The Rock (30 page)

“He said that everything has its origin as its destination. God does not command an abomination. The strife that the religion of Abraham forbids is not part of His design. The Rocks, on the other hand, are. Their story is. Through them, for better or for worse, the destiny of the peoples of Moses and Muhammad are inextricably intertwined.”

“And what if the story has a bad ending?”

“It is still one story.”

T
he second conversation followed late in the afternoon of the same day, after Abd al-Malik had recited his mid-afternoon prayers. Normally, he retired then, receiving no one. On this occasion, however, I was brought to his private quarters overlooking the courtyard in the palace.

“Our Syrian Rock is bigger than Abdallah’s Black Stone. What did your father have to say about the importance of size?”

“Adam had to land on one and carry the other. Size in itself does not bestow greater or lesser sanctity.”

“I was not suggesting otherwise, son of Ka’b. Surely, however, size has some implication for the Temples housing the two stones.”

“As does the future reunion of that which the First Man estranged through his travels.”

“Would that be a physical act that you are talking about?”

“It would.”

“Truly, this would be a wondrous sign! What said Ka’b about it?”

“It was he who foretold that it would happen. He said that it will be one of the signs of the Hour; that the Stones will not be annihilated like the rest of Creation on Judgment Day but will conjoin like a man does with a woman.”

“How will my heart rejoice over that which my eye will never see?”

“God’s signs are there for those who know how to draw consolation from them.”

“No man can be consoled from the annihilation of all things.”

“No. But he can from the knowledge that the Rock and the Stone are the last things to be annihilated. Their nature is to consume Time, rather than be consumed by it.”

“What exactly did Ka’b say will happen to the two Stones on the Day?”

“The Black Stone will say to the Rock: Are you ready to receive me? You who are the first creation of the Holy One, Blessed Be He, and I who am His envoy? And the Rock will reply, Yes, come to me. The Black Stone will then rise in the air, uprooting the Ka’ba from its foundations, and carrying with it all those who have over the generations made the pilgrimage to Mecca. It will come to Jerusalem to be received by the Rock. The Rock will open like a woman opens herself to receive a man. The Stones will mate in a final cataclysmic embrace, an implosion of passion and desire such as has not been witnessed during Creation, the wildest rutting season of all. So powerful will be the urge, it will fuse back together again that which He once separated.”

T
he third conversation took place in the Caliph’s audience hall. It was the morning of the following day. Officers, ministers, and secretaries were present. But instead of addressing them as was his wont, he turned to me, saying, “Do you like your profession?”

“Bookbinding is the source of great solace. I would not exchange it for another under any circumstances.”

“Describe what you do.”

“I turn wisdom into an artifact that men engage with and attend to.”

“How do you begin?”

“The wisdom has to be there, like the plan according to which God laid out Heaven and Earth and all that lies in between.”

“Wisdom precedes, in other words, what you do.”

“Precisely. As the idea of a circle precedes its drawing.”

“If I recall, those were your father’s words.”

“You have a prodigious memory, O Abd al-Malik. They are his very words used to describe the place of the Rock in Creation.”

“Go on. Describe how you make something out of this wisdom.”

“I take pieces of papyrus cut directly from the plant. These are
dried, woven in layers at right angles to one another, then wetted, hammered together, pressed, and smoothed in the workshop. Upon such sheets, using reed and ink, words are passed on to posterity. I deal in all that has to do with making it possible to fix and house such words between two covers.”

“Even when the Words are God’s own?”

“Especially if they are His. For then I know that the Book I am about to make is Divine, as will become the method, manner, and even the materials of its making.”

“I want to build such an artifact as you describe to house that place in the City of the Temple that sits on the very threshold of Heaven. There the prophet David sought refuge. I want to cover God’s Rock as his son Solomon did, and as you would His words. Only I want my Book to be in the shape of a Dome, a Dome built directly over the Rock, a Dome larger, and more beautiful, and more richly adorned than any other.”

T
he Rock was all that was left of God’s work on the first day. It was the height of hubris to imagine that I could connect that visible trace with His invisible Presence, the always absent Purpose of everything. My entire upbringing weighed against the idea of trying to do so.

Had not Solomon himself entertained regret after building his Temple? “The Heaven and Heaven of Heavens cannot contain thee,” he cried out upon seeing his magnificent monument. “How much less this house that I have built!”

Ka’b taught that the soul is most beautiful when it is naked. Building, through the extent of its artifice, its freezing into place the melting flux of nature, bodes ill for the Rock in its natural setting. Under the cool half-light of the moon, the spectacle of bare Rock against the starlit canvas of the sky draws the breath right out of a person. Time comes to a stop; the only sound is silence, a silence that takes the mind out of itself to meditate on other worlds. Truly, this is the first rung on Heaven’s ladder, I used to think to myself. To be transported, all one needs is to be there at night and look—look at God’s Rock set against His upturned bowl of a sky.

