by Kanan Makiya
It took the Caliph weeks to see me. This was our first meeting since his visit to the site just under two years before.
“Nicholas, the master-builder, served his Caliph well,” I argued with all the passion at my disposal. “He did excellent work and met his death in the service of God.”
“Not for the sake of God did your friend meet his end but for the sake of money,” Abd al-Malik replied.
Generosity comes to this Caliph like sweat to a stone, I thought to myself as I rode back to Jerusalem.
(photo credit 30.2)
All Is Vanity
When Nicholas fell from the Dome, no one was converting to Islam in Syria. The Church of the Resurrection was dazzling Muslims with its size, its magnificent mosaics, marbles, and gilded metalwork, not to mention the music that could be heard coming from inside. The great bells ascending and descending, the hypnotic chants of the monks, the high-pitched tones of the child choir, the ecstatic responses of worshippers to their priests—all this acted as a kind of bewitchment that worked to blur the word-filled edges of religious differences between men. Beardless men much further down the road to defection were asking what kind of victors we were who could not make pleasing things and sounds as well as those whom we have vanquished?
Abd al-Malik was completely dependent on Christian craftsmen like Nicholas for his building projects. And when criticism mounted that too many Christians were working on the Dome, Abd al-Malik snapped his fingers and said:
“Solomon turned to Hiram of Tyre for his architects, craftsmen, and materials. I am doing no more than he!”
The Caliph was enamored with the person of Solomon. Building had gone to his head. Before an assembly of courtiers and advisors, he said one day:
“David came out of the desert and waged a holy war of conquest for the land, an achievement which his son consecrated by building the Temple and making Jerusalem the capital of the sons of Ishaq and of the world. The sons of Ishmael can do no less.”
Ka’b had taught that Solomon’s House was endowed with columns that propped up a mass of gold so bright the eyes flinched. So, Abd al-Malik instructed that his Dome shine like a lamp on a moonless night. But whose jewels and gold would encrust the walls? Believers had none of their own. All had been acquired as spoils of war.
“Precisely!” Raja’ said. “Include those. Did not the noble Umar hang crescent-shaped Persian insignia in the Ka’ba as a sign of the submission of the King of Kings?”
Thus did pictures of crowns, bracelets, diadems encrusted with precious stones, breastplates, necklaces, and other ornaments and insignia make their way into the inner face of the drum and the arcades. They hung from golden branches bursting with fruit redolent of Paradise. Facing the Rock, the crowns of the kings whom the followers of Muhammad had trampled into dust circled and paid homage to it.
(photo credit 31.1)
I selected the trees from the pattern books of my artisans. Then, on pieces of wood that were to act as templates for my mosaicists, Raja’ ordered me to ink:
O ye People of the Book,
overstep not bounds in your religion;
and of God speak only truth.
In clear, unornamented letters which were to fit above the arches of the arcade, I wrote,
Believe in God and His Messengers,
and say not Three.
Refrain; it will be better for you.
God is One.
Far be it from His glory that He should have a son.
The Messiah does not disdain being a Servant of God.
The true religion with Him is Islam;
and they to whom the scriptures had been given
differed through jealousy.
Simple words. Orthodox words. God’s own words lettered in gold mosaic against a background of bright green. Every Muslim knew them by heart. And now they girdled the Rock. The craftsmen, who thus spelled out the errors of their own faith in glittering mosaic made to sparkle with mother-of-pearl, came from Antioch and Saloniki. A handful of the best were from that kitchen of thieves, Constantinople. The emperor’s artisans did not read Arabic. They made mistakes, which I did not uncover until after the tiles were glazed. Words were left out from one verse, which no one has so far noticed.
What is the point of addressing Christians inside a building they made with their own hands but are unlikely ever to throng? Abd al-Malik, it seems, had in mind his own defecting Muslims, not the followers of Jesus. This Caliph’s mind worked in convoluted ways. Why else would I be ordered to both wage polemics against the religion of Jesus and draw attention to the high regard in which he was held by Muhammad’s People?
