The Rock (24 page)

In truth, Ka’b did not know what to say. The wildness in him had long since brimmed over. After becoming a follower of Muhammad, he had tried not to look as if he were choosing between the Rocks. As a result, he appeared foolish. “He is a man weighed down by the Torah,” Abu Dharr said mockingly, “the way an ass is weighed down by the books it is carrying on its back.”

Ka’b was saved from his ignorance by his belief that religion and worldly things were able to join hands. For most men, it was easier to carry two watermelons under one armpit than it was to maintain the thought of such a union. I, for one, failed the test; he never did. Back and forth, like a juggler on a plank, Ka’b was most adroit at balancing the two watermelons of worldliness and the life to come.

How did he do it? Perhaps, it began to dawn on me, the secret was in what Ka’b said when he talked about the span of a man’s life being but a speck in the larger scheme of things.

“Keep the Day, not your own death, daily before your eyes,” he would say, “the Day that follows the work of the maggots and the bleaching of your bones. Never doubt it is coming. If piety means anything, it means to believe that the Day of the Raising of the Dead is drawing near, and on that day every soul shall be afforded its due. And no amount of remorse will avail the unbelievers.

I used to scoff at Ka’b for living his life transfixed on Judgment Day, as I scoffed at him for his obsession with the Rock.

Today, however, I too keep an eye out for the Signs that will precede the coming of the Day. I reflect upon the moment of Resurrection, when all the men and women who have ever lived will rise bodily from the grave, complete in soul and thought. Then I measure my few atoms’ worth of good and evil against one another, as I will do for the final time on Judgment Day, and consider what I should do on the morrow.

Before the final Reckoning, however, lies the wait in the grave. In this first station of our afterlives, my father waits. What is it like for such a man to be tucked away under the earth, knowing that his eternal fate has been prefigured even as the worms are fastening on him?

Are there any among us who have not forgotten their prayers at least once, or who have not prayed without performing their ablutions?
Is there anyone who can swear that he has never passed a child or a blind woman in need of help without stopping to do what he can? I can’t. Nor could my poor father, who has been waiting in that terrible place for forty years. The wait in the grave is for people like us. Upon the truest of Believers the surrounding earth presses more gently, “like the compassionate mother stroking the head of a son who is complaining of headache,” said the Prophet, trying to console his young wife Aisha, distraught after a Jewish woman had thanked her for some kindness by saying, “May the Lord give thee refuge from the torment of the tomb.”

The punishment of the grave is real. The external peace and quiet of the cemetery is deceiving. No contrast is more striking, no affliction more terrible, than what goes on inside each little house of worms. Martyrs and prophets excepted, each one of us, Believer and un-Believer alike, will undergo some torment, heavy or light, depending on the quality of his faith and works. If we escape the worst, because of how we have lived our lives, then the punishment that will go on eternally, and that comes after the Hour, is light. And yet none of us, between the moment of our deaths and His Judgment on the Hour, can escape the torments of the tomb.

“What are our years on the earth,” Ka’b used to say, “compared to being squeezed like an egg under a boulder for many times their number? And what is being squeezed like an egg under a boulder for a number of years compared to roasting in Hell for all eternity?” Someone should have asked that of Muslims after the murder of Umar. But when Ka’b died, the last person who worried about such questions also died.

L
ike Umar, Uthman and Ali, the third and fourth Rightly Guided Caliphs, were also murdered. With them died the practice of nominating a council of wise men to decide matters of succession. A pattern was being undone. By putting family before Community, Umar’s successor, Uthman, undid all that his predecessors had achieved. His death was brought about when he would not deliver
to justice his cousin and chief advisor, that son of a blue-eyed woman, Marwan, after he had conspired to have the governor of Egypt killed. Family and feeling were all that it was taking to kindle a sense of intolerable wrong; trivial matters were eliminating things of weight throughout the land.

But did Uthman’s wrong justify the terrible way in which he was killed and the uses men made of his death?

A party of those whom Marwan had plotted against laid siege to Uthman’s house in Medina, demanding that he give up the conspirator. Marwan was inside hiding with his son, Abd al-Malik, then a lad of ten. Father and son, destined to be the eighth and ninth Caliphs of Islam, witnessed the murder that was to bring grief and sedition in its train; it also brought their House of Umayya to the pinnacle of earthly power.

When Uthman refused to give up his cousin, three men climbed into the Caliph’s courtyard unseen by the guards on the roof. They found Uthman reading the Quran with his wife. Grabbing him by the beard, they cut his throat in front of her. Marwan and Abd al-Malik got away; their servant took Uthman’s shirt, gory as it was, and rode off with it to Damascus.