Imprisoning His Rock in a gilded cage, dressing it up in ceramics, marble, precious stones, gold lettering—”a whore’s glitter,” Ka’b would have said—was anathema. Had the ghost of Sophronius reached out from the grave and bewitched Abd al-Malik?
Was he about to do to my father’s Rock what the Patriarch’s queen had done to Calvary? Strip out the sheltering tent of the sky, and what are you left with? A relic like Golgotha. A cross laid out in a coffin made of silver and gold.

Can memory and conscience take shape against these as a backdrop?

The craft of bookbinding teaches that it can.

What is a book if not an artifact unfixed in time and space? A mobile receptacle for memories that would otherwise be lost? Ka’b adored the few scrolls and leaved books he had brought with him from the Yemen. The little wooden chest in which they sat partook of a kind of holiness. I was brought up to treat it like a reliquary, as inviolable as the holy Ark itself. No one was allowed to sit, or put anything, on top of it. No one was allowed to drink or eat when it was being opened. My first lesson in the value of books began with the chest that housed them.

Perhaps Abd al-Malik intuited this, and used it to turn me around to his way of seeing things—just as his Dome was going to turn the whole Community of Muhammad against his rival, Abdallah, holed up in Mecca.

Perhaps I was being seduced in the way a moth is seduced by the flame that will consume it? Even if I could bring myself to disturb the Rock in its natural setting, to forgo my former pleasure in the hope of wresting out an even greater one, could I trust this Caliph? I disliked and mistrusted his House, however much I had come to respect the discernment of the Caliph himself. Intelligence, after all, can be put in servitude to a man’s organs as easily as it can to the glory of He who made those organs in order to serve Him.

The Caliph needed me to justify forms selected on the basis of stories that he wanted to be like the mortar that bonds materials together, invisible to the eye but indispensable to the larger structure of things. The prospect both thrilled and terrified me.

The success of Muhammad, the very speed with which his followers had become rulers of half the world, demanded an answer to
the question of where they ought to be ruled from. Arabia was too remote. Mu’awiya, and even Ali, understood this. But only Abd al-Malik was able to translate the understanding into realities on the ground. Only Jerusalem, he had intuited, could put Muhammad’s People at the center of things, where they belonged.

Was not the City of the Temple the Holy Land to which all the prophets had emigrated? It had, therefore, greater merit than Mecca. Was that not the truth that my father taught and which I myself had passed on to Abd al-Malik? This Caliph was no innovator; he was simply restoring a balance that had been confirmed by God during the week in which He fashioned the world. Muhammad, God’s Grace Be Upon Him and His Household, was the seal of the prophets. God willed that his followers should crown the epic encounter between Him and all His creations—an encounter that reached its apogee on the day that the first Believer and his son underwent their great ordeal at the place that Abd al-Malik now wished to pay homage.

Thus did I reason myself into the whirlpool of my father’s obsession and Abd al-Malik’s desires. I was appointed advisor on matters of the Dome’s form and appearance. My task was to find a Syrian master-builder and justify a shape that would support and enhance Abd al-Malik’s Dome—a Dome that had to be bigger than the biggest Christian Dome in the city, that of the Church of Resurrection.

I
n Medina, on the day of my birth, long before he knew he would come to Jerusalem, Umar placed upon me a terrible burden—my name. Truly, the coming of the Redeemer to this land, and Abd al-Malik’s decision to build over the Holy Rock, was foreshadowed in that choice.

My father left out the merit of the son in the story of the great sacrifice that he told Umar on the Mount of Olives. Nor did Umar raise the question with him, perhaps because that is not what a man beside himself with grief at the sacrifice of his own daughter needed to hear at the time. For him, as for Umar, that was not where the true meaning of what happened on the Rock resided. But Ka’b was wrong to leave out the merit of he whose name is on the dying breath of every martyr in God’s cause.

The monks of the Holy City contend that the People of Muhammad follow too blindly in the footsteps of the Jews. What happened to Abraham and Ishaq they say, was but a preamble, a dress rehearsal, for the supreme sacrificial act of all time carried out by Jesus in the place where they have erected their Church. Because of what Jesus did, the whole tradition of bloodletting practiced in the old Temple was rendered null and void. Abraham did not offer himself. And Ishaq was just a boy who was offered by someone else; he too did not offer himself. Worst of all, he did not die; he was not even hurt. Not one drop of Ishaq’s blood was shed, they
argue most persuasively to the young Arab scholars who search them out. How could either Abraham or Ishaq, venerable prophets that they were, be compared with the Son who was Himself God, and who died so nobly on behalf of all of us?

The true meaning of what happened on the Rock during the great trial, therefore, needs to be re-examined. Mine is a moderate view, rooted in the teachings of the Holy Book; it starts, not by denying what Ka’b said to Umar on the Mount of Olives, but by adding to the story all those things that my father did not say. Is there equal if not greater merit in him who was to be sacrificed than in him who did the sacrificing?