The Rock (49 page)

The reference to a visit by Abd al-Malik to Jerusalem during the rebellion of Mus’ab ibn al-Zubayr in Iraq (687–90) during the construction of the Dome of the Rock has been transmitted on the authority of Raja’ ibn Haywa. See on this Elad,
Medieval Jerusalem
. The platform upon which the Dome sits today has eight sets of stairs, not four, and is an irregular trapezoid in shape. Sources tell us nothing about its appearance in early Umayyad times. Following Grabar, I have assumed that it had four sets of stairs opposite the four entrances to the Dome. See
The Shape of the Holy
. The use of flour instead of plaster because it is an “emblem of fertility” is an anecdote I took from Creswell (1932); it relates in the original to a different building and Caliph. According to the sources, the labor force on the site was Egyptian and Nabataean peasants, the remnants of the Aramaic-speaking population of Syria and Iraq. On all matters of construction methods and details, I have relied on Creswell’s
Early Muslim Architecture
. The ceiling of “expressed structure” described by Ishaq is not what one sees today, because all structural elements were covered up with false ceilings in later centuries. The pilgrim John of Wurzberg reported seeing the “most beautifully
adorned beams … supporting the roof itself.” On the strength of this description, Creswell (1932) believes that there was no false ceiling at the outset, “and that the beams of the roof were visible from within.” The effect would have undoubtedly been to make the building feel lighter and more impressive. Marguerite Van Berchem, in her essay on “The Mosaics of the Dome of the Rock” included in Creswell’s
Early Muslim Architecture
, cites a mosaic worker during the reign of al-Walid, Abd al-Malik’s son, who says of a different building “we have made it [the decorations] according to what we know of the forms of the trees and mansions of Paradise.” And Rosen-Ayalon, in
Early Islamic Monuments
, relates the whole iconographic scheme in the Dome to the theme of Paradise. Finally, Abd al-Malik’s concluding comment “Not for the sake of God did your friend meet his end but for the sake of money,” is adapted from a report in Tabari’s
History
, vol. 21,
The Victory of the Marwanids
.

The writings of al-Muqaddasi confirm how deep and pervasive Christian influence on Muslims in Jerusalem remained through the tenth century. See also Goitein, “Jerusalem in the Arab Period.” Grabar, in
Formation of Islamic Art
and his other writings, sees in the use of crowns, diadems, breastplates, and other imperial ornaments of the Byzantine and Persian princes on the surfaces of Abd al-Malik’s Dome “a conscious use of symbols belonging to the subdued or to the still active opponents of the Muslim state.” Soucek has argued the connection between the mosaic decoration of the interior of the Dome and the memory of the decoration of Solomon’s Temple as retained in the Muslim literary tradition; see “The Temple of Solomon.” The craftsmanship of the glass mosaic work above the arches on the outer face of the octagonal arcade is still the original of thirteen centuries ago. The mosaics are of outstanding quality, and rank, as Rosen-Ayalon has written, “among the most beautiful” and largest preserved walled surfaces of mosaic in the seventh century. With the exception of the dedication of the building, the inscriptions are taken from the Quran (4:169–71 and 3:16–17 are cited). As Grabar has stressed, these Quranic passages “precede by more than two centuries any other dated or datable quotation of any length from the Holy Book including pages from manuscripts”; see
The Shape of the Holy
. On the words that were left out of one verse by mistake, presumably because of a miscalculation, see Grabar, “The Umayyad Dome of the Rock.” It is an irony that the crusading
order of the Knights of the Temple, ferocious fighters who took the Temple Mount area as their headquarters in Jerusalem during the Crusades, mistook the Dome of the Rock for Solomon’s Temple. They converted this Muslim building celebrating a Jewish Rock into a Christian Church called
Templum Domini
, the Temple of our Lord Jesus. Staring in the face of the Christian knights every day for eighty-eight years were inscriptions asserting the importance of Muhammad, and impatiently demanding of Christians that they submit to his faith; it was fortunate for the ensuing history of Islamic art and architecture that the good knights appear not to have had anyone in their company who could read Arabic.

