The Rock
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Other sources: The Prophet named his wife Aisha, Umm Abdallah, the mother of Abdallah, because she was unable to conceive and Abdallah ibn al-Zubayr was her sister’s son and the first child born a Muslim in Medina; see Abbott, Aishah. On Yazid’s new rules of punishment, which resulted in the execution of 8,000 men in Basra, see Hadi al-Alawi, Tarikh al-Ta’dhib fi al-Islam (Markaz al-Abhath wa al-Dirasaat al-Ishtirakiyya fi al-’Alam al-’Arabi: Beirut). The compliment to Abd al-Malik, that he would one day rule the Arabs, was not actually uttered by Mu’awiya but by Abu Hurayra. Cited in Rabbat’s “The Meaning of the Umayyad Dome of the Rock.”
“He who takes revenge after forty years is in a hurry” is cited in Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society, vol. 5. The description of Hajjaj as a “gray wolf who breakfasts poorly” is adapted from a line in a poem by Al-Shanfara Al-Azdi; see Irwin, Night and Horses. Al-Hajjaj’s use of the sacred rite of pilgrimage as a ruse, which comes from Baladhuri and Tabari, suggests that the Syrian army had not changed the site of their canonical obligations. Why then was Abd al-Malik accused by Ya’qubi of wanting to divert pilgrims? The problem, it seems to me, is one of understanding how such an accusation actually appeared to be true to those who made it out of hostility to the Umayyads, while being false in its most extreme formulations. Details on the bombardment of the Ka’ba are from Peters’s Mecca. Descriptions of the harsh treatment of the people of Mecca and Medina in the wake of Abdallah’s defeat can be found in Tabari’s History, vol. 22. The verses praising Abd al-Malik are from the same source; Tabari attributes them, however, to Bakr b. Wa’il, following Hajjaj’s success in crushing rebellion in Iraq in the year 74 after the hijra.
Meeting Abd al-Malik
Abd al-Malik’s connections to Jerusalem, and his conception of Solomon as a model of the ideal Muslim ruler, are discussed in Rabbat’s “The Meaning of the Umayyad Dome of the Rock.” On the desert swallowing up Yazid’s army, see Wilferd Madelung, “Abdallah b. al-Zubayr and the Mahdi,” in Journal of Near Eastern Studies 40:4 (1981), pp. 291–305. The phrase “Naught is as His Likeness” is from the Quran 42:9, and the mention of the Day of Resurrection, when the Heavens shall be rolled up by God with His right hand, is from Quran 39:66. The plausibility of a conversation between Abd al-Malik and Ishaq on the footprint is my extrapolation from sources that have already been discussed (Waqidi, Rabbat, Van Ess). The details of a typical day in the life of an Umayyad Caliph are from Mas’udi’s description of Mu’awiya’s habits in Muruj; Abd al-Malik would have inhabited the same palace. The Caliph’s command that he not be addressed with flatteries or exhorted to righteousness is also from Muruj, but in a conversation with al-Sha’abi, reputed to be his only confidant.
Unlike his mentor Mu’awiya, Abd al-Malik’s character comes across as very fragmented from the sources. Ibn Sa’d tells us that he witnessed the murder of Uthman as a boy of ten, suffered an attack of smallpox in his youth, was not prone to speaking much, had his teeth held together with bands of gold, and had the head of his former friend, Mus’ab ibn al-Zubayr, Abdallah’s brother, stuck on a pike in order to set an example; his meanness and tendency to violence are attested to by Mas’udi; more stories of his meanness, along with his foul breath, bad teeth, and the nickname Abu al-Dhuban, Father of Flies, are from Baladhuri’s Ansab al-Ashraf (Beirut, 1996). On the other hand, Baladhuri also tells us that Abd al-Malik was a very pious man before becoming Caliph and one of the four most learned men in Medina. See on this Rabbat, “The Meaning of the Umayyad Dome of the Rock.” By all accounts, the man who finished building Islam’s first great monument in the same year that he stoned and flattened the Ka’ba was an orthodox and observant Muslim. Putting all of this into a coherent picture required considerable license; I opted to leave the Caliph’s character and motives somewhat enigmatic and mysterious.
