The Rock (34 page)

The crown of any such edifice is its dome. Domes test the true art and mettle of a builder like no other element. Ours began going up a year or so after Abd al-Malik’s visit to the site.

Nicholas insisted on constructing it out of two shells, independently fitted to one another like inverted cups. The curved ribs of each dome were bent, not cut, and held in place with cross-braced wooden struts as in a ship’s hull. It was stronger that way, Nicholas said. More importantly, the height I aspired to on the outside would not be marred by a tunnelled effect on the inside. Praise be to God who put proportion in that good man’s mind where all true works of architecture are carried, enabling him to see the consequences of geometry and arithmetic before they materialize on the ground.

The effect, while walking around inside the structure, before the roof was laid down, was one of striped light shimmering and dazzling the eyes as one passed under the symmetrically aligned trusses. The beauty of expressed structure tells its own story, and I needed no other argument to leave the beams and struts exposed rather than hiding them under coffered ceilings hanging off roof
trusses, as had been done in the Basilica of the Church of the Resurrection.

Thirty-two ribs spring upward from a wall-plate fixed to the top of the drum. These converge at the apex, where all tensions are resolved. I insisted on thirty-two so as to maintain a symmetry based on a factor of four, the number of sides of the Ka’ba: four doors, eight sides, sixteen drum windows, and thirty-two ribs. On the inside of the Dome we had the wall-plate cantilever beyond the wall to support a stucco cornice girdling the drum, which I thought provided a handsome transition from the starkly vertical to the gently sweeping curve of the dome. Similarly, on the outside, a cornice separated the Dome from its drum, which, again, is only fitting, seeing as how a change of material occurs there.

I wanted the decoration to be as lavish and rich as Nicholas’s
structure was spare. Had not Solomon’s Temple been filled with golden trees and sumptuous fruit? That which God has blessed has to have its riches come bursting out of all its surfaces.

(photo credit 30.1)

Working from pattern-books that my mosaicists presented to me, I chose according to what my father had taught me of the shapes and colors of the mansions and trees of Paradise. Vinescrolls, five-pointed leaves, pinecones, bunches of grapes looping out of trees or vases, and chains of half-palmettes were carved or painted on plates of wood and attached to the exposed roof beams. I wanted them to be overwhelming in quantity and variety. The tie-beams, being closer to the ground, were clad in metal, upon which craftsmen applied finely painted gilt, sometimes working the metal surface directly in a variety of ways. Likewise, the piers were decorated with vinelike plants rising from acanthus leaves, their stems laden with expensive ornaments and jewelry.

Golden trees, and treelike forms with multicolored trunks, luxuriant blossoms, and clusters of fruit, spill from the surfaces of the arcade. Sometimes I had sinuously curving vegetal forms growing out of jewelled vases. These I would have necklaced in collars of gold studded with chips of mother-of-pearl. The golden trees bore real fruit, just as Ka’b had told me they had in the lush gardens and courtyards of Solomon’s Temple. On the soffits of the arches, in cubes of mosaic, my craftsmen depicted grapes, dates, figs, pears, apples, prunes, quince, olives, cherries, lemons, and pomegranates.

W
hile building his skeletal structure, Nicholas scrambled about on the scaffolding as though he were putting together Noah’s Ark. He picked only the finest pieces of oak and cedar for the Dome’s ribs, even though the difference could hardly be seen from the ground. These species of wood are not subject to the attacks of worms, he said, when Raja’ tried to get him to obtain cheaper alternatives.

It was while he was working on the final stages of the inner
dome, nailing boarding that had palm-tree fiber glued on to hold the plaster, that he slipped and fell onto the craggy surface of the Rock below. Nicholas’s back was broken. We carried him to his house on a stretcher, but he was beyond the art of the doctors and died the following day.

I was distraught. We lost much of our Christian workforce that week, because word spread that Nicholas’s misfortune had been caused by his disobedience to the Church. A priest’s instruction should be heeded, one of the marble-setters said to me, for it is not his words that bind, but those of Jesus:

I appealed to Raja’ to dispense one hundred gold pieces to Nicholas’s family in recognition of his service on the Caliph’s behalf. But Nicholas had died uncircumcised, reminding everyone that, in spite of half a century of Muslim governance, Jerusalem was still Christian. In that was considerable loss of face for the followers of Muhammad. Raja’ refused to pay more than Nicholas was due on the day that he died. I decided to appeal directly to Abd al-Malik.

It took the Caliph weeks to see me. This was our first meeting since his visit to the site just under two years before.

“Nicholas, the master-builder, served his Caliph well,” I argued with all the passion at my disposal. “He did excellent work and met his death in the service of God.”

“Not for the sake of God did your friend meet his end but for the sake of money,” Abd al-Malik replied.

Generosity comes to this Caliph like sweat to a stone, I thought to myself as I rode back to Jerusalem.

(photo credit 30.2)

W
hen Nicholas fell from the Dome, no one was converting to Islam in Syria. The Church of the Resurrection was dazzling Muslims with its size, its magnificent mosaics, marbles, and gilded metalwork, not to mention the music that could be heard coming from inside. The great bells ascending and descending, the hypnotic chants of the monks, the high-pitched tones of the child choir, the ecstatic responses of worshippers to their priests—all this acted as a kind of bewitchment that worked to blur the word-filled edges of religious differences between men. Beardless men much further down the road to defection were asking what kind of victors we were who could not make pleasing things and sounds as well as those whom we have vanquished?

Abd al-Malik was completely dependent on Christian craftsmen like Nicholas for his building projects. And when criticism mounted that too many Christians were working on the Dome, Abd al-Malik snapped his fingers and said:

“Solomon turned to Hiram of Tyre for his architects, craftsmen, and materials. I am doing no more than he!”

The Caliph was enamored with the person of Solomon. Building had gone to his head. Before an assembly of courtiers and advisors, he said one day:

“David came out of the desert and waged a holy war of conquest for the land, an achievement which his son consecrated by
building the Temple and making Jerusalem the capital of the sons of Ishaq and of the world. The sons of Ishmael can do no less.”

Ka’b had taught that Solomon’s House was endowed with columns that propped up a mass of gold so bright the eyes flinched. So, Abd al-Malik instructed that his Dome shine like a lamp on a moonless night. But whose jewels and gold would encrust the walls? Believers had none of their own. All had been acquired as spoils of war.

“Precisely!” Raja’ said. “Include those. Did not the noble Umar hang crescent-shaped Persian insignia in the Ka’ba as a sign of the submission of the King of Kings?”

Thus did pictures of crowns, bracelets, diadems encrusted with precious stones, breastplates, necklaces, and other ornaments and insignia make their way into the inner face of the drum and the arcades. They hung from golden branches bursting with fruit redolent of Paradise. Facing the Rock, the crowns of the kings whom the followers of Muhammad had trampled into dust circled and paid homage to it.

(photo credit 31.1)

I
selected the trees from the pattern books of my artisans. Then, on pieces of wood that were to act as templates for my mosaicists, Raja’ ordered me to ink:

In clear, unornamented letters which were to fit above the arches of the arcade, I wrote,

Simple words. Orthodox words. God’s own words lettered in gold mosaic against a background of bright green. Every Muslim knew them by heart. And now they girdled the Rock. The craftsmen, who thus spelled out the errors of their own faith in glittering mosaic made to sparkle with mother-of-pearl, came from Antioch and Saloniki. A handful of the best were from that kitchen of thieves, Constantinople. The emperor’s artisans did not read Arabic. They made mistakes, which I did not uncover until after the tiles were glazed. Words were left out from one verse, which no one has so far noticed.