The Rock (31 page)

A
fter Moriah had been pointed out by God, Abraham and his son left their asses at its foot and climbed the mountain. On the summit, Abraham sharpened his knife. He built the altar, and he trimmed and arranged the wood in the right order for a burnt offering. Then he embraced the boy, who only now, even as he was being bound hand and foot, began to realize that something was amiss.

Like a soft-spoken dove, Ishaq whispered:

“Father!”

“I am here, my son.”

“I behold the fire and the wood. But where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?”

“The Lord will look to His lamb, and draw it to His bosom.”

Between the question and the answer, Abraham would have had to look into his son’s eyes. He would have had to look into his eyes yet again as he raised the knife to dispatch him. Tradition demands that, in the case of an unblemished offering, the killing must be done in a single stroke. If, in the act of slaughtering, there occurs a pause long enough for a whole other stroke to take place, the sacrifice must be disqualified.

But according to the Jewish sages whom I have consulted, that is when the exchange of words took place. There would not have
been enough time for the sacrifice to be done correctly. Abraham’s ordeal would have been for naught.

Suppose, however, the exchange of words took place before the binding. Or suppose there was enough time to make the cut precisely as it should be made. How could
this
be a true sacrifice if the offering’s own blood was not shed? All the wise men that I have consulted teach that sin can be expiated only with blood. Tradition demands it, and only the blood of the victim himself counts for true atonement. The blood of a substitute will sometimes be accepted, as Muhammad’s father, Abd al-Muttalib, found out to his relief, but it is never as good. We know why God accepted a substitute on that particular occasion. Because He wanted His Messenger to be born. But how could He accept a substitute in the case of the supreme sacrifice, Abraham’s sacrifice of his son on the Rock? The Christians have an unimpeachable point here that needs to be accounted for.

Perhaps the Patriarch inflicted some kind of wound that released blood that washed over the Rock but left the boy alive. Would that consummate Abraham’s offering?

No, say the sages of blessed memory. It would not be enough. Where are the ashes? Tradition demands ashes. To be properly sacrificed, an offering must release blood and leave behind ashes. What happened to the ashes of him who was the perpetual offering? If they were not there, then Ishaq was not killed. What precisely happened on the Rock to confer merit on both Abraham and his son?

The first time I heard the story was the day that we settled into our new house situated eighty-six paces away from the story’s setting. No sooner had our baggage been set down than Ka’b took my hand and hurried to the esplanade, which was still covered in filth. Beside the Rock that he and Umar had uncovered, he told me the story of the origins of my name. I wanted to know whether or not the boy had been afraid. Ka’b said,

“Perhaps, but the fear went away after his father spoke.”

“Why did he submit to being tied up?”

“He trusted his father.”

“Did he struggle to release himself?”

“No.”

“But then his faith was being tested as much as his father’s.”

“It was.”

“What would be the point of binding him, depriving him of the possibility of failing God’s test?”

Ka’b was silent. He did not know what to say. That silence led me to search in new directions. And this is what I have concluded.

O
f course Abraham’s sacrifice was a true offering, and as such, the boy had to have died. Otherwise, how can the sacrifice of a would-be victim, taken down from the altar sound of limb, be greater than that of an actual victim, like Umar’s daughter, whose body became food for worms? The Christians have a point: He who does not act out a plan, whatever his intentions, is not like one who carries it out. How, then, did the boy die
and
go on to spread his seed until his descendants were as numerous as the sands on the seashore?

Abraham would have pinned Ishaq down with his knees. Had the arm clenching the knife in its fist faltered, as it might, Abraham would have steeled himself and made it strong. That was his nature. With steadied hands, according to the rite, he slaughtered the boy. But did he kill him? The boy may have died of fright before the blade struck, as some people say. Still Abraham had to slit Ishaq’s throat because a full quarter of the boy’s blood had to spill on the Rock. Whether it was the blade that did the deed, or Ishaq’s own terror, there is no escaping the conclusion that Abraham’s son was the first true lamb of God.

No sooner had the deed been done, and the body consumed by fire, than a resurrecting dew fell upon those ashes of righteousness. The boy revived. God, who commands the wind, showers the rain, and nourishes the living, also quickens the dead. In the blink of an eye, salvation sprouts, bringing life where before there was only
death. There and then on the Rock, the son of Abraham was resurrected as proof of his great virtue. Thus it had to be with him whose binding was intended to be more than just a test of Abraham’s submission, and whose blood has watered the gardens of the pure ever since.