Abd al-Malik’s reference to the place of Adam’s Fall are from traditions attributed to Ibn Ishaq, as edited by Newby. Adam’s head poking into Paradise is in Tabari’s History, vol. 1. Al-Akhtal was a Christian Arab who was considered the most accomplished eulogist of the Umayyads. Irwin writes that the name al-Akhtal means either one “whose ears are flabby and hang down” or “one who is loquacious.” Ahktal’s fondness for wine is apparent in his poetry; he was the earliest poet in the Islamic period to compose a piece in its celebration. His antics at the Umayyad court, and the story of his appearance before Abd al-Malik drunk, including the exchange between the two men, I found in Jurji Zaydan’s Tarikh Aadab al-Lughah al-Arabiyya, vol. 1, The History of Arabic Literature (Cairo, 1957). Both Zaydan and Irwin discuss the growth of poetry and patronage in the Umayyad court. On the truce Abd al-Malik negotiated with the Byzantine emperor, allowing him to focus resources on Ibn al-Zubayr in Mecca and building the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, see Khalid Yahya Blankenship’s The End of the Jihad State (State University of New York Press, 1994).
Mecca and Jerusalem
If it was not the story of the Prophet’s miraculous journey from the Rock, or inner-Islamic political rivalries, that gave rise to Abd al-Malik’s decision to engage in the enormous undertaking of building the Dome—which cost him seven years of Egypt’s revenue, his richest province—then why did he do it? It is impossible to read Abd al-Malik’s mind from the sources. Accepting that he was an orthodox Believer suggests that underlying his decision lay deeply contentious and unresolved issues among Muslims of the seventh century having to do with the relative sanctity of Arabia versus the “Holy Land”—a phrase which often included Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. A new religion was in the process of defining itself in relation to its earliest roots in Judaism and the overwhelming cultural and political fact of Christianity in the newly conquered territories. It would have been imperative for Abd al-Malik both personally and politically to justify himself religiously by elevating in importance the status of Jerusalem over Mecca; how he might have gone about doing so is what this chapter speculates upon.
The traditions extolling the sanctity of Jerusalem are among the oldest in the Islamic tradition; see Moshe Sharon’s extremely important “The ‘Praises of Jerusalem’ as a Source for the Early History of Islam,” Bibliotheca Orientalis 49:1/2 (January–March 1992). Priscilla Soucek considers “that by the end of the first century of the Islamic era the Temple area was regarded as one of the holiest places in the world.” See her important article “The Temple of Solomon in Islamic Legend and Art,” in J. Gutman, ed., The Temple of Solomon (Missoula: Scholar’s Press, 1976). Al-Azraqi, the chronicler of Mecca’s history, reports that Meccans were preoccupied with disproving the notion that Jerusalem was “greater than the Ka’ba, because it [Jerusalem] was the place to which the Prophets emigrate because it is the Holy Land.” This kind of concern simply confirms the prevalence of the idea. Cited in Grabar, Formation. I have also drawn upon Busse, 1968, and H. Busse, “Jerusalem and Mecca, the Temple and the Ka’ba: An Account of Their Interrelation in Islamic Times,” in The Holy Land in History and Thought, edited by Moshe Sharon (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988); S. D. Goitein, “The Sanctity of Jerusalem and Palestine in Early Islam,” from his Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966); Abdul Aziz Duri, “Jerusalem in the Early Islamic Period: 7th–11th Centuries A.D.” in Jerusalem in History, edited by K. J. Asali (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1990).
Other sources: Stories of Abraham’s critique of his father’s idolatry were in circulation in the closing centuries B.C.E; see Kugel’s The Bible as It Was. These found their way into the Quran (19:41–50, 9:115). Other verses from the Quran relevant to the chapter are 53:38, 4:124, and 18:9. Hebron was in all likelihood designated as Abraham’s burial place during the Umayyad period, not earlier. I am unaware of particular instances of how the story in Genesis (16:10–13 and 21:16–19), of two sons born of the same father but separated by jealousy, was actually used in the tradition to symbolize the relationship between Judaism and Islam; Ishaq’s line of reasoning with Abd al-Malik on this matter is therefore my invention.