Abd al-Malik’s appointment of Jewish Servants of the Haram, known as the
akhmas
, and the extremely important ritual ceremonies held on the Haram during the days of Abd al-Malik, are cited in Sibt ibn al-Jawzi’s thirteenth-century
Mir’at al-Zaman
. Al-Jawzi bases his account on the earlier ninth-century writings of al-Waqidi. The relevant several pages of Sibt ibn al-Jawzi, upon which I have based my account, are translated in full and exhaustively analyzed in Elad,
Medieval Jerusalem
. S. D. Goitein, in “Jerusalem in the Arab Period,” says the practice of having foreigners serve in temples was not all that unusual in ancient times (see Ezekiel 44:9–10). The tradition of employing Jews to light the lamps in the Dome of the Rock seems to have continued until the reign of Umar ibn Abd al-’Aziz (717–720). The significance of the cleansing and purifying rituals being performed on Mondays and Thursday, as cited by Sibt ibn al-Jawzi, is that these are the days Jews read the Torah. Julian Raby, in “In Vitro Veritas: Glass pilgrim vessels from seventh-century Jerusalem,” has shown that a first century Jewish tradition of making glass vessels for ceremonial and religious purposes during the days of the second Temple was restarted by Abd al-Malik in the seventh century; see his article in
Bayt al-Maqdis: Jerusalem and Early Islam
, part 2, edited by Jeremy Johns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). See the same source on the coins issued by Abd al-Malik, probably in Jerusalem, showing a branched candlestick that looks like a menorah. The sum total of all of these activities must have been viewed by the Christians of Jerusalem as deeply threatening; certainly, according to Anastase of Sinai, they seemed to have interpreted Abd al-Malik’s actions as building “the Temple of God.” Elad in “Why Did Abd al-Malik Build the Dome of the Rock?” in
Bayt al-Maqdis
, part 1, cites a Kharijite sermon denouncing Abd al-Malik in these words: “He destroyed the sacred house of God, and revived the way of the ignoble
people [the Jews]. Then he gave the Rock a form like that of the Place [the Ka’ba], to it the rough Arabs of Syria go on pilgrimage.” Finally, while there is no direct written testimony confirming that the Umayyads considered Jerusalem to be their capital during this period, Elad convincingly shows in his article that the scale of their human and material investment in the city was such as to leave no doubt that this was the case.

Other details: On the significance of the passage from the Book of Revelation cited by the hair-shirted leader of the group that intended to destroy Abd al-Malik’s Dome (a fictional incident), see Norman Cohn’s
The Pursuit of the Millennium
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). The imagery that Ishaq conjures up comparing the Dome to a beautiful woman bedecked with ornaments is adapted from Lamentations 4. I have adapted the early traditions relating to the merits of Mecca versus Jerusalem from the examples cited in Kister’s “You Shall Only Set Out for Three Mosques.” On the smells of Paradise, see the Quran 83:23–28, 76:5–22, and 52:19.

Grabar, in
Formation
, tells a wonderful story taken from the tenth-century geographer Ibn Rusta on the origins of the extremely elaborate uses that various kinds of incense and perfumes were put to in the Dome of the Rock. One day a certain Uthman ibn Maz’un spat in the covered part of the court of the Prophet’s mosque in Medina. “It made him so sad that his wife enquired about the reason for his unhappiness. He answered, ‘I spat in the
qibla
while praying. But I did then go back there to wash it, then I made a paste with saffron and covered it with it.” Ibn Rustah comments: “It is thus this particular Uthman who was the first one to cover the
qibla
with perfume.” Grabar goes on to make a very important observation: “The very nature of the story, its incidental and accidental character personalized through some otherwise little known individual, illustrates the point that, in the Muslim view of Islam and of its growth, there was no preconceived, theoretical notion of a holy place but an accretion of unique and at times trivial events that became accepted. It is as though the culture were psychologically reluctant to interpret abstractly the physical reality of its Muslim life.”

Finally, the title of this chapter comes from the line in Ecclesiastes 1:2, “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity,” and the last citation “The eyes attain Him not, but He attains the eyes,” is from the Quran 6:103.

