The Rock (37 page)

G
od’s chosen instrument both in the time of Moses and in the time of Mohammed was a People of the Sacred Direction. For in the beginning there was only one Rock and one Direction. This common orientation created deep ties of knowledge and experience
between the peoples of Moses and Muhammad—from astronomy to pilgrimage, from the separateness of the categories of creation to proper rules of sacrifice, from ideas of cleanliness and defilement to architecture and the geography of Heaven and Hell.

True Believers prayed facing the Rock that David and Ahithophel had uncovered. The heads of animals about to be slaughtered were turned toward it. And while the first Muslims were undergoing persecution in Mecca, they took the greatest of care never to spit or to relieve themselves in this holiest of directions—the first sacred axis of Islam, which Umar himself had returned to True Belief.

Ka’b lived through an age of prophecy and unsettled customs, an age in which wisdom did not lie in teaching what had been revealed; it lay in revealing what ought to be taught. He wrestled with his soul as hard as Jacob with the angel before accepting Muhammad. But accept him in the end he did. He attached himself to Muhammad’s mission while his own people were lost in lamentations over their subjugation and the destruction of their Temple. My father did not speak of the Rock, until his visit to the Holy City. Perhaps he thought the Arabs would not know what to make of it. Perhaps he did not know what to say.

Umar was the first to know. But his knowledge remained unpolished. At the moment of his greatest triumph, the great Redeemer allowed religion to become subordinated to politics. He worried about what people might think if the sons of Hagar looked too much like the sons of Sara. And so he chose to define the People of Muhammad by expunging from them what was rightfully owed to the People of Moses.

If Ka’b considered this unworthy, it was not because he thought Umar ought to abide by what the Jews believed. It was because the great Caliph was denigrating the actual place of God’s ascent and Abraham’s sacrifice. He was denigrating all those prophets who predicted the destruction of the world and yet foresaw redemption coming only out of this mountain upon which I am now writing.

“I am laying in Zion a foundation stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone,” Isaiah had said. The Rock of Foundation:
Foundation, not only as a story about origins, but as an ongoing holding together of the world. For around this Rock, Isaiah prophesied, all nations would end their warring and gather for a final reconciliation. Such a lodestone could have provided a clarity that was both welcome and necessary in the confused and confusing state of affairs in which Believers found themselves immediately after the conquest.

But Umar turned his back on the Rock. And later generations, for whom Umar’s bones were warmer than their own flesh, continued to build their mosques in the direction the Conqueror of Cities had built his. The Rock was ignored, turning into a thing toward which one gradually became indifferent. The unerring spirit of an age that had begun with such promise, that had conquered half the world in a handful of years, foundered; it was entombed within a stone that lay like a troubled conscience upon the land.

Muhammad would not have recognized the Believers as his followers. They grew idle and soft. The City of the Rock was being turned into a mine for profit in this world, not the next.

The moment Umar made his fateful decision, Ka’b knew that he had failed. Other men might have bent like reeds in the wind. But Ka’b harbored one of those abiding passions that ripens and deepens in adversity. The Rock was his probe; having worn out his sandals searching for it, only to be misunderstood, he gave himself up to the Rock.

A thing belongs to the one who remembers it most obsessively. Only through such remembering can we defend the mystery against the sorcery, worship the incomprehensible while rejecting the absurd, dispel the superstitions that complacency brings swirling around Him, and separate out of the inexplicable what is necessary and true.

“R
emember what happened to the king who strove to build the tallest tower! He sought to scale the heavens above the clouds, imitating
Him who is Most High. Instead he was ensnared and scattered by a whirlwind, flung aside to lie on a mattress of maggots, swaddled in a blanket of worms. Turn this world into a bridge over which you cross, my son, but on which you must never build. The living are but passersby on their way to Judgment.”

Like a blind man proud of his blindness, Ka’b never saw the point of a beautiful building. A permanent one, built of stone, was the gravest sin:

“What! Would you alter the structure of the universe!”

The Rock, which had honed and tested my father’s mettle, left him saddled with a vision that so encompassed the world that he lost touch with everything else around him. Perfection of the life is better than that of the work, taught the man whose own life’s work had dissipated like sand between his fingers.

For years I took for granted that, by not leaving behind anything new, or any kind of imitation of Him, the scroll of my good deeds would outweigh the bad. I lived quietly, honoring through my bookbinding only that which was given to men by God. I tended to my business, just waiting to be ensnared by the Decree from which there is no refuge—until a son of Umayya came along, wanting to be regaled with my father’s stories.

I do not share in Abd al-Malik’s conceit that due consideration of His first Work would admit me into the Almighty’s good graces on the Day. A man does not enter Paradise just because he has painted his own picture of it. But, perhaps by returning to childhood’s stories of Paradise one can enhance his sense of its mystery. Whenever I start to worry about whether or not I did the right thing in serving a Caliph whose intentions were not mine, I recall what David and Solomon built around Abraham’s deed on the ordinary-looking mountain summit above which I placed my Dome. It was not easy translating that story into permanence. I had to work the earth of my heart, in the place where the struggle against weeds is first felt as a pain in the knees and back.

