The Rock (13 page)

Sophronius did not haggle over a word the Caliph had written. He agreed to all of Umar’s amendments, knowing he could not afford to lose the Caliph’s goodwill. His strategy was to avoid a war that the Christians would lose, and to gain a foothold instead inside the mind of his adversary.

And now, Sophronius looked to turn another of his city’s splendid
assets—its works of art and architecture—to his advantage. Looking Umar directly in the eye, he said: “As measure of our gratitude and goodwill, we ask of the King of the Arabs to join us on a tour of the Holy City. We would be honored to thus seal this Covenant between our two religions in a spirit of amity and respect.”

“Splendid!” replied Umar. “We would be delighted to hear from you about the prophets whose footprints have blessed every rock and tree of this land. We are told that you are an authority. Above all, we wish to go to the Sanctuary of David. To the place where God tried David, and where he sought forgiveness, falling down on his face and bowing in repentance. It is our deepest desire to visit that particular place.”

“A pious spirit breathes through your words, O King of the Arabs,” said the Patriarch. “No priest of God clothed by Him in the sacred gown of His service can afford not to heed them. Jerusalem is the happy Church on which Our Lord, the son of David, poured forth all his teaching, together with his blood. On the merit of His blood, through us, his most unworthy heirs, this city lays claim to the holiest places in God’s creation. We are honored to be your guide. I am at your disposal.”

“As we are on the subject of how the Lord of Creation clothes His servants, I take it you think He demands extravagance,” Umar remarked, pointing at Sophronius’s golden chains.

“I am my office,” replied the unflappable Sophronius. “Rules govern men like me. We do not stand over rules but subject ourselves to them. The function and appearance of my robes of office ensure that my person is always subordinate to those rules; I wear them not to adorn myself, but to hold in check the confusion and anarchy of the world. Thus does my dress make manifest the order that God has ordained in the world.”

“But you were a monk,” Umar pressed on, “and lived alone, dressed in black, doing God’s business. Did you desire the life of this world and its adornment back then?”

“You are well informed,” the Patriarch replied. “I remember
with sorrow what I once was, how I rose in contemplation above all changeable and decaying things and thought of nothing but the things of Heaven. Even as I speak to you now, I sigh as one who looks back and gazes at the happy shores he has left behind. Unfortunately, today, by reason of my office and pastoral care, I have to bear with the business of the world. In truth, after so fair a vision as I enjoyed as a monk, I now seem fouled with worldly dust. All the more reason not to let it show in my dress.”

This was no ordinary priest, as even Ka’b now realized.

(photo credit 11.1)

N
ot a soul, circumcised and uncircumcised alike, was without foreboding on that Palm Sunday. The early morning mist clouding the horizon had already been dispelled by the touch of the rising sun, leaving the air cool and dry, as diaphanous as hidden intentions suddenly exposed.

Overnight, the Christian faithful had strewn the road from the Mount of Olives to the Holy City’s Eastern Gate with palm fronds. Monks, priests, and bishops with ornate accoutrements, many of them carrying crosses, had assembled to head a huge procession. They mingled with those of the Prophet’s Companions who had accompanied Umar, Conqueror and Redeemer, on his desert trek from Arabia. To forestall being swamped by Christians, it had been decided that all male Believers would enter the city.

Even Ka’b thought that would be enough. Still he left me behind at the camp with the servants and the women for that momentous entry. I was a mere slip of a boy at the time, old enough to want to be a man but not old enough to understand anything. “Too dangerous, too dangerous,” he kept on muttering when I pestered him for permission to accompany him. “We could be walking into a trap. Who knows what these Christians have in store for us?” I bitterly resented being left behind.

Muhammad’s followers, it transpired, were vastly outnumbered by those of Jesus who materialized as out of thin air, replete with whole families dressed in their finest and most festive garments.
Worshippers mingled with curiosity-seekers, men with women, children with fearless desert warriors who could ride for weeks on a diet of dried bread and dates.

Only the Arabs wore swords, and these had to be kept sheathed on Umar’s instruction. Notables from both parties led the way. They were all on horseback—all, that is, except Umar. He surprised everyone by appearing wrapped in a cloak of camel hair like a simple Bedouin, and riding an ass instead of a horse.

His dramatic arrival upset those Arabs who had spent four years in Syria and had seen wealth and treasures unknown to their brethren in the Hijaz. These “princes,” as they had taken to calling themselves, were frankly embarrassed by the sight of their supreme commander appearing in such a manner before those whom he had vanquished. And they told him so. The entry had to be delayed while the argument went on. Even Abu Ubayda abandoned his customary restraint and urged the Caliph to make a concession. It had to be a horse, not an ass, they argued, or at the very least a camel.

To make matters worse, Sophronius had sent fresh white linen garments as a gift to the Caliph. Did he do this to insult Umar, or because he did not know the person with whom he was dealing? I am inclined to believe that he still did not grasp that all excess in matters of appearance were as dung as far as Umar was concerned. Austerity and simplicity were his creed in all things.

