The Rock (29 page)

His advisors say that he used up all the wealth hoarded by Mu’awiya and decades of successful campaigning in foreign lands to defeat Abdallah and turn people around. In order to devote himself to his internal problems, they say, Abd al-Malik signed a truce with the Byzantine emperor that required him to pay 365,000 gold pieces, one thousand slaves, and one thousand horses annually. The deal untied his hands. Still, how could he afford such an onerous sum and have enough left over to defeat Abdallah hunkered down in Arabia? If Mu’awiya’s frugality and Abd al-Malik’s truce explain his military victory, they do not explain why Abdallah was forgotten in the year that the Ka’ba was destroyed. Habits of the heart are not purchased with gold or changed by the sword.

Abd al-Malik had intuited that military means alone were not enough. But to which direction would he turn with this intuition? The Caliph was holding back, perhaps even from himself. Suddenly, however, a year after I had been going backward and forward between Jerusalem and Damascus, I saw the Caliph’s purpose flushed out. Three seminal conversations wiped clean the slate of his uncertainties. They flared up on the day following my encounter with that worthless windbag Akhtal.

T
he first conversation took place in private, during Abd al-Malik’s noon meal. There were no secretaries or petitioners. I was called in and invited to help myself to some chicken roasted with garlic. No sooner had I taken a mouthful than Abd al-Malik said:

“The son of Ka’b should not have let himself be needled by our poet.”

Mercifully, I had foreseen this rebuke and answered, “I was held back, O Commander of the Faithful, not by Akhtal’s rudeness, but because his words sparked a moment of illumination on to which I needed to cling for a while.”

Looking into Abd al-Malik’s eyes, I continued: “Our forefather, Abraham, was driven from the City of the Temple to the City of the Black Stone. But what drove him away? Ka’b gave this question much thought. Perhaps it was the Rock’s cold and forbidding nature, to which Akhtal alluded.”

“What are you talking about, Ishaq?”

“After his trial on Moriah, Abraham did not want to be buried under the Rock—unlike Adam, who yearned to return to the Garden and sought the place on Earth closest to it as his final resting place. The Knight of Faith had a nightmare in which he imagined that he was the Rock upon which the terrible ordeal had been enacted. He did not know that he had ever been anything but the
Rock. Suddenly, he awakened and realized to his astonishment that he was Abraham. But it was hard to be sure whether he was really Abraham and had only dreamt that he was the Rock, or was really the Rock and was only dreaming that he was Abraham. For a split second, the father of the Arabs and the Jews was confused.”

“What is there to be confused about a rock?”

“The Rock was no longer just a rock, sitting there at the summit of the mountain, silent and unyielding, indifferent to all that was unfolding around it; it had metamorphosed into the lodestone of Abraham’s worst nightmares, the meeting point of his most hidden desires and fears. Abraham was relearning the meaning of fear. The memory of what he had been about to do weighed upon him. He ached to put distance between himself and the mountains of the Holy City looming over him like giant parched bones. He had to die somewhere else. Not that he knew what would bring him peace; all he knew was that it could not be a thing that took its form from his own deepest fears, from suddenly resurrected memories of bridled impulses and expiated joys. He who had called his own father wretched had spent a lifetime running away from wretchedness. But, like furies, the memories stayed in hot pursuit, catching up with the old man during his nightmare. Furies began to inhabit the frail frame of the man who so willingly would have given up his own son on the Rock, and wherever he turned, he found himself chased by them until they coalesced into the unforgettable shape of an enormous hulk of limestone.”

“Men are saying he is buried in Hebron.”

“In a valley treed with sycamores and carobs, filled with orchards of grape, fruit, olives, and figs. He found peace in a land that is as soft and green as the Rock is hard and gray. No more harsh shadows and dramatic vistas. No more infinite horizons and star-filled skies. But it is not his resting place that came to my mind while Akhtal was speaking.”

“What, then?”

“His flight to Mecca.”

“To build the Ka’ba …”

“And achieve atonement. He took to the road in search of his firstborn, the long-lost Ishmael, dispatched upon Sara’s whim into the desert after the birth of Isaac.”

(photo credit 25.1)

God hears the voice of the boy, wherever he may be
.

“Who said those words?”

“The Almighty said them to Moses long after Abraham’s time, as he had said them to Abraham before, which is what sent him to the desert where Ishmael and Hagar now lived.”

“Separation breeds strange habits of the heart.”

“Attraction grows with distance, like a distant bridegroom pining for his faraway bride. Abraham was drawn to Ishmael just as the Black Stone will be drawn to the Rock from which it was long ago separated; he was fated to atone for what he had done on the Rock by repairing that which his abandonment of Ishmael had torn asunder.”

“It is fitting, I suppose, that the father of the Hebrews and the Arabs should be destined to return to his firstborn. But why were the two rocks separated in the first place?”

“Why was Ishmael cast out in the desert and the hands of men
turned against him? God intended it that way. Perhaps He wanted to test His children, as Jews friendly to Muhammad say. Or perhaps He intended a curse on both peoples’ heads, like the mark that branded Cain for killing his brother. Knowing in such matters belongs to God alone.”

Abd al-Malik went quiet. The Caliph was lost in a private world. Breaking out of his reverie, he said: “What are you suggesting with all this, Ishaq?”

“To the origins of the two holy cities, O Abd al-Malik, to Mecca and Jerusalem, to what separated them in the first place, and to that which must one day bring them back together.”