The Father of Faith was asked to kill his favorite on a rugged and distant mountaintop in complete isolation. He was asked to kill
with no hope of being understood by those nearest and dearest to him, knowing that no one could possibly benefit from what he was about to do. He did not protest God’s justice as he had done in the case of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Throughout his ordeal, he was silent, resolved, completely resigned. Of all the different places to undergo such an ordeal, Moriah’s Rock was the unlikeliest. And of all the different ways of doing God’s will, Ishaq’s was the hardest.

The blood of the ram would have mingled with that of my namesake; it would have run down the gently tilting face of the Rock, inside the lines and down the perforations of its craggy surface. As it spread, the blood changed that which it was washing over. The blood of my namesake, the first martyr to true Belief, is not about the loss of life; like the Dome I was resolved to build, it is about the birth of new meaning: bright red blood coagulating to dark black, delineating the boundaries of a new holiness.

But what is left of that new beginning, of that original act of foundation? The wood upon which Abraham was to sacrifice Ishaq was consumed in the fire along with the ram; the rope with which Ishaq was tied up has rotted, the knife long since been lost.

That leaves only the Rock.

Only the Rock to remind us of a fragile string of feelings and traditions. The Rock: last surviving trace of horror’s resolution into ecstasy. The Rock: sole surviving witness to the passions that have driven men to become little Abrahams on this mountaintop over and over again.

What happens to an otherwise benign piece of the landscape when it is converted into an executioner’s bench, and then into an instrument for the working of that great force of change, memory? Its ordinariness is unmade before our eyes, all its prior meanings annihilated.

Can the children of Abraham, the one taken by God for His Friend, afford to forget such an annihilation, or continue to pray with their backs to the greatest Enigma, an act for which they will surely have to account one day? And if a man does not pray with his
back to the Rock, is it enough for him to eat figs in its shade, entrusting himself to God’s will?

My patrimony came burdened with the problem of direction, the inheritance of a whole generation, all of whom were born to converts in an age of conversions.

Building taught me that Ka’b was wrong: True Faith is not a precondition for coming to God. Good works are. If there is a difference between other men and women of the Book who advocate commendable attitudes and do good deeds and we who have the True Faith, it is that we are in duty bound to show greater gentleness, forgiveness, and tolerance. Otherwise, in His eyes, we are all the same.

I, Ishaq son of Ka’b, born Jacob of Judah, believe that we have a duty to remember and honor both the submission of the Father and the submission of the Son on this Rock. Time is irredeemable. The Lord of Creation sees our end in our beginning. Abraham’s deadly seriousness stood a witless world on its head. Fused with my namesake’s merit, it forged mankind’s most sublime act of submission. And submission is at the core of what Muhammad preached.

I have ensured that the true legacy of the man who happened to be my father will no longer be forgotten. Not that the old curmudgeon will ever thank me for it. The Lord of Creation will do that before he ever will. But it was his unworldliness in the end that brought the Dome of the Rock into the world. It is his lore that allowed me to shape a stone so beautifully it will stand until the
End of Time as a reproof to men’s penchant for forgetfulness and smallmindedness.

The Dome of the Rock was a kind of solution. Through the hands and the eyes, connections often become visible to the heart where, before, words had reaped only confusion and division.

The decision to build may begin out of anger, spite, vanity, or even sweetness. But to succeed at it requires reaching beyond such motives to a moment of tranquillity when, by the grace of God, one is able to see the forms in which His words can once again be heard.

Intention sits at the heart of Judgment. Abraham will be judged, not for what he did, but for what he intended to do. I, on the other hand, served a Caliph whose wars and vanities were not mine. Do the merits of what I built outweigh Abd al-Malik’s intentions?

God knows everything that was in my heart. He culled a building out of me that outweighs those intentions to call upon Time’s two extremes—creation and annihilation. The Rock does not belong to the followers of Moses any more than it belongs to the followers of Muhammad. First and foremost, it is His Rock, to which He will return on the Day when all motives will have dissolved into nothingness and a new reality will have unfolded in which will be exposed the whole slew of intentions that have shaped our destiny from the moment Adam ate of the forbidden fruit.

T
he gentle Muhammad was sent to fold his wings in tenderness over the Believers and warn them that the beginning of the end will come as a terrible breakdown in the proper order and comportment of people and animals. Sedition, defilement, and fornication within genders and across species will be the rule. For seven years there will have been no leader in prayer worthy of a following, and not a soul will have visited the Dome
.

On the morning of the last day of the seventh year, men and women shall rise to discover that the Ka’ba has disappeared without a trace. They will turn to their Holy Books only to discover that the text has evaporated from the page, leaving glistening white parchment. Not a letter will have been left behind. The memory of God’s Book will have been blotted out of all hearts. Not a word shall be remembered. For their amusement, men will have returned to the songs and tales of the Age of Ignorance
.