What did the father do now? No doubt he seized the newly arisen boy by the shoulders to slaughter him again, as God had commanded. Only just before the ministering angels intervened with Him on high to save the son by substituting the ram in his place, the boy himself asked to be bound. He feared for his father’s sake; his offering would be found wanting if, in a moment of weakness, he cringed and the knife were deflected from its purpose.

“O my father,” Ishaq said, “if you desire my sacrifice, nothing is imposed on you by me. Your punishment for shedding my blood is by this diminished. Only make my bonds fast, for if the death is hard I do not believe I will be able to endure it when I feel death’s touch. Hone your knife so that you can finish me off quickly and release me from my agony. When you lay me down for sacrifice, lay me down on my face, not on my side. For I fear that, if you look at my face, you will soften and abandon God’s command. If you wish, return my shirt to my mother; it might be a consolation to her. Now, proceed. Do it!”

F
or weeks I walked like a man in a daze up and down the cobbled streets of Jerusalem, visiting my old haunts. I sat for hours in the convoluted halls of the Church of the Resurrection, looking at how Calvary’s rock had been fitted to its church. The building meandered from the great steps of the Cardo, to the Basilica, to the central court, to the Rotunda, with Adam and Helena’s tomb tucked away underneath. The giant envelope of a form fitted these different places connected with the death and burial of Jesus arbitrarily. Calvary was all but lost in the confusion. One stumbled upon it by accident. It was not in the center, because the Church of the Resurrection had so many of those. A center has to be there all at once, all the time, and from every direction; it has to be suggested by the large and the small in the whole edifice. Every surface and detail has to strive toward it.

I climbed the Mount of Olives, approaching the Church of the Ascension on its summit from different angles, considering afresh the question of its rotund shape, so unlike that of any other edifice that I have ever seen. This unroofed building that was all wall and columns never failed to lift my spirits. The sky was its canopy—its only decoration, constellations of stars blended into the firmament like smoke from a sacrifice. What arresting stroke of genius had conceived of that for the place that Jesus had been called upon to return to Him on High? Like the Muslims that I grew up with—and
unlike my father—I never excluded the possibility that Jesus the Prophet, not the Son of God, God forbid! might have ascended from here into Heaven, as the church’s caretakers tirelessly tell their visitors. Perhaps those
were
his footprints embedded in the sandstone in the center of the church.

But the Churches of Jerusalem had not been founded on the Prophet’s truth. The willingness to suspend disbelief, which is what I do when I walk up the Mount of Olives or go into a beautiful church, is not True Belief—not, at any rate, as we followers of Muhammad understand it. True Belief is the certainty that God returned to His heavenly place of abode from the plain, gray, ordinary-looking piece of Rock that nestles in the sanctuary beside my house. My task, therefore, was to celebrate the wordless equivalent of that certainty, to sate the hunger of all men to believe from a place of deep humility.

I
consulted Nicholas, a Greek master-builder responsible for many of the finest churches in Syria. Knowing that the secrets of his trade were handed down from father to son and could be imparted only under the strictest of vows and never to a man of alien faith, he refused to talk to me about his craft at first, fearing both the admonition of his Church and the ire of his family. By appealing to our years of friendship—we had enjoyed an interlude of companionship as young men—and the pride he took in his considerable skills, I eventually won Nicholas over, and enticed him into a conversation on the setting out of domes.

“Give me a point, and a square,” he said after crossing himself repeatedly to ward off the possibility that he might be commiting a grave sin, “and I can erect any dome you want.”

The point sat at the center of the square, where its two diagonals intersected. From the same intersection, another square could be drawn at right angles to the first. Thus were created eight equidistant points.

(photo credit 28.1)

“Now think of these as describing the circumference of a circle. That is the drum of your Dome, and that is how I would mark it out with pegs on the ground.”

I took to playing with this geometry, using a stick in the sand—as I often did when deciding upon a frame for chapters of the Holy Book, which I would then execute in gold on parchment and surround with twisting tracery superimposed on patterns of straight lines.

In so tracing lines on a prepared patch of fine sand, I stumbled upon a remarkable consequence of Nicholas’s rules. By taking the original superimposed set of squares and extending all eight of their sides, a new set of intersections was harmoniously generated. I had made a new octagon, bigger than the first, but as perfectly derived from its archetype as the ripples made by a stone thrown into the stillness of a pond.