The Rock (12 page)

“What made him become a monk?” Umar wanted to know.

“Alexandria,” Ka’b replied. “The city attracts them and turns out new ones all the time. Its streets are bursting with black-robed monks, scuttling past colonnades, holding secret little conclaves, and conducting arcane debates.”

“Travelers passing through Medina,” said Umar, “tell fantastic tales about this city. They say that its streets shine so bright, awnings of green silk have to be hung over them to relieve the glare.”

“Every wall and pavement is clad in white marble,” Ka’b replied. “So white it is painful to the eyes.”

“A white city,” pondered Umar, “born of the whim of a soldier who was in a hurry to conquer the world, and peopled by Greek-speaking Jews and Christians who dress in black—a striking combination. I wonder if it is the glare of the marble that made the monks wear black?”

“The city is an unnatural mix of incompatible elements, each of which pulls in a different direction,” said Ka’b. “Hence its susceptibility to licentiousness and abominations of the flesh. Caught between the sea and a desert that stretches into the heart of Africa, Alexandria chose to face seawards, toward Constantinople and all things Greek, turning its back upon its own people. In that orientation lie the seeds of the city’s ruin.”

“Such a fickle place, yet you say it has formed our man and shaped his thoughts, not Jerusalem,” Umar said.

“Jerusalem faces the desert,” Ka’b replied, “and just as Alexandria never really belonged to its desert interior, so does our
man Sophronius not really belong to Jerusalem. His allegiances lie elsewhere.”

“You are speaking in riddles, my friend.”

“The arms of the cross span this man’s life,” explained Ka’b. “He has spent the better part of his life combating heresy in Egypt. There Christians have been at loggerheads with one another for as long as anyone can remember. He believed Egypt to be in dire threat of succumbing to the wrong kind of Christianity, and he stayed to heal the growing divide within Christendom. The danger was greatest in Alexandria. Sophronius believed he could change things. But he had no idea what he was getting himself into. Rivers of blood had been spilled over the Christian soul of Egypt—and nowhere as much as in Alexandria, a city of foreigners that hated all things foreign. And what was Sophronius if not a foreigner!”

“What is the argument between the Christians all about?” asked Umar.

Ka’b tried to explain that it all boiled down to the true nature of Christ. Did the Son of Mary have a single divine Nature, one that subsumed the human, as the local Copts believed? Or did He have two natures, divine and human, as the Orthodox, led by Sophronius, taught.

“How can any man have more than one nature?” an incredulous Umar wanted to know.

“Because all Christians uphold the heresy that Christ is both the Son of God and the Son of Mary,” my father explained. “From this foolishness, many problems ensue. To extoll His divinity, as the Copts do, diminishes His humanity. As far as Sophronius is concerned, this belief renders meaningless the actual, physical sacrifice of Jesus on behalf of mankind, the pain that Sophronius says Jesus literally and truly experienced on the cross. The Copts, on the other hand, believe that placing undue emphasis on the humanity of Jesus is a heresy in the opposite direction that diminishes the transcendent nature of God.”

“And the ordinary people of Alexandria,” Umar asked, “do they concern themselves with such questions?”

“They are obsessed with them. If you ask a man on the street how much a certain thing costs, he is quite likely to reply with a discourse on the Immaculate Conception. And when you ask him the price of bread, he will reply that, before he can answer such a question, it must be put into the larger context of whether the Father is greater than the Son, or whether the two should be put on an equal level. If by now your head is spinning and you decide to ask your innkeeper to prepare a bath in which to relax, he is likely to demand that you agree with him in advance that the Son was made out of nothing, and not from his mother’s womb.”

“Where does the emperor of the Romans stand on all this?”

“All he wants is a united Church,” replied Ka’b. “Doctrinal squabbles bore him. For this purpose, he had his cronies in Constantinople invent a third doctrine, a compromise between the two that proposed that Christ had two natures, as the Orthodox insisted, but only one will, as the Copts insisted. Everyone saw through this crass maneuver. Nonetheless, it was proclaimed the official doctrine and enforced at the point of the sword.”

“I gather from all this that Sophronius’s mission in Egypt failed.”

“Miserably,” Ka’b replied. “He made a fool of himself during the debate of the council of church officials in Alexandria. I am told that he fell on his knees at one point and begged his opponents to repent the error of their ways.”

“And did they?” asked Umar.

“Of course not.”

“What then did the old man do?”

“He promptly wrote a long treatise on the dual nature of Christ,” Ka’b said, “which he dispatched to all the Patriarchates of the Byzantine empire. I am told that it is unreadable and greatly annoyed his emperor. However, no sooner had he sent it than our armies reached the gates of Jerusalem.”

“A propitious omen,” remarked Umar. “I still don’t understand why such a man, so advanced in years, would choose to spend his twilight years in Jerusalem.”

My father explained that Sophronius had spent his youth
in Alexandria writing passionate lyrics about the holy sites of Jerusalem. He spent his mature years fighting for the belief that the person of Jesus is on the same level as his divinity. Finally, when he was old and defeated, that same longing for the unattainable, which was the only constant of his turbulent life, brought him for the first time to the actual place where Jesus was born and died.

“My dear Ka’b,” Umar said with a gleam in his eye, “I am told that such longing for a promised land is a state of mind perfected by the Jews. I want to know how a heathen city, infamous for its self-indulgence, can fashion a Christian monk who then pines after a different city than the one that made him! And when he finally reaches the object of all this yearning, he becomes so attached to the place that he refuses to leave it even after it is abandoned by its cowardly commanders. This Patriarch is a man of principle, undeterred by the odds. I respect that.”