True to form, Umar would have neither Sophronius’s linen nor his commander’s horse, saying to Ka’b, who alone among his advisors stood by him in his decision: “Nothing good can come out of making me into another person. I fear lest I grow too great in my own eyes.”

In defense of Umar’s decision to enter Jerusalem on an ass, my father said that it had long ago been prophesied,

Sophronius and his priests maintained a discreet silence as the Believers argued among themselves, seated cross-legged in a circle on the mountain summit.

The Patriarch’s great liability in his endeavor to pull the wool over Umar’s eyes was ignorance. As discerning a man as he obviously was, the information he had about the Arabs on his doorstep came from wild rumors that had been circulating in Jerusalem in recent years. The Arabs, he would have heard, were not interested in production, commerce, or religion, only in plundering and wars. Why, they did not even have sacred texts through which a learned man might know them! The Quran had, after all, not yet been collected into a book. Local gossip likened the Arabs to bloodthirsty wild animals. “They behave like beasts of prey, though they look like human beings,” I heard a Syrian Christian say in the market only the other day.

Nonetheless, the measure of this Patriarch was that such talk did not deter him from acting as a guide to one who was insistent upon acting the fool, as he must have thought, an impostor making a show of piety designed to impress the common folk by entering Jerusalem the way Jesus had done.

After an excruciating delay, the Caliph had his way as he always did in such matters. With the sun already high in the sky, the party began its descent. Abu Ubayda’s squadrons of thirty-five thousand soldiers stayed behind, keeping the city encircled; they were in full combat readiness, prepared to pounce like lions should any mischief befall their comrades.

At the foot of the Mount of Olives lies the garden of Gethsemane. Here, by a rock in the vineyard, Judas betrayed the son of Mary and Joseph, and was arrested. The Christian faithful are most diligent in offering prayer at this spot, holding that it is the place where Jesus first took upon his shoulders the evils of the world. Around the rock on which Jesus knelt to pray, the Church of the Agony has been built. Sophronius had to make a stop here. He invited Umar to join him in prayer. Wisely, Umar refused, not wanting to set a precedent in these circumstances and at this particular location.

(photo credit 12.1)

After Sophronius’s prayers, the procession continued across the valley, winding its way down and then up again past the tomb of the mother of Jesus, toward the Gate of the Sheep’s Pool on the eastern wall, which opens the Holy City onto the desert and the River Jordan. To the right of this gate, an olive grove was beginning to fill with people. Men and women were pouring down the mountain now that it was clear that there would be no hostilities. The Caliph and the Patriarch stopped beside the only fig tree in the olive grove. On this tree, said Sophronius, Judas hanged himself after betraying Jesus. It so happened, he said, that Jesus had cursed this very tree upon his triumphal entry into the city on Palm Sunday, because he was disappointed to find it fruitless. The tree stands there to this day, protected by a circle of stones, as barren as when Jesus first saw it.

In the olive grove around the fig tree, our warriors had meanwhile assembled, edging their way toward their Caliph while nervously fingering the hilts of their swords. Intermingled among them, and obstructing their passage, were an even larger crowd of unarmed Christian men, women, and children, carrying palm and olive branches and singing hymns. The very little ones, already overcome by boredom and fatigue, were carried on men’s shoulders. A crowd of Bedouins and local peasants looked on from the rear and sides.

Clearly visible to the crowd, eighty paces southward along the city wall on the other side of the road, was the Gate of Repentance, last used by the emperor Heraclius during his triumphal entry into the city a mere six years before the arrival of Umar’s army. He was returning to Jerusalem victorious from his defeat of the Persians, who had sacked the Holy City a few years earlier with the help of local Jews. The Persians had returned to Ctesiphon, their capital in Iraq, carrying what the Christians claimed was a piece of the cross upon which Jesus had been crucified. Heraclius seized this piece of wood after defeating their army and brought it back in triumph to the Holy City, passing through the Gate of Repentance. Men whose wisdom is not in doubt say that the threshold and entablature of this finely carved stone gate, which opens directly onto the Temple Mount, is all that is left of Solomon’s Temple. But Umar and my father did not know that at the time; they found the gate mysteriously sealed, as it remains to this day.

At the foot of the flight of steps leading up to the Gate of the Sheep’s Pool, Umar and Ka’b held a private conference, following which the Caliph strode up the steps alone in his camel-hair dress and in full view of the crowd of people. Without looking at them, he threw himself to the ground and lay prostrate in homage before the wide-open doors. Loudly he said the special greeting all pilgrims make when they visit the Holy City of Mecca: “Here am I, at your service, O God! I am here to serve, whatever be your will.”

Then, on knees that had been hardened like a camel’s from the frequency of prayer, Umar prayed until he had outdone Sophronius’s
demonstration of piety many times over. Watched over by hosts of incredulous and sullen Christians, the Believers threw caution to the winds and followed his example.

“Bear patiently what people say, and remember Our servant David, the man of might,” Umar recited: