mother of all Holy Registers during Creation. And yet I would have moved mountains to have had his body interred in the Holy City. Tradition overruled me; it is against the custom of the followers of Moses and Muhammad to prolong a burial. A man has to be buried in the place where he has died. The speckled crow of fate, which so filled my father’s heart with love of a place, played a most unhappy trick by making him die among strangers.
We had gone to Homs at Mu’awiya’s insistence to provide information to the local governor about Abu Dharr, a Companion of the Prophet who had it in for my father. Mu’awiya was considering sending Abu Dharr back to Medina in disgrace for fomenting discord against his House. Abu Dharr had dared to imply in the local mosque of Homs that the House of Umayya was implicated in Umar’s assassination. My stepmother worried that Abu Dharr would exploit the nine-year-old rumor that Ka’b had predicted the assassination of Umar in order to implicate him in an Umayyad plot against Umar.
“Son of a Jew, are you trying to teach us our religion!” Abu Dharr spat at Ka’b in front of a large group of men. His enmity dated back to a public slight made by Ka’b out of zeal for Uthman. Everyone outside the circle of the House of Umayya thought Ali, not the weakling Uthman, ought to have become Caliph. Abu Dharr was a partisan of Ali, as was I at the time of my father’s death, as were all men of principle who had not entrusted the reins of their restless hearts to strange and corrupted passions. “But of what use is the sword in distinguishing Right from Wrong,” Ka’b would retort, “when it destroys the spirit together with the body?” The civil wars that tore Muhammad’s people apart over Uthman’s successor made me lose my zeal for politics. Would the bloodletting and sedition inside the Community have been averted had Ali ruled before matters soured as they did? I am no longer sure it would have made that much difference. From ignorance to wisdom to senility, time turns like a waterwheel in whose cycles we are held to ransom. Even the best of times are only a respite granted to us by God.
And yet it was foolish of my father to make an enemy of such a man. Because of his reputation, Abu Dharr was unassailable; men compared his piety and humility to those of Jesus. The harsh exchange between them left bitter memories that haunted Ka’b in his last years. Now it had brought him to Homs in Mu’awiya’s service. The governor of Syria needed to do damage to Abu Dharr’s name before exiling him to Medina. I wanted nothing to do with the whole business but had to go along because, at that stage, my father needed someone to tend to his needs.
The five-day journey up the Syrian coast exhausted Ka’b. The weather was unusually humid that summer. Upon arrival in Homs, he looked ashen and complained of dizziness and fatigue. I prepared a straw pallet at the inn and laid him down to rest. That is when I began to notice that his nose was more pointed than normal, and that the sockets of his eyes were slightly caved in. The tips of his ears were cold and flaccid to the touch. The most striking change was apparent in his complexion; it went dark and pallid. I thought little of these signs at the time. Now I realize that he was about to yield up the leasehold of his days.
I fretted, wiping his face and trying to arrange for help. Ka’b would have none of it. He wrapped his fingers feebly around my wrist to calm me down.
“When destiny digs in its claws, amulets of any kind are useless,” he said, grimacing with each breath. “To every man and purpose under Heaven there is a time—a time to be born, and a time to die. For some years now, I have seen Izrail lurking in the sagging of my flesh. Today, my stomach and entrails burn and throb; he has his hands clasp
ed tight like a band around my heart. I can hardly breathe. My rope is about to be cut.”
“Father! What would you have me do?”
“Anoint my head with oil. Put kohl around my eyes.”
I made his sunken cheeks and bald dome shine, while the tip of his nose was turning a light shade of blue and his nostrils flared up with each breath.
“Prop me up,” he rasped. “I want people to say that Ka’b met his Maker the healthiest of men.” With the innkeeper’s help, I pulled him up, pressing cushions into the small of his back and all around his sides, until he sat upright.
No sooner had we finished than his breathing got louder and more erratic. A rattling noise was emanating from somewhere deep inside his throat. He tried to speak. His face was pointed toward me as he spoke his last words, but his eyes were looking through me as though into a void. How long we remained in that state, I no longer remember. All I remember is the unspeakable ugliness of this last stage of our lives, even in the absence of violence or disease.
Ka’b did not die well. Perhaps he had escaped life’s woes for too long, like a man marked not by fate but by God’s grace. It is harder to give ground after twice as many seasons as is afforded other men. Ka’b left unwillingly to his allotted place in the beyond, letting out a bellowing roar as his head jerked backwards into the pillows. He gasped as though he were choking and being strangled to death, and then he threw his hands up to clutch at his throat. The calm and repose with which he had prepared for this moment were gone. His eyes bulged out of his head and looked terrifying. Somehow the kohl had smudged and spread around the sockets in big smears. Panic-stricken, he tried to call out, but the only sound to emerge from his lips was a hoarse rattling. As death’s flood brimmed up in his heart, his last breath was a long, gurgling exhalation.