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The relationship between weaving and geometry is explored in Joseph Rykwert’s On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). On Mecca’s growth around the pre-existing sanctuary of the Ka’ba, and on the Black Stone as the kernel of the Ka’ba, see Peters’s Mecca and Rubin’s “The Ka’ba.” Rubin cites Ibn Jurayj, who was born in Mecca in the eighth century and had an excellent knowledge of its history; he relates that the Ka’ba was originally an ’arish, the word by which the Arabs used to refer to the tabernacle built by the Israelites in the time of Moses (and which was the precursor to the first Jewish temple). “The report of Ibn Jurayj seems to imply,” writes Rubin, “that the Ka’ba was originally built and treated like a similar sacred tabernacle, in which the dominant element was the kiswa [the black cloth cladding the building].” Busse also describes the relationship between Yom Kippur and the Ka’ba’s annually renewed clothing of black in “Jerusalem and Mecca, the Temple and the Ka’ba.” The idea of the Ka’ba being “the first sanctuary to be established on earth” is based on the Quran (22:30), which refers to the Ka’ba as “the ancient house.”
Sons conspiring against their own souls is drawn from the Quran 6:123. The hand of fate is a common image in Arabic poetry, and the idea of God’s Messenger raising witness against his own people is taken from Quran 2:143. On the uses of the language of wonder in Arabic literature and letters, I have benefited from Roy. P. Mottahedeh’s wonderful article, “Aja’ib in the Thousand and One Nights,” pp. 29–39 in The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society, edited by R. G. Hovannisian and G. Sabagh (Cambridge University Press, 1997). The embrace of the Black Stone and the Rock is one among many harmonizing traditions (the others deal with the Day of Judgment and the Dome as the heir of Solomon’s Temple). I have taken this particular idea from the eleventh-century scholar and resident of Jerusalem, Abu Bakr al-Wasiti, embellishing his words with the addition of an erotic dimension present in early Jewish sources; see Sharon’s article citing al-Wasiti, “The ‘Praises of Jerusalem’ as a Source,” and Patai’s Man and Temple for the erotic imagery.
A curious tradition attributed to Ka’b arguing how the Black Stone and the Rock are connected in the larger scheme of things appears in Kitab Ba’ith al-Nufus ila Ziyarat al-Quds al-Mahrus (The Book of Arousing Souls to Visit Jerusalem’s Holy Walls) by Burhan al-Din ibn Firka al-Fazari, born in Damascus in the thirteenth century. It reads: “Verily, the Kaaba is in an equivalent position to the Frequented House in the Seventh Heaven, to which the angels of Allah make pilgrimage. And if rocks fell from it, they would have fallen on the place of the Rock of the Temple of Mecca [i.e., the Black Stone]. And, indeed, Paradise is in the Seventh Heaven in an equivalent position to the Holy Temple (in Jerusalem) and the Rock; and if a rock had fallen from it, it would have fallen upon the place of the Rock there. And for this cause the city is called Urushalim, and Paradise is called Dar al-Salam, the House of Peace.” Translated by Mathews (1949).
One of the compilers of these early traditions in praise of Jerusalem, Ibn al-Murajja, who wrote his Kitab Fada’il Bayt al-Maqdis in the first half of the eleventh century, cites a prophecy which he attributes to Ka’b al-Ahbar: “It is written in some holy books: I [God] will send to Aryusalaim, which means Jerusalem, and the Rock which is called the haykal [Temple] my servant Abd al-Malik, who will build you and adorn you. I shall surely restore to Bayt al-Maqdis its first kingdom, and I shall crown it with gold and silver and gems. And I shall surely send to you my creatures. And I shall surely invest my throne of glory upon the Rock, since I am the sovereign God, and David is the King of the Children of Israel.” Cited by Elad, Medieval Jerusalem.
A Moment of Decision
Whatever the reasons for building the Dome of the Rock, just like its great predecessor the Temple of Solomon, the project would have been controversial in a Muslim—Arab context that was still simple and pure in its habits and ways. David had after all positively ached to build the Temple but was unable to do so, perhaps because building a Canaanite—Baal temple—which is what Solomon built—was perceived by a majority of the Israelites at the time as a concession to the despotic systems of kingship they were ideologically against. Direct evidence for this tension at the heart of the whole Solomonic enterprise is in the Bible (2 Samuel 7: 5–7). “Go tell my servant David,” says God, speaking to David’s seer and counselor, Nathan, “would you build a house for me to dwell in? I have never dwelt in a house [before] but have been moving about in a tent as a dwelling.” What is this if not an argument against kingship of the sort Umar ibn al-Khattab would have felt completely at home with? Both Solomon and Abd al-Malik did not agree, and for much the same reasons, although perhaps Solomon had his doubts (I Kings 8:27), which are cited by Ishaq as he struggles with his own doubts over the idea of building over the Rock.