“The Son of Mary is only a Messenger,” Raja’ said, acting as his master’s voice. “Is a Messenger any less a prophet for being His servant?” And so it came to be that, in the best-lit spot in the entire building, was written the commandment:
Pray for your Messenger and your servant,
Jesus Son of Mary!
If Abd al-Malik had hoped his Dome would supersede the Church of the Resurrection in beauty and excellence, he positively relished the fact that it would do so over the spot that Christians had desecrated. He wanted to rub the noses of the monks in the smell of his authority. Three hundred Guardians of the Noble Sanctuary—as the Temple Mount was being called—were appointed, including descendants of the seventy Jewish families that the caliph Umar had transferred from Tiberias to Jerusalem with my father’s help.
These Guardians maintained its cleanliness and were charged with carrying out rituals that Raja’ said had been practiced in the days of Solomon. Among the Jews were glassmakers, descendants of the men who ran the great workshops in Sidon producing mold-blown glass vessels for the Temple and the Jewish Feast of the Tabernacles. Abd al-Malik wanted them to make lamps for the Noble Sanctuary, which is most generously lit, as well as spittoons and storage jars. I personally oversaw the installation of five thousand lamps with their chains—four hundred and sixty-four of which were in the Dome of the Rock.
The salaries of the Noble Sanctuary’s extravagant number of Guardians are paid directly by the Treasury in Damascus, from the fifth share of the spoils to which the Caliph is entitled. Whenever one of these Guardians dies, the rule is that his first son take his place, followed, in turn, by his son, and so on for as long as the family continues to bring forth offspring.
At each of the Dome of the Rock’s four gates, from among the three hundred Servants, Abd al-Malik placed ten Jewish gatekeepers. Their duties included kindling the interior lights daily, using oil made from the seeds of the ben tree, a species of moringa. The ben oil is mixed with the purest olive oil to make the one hundred candles consumed on average every night. On the days that the Dome is closed to visitors, only its special Guardians may enter.
Such rituals were more lavish than anything I had imagined when I first agreed to work for a man in whom the grasp of religion seemed so firm—unlike the other princes of his House, whose religiosity dissipated as quickly as the enormous wealth they suddenly acquired from the conquered territories of Iraq and Syria. The inquiring, self-effacing man who had employed me to tell him Ka’b’s stories was gone. In less than seven years, he had changed into a king afflicted with the disease of caring only about how he appeared before others. On the day of the opening of the Dome, I heard him chuckle, “Solomon, I have outdone you.”
The monks were furious with Abd al-Malik’s Jewish appointments, the announcement of which coincided with the first appearance of copper coins issued in the Holy City showing a branched candlestick resembling a Jewish menorah.
(photo credit 31.2)
The air of the city crackled with anxiety. Stories began to circulate of Jewish glassblowers who threw their sons into the furnace for consorting with Christian youths. An all-out conflagration was narrowly averted when a former monk and his followers dressed in hair shirts were caught preparing to clear an old abandoned tunnel under the esplanade. The party had been intent on secretly storming t
he Noble Sanctuary on the eighth day following the opening ceremony for the Dome, the day on which their Savior had been resurrected. The men, fully expecting to die, intended to hold the Sanctuary long enough to destroy the Dome, thus fulfilling the prophecy of the destruction of the Temple before the coming of the Messiah.
The men had thirsted for death so much that it had made them slipshod in their preparations. They were spotted by a watchful Jewish Guardian of the Sanctuary. Just before his beheading, the monk who had led the group described a vision of the End of Days which had come upon him. He had seen a white horse walk through the portals of Heaven, which were opening in front of his eyes.
“He that sat upon the horse,” he said, “came in righteousness to wage war. The armies of Heaven followed Him, clothed in pure white linen. Out of the Rider’s mouth I saw a sharp sword big enough to smite nations. I saw the Beast and his false prophet surrounded by the kings of the earth, all gathered to make war against Him who sat upon the white horse. But the Beast was taken and cast alive into a lake of fire and brimstone. The rest were slain. Then I saw the souls of them that had remained steadfast. They came down from Heaven to reign in a New Jerusalem. The Holy City was filled, like a bride adorned for her husband, with the glory of God, her light clear as crystal and brighter than a jasper. In that New City, I was told, I would reign with Jesus for a thousand years, until the Hour when all the dead would be awakened.”
