The Rock (26 page)

The Caliph was not convinced.

“We have fattened a dog, and now he comes to eat us. What else is there to know about the man? He lived in Medina as he claims. There he almost certainly heard the Prophet preach before
large groups. Everyone did in the old days. Perhaps he actually heard the Prophet describe a vision like Jacob’s that came over him during sleep. Am I to be seen haggling with a former slave over whether the ascension was a dream or an actual event while the Holy City goes up in flames all around me? Yasar has nothing to lose from attaching the Rock to the person of the Prophet. It is a clever move bound to gain him supporters. I am surprised no one thought of it before. The man does not seek to win an argument but rather to acquire a reputation. No, we will have to outwit him on his own territory: the footprint. Return to the footprint, son of Ka’b. Think! Search for an explanation of its origin, one worthy of your father.”

T
hat night, for the first time in years, I tried to recall all of my father’s stories. I put them in chronological order from Creation to the destruction of the Temple. I listed every prophet who had had anything to do with the Rock, and then painstakingly eliminated them, one by one from the roster of possible owners of the foot behind the print. Jesus, David, Solomon, Jacob, and all the lesser prophets were either not old enough, or had not had an appropriate opportunity to leave an imprint that would go unnoticed all these years. Adam was too frivolous. Ishmael lived in Jerusalem only as a young boy; the impression was too big to be his. How about my namesake, Ishaq? Unlikely. It would be his father’s before his. I struggled particularly hard over Abraham. Even Yasar stressed the physical resemblance between Abraham and Muhammad. How, then, could he distinguish between their footprints? For that matter how could an imprint have been left on solid rock by a mere man?

Suddenly, while considering this argument, the slate of my uncertainties was wiped clean, and from my father’s stories, the truth dawned like one of those universal forms of the Divine that owed no allegiance to time or place but had to be a sign of our salvation. The name of the Truth was God.

In the twelfth hour of the sixth day of Creation, on Friday the sixth of Nisan, after the First Man had been cast out of the Garden, stripped of his Garment of Light and admonished for his transgression, God put His foot on the Rock to ascend back to Heaven. Ka’b had said so. Therefore, the footprint had to be God’s own impression, left behind just before He took himself outside His own creation, angry at the degraded thing that Adam had made of himself. He became forever transcendent because of the First Man’s transgression and had left His mark behind as a reminder of all that we had lost.

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u’awiya was delighted. The very next day, citing the authority of Ka’b and a number of other luminaries he had lined up for the occasion, he announced that the impression on the Rock belonged to the Lord of All the Worlds. No mention of Yasar or the story of the Prophet’s ascension was made.

The monks felt vindicated because in their eyes God was Jesus Christ. The Jews were happy because it was their story of Creation that Mu’awiya had just ratified. The Rock of Foundation, not Calvary, was the navel of the universe. And Yasar had been checked because the stakes had been raised. He now had to deny the Caliph’s assertion that it was God’s footprint on the Rock, and this looked like blasphemy. Like a piece of limestone dropped in acid, the dispute dissolved.

T
he peace of the sword did not leave the sword in peace for long, as Yazid, Mu’awiya’s son, quickly found out. The nomination of an heir did not sit well with supporters of the House of Ali in Iraq; it smacked of kingship. Nor did it sit well in Mecca and Medina. No one outside Mu’awiya’s clan wanted the Caliphate to be a plaything of his progeny; by right, it belonged to the family of the Prophet. Many Meccans, become rich overnight because of Umar’s conquests, watched as their wealth slipped away along with their power into the hands of newly converted tribes, settlers, and even Christians from the rich northern provinces. “These upstarts do not grasp Muhammad’s message,” they said to themselves. Yazid derived support from them. Worse, he encouraged games of chance and riotous feasting, and was the first to employ eunuchs in the women’s quarters of his palace. All that people talked about in his court was women and food. “Look! How they veil their beards and sell their arrows for spindles,” men said of the Caliph and his court.

It came as no surprise, therefore, that as the Arabs of Damascus played musical instruments and drank openly in the streets, the holy cities of Arabia refused to give Yazid their allegiance.

Yazid’s murder of Husayn, the son of Ali, the Prophet’s favorite grandson, had been the final straw. Husayn had inherited the mantle of leadership from his brother Hasan, who had conceded it to
Mu’awiya. “So long as Mu’awiya is alive,” Husayn had said at the time of his brother’s poisoning, “let every man stay in his own house and draw his cloak over his head.” But Yazid did not carry his father’s weight. And Husayn would not keep his head cloaked for a drunkard with an appetite for revelry shared by all those he set in power.