While the holy cities of Arabia were giving their oath of allegiance to Ali of the House of Hashim, Mu’awiya, still governor in Syria and a cousin of Uthman, was pinning up the bloodied shirt of his kinsman in the court of the mosque of Damascus. Barely had Uthman’s grave been filled when fresh ones were being dug all over the empire. A fever for revenge such as the Arabs had not known since the Age of Ignorance devoured the land.

A new age began with Mu’awiya’s cry of vengeance over Uthman’s shirt; it ended with the community tearing itself apart. Deeds that should have been hidden were not. Men were held in thrall to the idea that only through more killing, and more dying, would there be a recovery from it. Everyone wanted the Caliphate for himself. Ali of the House of Hashim, the Prophet’s cousin, was the most deserving. But even he could not lance the boil of desire mixed with loathing that now fixed men’s hearts on hateful things. His short reign was eaten up by the first great wars of sedition. Four
years after succeeding Uthman, Ali’s forehead was hewn with a sword as he prayed.

Hasan, the son of Ali and the Prophet’s own grandson, conceded leadership to the House of Umayya in that year of ill omen, the forty-first year after the Exodus. He was Caliph for a matter of months. Hasan had not wanted his followers to be butchered for a kingdom’s sake. Arabia grumbled at the deeds of Hasan, he who of the Prophet’s family most resembled the Messenger of God. Idle tattlers called him a weakling, even after he was poisoned in Medina. But no one can upset the hour when words fall silent and destiny springs its trap. Wrong had triumphed over Right. God clearly had no intention of uniting Prophethood and the Caliphate in the same House—not in the House of Hashim.

I
n the gathering gloom of Muslim affairs that followed my father’s death, I turned to business, opening a stall on the Cardo. I conducted a general trade in books. Buying, selling, transcribing, all now fell within my purview. I even dabbled in calligraphy. But my real vocation remained bookmaking and its associated arts: cover and border design, leather tooling, floral and geometrical inlay in which I pioneered various new combinations of ivory, bone, multicolored wood, and gilding.

But the visitation of those fearsome angels kept on recurring in my dreams. Little by little, their skulking presence made headway during sleep, when my senses and defenses were at rest. In that state, echoes from times past and shadows of things to come are able to crowd upon the troubled mind unimpeded. Slowed down by the inaction of the senses, the mind is unable to sort out the meaning of what it sees. Memory is confused, and foreknowledge, though also confused by the veils of memory, is imaged in shadows from our waking moments and pursuits. The mind smolders like a fire heaped over with chaff.

M
u’awiya was interested in all things related to the Holy City. His authority rested upon Syria, a province still overwhelmingly Christian. He had learned to navigate his way through all the factions and sects of the city during his inauguration as Caliph, which had taken place in Jerusalem. As the Christians like to put it, Mu’awiya was “crowned” in their midst.

Mu’awiya had arranged a most elaborate ceremony immediately following the news of the murder of Ali, his archenemy and the leader of the House of Hashim. The charged atmosphere of the moment was dissipated into pomp and circumstance! The strategy worked. All the tribes that had come from Arabia and settled in Syria trooped in to the Holy City, competing with one another to be the first to attach their banners to his pole. Within months of his inauguration, Hasan, son of Ali, had conceded the Caliphate to him. No other Caliph since Umar had so singled out Palestine, and made of it a substitute for the Hijaz, a fact that was held against the House of Umayya throughout Arabia. But in Syria and Jerusalem, it worked in his favor.

I was in attendance when he toured the holy sites on the day of his inauguration and I heard him assume a title previously bestowed by God on Adam and David alone. In the outer courtyard of the Church of the Resurrection, Mu’awiya declared: “The earth belongs to God and I am His Deputy.”

All of Muhammad’s Rightly Guided successors had spurned this title. God had given the Prophet Companions for whom humility was a watchword; they loved his person more than their own. Such men did not seek the world, however much it sought them. When a fawning petitioner tried to curry favor with Umar by calling him God’s Deputy, he was pushed to the ground and rebuked sternly. Reminded of this incident, Mu’awiya smiled and said:

“What’s approved today was reproved once. Things now abominated will someday be embraced.”

He was right. The title stuck. Every Caliph since Mu’awiya, including his protégé and admirer, our own Abd al-Malik, has adopted the same heresy of a direct line of communication between himself and God—a heresy whose legitimacy his own Arab constituency interpreted as being confirmed by God after Mu’awiya was approached by both Peoples of the Book to arbitrate their dispute over a footprint.