The Rock (19 page)

His soldiers carried off the candelabra, trumpets, and holy vessels of the Temple. They carried away the two pillars that had adorned the entrance to Solomon’s Temple, and which carried
God’s name. Every year, on the day of the destruction, eyewitnesses say, these pillars pine away in their place of exile until tears stream down their rounded sides.

(photo credit 17.1)

Titus banished the Jews from their city and forbade them from ever re-entering it. The few who had survived his siege emerged from their hiding places to salvage bits and pieces of their lost treasures, but they would never again govern themselves in the same way, much less resurrect on the torn and shredded landscape the monument of their former days of glory.

The powerlessness of the People of Moses brought out the worst in the Romans. Helena, mother of Constantine the Victorious, had the pillars and capitals that remained intact on the Temple Mount carted away to adorn her New Temple on Calvary. Then she ordered that the site be turned into the city dump. And so the newly Christian city began daily to empty its bowels on what was left of the Jewish one. Excrement and refuse had been gathering for three hundred years when Umar, Ka’b, and Sophronius found themselves picking their way through it.

Piles of garbage sat alongside heaps of building rubble, broken pots amidst broken columns, pediments, and architraves. Ka’b did not know one part of a monument from the other. He did not have the faintest idea how these parts might once have fitted together. Blades of grass that had been fertilized with human excrement were
growing in a strange receptacle. Was it once a kitchen pot, or a broken urn, or even a piece of the great altar of sacrifice itself?

(photo credit 17.2)

The Temple that lived in his imagination, and through him, Umar’s as well, was built of words—and was all the sweeter for it. An unbearably wonderful thing was firmly lodged in his mind’s eye in spite of being unseen, but its physical expression was not only gone, it had been destroyed over and over again until it had been ground back into the dust of the mountain.

The words, however, he knew by heart; they lived on—in a way that broken artifacts could not. And the words said that, corresponding to His House on Earth, was an absolutely perfect counterpart in Heaven. When Moses ascended to Heaven without having walked the streets of the Holy City, the Lord made it up to him by cleaving the seven firmaments to show him its heavenly equivalent. The two cities faced one other. The same services were performed in both, so that, when the high priest was sacrificing and burning incense on Earth, the Archangel Michael was doing the same in Heaven. What was the Archangel doing now? What had he been doing for the last three hundred years?

Ka’b stumbled about in a daze; he was looking and not looking at the same time. Thoughts cascaded through his head, yet he did not know what to think about any one in particular. My father was in a strange state for the next several days: utterly distracted, unable
to attend to me or any practical matter, seeking every opportunity to go back to the desecrated sanctuary, desirous only of wandering aimlessly among the refuse and the filth. I think the desire to knit together the scattered remembrances of his life around the Rock turned into an obsession on that day.

H
ow did my father know where he was on the sanctuary? And how did he go on to find the precise spot where David and Ahithophel had long ago found the Rock?

The desire to offend has a smell to it. Ka’b followed his nose.

Helena had singled out the Rock. She had ordered that the smelliest scourings be dumped there, including the manure of the city’s stables. Ka’b found the Rock because the dung reeked most foul and was piled highest over the precise spot where the Holy of Holies had once stood in David and Solomon’s Temple. He was assured that he was standing in the right place when he spied the menstrual cloths of Christian women collected there.

Umar asked Ka’b and Sophronius to step aside, and set to work alone, throwing the dung with his bare hands into his mantle, which he had placed flat on the ground. Taking the four corners of the cloak into his hands, he carried it on his back, doubled over with the weight, to the wall of the noble sanctuary. There he threw his load over the wall into the Valley of Hell, where the kings of Israel had buried the ashes of the idols that had desecrated their Temple in olden times. Before following his example, my father prophesied the fall of Constantinople, and said: “Be joyous, O City of the Temple! For to you has come the Redeemer, who will cleanse you of your contamination.” Sophronius stood aside and watched while all this was going on; he was joined by the rest of the party, who had in the meantime cleared the entrance gate. Umar and Ka’b labored at the pile until enough of it had been cleared to ascertain that they had indeed found the Rock.