The son of Ali came to Kufa in Iraq, where the people were swearing allegiance to him and cursing the House of Umayya. But Yazid’s army intercepted his small party of followers and friends, and denied them water on the parched fringes of the Iraqi desert. With his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, Husayn drank the bitter draught of death instead of the sweet water of the Euphrates. Two sons, four brothers, five nephews, and five cousins died with him on the plain of Kerbala. Only after they had fallen did Husayn take to horse against his foes. He smote until he fell, having been struck seventy-two times. Only two of his sons were left alive—a babe in arms, and a lad sick in bed.

“Short work!” Yazid’s men told their commander. “Time enough to butcher and dress a camel, or to take a little sleep.” When the severed head, still in the flower of youth, was put into Yazid’s hands, he turned it round and round. With an air of indomitable insolence, he struck it on the mouth.

“Enough!” cried out a man in his court, unable to control himself at the horror of the deed. “I have seen God’s Apostle kiss those lips.”

The manner of Husayn’s death sparked the bloodiest unrest yet among the Arabs. The bitterness spilled into a war lasting eleven years. We escaped unscathed in Jerusalem. Still, it felt like the end of the world. The sunlight glared saffron yellow on the walls of the city the day a messenger arrived with the why and wherefore of the massacre of the scions of the House of Hashim on the banks of the Euphrates outside Kerbala. Men went out into the streets, lashing out with their swords like frenzied camels in heat making directionless tracks in the sand. Not a stone was turned in the Holy City on the day that Husayn rose to his Maker but that
fresh blood was found underneath. The very earth trembled at the slaying.

Truly, we are an aggregate of elements that emanate from the deep well of our beginnings. Yazid, that accursed son of an accursed father, whose father God’s Prophet himself did curse, had spilled innocent blood as if it were water. Mu’awiya had spilled it for a reason; his son didn’t need reasons, thinking himself freed by power to shape the lives of Muhammad’s followers in ignorance of who he was and where he came from. In that act of forgetting, the license to wild impulses and the illusion of freedom was born, dragging vanity and vaulting ambition in their train.

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xploiting men’s horror of Yazid’s deed, Abdallah, the son of Zubayr, proclaimed himself Caliph in Mecca. His father had been the fifth Believer in Muhammad. Abdallah himself was thought blessed for being the first child born into Muhammad’s religion after the Exodus. His mother was the daughter of Abu Bakr, and sister to the Prophet’s favorite wife. No man in Medina was better tied to the House of Hashim on all sides. His father, Zubayr, had become a very wealthy man, accumulating valuables worth fifty thousand gold pieces, along with vast numbers of horses, slaves of both sexes, and estates. With this wealth, Zubayr’s sons built themselves town mansions in Medina made of plaster-work, brick, and teakwood imported from India. But the flow of revenues from the conquered provinces that had made all this possible had recently dried up. The new seat of the Caliphate in Damascus was drawing everything to itself. If Husayn’s death was not the only reason for war between the holy cities of Syria and Arabia, it was, nevertheless, the excuse used by men intent on fighting to the finish.

Abdallah denounced the practice of ruling from Syria instigated by Mu’awiya. Muhammad’s People, he said, must be ruled
from the cradle of prophecy, the land of the Hijaz. The Prophet was a son of Mecca, not Jerusalem. And Yazid was descended from the House that had led the struggle against him in the Age of Ignorance. Abdallah chose Mecca, not Medina, as his seat of government, because it housed God’s most ancient Temple built around the Black Stone.

Thus did a rift between the Believers turn into a festering wound. While Abdallah consolidated his hold over Mecca and the Hijaz, garnering support from his guardianship of the Holy Places and playing Yazid’s tyranny to his advantage, dissension and strife escalated. Had not the governor of Basra executed eight thousand in promulgation of Yazid’s new rules of punishment? men asked as they, in turn, entrusted the reins of their restlessness to passion and desire. Revulsion at the House of Umayya grew to the point that Yazid had difficulty raising an army willing to attack his foe in Mecca. When he finally did, it was swallowed up in the desert and disappeared from the face of the earth. Yazid then took to paying poets and scribblers to hurl taunts rather than spears on his behalf:

“If Abdallah were a Caliph, as he says, he would show himself. He would fight like a man. Instead he plants his tail in the shadow of the Black Stone like a female locust laying its eggs.”

Yazid died waiting for Abdallah to budge from his desert fortress. He had ruled for three years and left no successor. The father of Abd al-Malik, Marwan, of the same House, wrested the Caliphate from rivals but ruled in name for less than one year; he died as ingloriously as he had lived after enraging one of his wives for refusing to name her son his successor. She was a corpulent lady, who, shortly after copulation, took her revenge by spreading the cheeks of her buttocks and squatting on her husband’s face until he suffocated. Or so at least men say.

Verily, only to the Omniscient One belongs knowledge of such abominations.

While such goings-on ruled the men and women of Damascus, Abdallah rested secure in Mecca. He was as hard as he was inflexible. He had his own brother executed and stuck on a gibbet outside
Mecca for having disagreed with him. In this obdurate nature were sown the seeds of his demise.