The Rock (32 page)

Extending the sides of the octagon in the sand generated yet another pair of superimposed squares, larger than their predecessors. One could go on and on, I realized. The pattern emerging was
like a living crystal, infinitely extendable around a point of origin and always with perfect symmetry in every direction. Connecting the outer eight points gave me an outer enclosure, the boundary wall enveloping two interior ambulatories, which, in turn, enclosed a circle out of which was going to rise the highest and most splendid Dome imaginable. There before my eyes in the sand was what I had been looking for—a graded passage from this world to the next by way of the Rock.

E
ight is the number of Paradise just as surely as Arabic is its language. God provided His creatures with eight paradises and only seven hells, Ka’b used to say.

“Why the difference?” I asked.

“Because His mercy is greater than His wrath. Is not the covenant between a newborn and his Maker made on the eighth day, the day his foreskin is cut? And did not the Prophet say that the Garden of Refuge for the Companions of the Right, virtue’s ultimate reward, is the eighth level of Paradise?”

Four rivers—of water unstaling, of milk uncurdling, of honey purified, and of wine delightful—irrigate this highest level. The Garden is near the Lote-Tree of the Boundary under the Throne of God, itself carried by eight angels, all hovering in the Heavens directly above the Rock. Fountains gush everywhere. Shade trees, date palms, pomegranate trees, and other fruit trees abound. The air is redolent of musk, camphor, and ginger. In such a place the
God-fearing shall dwell in the presence of their King Omnipotent, and find out that all their Lord had promised them was true.

Believers know these things because they are written. But not all of them know about the importance of eight. A bare handful realize that all the Peoples of the Book are folded under that number’s divine wings.

Christians say that Jesus rose to Heaven on the eighth day of the Passion. The pool in which they circumcise the hearts of their children is shaped like an octagon. Baptism, as they call it, makes the newborn a companion of Jesus on the Day of Resurrection. My Dome was in the shape of this number of the afterlife. The thought of it brought tears to my eyes.

In the course of a lifetime, a man is lucky to be granted two, three at most, insights into what is unmistakably right. Normally, the mind contents itself with shuffling around the dead facts of experience, trying this and then that, invariably settling on a compromise of sorts. But in the rare event of such an insight, the veils are stripped off life’s clutter to reveal the bright forehead of exactitude. The soul has grasped a living truth! The Beautiful, a deeply overpowering sensation that fills the soul with the warmth of Rightness, is revealed.

What is Rightness if not also Truth and Justice? My commission was one of immortalizing in stone the Truth and the Justice of my father’s Rock. Nothing about it was contingent. Like a harmonious chord, the building had materialized in my mind as an emanation of cosmic laws. The architecture was rhythmical and sequenced as it should be; it rejected the confusion of the superficial. Even the circumference of the Dome fell into place by itself, as it were, according to a definite proportion and in perfect harmony with every other dimension—as did the locations of the piers and columns that fell naturally on the points of intersection of my lines. I did not choose those points; they made themselves known to me. Nor did they conceal one another in the plan, but rather permitted, from any point in the interior, a view all the way across to the other side.

Transparency, as all men know, is the rule in Paradise.

Can rotating a square around a point accomplish all this? Can it determine the appropriate correlation between His ineffable nature and built form? To find shapes properly grounded in scripture and the stories of the prophets from so few rules is more reminiscent of Him than months, even years, of knowing Him through words alone. And all of it happened while I was playing like a child in the sand. When His Design was traced out with my stick, I was blessed with a glimpse into the dawn of what was to come. I knew then that, finally, I had awakened from the dream of this life to the reality of the next.

T
wo problems had to be resolved—the location of the Rock’s center, the building’s starting point, and the dimensions of the square that Nicholas had talked about.

The Rock sprawled irregularly over a much larger area than is apparent to the eye today. Who dared to vouch on his or her own authority where the all-important center was? Scrambling over the surface, I drove a small wooden stake into the crevice that Ka’b had always said marked the Rock’s center. That stake became the marker from which the whole edifice was laid out.

The second problem was more complicated. Nicholas had said—and it was borne out by my drawing—that everything depended on the dimensions of the square: the diameter of the Dome, the outer perimeter of the octagon, the width of the two ambulatories, to say nothing of the area of the Rock left visible. All of these would fall into place only after the length of the square’s diagonal had been determined. I needed a criterion by which to determine this critical dimension.