T
o every prophecy in an unsettled age there comes a time of fulfillment, a time when one begins to see in the present and toward the shape of things to come. Such a time was now settling upon my father. The Rock, he realized, stood in for a greater reality than was suggested by its appearance. Such a time had also come upon Sophronius, who, having failed to leave an impression on his uncouth visitors, clung to the hope that he could redirect their prodigious energies away from Calvary. And it had come upon Umar, he whom all the Peoples of the Book were now calling the Redeemer.

“Where should I build my mosque?” Umar asked, speaking to no one in particular.

“Has not your heart found that which it was looking for, O King of the Arabs?” Sophronius replied. “Honor that which sent it forth on its long and difficult journey. I say you should build on top of this hard, flat piece of rock that your hands have uncovered; it will elevate your house of worship so that it overlooks the desert from whence you came, and provide a solid foundation for the things that you wish to do.”

“What do you think of the suggestion, my good friend?” asked the Caliph, turning to my father.

Ka’b did not pause to think. The Commander of the Faithful and liberator of Jerusalem could not be beholden to a Christian monk for the site of his mosque.

“The Rock is without any redeeming value in this priest’s eyes,” he said. “Quite the opposite. He wants to see it desecrated, so that the so-called prophecies of Jesus will look as though they have come true. Knowing that his religion has lost the power of desecration, he would have you bury the Rock on his behalf, hide it under a building that draws attention to itself like his dungheap of a church. I say, therefore, O Umar, beware his forked tongue. Remember that the Rock uncovered is his Church unmasked. Leave His Sign clean and exposed, for all to admire and see. Build north of the Rock, not on it. In that way God will doubly favor you for giving Him back His foundation stone and for being the one who brought back into alignment the two holiest directions of Moses and Muhammad.”

“I see you still lean toward the Jews, O Father of Ishaq,” Umar replied with a twinkle in his eye. “I have made up my mind. Our mosque will be south of the Rock.”

“But then we shall be praying with our backs to the Rock!” exclaimed Ka’b, horrified.

“So be it,” the Caliph replied.

U
mar’s mosque was cobbled together hastily. Aside from his decision to build south rather than north of the Rock, no consideration was given to the sanctity of its location. There was neither art of proportion nor technique of construction in the place of prayer that the Prince of the Righteous constructed. Men would have to put their foreheads to the ground inside a square shed assembled from thrown-away boards and beams collected from a Christian dump. The Caliph was in a hurry to return to Medina. His stay in the Holy City lasted only a week.

The son of Khattab identified the religion of Muhammad with proximity to the Prophet, which he measured by distance from his grave in Medina. In Umar’s eyes, the Prophet’s Companions were the only rightful rulers, and their roots were sunk deeply in the soil of the holy cities of Arabia. Jerusalem was just too far away.

A multitude of poor Bedouin Arab tribesmen, the first converts to Islam, made the rule of the first four Rightly Guided Ones possible. These were the great fighting men of the desert who had taken Iraq and Syria in the blink of an eye. By heading northward with their families, they became holy warriors like those who had accompanied the Prophet David, Peace Be Upon Him. Umar recorded their names, genealogies, battles, and the year of their conversion to True Belief, in registers. He made them live in closed camp-cities, separated from the non-Arabs of the conquered territories;
he held them to stricter standards than anyone else; he tried, not always successfully, to prevent them from holding and cultivating land outside Arabia. Then he compensated them with handsome annuities out of revenues collected by taxing everyone else.

Umar’s bias against non-Arabs did not affect his fondness for Ka’b. He took pride in the conversion of his friend. When the Caliph expelled the People of the Book from the Hijaz, my father was already his counselor. In fact Ka’b had a role in the resettlement of Jews in Palestine. Forty-two of these, scholars and experts on scripture to a man, he turned to Islam.

“Two religions cannot subsist together,” Umar said by way of explaining his decision not to let any captive over the age of puberty reside in the two holy cities of the Hijaz.

In due time the Caliph had to soften the harshness of his new orders, allowing Jews, Christians, and Magians to visit Mecca and Medina on business so long as they stayed no longer than three days. But always he longed for a pure and untainted Arab state, one that continued to expand from its center in Medina.

For all his bluntness, Umar was not unaware of Ka’b’s distress at his decision to build south of the Rock.

“Did He not send down His Word as an Arabic Book?” he urged upon Ka’b in Mecca, on the day of rest that follows the slaughtering of the camels during the first pilgrimage season that followed his departure from Jerusalem.