If I had wept for joy at resolving the cube of the blessed Ka’ba into the Dome of His Rock, it was because the number of the afterlife had materialized out of my lines in the sand, but after hearing that half-crazed speech, I had to ask myself if the resolution had been a blessing or an omen. Had grim destiny marshalled the strife needed to bring dead stones back to life as a harbinger of darker times to come? And was destiny’s herald happy or angry with the stones I had helped Abd al-Malik bring back to life?
Ka’b held that a beautiful building is like a beautiful woman bedecked with ornaments. Men play with her until they become besotted. If she gives no thought to her end, allowing herself to be played with, then she will be ravaged, her body defiled, her most intimate places exposed and violated. So it was with the rape of the Temple of the Hebrews, whose stones we had now turned into a Muslim Dome. Twice, this jewelled daughter of the sons of Ishaq had been despoiled, her ruin willed to be as vast as the sea.
“Why was her ruin so great?” I asked Ka’b.
“Because she drew eyes to herself, away from God,” he replied. “God wanted to show the People of the Torah that vanity is of no comfort in this life, much less the next. So he lit a fire under their feet until His Rock was laid bare to the world’s gaze. Jackals roamed over the place that David had promised would be his cornerstone and the followers of Jesus had spurned. No curse could compare with the one that descended over this holiest of places.”
I had paid no attention when Ka’b spoke of that curse in earlier days. But now that Abd al-Malik had exceeded himself, I remembered it. Were glitter and human artifice, however marvelous, about to replace the invisible order of justice and peace among tribes that Islam was intended to bring back into the world? Were we, the People of Muhammad, in danger of visiting upon ourselves the grim fate of which my father spoke, and which none but he had foreseen? What was in the Temple of Abd al-Malik to stop it from succumbing to the fate of its predecessor?
Building the Dome carried graver consequences than simply arousing the ire of local monks. After news of the huge sums being expended on the City of the Temple reached Arabia, Abdallah’s poets and scribblers accused the Caliph of “reviving the ways of an ignoble people, the Jews.” They pointed to prophecies that foretold of Jewish salvation at the hands of an Ishmaelite king. Unscrupulous wags dreamed up a whole stable of new sayings that they attributed to the Prophet. According to these, Muhammad himself had denigrated Jerusalem out of anger with the Jews.
“A prayer in the mosque of Mecca,” the Prophet was reported to have said, “is better than a thousand prayers in any other mosque except that of my mosque in Medina.”
Abd al-Malik’s propagandists countered with lies of their own: “You shall only fasten the saddles of your riding beasts for three mosques,” they had the Prophet saying, “the sacred mosque in Mecca, my mosque in Medina, and the farthest mosque in Jerusalem.”
Apocryphal tales sprang up like spring grass throughout the conquered territories. One young laborer, newly converted to Islam, told me that his father had approached the Prophet on the day of Mecca’s conquest, saying, “O Messenger of God, I vowed to pray in Jerusalem on this day. Should I go right away?”
To which the Prophet is supposed to have said, “Just one prayer in that place will absolve you of sin until you become as you were on the day your mother bore you.”
The war of words got nastier. Fanatics accused Abd al-Malik of changing one of the pillars of True Belief—the pilgrimage. Abd al-Malik, they said, intended to divert the pilgrimage to the new Temple he was building in Jerusalem, which would one day replace the Ka’ba.
Believers could see their Caliph in Damascus praying toward the Black Stone five times a day. But Abdallah was appealing to their feelings, not to their reason. They became confused. The learned among them worried that there would be no legitimacy left in a Christian province were their Caliph to repudiate the font of his authority and power in Arabia.