The last thing Ka’b wanted to do was to make Umar more interested in Sophronius. That crafty old fox had managed to stay in control without an army to speak of even as every city, town, and hamlet in Syria fell to our forces. His strength of purpose and personal style had proved persuasive enough to bring Umar to Jerusalem. Ka’b pinned his hopes of installing more caution in the Caliph regarding the kind of a Christian that he knew the old man to be.

“The problem, O Umar, is that, for Sophronius, the places of Jesus’ life, and especially his death, hold deep meaning. He believes that, if he touches the rock upon which Christ died, or walks upon the cobblestones that he walked upon, he will receive more of Christ into himself. It is not in the nature of a man like this to be reasonable with us, whatever the show he may be about to put on today.”

“Am I dealing with an idolater,” asked Umar, “or a man of holy scripture who is doing the best he can to defend his city and his people?”

“That,” replied Ka’b, “is what we are about to find out.”

T
he tent in which Sophronius awaited Umar was not big enough to accommodate the large retinue the Patriarch had brought along with him. Most of the men were lingering outside when Umar, Abu Ubayda, and Ka’b arrived. Of the Christian delegates inside the tent, there was no doubting which was the Patriarch. He had come in full ecclesiastical dress, gold chains draped over his neck and shoulders, and long silk robes trailing behind in the dust.

Umar was dressed in the same worn-out, coarsely woven battle tunic that he had been using on the road. He was contemptuous of finery of any kind, especially when used to enhance the body of a man. There were times, even after he had become Caliph, when he would lead the Friday prayers in attire so ragged and worn you could see through the holes in his shirt. Worst of all, the Caliph was self-righteous about his attire, often to the point of embarrassing his daughters and those who kept his company. Arriving late for prayers one day, he said that he had been held up washing his shirt, the point being that one shirt was more than enough for a true Believer. “Nothing is allowed to Umar,” I once heard him say to Ka’b, “beyond a garment for winter, one for summer, and enough for pilgrimage and the rites, along with food for his household but at the middling rate.”

Such stories about the Caliph were commonplace in Medina, but they had not yet reached the ears of Sophronius. My father felt a wave of relief flood over him when he realized that the Patriarch did not know something known by every urchin in Arabia.

If Sophronius felt the incongruity of his attire, given the appearance of the man to whom he was about to surrender his city, it didn’t show. Looking directly at Umar, he rose from his seat, bent slightly at the waist, and, through a weasel-faced translator on his right, extended his greetings:

“Your arrival from so great a distance does us honor, O Prince. We who are at your mercy greet you, as do the priests and the Church that I represent, the very same church that with deepest concern is entrusted to keep watch over the inhabitants of this fair city, all of whom call on the name of Our Lord.”

“Your vigilance in the service of God is to be commended,” replied Umar tactfully.

“If we were not vigilant,” said Sophronius, “we could not excuse ourselves before Him who willed that we should be the sentinel.”

Umar sat, and everyone followed suit. Up until then everything about the terms of the city’s surrender had been done verbally. Imagine the surprise of the Muslims when the translator suddenly produced two scrolls from inside his robes and explained in stilted Arabic that he was holding the draft of a covenant based on the discussions held with Abu Ubayda. In the interests of lasting peace, said he, the Patriarch had committed these to writing. From the expression on Abu Ubayda’s face, all this came as a surprise. Only now did Umar realize that his adversaries had something more than just his word in mind.

The Christian translator prepared to read out the Arabic version, while keeping the Greek one rolled up in his hands. Umar motioned for him to stop, and reached out for the scroll, which he began to read to himself.

“This is a document submitted to Umar, son of Khattab, King of the Arabs, by the Christians of the Holy City.”

“Am I now a king?” Umar asked, turning to Abu Ubayda who was seated on his right.

“If you tax the land of the Believers too heavily and put the money to any use that the Law does not allow,” Abu Ubayda replied, “then you are a king, and no Caliph of God’s Apostle.”

“By God!” Ka’b overheard Umar saying to himself, “I know not any longer whether I am a caliph or a king. And if I am about to become a king, it is a fearful thing.”

“A turban is your crown!” exclaimed my father. “A plague on them and their kings!”

Umar returned to the text.

“No Jew will be authorized to live in Jerusalem.”

Apart from this one sentence, the draft conformed with what had been agreed upon previously. Umar did not say anything; he just asked for a pen, and crossed out the offending sentence. He
did it slowly and deliberately so that everyone inside that tent could see him doing it. I bring this up because so much doubt has been cast in recent years on whether or not the Caliph left the ban on a Jewish presence in Jerusalem in force or not.

The Christians are responsible for the confusion that later transpired. Long after Umar’s departure, when their interests in Jerusalem looked as if they might be threatened because of new settlers, they took to flourishing a document they called the “Covenant of Umar.” Muslims who wished to make a name for themselves, or who had developed business interests with Christians, took this forgery for the real thing. The scroll containing the prohibition crossed out by Umar is written in Greek. How could Umar have read, much less signed, such a document! The authoritative version was the Arabic translation, as amended by him. The fact is, no one in the Muslim delegation got to see the Greek version because it had been superseded by the Caliph’s own amendments. No doubt it got buried in the Church’s archives and resurrected when it suited the Christians, long after Umar’s death.

Having gone over the terms carefully and consulted with Abu Ubayda, Umar added at the very top of the document, “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,” and crossed out “Umar, son of Khattab, King of the Arabs.” In its place, he wrote “God’s servant, Umar, Commander of the Faithful.” This was the first time that the title “Commander of the Faithful” was used by the people of Muhammad.

“Tell your master,” Umar said to the translator, “that he has negotiated an honorable Covenant, which gives his people more than we have committed to elsewhere. This is in recognition of the respect with which we hold his office and his person.”