The Rock (20 page)

“He did,” replied Ka’b.

“And did the Lord of all Being not reveal Himself to an Arab heart so that He might warn them in a clear, Arabic tongue?”

“I suppose so,” said Ka’b, not wanting to contradict the Commander of the Faithful.

“And did He not do so in order that His Messenger could warn those who dwell in the Mother of Cities, Mecca, home to God’s most ancient house?”

“Yes, but …” Ka’b said, before being interrupted by his increasingly excited friend.

“What did God say about facing Him? Tell me, what did He say?”

“The good Lord said many things. He said, for instance,

“He specified one particular direction, as the Father of Ishaq well knows,”

“But which Holy Mosque do the words refer to?” replied Ka’b. Whereupon Umar became angry, detecting impropriety in the question.

“Other verses were revealed in Medina, in the seventeenth month following the Apostle’s flight from Mecca,” he said in a colder, more clipped tone of voice. “Was I not in the room when Gabriel spoke in Muhammad’s ear to tell him that God had changed our most sacred axis of prayer? Can a man forget what happens in such an hour? The Prophet, God’s Grace Be Upon Him and His Household, was leading the afternoon prayers. He had just finished two prostrations facing Jerusalem, when suddenly he broke his rhythm and, with the uncomprehending eyes of the whole assembly boring into him, he slowly turned a half circle until he faced the Holy City whose guardians are the Prophet’s own House of Hashim. He faced Mecca. His back, mark you, Ka’b, was now to Jerusalem! I was paralyzed with fear, transfixed with horror! We, his closest companions, had been given no warning. Not that Muhammad could have warned us, because the Spirit of the Lord was descending upon him at that very moment, in our presence. I tell you, Ka’b, I could see the Spirit in his face. Like a man in a trance,
he began to utter beautiful new words that no one had heard put together in that way before.”

Muhammad had inaugurated an earthquake on that day in Medina when he changed the Sacred Axis. His community was deeply troubled. “O Messenger of God,” they asked of him, “what is the condition of our brothers who died before this change?” But the Prophet would say nothing, which troubled them even more.

If Umar had been frightened by this turn away from the Rock of Moses, what about his counselor? Ka’b had prayed in the mosque where the change had taken place. Standing inside its walls he had foretold the conquest of the City of the Temple. In the course of the great oration that had brought Ka’b such fame throughout Arabia, his eyes must have lingered on the old niche in the middle of the northern wall facing Jerusalem. Two stones used to sit on either side of it. After the new verses were revealed, the stones were relocated to a new niche in the southern wall. The old niche was blocked up, but its impression remained. So men took to calling the place the Mosque of the Two Sacred Directions. After his speech, Ka’b would have had to turn to the new niche, his back to the Rock. How else to pray in a city that sits between Mecca and Jerusalem?

Ka’b’s distress had led the normally taciturn Umar to make one of his longest speeches. The Caliph of the Arabs found his tongue whenever he needed to suppress doubt.

“His word was sent down as an Arabic judgment,” thundered Umar. “Face the facts, old man—the torch has passed over the heads of those who were favored of old; it has been passed to the
sons of Ishmael, not Ishaq. The Black Stone has replaced the Rock, just as Arabic has replaced Hebrew. Abraham’s descendants by Hagar, not Sara, are the newly chosen ones. You will find peace only after you accept God’s will.”

Ka’b could not accept it. Not because he was a descendant of Abraham through Sara. Nor because he was from the land of the Yemen, and a southerner with an inferior line of descent, according to his northern cousins. And certainly not because he was inclined toward the Jews, as Umar had implied (an implication that handed to Ka’b’s detractors the barbs and insults that would henceforth be used against him).

Perhaps Ka’b had lived a fantasy—call it the final delusion of an old man—that Medina had been a detour, and that Umar’s coming to the resting place of the pure would be a new dawn visible to anyone with eyes. Only now the Arab Redeemer, as he had dubbed him, had turned out to have feet of clay. Ka’b found that hard to accept in a man he thought of as his friend.

My father couldn’t accept Umar’s decision because he never understood it.

“Those who can see lift their eyes to the Heavens and contemplate its manna. Those who cannot see look at the onions in the ground,” he said to me by way of expressing his disappointment.

U
mar’s piety was homespun and unrefined, his tolerance limited. Ka’b’s knowledge, his expertise in the Torah, had elevated him above other Believers at a critical juncture in the life of Muhammad’s fledgling community. Every Companion of the Prophet had his scripture expert, and circumstances brought Umar together with one of the best. Ka’b defended his sponsor’s coarseness, provided biblical justifications for his harsh treatment of his wives, and when Umar had his eldest son lashed to within a hair’s breadth of his life for having tasted wine, Ka’b stood against the approbation that descended like a sandstorm and vanished as quickly.

Umar was not an imaginer of genius like Muhammad. He could
not cut through time and circumstance like a knife through cheese. He was a follower, a deputy of the Messenger of God, as he called himself. The Believers in Medina needed to believe in someone if they were to hold together as a community after the death of their Prophet. Abu Bakr had passed away after only two years. So they followed Umar, who turned following into a state enterprise; he incarnated the principle of following. Umar knew how to turn people into followers, how to rank and reward them in accordance with how good they were at it. Ka’b understood that this was not easy; his friend and protector had a gift. How else to capture half the world and its crown jewel in six short years after the Prophet’s death! It took a genius for following and for being followed.