There was a grain of truth to Abdallah’s accusation. Abd al-Malik employed every trick at his disposal, short of force, to reduce the number of Syrians going to Mecca. He wanted Syrians to go on believing that his House was the sole surviving continuation of the Prophet’s own. His rule depended upon it. But it was hard to do that if people kept travelling backward and forward between Syria and the seat of rebel activities in Mecca. People might begin to think that the House of Hashim, from which the Prophet and his murdered grandson Husayn descended, lived on in the person of Abdallah who, although not a Hashemite, was bonded in kinship to the family of the Prophet on both sides. Abd al-Malik needed to distract his subjects, turn them away from thoughts of Mecca. What better than a massive public works program that outdid the uncircumcised in their own city!
Can a Temple refashion the clay of a man’s heart? The monks of Jerusalem thought so. Abdallah thought so. Above all, Abd al-Malik thought so. In fact, he counted on it.
“You see that old man?” Abd al-Malik said, pointing to an Arab praying in the Dome on the day of its opening. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he mumbled verses from the Holy Book to himself. “We were like him once, but our hearts have grown harder since.”
“His tears watch over us,” I replied, noting to myself that the old man was performing his prostrations so as to face the Rock and the Black Stone at the same time. “On the day they stop, we should worry.”
The Dome changed people’s hearts in many ways. If some of Abd al-Malik’s subjects were crying, the eyes of others were popping out of their heads in astonishment. You could see visitors silenced, with dropped jaws, standing beside others incanting incessantly, like the hoopoe bird, “What is this that our Caliph has built?”
You heard pious folk to whom the Dome had become a kind of salvation saying to one another, “This is not a building! It is a sweet-smelling vision descended from another world. Thanks be to God who has seen fit to bless the stricken followers of Muhammad.”
In truth, no Believer had laid eyes on so marvelous an artifact before—and built to cover the Lord’s own footprint, in a place that had witnessed a father and his son’s supreme test of faith. The same marks on the face of the Rock once used to drain the blood of my namesake were now used to drain water, the buckets and buckets of it needed to wash the Rock on the Monday and Thursday of every week. And not any kind of water—only the sweetest-smelling, further perfumed by a secret concoction of crushed roses, mistaqi, and saffron.
All kinds of new smells were enveloping and soothing suffering souls. On the morning of the same Monday and Thursday on which the Ro
ck was washed, the Jewish Guardians would prepare a mixture of ambergris, rose water, and saffron, and from these would make a special kind of incense intended only for the Dome. The rose water was pressed from the best red roses of Persia, left to mature and put in censers of gold and silver inside which lay an odoriferous Indian wood rubbed over with musk and myrrh extracted from Arabian trees considered divine. Then the Guardians would lower curtains made of variegated and decorated silk until they hung down among the pillars. Now the incense would encircle the Rock entirely, condensing and clinging to all its surfaces. When the curtains were raised, the subtle odor, bearing a hint of the fragrance of cloves and sweet as a zephyr’s breath, wafted out to fill the city.
“Come one, come all!” the public herald would call out. “Abd al-Malik’s star-studded Dome, intimating in its perfection the world to come, is open. Come and perform your visit.”
And the people would hasten to pray in the Dome as if pious and serene thoughts, not smells, had begun to exude out of every joint and pore of stone; they would depart saying that they had been reminded of Paradise, whose fragrance is of musk, camphor, and ginger. On whomever the odor of the incense was found, it was said of this person that he was “in the Rock.”
Myself, I tried not to enter the Dome after it was opened. It was too full of visitors, streams of people coming from the four corners of the empire, who wanted nothing more than to be able to say that they had the air of Paradise on their clothes. I would see them going to and fro from the rooftop of my old house, hear them telling one another, with rapt faces, how on the same two mornings of every week, the Guardians of the Sanctuary would enter the bathhouse to wash and purify themselves. They would go to a room in which there was stored the special perfume intended for washing down the Rock. There, they would take off their clothes and put on garments of silk brocade adorned with figures made for the occasion. A girdle embellished with gold would be fastened tightly around their waists. After dressing themselves, they would rub down the rock-face in front of all the visitors. When these visitors returned where they had come from, expressions of awe travelled back with them, rippling over the anxieties and fears of the age like a smooth, sweet-smelling balm.