The solution came to me like a bolt from on High. The template that I needed for Abd al-Malik’s Dome in Jerusalem must derive from Abraham’s Ka’ba in Mecca. The cube that housed the Black Stone was, after all, destined to return to the Rock on the Day when
all things would be annihilated. That is what Ka’b had said. The Black Stone would uproot the Ka’ba from its foundations and travel with it to Jerusalem. The two holy Rocks would then conjoin in a cataclysmic embrace. Abd al-Malik’s Dome had to accommodate its counterpart in Mecca. All three dimensions of the Ka’ba had to fit inside the new Temple that Abd al-Malik was building over the ruins of its predecessors in Jerusalem. The diameter of the Dome had therefore to be equal to the height of its drum from the ground, whose dimensions were, in turn, derived from the diagonal of the Ka’ba, whose four corners are the four piers in the plan of the Dome of the Rock.

Y
ou will no doubt have to prepare the surface of the Rock, cut it into shape, smooth it over, and dress the surface,” Abd al-Malik said after the plan that Nicholas and I had carefully drawn on animal skins had been explained to him.

“Absolutely not!” I blurted out, horrified. “The Rock must not be touched, no matter what else we do.”

“How can it remain in such a crude and ugly state when it occupies pride of place inside a great monument?” asked the incredulous Caliph.

“The Rock is beyond our canons,” I replied. “It may terrify, be wondrous, awesome even, but it is not and can never be merely beautiful. It is, after all, His first creation and the cornerstone of the entire cosmos.”

“Where is the Beautiful, then, in what you are proposing?”

“It is in Abd al-Malik’s Dome in the first place, followed by all the other surfaces that hold it up. Imagine a delicate and intricately embroidered canopy suspended over the Rock. The Dome is to the Rock what the sky is to the earth, what the night stars are to the celestial pole. It is the mirror to the Rock’s opacity, the beacon of its Truth.”

“Do you not aspire to any kind of likeness between the Dome and the Rock?”

“None whatsoever. To Him alone belongs sublime similitude.
The Rock and its Dome harmonize through contrast and opposition. Similitude and continuity between them would be the Devil’s embrace. When you cannot compete with something or even simulate its meaning, it is wiser to do something else entirely. Then the Dome, and that which it celebrates, are together enhanced.”

“How should the Dome look?”

“A landmark, visible by virtue of height and color from every approach to the city and every point within it. From within, looking up into the cupola, its inverted roundness must present a spectacle of small, smooth, delicate, subtly colored parts that lead the eye of the beholder on a wanton kind of chase to sights worthy of Heaven. The mind delights in variety that is intricate, elusive, and intertwined, as long as it is also ordered and contained, held within an overarching uniformity. The Dome is unity, like the tent from which it derives. Contained within it is a primal force, the rugged craggy summit from which He fashioned everything. I would have the raw Rock rising like an eruption from a sea of polished marble, an island in glassy-smooth coral waters.”

“How can what you describe be achieved?”

“With the use of precious, glittering materials, perfectly cut and set to an invisible order mimicking that of the plan before your eyes. By human artifice, we will adorn your Dome with that which really belongs only to Him, and with which He has decorated Paradise.”

“Is this how Solomon decorated his Temple?”

“It is. But we have gone a step further than Solomon. He cloaked the Holy of Holies in darkness, whereas we shall flood the Dome with light.”

“Why were there no windows in the Holy of Holies?”

“Because Solomon’s advisors said God resided there, and, thus, they believed His light physically radiated from that place. And because Solomon copied the pagan temples he saw around him, all of which had dark, inaccessible centers. In place of their idols, he put the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies. When the Ark was lost, the chamber was left a dark and empty cube, like
the Ka’ba, qualities the Israelites associated with the brooding presence of the Lord. The Romans, who were used to brightly decorated temples reeking of incense and filled with the golden effigies of their idols, thought them mad.”

“How could you possibly know what the Holy of Holies looked like?” interjected Raja’, son of Heyweh, a theologian and collector of traditions about the Prophet, whose advice was highly regarded in Abd al-Malik’s court. “There is no description of it in God’s Book, and the Prophet said nothing about it.”

“I know it from the Book of Moses, which my father was taught in the land of the Yemen.”

“A Book thick with praise, but thin on the matters of shape and form that you are talking about.” Raja’ considered himself an expert on the City of the Temple and its holy places.