“But was there a Mecca at the time of which you are speaking? All was desolation and destruction, relics of the Deluge.”

“There was the Black Stone.”

“Abraham fled one Rock to run up against another …”

“He took the same route as Adam when he met up with Eve. And surely enough, a month’s camel-ride away from Mount Zion, he found Ishmael and the prize that the First Man had brought with him from the Garden.”

“The Black Stone.”

“The very same. Tarnished by time, but recognizable. Abraham found the Stone in the valley at the foot of Mount Abu Qubays, where the winds and wild beasts had pushed it. The father who had nearly lost a son on one Rock now set to work building a Temple with the other. The Stone had to be protected. The house that Adam built around it had long since gone. Only its memory survived. The prophets, including Muhammad, knew of it, the Jewish sages of Arabia knew of it, and Ka’b knew of it.”

“What did Adam’s house look like?”

“It was made of black cloth and wooden pegs, Ka’b taught, which is why weaving is the first craft and lies at the origin of the art of shelter. All the rules of geometry were suggested by the straight lines, from which a square piece of cloth is still made. Bookbinders make their papyrus sheets the way Adam made his cloth. Adam’s tent, called a tabernacle by the Jews, opened onto an
enclosure marked out as a sanctuary. The doorway faced the gateway into the outer enclosure of the sanctuary, which, in turn, faced the direction from which Adam had come—Moriah’s summit. Thus was created the first direction toward which the prophets turned in prayer, and the prototype of the tent used by the Children of Israel during their wanderings.”

“The Mother of All Books teaches that Abraham and Ishmael built the Ka’ba, carefully setting the Stone into its southeast corner because there it would be protected from flooding. But they used stone, not cloth.”

“They draped the walls in black cloth, annually renewed by men ever since to remind them of the house that Adam had built. The Stone, whose color was on its way to blackness when Abraham found it, had been exposed to the ravages of flash floods, sandstorms, and the blazing heat of the sun. Abraham had to improve upon what Adam had done. Thus did the first shelter made of cloth become the first building made of stone clad in cloth. Around this primordial square grew Mecca, a city that received both its form and its meaning from the Stone.”

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“Abraham the priest had become Abraham the builder.”

“The two roles later combined in Solomon, as they were to combine for the last time in Muhammad when he rebuilt the Ka’ba. Solomon built a Temple around the Rock that had so unsettled Abraham. As Mecca grew around Abraham’s Ka’ba, so did Jerusalem grow around Solomon’s Temple. Guarded by fearsome cherubim, Solomon placed the Ark on top of the Rock, inside a room known as the Holy of Holies. That room, the heart and soul of Solomon’s grand design, was built of stone in the same shape as Abraham’s Ka’ba.”

“A cube!”

“Precisely, O Caliph. Duplication is here a sign of God’s majesty; it is the affirmation of the as yet unwritten covenant between the two holiest cities in creation. Memory was hard at work.”

“Solomon’s Temple, I am told, far exceeded the Ka’ba in beauty and magnificence.”

“It certainly did. Yet the Ka’ba is the most ancient house, in God’s words, the first sanctuary to be established on earth. Age is to the Ka’ba what beauty was to the Temple.”

“What did Solomon do after the completion of his Temple?”

“He prayed and offered sacrifice to God in Jerusalem, just as our father Abraham had done before him in Mecca. His words, Ka’b always said, were Abraham’s own. Solomon finished his work on the tenth day of the first month of the year, Yom Kippur, the very day that the Ka’ba annually receives its new clothing of black.”

“Praise be to God!”

“Like nature’s cycles, such temporal recurrences are proofs of His Design.”

“I inherit a deeply divided kingdom. What happened to break the covenant between Mecca and Jerusalem?”

“Time passed. Memories dimmed. Desires multiplied. Cities grew larger in concentric circles around the two Rocks. Distance from the center forged new memories and desires inside new forms. Men disagreed over what had happened in the past, and why. Desires and memories washed over both holy cities until the descendants of Abraham could not tell the one apart from the other. All
that they remembered was what they wanted to remember. The present prevailed as the frailties of the First Man were passed on to his heirs. The inhabitants of Mecca and Jerusalem even forgot one another’s existence. Sons of the same father began to conspire against their own souls, forgetting God, not even knowing that that was what they were doing. He, however, did not forget them. He sent Messengers to bring men back to his bosom. Muhammad was the last among these. He came after the Temple of Jerusalem had been destroyed, its Rock desecrated with statues and Christian dung.”

“So Ishmael’s descendants in Mecca were singled out by the coming of Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him.”

“Because there was nowhere else for His Messenger to go. The hand of fate carried him there. To every nation He raises a witness against itself. His coming meant that the time of those who were born to die for His Name by the sword had arrived: the Sons of Hagar would no longer stay in the desert. They had to join with the Sons of Sara and come to Jerusalem. We must not forget both sacred Rocks were jewels in the beginning. Adam landed on one and carried the other. Both featured in Creation. Both have a divine origin. They were even defiled in the same way. Did not Ka’b and Umar find menstrual cloths and filth on the first day of the Muslim conquest …?”

“The day on which Jerusalem and Mecca were reunited.”

“Long-lost lovers brought back into an uneasy embrace. But an embrace nonetheless.”

“The signs of that shared destiny are not in evidence today. One last question remains, Ishaq. In His wisdom, the Holy One chose to complicate our lives by changing the axis of prayer in the second year of the Exodus from one Rock to the other. What did your father have to say about that?”