It is worth noting, in view of the origin of Solomon’s Temple in the tentlike structure of the ancient tabernacle used by the ancient Israelites, that Abd al-Malik decided to build his temple in the shape of a qubba, which today means “dome,” or “cupola,” in Arabic, and by extension has become a reference to the whole building. But in the seventh century, qubba meant “tent,” or some variety of a temporary covering like the Ka’ba’s covering of black cloth, the kiswa. The use of the word qubba in the inscription on the outer face of the octagon of Abd al-Malik’s building is, as Grabar puts it in The Shape of the Holy (p. 64), “the first example of a new usage for a traditional Arabic word.” With these comments in mind, it is interesting to return to the image of the destruction of the Temple of Solomon in al-Biruni’s fourteenth-century manuscript (shown in “Finding of the Rock”). The Muslim illustrator has, it is worth noting, imagined Solomon’s Temple as a tented dome modelled after the Dome of the Rock.
The diameter of Abd al-Malik’s qubba, as K. A. C. Creswell has measured it, is “within less than half a metre” of that of the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, strongly suggesting that the Dome of the Rock, in addition to all its other meanings, had to rival the Church of the Resurrection; see Creswell, “The Origin of the Plan of the Dome of the Rock,” British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, Supplementary Papers no. 2 (1924). When al-Muqaddasi, a resident of Jerusalem, asked his uncle why Abd al-Malik’s successor, his son Walid, spent so much money building the mosque of Damascus, his uncle replied: “O my little son, thou hast not understanding. Verily al-Walid was right, and he was prompted to a worthy work. For he beheld Syria to be a country that had long been occupied by the Christians, and he noted there the beautiful churches still belonging to them, so enchantingly fair, and so renowned for their splendor, as are the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Churches of Lydda and Edessa. So he sought to build for the Muslims a mosque that should be unique and a wonder to the world. And in like manner is it not evident that Abd al-Malik, seeing the greatness of the martyrium [qubbah] of the Holy Sepulchre and its magnificence, was moved lest it should dazzle the minds of the Muslims and hence erected above the Rock the Dome which is now there.” Cited in Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art.
On the importance of books as artifacts, see the delightful story of the Holy Scroll in al-Mahalla, a provincial capital in the Nile delta, in Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society, vol. 5.
The Father and the Son
There are only two, nonexclusive ways that the Jewish symbolism of the Rock could be appropriated for Muslim purposes and used to rebut Christian religious claims to Jerusalem: through the Rock’s association with God and his center of Creation, and through its association with the “Friend of God” and the first Muslim, Abraham, a prophet who was the ancestor of the Arabs and in the Muslim view, neither a Christian nor a Jew. The hypothesis that the latter might have been the case was powerfully put forth in the seminal essay by Grabar, “The Umayyad Dome of the Rock.” But between the story of Abraham’s trial as told in Genesis (22:16–18), and the Muslim version in the Quran (37:99–11
0), an important change had taken place. The son, who is not identified by name in the Quran and whom the majority of early traditionalists thought of as Isaac (Ishaq), became an active participant in his own sacrifice. “My father, do as thou art bidden,” he tells Abraham in the Quran, “thou shalt find me, God willing, one of the steadfast.” The interregnum was of course filled with the enormous influence of Christianity and the example of the supreme sacrifice of the Christian Messiah on Golgotha. Judaism had to confront the same influence long before Islam, the difference being that Muslims found the figure of Christ admirable and attractive, whereas Jews did not. And still the pressure to prove one’s own foundational act of sacrifice to be at least equal to that of Christ remained great. Shalom Spiegal’s translation and marvelous 140-page commentary on a twelfth-century poem by Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn, which retells the story of the Akedah, provided me with my inspiration for the writing of this chapter: See his The Last Trial: On the Legends of Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). Spiegal argues that the requirement of blood for expiation of sins is a Talmudic teaching that predates Christ. Certainly that was also true of the Arabs before Islam, as the story of Abd al-Muttalib’s sacrifice from Ibn Ishaq’s Life demonstrates. Two other books were helpful: Jon Levenson’s treatment in The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son; and Frederic Mann, ed., The Sacrifice of Isaac in the Three Monotheistic Traditions (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1995). The words of the son of Abraham cited in the last paragraph were attributed to him by Ibn Ishaq, the eighth-century biographer of the Prophet, as edited by Newby.