The one thing that my father forgot, however, is that a follower is not, and can never be, the Messiah.

I
n the winter of the year in which he presided over the surrender of Jerusalem to those whom he deemed barbarians, Sophronius died. From his deathbed, the old Patriarch had struggled to defend Christian sites in the Holy City. This leader of men, whose life had been an affair of places not of the heart, died unhappy and broken, still in anguish over the concessions he had been forced to make. Even my father had come around to a grudging admiration of the stubborn priest into whose company he had been thrust by chance and circumstance.

The quarrel between Umar and Ka’b was also an affair of place.

So long as the Holy City remained in Christian hands and the problem was how to wrest it from them, the quarrel lay dormant, like a sleeping giant whom no one even suspected was there. When Umar said, “We are the People of the Sacred Direction,” Ka’b would agree. As soon as Umar chose to build south not north of the Rock, however, the giant woke up.

Shortly after Ka’b had been pressured into turning his back on the Rock, first on the Mount of Olives and then on Mount Moriah, I asked him a question, the kind only a boy can dare to ask.

“Why does God, who is the One, have two holy Rocks? And why did He change the sacred axis of prayer from one to the other, so that Jews face one Rock while we Muslims face the other?”

He replied by citing these lines of scripture:

Ka’b was talking around my question. He went on to say that, since there were three holy cities, not one, men were prone to make mistakes in ordering them by merit. What kind of mistake? He would not elaborate. Then he went on to say that the Messenger of God, unlike his Companions, was lenient in matters of direction. By way of illustration, he told me the story of Bara’ the son of Ma’rur, a Meccan with whom he used to be on good terms. Bara’ was a Believer long before the Exodus to Medina. He liked everything Muhammad had to say about God—with one exception. Bara’ was unable to pray with his back to the Ka’ba because all the idols of his ancestors were housed there.

“I decided,” he told Ka’b, “that I was going to be a follower of Muhammad in all things except this. I had to pray as my ancestors had done, facing the Stone that I was most comfortable with.”

Muhammad’s Companions, especially Umar, were outraged. Those were the days when everyone prayed facing the Rock of Moses, which they had never seen. Being God’s Messenger, Muhammad was asked to rule against Bara’. But he would not do so. All he would say was: “You would have had a Sacred Direction if you had kept to it.”

Every man interpreted these words in his own way. The lesson that Bara’ drew from the Prophet’s reply was to position himself south of the Ka’ba during prayer. In this way, he told Ka’b, his face would be aligned with the Black Stone and the Rock of Jerusalem at the same time. That is where my father got the idea that he put to Umar in the City of the Temple.

God had something in mind when he changed the direction of prayer, Ka’b kept on saying. But he could not give a satisfactory
account of how the two Rocks came into being, or of the relation between them. Nor did he like talking about the subject. For upon the choice of which Rock to align one’s toes with during prayer, the most important friendship of my father’s life had foundered.

Ka’b never answered my question. Instead, he followed the example of Bara’, which meant avoiding at all cost praying inside the mosque that Umar had built. He located himself out in the open at prayer time, on the sanctuary esplanade, north of David’s Rock. Like Bara’, Ka’b had both holy Rocks in alignment with one another. He felt at peace, not because he knew he was doing the right thing but because he did not have to think about choosing between the two Rocks.

M
y childhood ended six years after the conquest of Jerusalem, with the murder of the son of Khattab at the hands of a disgruntled Christian slave who blamed Umar for the amount of tax he had to pay. When Abu Lu’lu’a’s double-bladed dagger pierced the Prince of True Believers in the twenty-first year after the Exodus, its ugly tip found its way into my father’s heart. Suddenly he aged. “Your father has gone into his dotage,” my stepmother said as she fussed and rearranged and took over his daily routines in a way she had never done before.

An age of chivalry and noble religious purpose had come to an end. Along with Sophronius, dead of a broken heart, Abu Ubayda of the plague, and, most importantly, Umar, murdered by means so foul, died the kind of wisdom that had allowed so peaceful a transfer of sovereignty in the City of Peace. People began to turn their oaths into screens for their misdeeds. Recrimination filled rooms like foul-smelling smoke. Politics was stripped of its noble purpose to become the pure distillation of rumor.

“The luck of Islam was shrouded in Umar’s winding-sheet,” Ka’b took to saying.

My father had been too close to power to avoid getting entangled in the veils that were now being cast over men’s hearts. His warning to Umar, for instance, about the dangers facing him in the conquered territories, was taken for a prophecy of the Caliph’s assassination. The conversation that gave rise to this interpretation
took place three days before Abu Lu’lu’a did his terrible deed in the presence of Abu Dharr, my father’s bitterest foe and a Companion of the Prophet from the earliest days. No sooner was Umar killed than word spread like wildfire that my father had foretold the precise manner and timing of his benefactor’s demise!