The correspondence of the ancient Egyptian words for “south” and “north” with “face” and “back of the head” is from Henri Frankfurt,
Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man
(Penguin Books, 1949). Umar ibn al-Khattab is reported to have said that he would not have kissed the Black Stone had he not seen the Prophet doing it. On Zion’s “foundation stone,” Ishaq is citing Isaiah 28:16. The Jerusalem-born historian and geographer al-Muqaddasi wrote: “The Holy Land is truly a mine of profit both for This World and the Next.” (Le Strange, 1890). Ka’b’s denunciation of building is a combination of Isaiah 14 and a saying by the famous preacher, Hasan al-Basri, who died in 728. See
EI2
under “Hasan al-Basri.” Desert monks used the expression “to work the earth of the heart”; see Norris. Abraham is referred to in the Quran 4:124 as the “friend of God.” Ishaq’s ruminations on true faith versus good works is adapted from a conversation between the great ninth-century Sufi teacher Dhu ’l-Nun and his disciples. See Tor Andrae,
In the Garden of Myrtles
(Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1987). The passage from the Quran cited just before the end of the chapter is 2:130.

At the heart of the prophet Muhammad’s message lay the conviction that the last day, the day of judgment and retribution, was about to strike. The Quran speaks of it in the present tense. Different natural catastrophes will usher it in—the signs described by Ishaq. On this matter, see Tor Andrae,
Mohammed: The Man and His Faith
(Harper & Row, 1960). As a consequence the set of beliefs in
al-sa’a
, the last hour,
al-fana’ al-mutlaq
, the complete annihilation,
yawm al-qiyama
, the day of resurrection, and
yawm al-din
, the day of judgment, became essential in Islam. The disappearance of the Ka’ba and the evaporation of all words from the pages of scripture are signs according to al-Ghazzali (1058–1111). See Haddad and Smith (1981) for a comprehensive discussion. The parallels in Jewish messianic thought are discussed in G. Scholem, “Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea,” in
The Messianic Idea in Judaism
(New York: Schocken Books, 1971). Passages from the Quran that are integrated into the text or cited are, in the order of their occurrence: 54:2; 54:1; 69: 13–16, 81:1–14; and 82:17.

Ishaq’s description of the
al-mahdi
, or rightly guided restorer of true religion and justice who, according to a widely held belief among Muslims, will rule before the end of the world, is actually attributed in
the tradition to his father, Ka’b. See
EI2
, vol. 5, under “al-Mahdi,” where much of my material on the Divinely Guided One originates. The three things that catch men unawares, a found article, a scorpion and “the coming of the Divinely Guided One,” or the
mahdi
, is from a third-century Talmudic teacher cited in Scholem,
The Messianic Idea in Judaism
. The image of redemption breaking like a dawn on the horizon is from a story in the Mishna cited in the same source. Scholem notes that, by medieval times, it is no longer easy to tell whether it is Jewish messianic ideas that are being incorporated into Muslim ones or the other way around.

Was the Dome of the Rock, and the Haram complex of which it is a part, conceived with the Day of Judgment in mind? Concluding a chain of careful argument from site planning considerations to the decorative scheme of the Dome, Rosen-Ayalon (1989) thinks that it was. She cites this revealing passage from al-Wasiti, author of
Fada’il al-Quds
(The Merits of Jerusalem): “the Dome of the Rock is the Temple … the throne of the Day of Judgment will stand on the Rock, and there will all congregate.…” This congregation,
wuquf
, which I have called “the Standing,” follows the gathering,
hashr
, and bears a strong resemblance to a pilgrim’s experience of God during the Meccan pilgrimage, the high point of which is standing before a small protuberance of rock on
Jabal al-Rahma
, the Mountain of Mercy, in the plain of Arafat in Mecca. For a powerful literary evocation of this scene, see Elias Canetti,
Crowds and Power
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995). The “King of Absolute Sovereignty, the Avenger, the Dominator, the All-Powerful, the Abaser, the Exalter” are attributes and names of God according to al-Ghazzali. The idea of terror being “the ruling principle of the sublime” is from the essay by Edmund Burke,
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
(University of Notre Dame Press, 1968).

1.1
The Temple of Solomon. Drawing of floor mosaic in the Theotokos Chapel, Church of Mount Nebo, Jordan, early sixth century. The Holy of Holies is at the center with the great altar just below it shown in flames with an offering. Dan Bahat and Shalom Sabar,
Jerusalem: Stone and Spirit
(Rizzoli International Publications, 1998). For a photograph of the original mosaic, see Michele Piccirillo,
The Mosaics of Jordan
(Amman, Jordan, 1993).