The Rock (39 page)

In the preceding pages, fiction has stepped into the breach—a fiction of assembly. A variety of stories culled from the literature of three religious traditions have been put together like a mosaic. With few exceptions, I have not allowed myself the liberty of changing the original sources from which the pieces were taken (the exceptions have to do with language, continuity, and the modification of a detail in order to eliminate repetition and confusion). Still, the outcome is unmistakably fiction, mimicking the assembly of a building to a new plan using the detritus of greatly esteemed predecessors as its raw material—predecessors that were designed to celebrate the same much-revered site.

This way of making stories corresponds to that of the chief protagonist of this book, a seventh-century learned man and former Jew (perhaps even an ex-rabbi), Ka’b al-Ahbar, who accompanied the Muslim caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab during his conquest of Jerusalem. Muslim tradition has preserved accounts of the events that occurred during the week or so that Umar spent in Jerusalem, many of which have been integrated into the text and can be found in the sources. Perhaps they are not enough to prove that the historical Ka’b was as taken with the Rock on Mount Moriah as I have made him out to be. But then I make no claim that this is how things actually were—just that they are in accordance with the sources as I have chosen to thread my way through them.

Jewish and Christian sources tell us nothing about Ka’b. The little that we know comes from Islamic literature in which Ka’b occupies a rather shadowy place (highly respected growing to deeply compromised in later sources). As far as anyone can judge, Ka’b is the oldest authority among Muslims on Jewish scripture. Mu’awiya, the founder of the Umayyad Caliphate and a contemporary of Ka’b, is cited by the highly
respected compiler of traditions Bukhari as saying that Ka’b “possessed knowledge like fruit, but we were remiss in relating it from him.” Mu’awiya also said that Ka’b was “the most reliable of those transmitters [of traditions] who relate on the authority of the People of the Book, but in spite of this we used to test him for falsehood.”
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Notice the circumspection in the second half of the sentence. Was this a later addition to what Mu’awiya said? Or was it present in how Ka’b was viewed by his contemporaries? The highly respected compiler of historical anecdotes, al-Tabari, reports that Ka’b refused to become Mu’awiya’s counselor in Damascus.
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Perhaps there was a personal grievance between the two men. The sources do not allow for certainty in such matters. The task I set myself was to make allowances for both possibilities while sticking to the “fact” that Mu’awiya, and after him his protégé Abd al-Malik, clearly held Ka’b in very high regard.

Ka’b is said to have died in Syria, at the extremely unlikely age of one hundred and four, during the reign of the third Muslim Caliph, Uthman ibn Affan (644–656).
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On the basis of traditions transmitted orally for at least a century before being recorded, Ka’b was an Arabic-speaking Yemenite who arrived in Medina around the time of the Prophet’s death. According to one version of events, he is said to have accepted the prophecy of Muhammad during the Caliphate of Abu Bakr (632–634). Allegiance to Muhammad as God’s Messenger was all that conversion to Islam entailed during those years.
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But what kind of a Muslim did that make Ka’b? After all, all Muslims were converts of one sort or another in those early days. Was Ka’b a Believer in Allah and in His Messenger with all that later generations of Muslims read into that statement? Or was he a dissembler, a fraud, and an opportunist, as has been claimed by Western scholars and modern
Islamists alike?
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The difference between such characterizations is not in the sources; it is in the eye of the beholder. I have tried to straddle both views to some extent, leaving it to readers to make up their minds as they interpret the facts laid out by the narrator of this book—Ishaq, Ka’b’s son, a practicing Muslim and true Believer by anyone’s standard (and about whom nothing exists in the sources other than a reference to Ka’b as “Abu Ishaq,” the father of Isaac).

The license to invent or to imaginatively fill in gaps is in part justified by the impossibility of separating the historical figure of Ka’b from the legends that have been woven around him. Nonetheless, he does seem to have inspired confidence in those who met him and greatly esteemed Muslim writers of later centuries. Al-Jahiz, for instance, in his
Kitab al-Hayawan
, considered him trustworthy and rose to his defense on the question of interpreting the Pentateuch. Al-Kisa’i, as well, in his
Qisas Al-Anbiya’
, attributes many legends to Ka’b, including those surrounding the prophet Joseph, among the most colorful and erotic in Muslim tradition.
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What exactly did Ka’b do? It is probably safe to conclude that he was a
qassas
, or popular storyteller and preacher, a forerunner in the genre of storytelling that later produced such great works as
One Thousand and One Nights
. Ka’b’s vocation, its fortune and reputation, fluctuated over the centuries, combining as it did exegesis of sacred writings, soaring flights of imagination, and outright charlatanism. There is every reason to think that Ka’b took his storytelling as seriously as his listeners, for whom it was a way of dealing with the great metaphysical questions of existence. Ka’b, after all, had the reputation of being a very wise man. But so have many scoundrels in the past.

Ka’b dealt in a genre of stories known as
Isra’iliyat
(Judaica), which eventually fell into disrepute and were frowned upon by Muslim scholars. Even though Ka’b had been dead for at least a century by the time such distrust became widespread, traces of it probably existed during his lifetime. Indeed, it would be surprising if this were not the case.

Ka’b’s storytelling methods have to be gleaned from partial references in a wide variety of Muslim sources. I imagine our hero cobbling together the Bible, the Quran, rabbinical literature, Southern Arabian oral and folk lore, his personal likes and dislikes, and, above all, what he felt his audience wanted to hear. I think of the historical Ka’b as an entertaining rogue, a man with an agenda but also one who liked playing to the gallery. His modus operandi, not his truthfulness, is what makes his contribution to the raucous and imaginatively wide-open world of early Islam so invaluable. In its early years, Islam needed men like him to flesh out its appeal, because such men knew how to ground the Prophet’s message in a larger cultural framework than that of Mecca and Bedouin Arabia. This contribution of marginals like Ka’b, Wahb ibn Munabbih, and others, has largely gone unappreciated by modern Muslims in part out of a fear that such acknowledgment might undermine the authenticity of their faith. Acting on that same misplaced impulse, a senior Palestinian negotiator asked his Israeli counterpart in the summer of 2000 how he knew that his Temple had been located on the Haram. Not only are such fears belied by the whole premodern corpus of Muslim tradition, they make total nonsense of it.

The unambiguous evidence is that early Muslims were ardent seekers of Jewish lore and scriptural interpretations. Long before the advent of Islam, Christian writers were commenting on the affinity between the beliefs of the Arabs and the Jews. We know from Bukhari that, in Muhammad’s time, Jews used to read the Torah in Hebrew and interpret it to the Prophet’s followers in Arabic.
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However, starting in the eighth century, the doctrine that the Old and New Testaments had been corrupted by Jews and Christians, respectively, was developed. Muslims were discouraged from reading them. This later Muslim doctrine crops up in different versions of the story of Ka’b’s conversion, confirming their implausibility. Over time it developed into the idea that the “People of the Book” should not even be taught the Quran (for fear, presumably, that they would corrupt God’s words in the way that they had corrupted their own Holy Books).

The apogee of this school of thought is the modern idea that some converts, like Ka’b, were subverters of Islam from within. In 1946 an
article was published entitled “Ka’b al-Ahbar, the First Zionist.” The author, Abu Rayya, a disciple of the Islamo-Arabist leader Rashid Rida (1865–1935), set out to prove that Ka’b had been involved in a conspiracy to murder the caliph Umar.
⁹
The article was heavily criticized by fellow Egyptians and is by no means representative of all Muslim theologians and scholars. But it is suggestive of the new wounded and defensive mindset that was to surface with the creation of the State of Israel and the escalation of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
¹⁰

The most delightful thing about Ka’b, from my point of view, is that, in telling stories about the summit of Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, he did not favor one source or religious tradition over another. Like Ka’b, I ardently hope that my readers have a difficult time discerning whether a given tale in this book, or a particular detail of one, is Jewish, Muslim, or Christian in origin. Nor would Ka’b have dreamt of telling the story of Jerusalem’s most famous rock by adherence only to what was undoubtedly authentic about it. Authenticity, as far as he and this book are concerned, has nothing to do with historical fact, or quarrelling about “who came first”; it is a quality established by age and by a certain deference to age. In any case, fact-finding scholarship already exists, scattered in hundreds of excellent books. Ka’b, as I have portrayed him, was engaged in a different kind of enterprise.

He was seeking to interpret the human significance acquired over time by a piece of the natural world. Perhaps, from our modern point of view, the mysteries of the godhead are an odd angle from which to pursue such a search. At least he was doing so in search of a foundation, a common ground, upon which to stand and engage the whole world, and not just one little parochial part of it.

But why would he do so on a rock, and what could he have known about a seemingly innocuous piece of the Jerusalem landscape, living as he did in the Yemen, an arduous month’s journey away?

I
t is plausible to think that Ka’b knew and perhaps even taught a passage like the following from the Midrash Tanhuma, written in the third century:

At any rate, somebody like him, perhaps even one of his students, had to have passed it on to Abu Khalid, whom I cited at the outset of this essay, and who died in Jerusalem in the third quarter of the eighth century.

The name “Rock (or Stone) of Foundation” also appears in the form of this early midrashic recollection of the duties of the high priest inside the Holy of Holies during the days of the Herodian Temple:

The rock appears to have grown in importance from the simple, physical description of the Midrash Yoma to the thunderous cosmic implications of the Midrash Tanhuma. If so, why?

The question is even more interesting when one considers that there is no unambiguous linkage between the
Even Shetiyah
of Jewish
tradition—soon to become the
Sakhra
of Muslim tradition—and the Bible. Ka’b could not have relied on the Bible alone to arrive at his conviction that the rock that Umar and he had uncovered on the Temple Mount was the place of Adam’s fall and burial, the site of Abraham’s sacrifice, the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite, and the place where David prayed to avert God’s wrath, as well as being a part of Solomon’s Temple.
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He needed to know the work of the rabbis in the first centuries of the Common Era, for they are the ones who first established the link between the rock and these stories. Because of them, the rock was elevated to prominence, and only then was its role rationalized backward into the whole corpus of stories with which Ka’b regales his son and Umar ibn al-Khattab. And how could that not be the case? After all, why should anyone want to magnify the significance of a piece of rock when a perfectly magnificent temple was sitting right on top of it (until it was destroyed in the year 135, it hid the rock from view)?

Describing the outcome of that final act of destruction in 135, the third-century Greek historian Dio Cassius wrote: