The Rock (6 page)

L
ike so many turning points in Ka’b’s life, his presence in Umar’s circle was confirmed with a story.

“What do we owe to Adam?” Umar asked Ka’b shortly after my father had changed his name.

“Our salvation,” Ka’b answered in the blink of an eye. “If we have been afforded even a glimpse into the secrets of Heaven, in spite of the silt of time that has covered us in doubt, it is because we are descended from Adam’s body. All the people who have ever lived, including all those still alive today, and those yet to be born tomorrow, owe, not only their existence, but their reason for existence, their validation as created beings, to him who was created first.”

“But Adam was stripped of his Garment of Light and saw his nakedness.”

“His imperfections have also chased us over the ages like a demon. If we are forever striving to defeat Adam’s demons, it is in order to restore us to the state of perfection that was initially breathed into him.”

“And the rest of the prophets? Were they also being chased by Adam’s demons?”

“Certainly. And none more so than David, conqueror of the City of the Temple.”

“What did the great warrior-Prophet do?”

“He upset the peace by attempting to dislodge the keystone of creation.”

“Tell us the story, O Ka’b,” said Umar, not knowing that the story he was about to hear was destined to become the kindling of his zeal for another Holy City.

(photo credit 3.2)

W
isdom and pain, the fundaments of the universe, Ka’b told Umar, are memories of Heaven and Hell. “Think,” he said, “of two symmetrical cones balanced apex to apex. God’s design is such that the ever-expanding cone of wisdom meets the bottomless abyss of pain at a singular point, the fulcrum of the cosmos. The Rock keeps the peace by holding the burden of memory in balance. Which is why David positively ached to build a Palace of Peace upon it.”

“A peace that was disturbed.”

“Yes, many times, beginning with Solomon’s father.”

“What did David do?”

“He tried to move the Rock.”

“Move the Rock! How could anyone dream of such a thing?”

“It had become covered in refuse and dirt. The king was hopelessly entangled in the family troubles that plagued his last years. He spent all his time in prayer and neglected the affairs of state. The people of Israel began to complain that he was not doing anything for them. David was obliged to come out of seclusion. How could he do so and repent for his sins at the same time? Suddenly, he remembered the Rock he had purchased from Araunah the Jebusite as a young man, and he went in search of it.”

“What did he want to do with it?”

“Turn it into the cornerstone of God’s House. But Mount Zion
had been soiled by the idolatry of the Jebusites and, it must be said, by David’s own sins. Accompanied by Ahithophel, a prophet blessed with unnatural wisdom, David set out to seek repentance by clearing the summit of all that had sullied its sanctity over the ages.”

“The king removed the refuse with his own hands?”

“He dug up the top layers of dirt that had accumulated around Moriah’s summit. Then he threw the soiled earth over the side of the mountain. David kept on digging away at the dirt until he hit the Rock. A piece broke off, and, not knowing what it was, he started to throw it away.

But the Rock said, “You cannot lift me.”

“Why not?” David asked.

“Because I am here to hold back the Waters of the Deep.”

“Since when?”

“Since the hour in which the voice of God was heard to utter the words, ‘I am the Lord thy God.’ As the earth trembled, split asunder, and began to sink into the abyss, I was put here to hold it back!”

David persisted in his efforts to remove the piece of Rock. When it finally broke off, the Waters of the Deep, the enemies of order, began to rise, threatening a deluge far worse than that which had engulfed the Earth in the time of Noah, a deluge so powerful as to completely undo the work of creation and sink the world into primordial chaos.

Terrified by what he saw, David cried out: “Whosoever knows how to stem the tide of waters and does not do so will one day throttle himself!”

Ahithophel acted swiftly. He inscribed the divine name upon the piece of the Rock that David had dislodged, and pushed it back into place, chanting:

The raging seas were stilled, the waters subsided, their rebellion suppressed through the agency of the terrible, glorious, ineffable Name. The Rock had been saved, and was thenceforth called the House of the Lord God.

But the waters had sunk so low that David feared that the earth was about to lose all her moisture. So he began singing and strumming his harp, a magical instrument whose strings were made from the guts of the ram sacrificed by Abraham years before. And the Waters of the Deep rose again to their rightful place.

O
ne day Abu Bakr went into a beautiful garden and saw a ringdove in the shady leafage of a tree. “You must be as happy as Adam in such a garden!” he sighed, “to find your shelter inside the green leaves of such a bountiful tree, and your food close at hand, and never to be called to account. Ah! Would to God that I had lived such a life!” Then he came down with a fever and died, but not before writing a testament appointing Umar, the son of Khattab, Caliph after him.

On the morning after Abu Bakr’s burial, Umar mounted the Prophet’s pulpit, around which the Believers had assembled. The pulpit had three steps. The Apostle of God always stood on the top one, but when Abu Bakr was Caliph, he had taken to addressing the congregation from the second step. Everyone waited to see what Umar would do.

Umar stood on the first step, gave praise and thanks to God, and swore to do justice. His first act after he stepped down was to write a letter appointing a new chief commander of the host in Syria. His second act was to appoint Ka’b his counselor and to call upon him to explain the extraordinary visitation which had come upon Ka’b in his sleep.

T
he outline of my father’s vision or dream, I know not what to call it, was recorded immediately upon waking, while still fresh in his mind. I treasure his record of it, written in his own hand on a small brown papyrus sheet whose edges had gone ragged.

It is devoid of ornament if you discount the long upstrokes lilting to the right, even though he wrote from right to left, and you can see how meticulously Ka’b has scripted the letters
ain, ghain, fa’
and
qaf
. Why, the ink has not run into a single eye. That takes painstakingly careful execution of each letter’s head, no mean achievement for a man who wrote so little, preferring to commit things to memory.

What is on this sheet of papyrus, I hasten to add, is not everything my father saw that night, for a vision is a sudden wider view of past and present realities, a form of illumination issued by God in the shape of images, not words. Impetuously, it drives the soul upon which it has been visited to fuse with the larger sweep of His intentions, moving toward a grander goal than the mere contingencies of an individual life. The words I have before me are Ka’b’s poor substitute for all that, hastily scribbled down after the searing clarity of what he saw in the darkness had already begun to recede with the light of dawn:

After his conversation with Umar, Ka’b was invited to tell Believers what he had seen that night. Word of it spread through the city like a spring wind.

I would give ten years of my life to have witnessed my father’s performance that day. But I was still a growing seed in my mother’s belly. Ka’b, I am told, was dressed in a long black cloak that sat well on him in spite of its rough homespun cloth. In his right hand he carried a staff upon which he appeared to lean and sway from time to time. Inside a square enclosure, whose sun-dried brick walls had been assembled by the Prophet himself, God’s Blessings Be Upon Him, my father stood beside a column cut from the trunk of a palm tree, under the shade of a roof made from palm fronds. He stood not twenty paces from where God’s Messenger lay buried, his grave covered with freshly cut fronds. In that blessed house, the first mosque of Muhammad’s People, forty or so of the Prophet’s closest Companions were present, along with many of the young men who were shortly to bridle their horses and set off on the road to glory.

The Arabs did not know it at the time, but they were standing on the threshold of great conquests. Place and timing were crucial
to understanding the extraordinary reception my father received that day. Heraclius, the Byzantine emperor, had just evicted his Persian rival, Khusraw, from Jerusalem and restored the cross of Jesus stolen by the Persians. That part of what my father had to say was already known to his audience. But Ka’b was saying much more: with cool, refreshed eyes that could see that for which they longed, he was telling the followers of Muhammad that the City of the Temple, held hostage by Byzantium, was a pomegranate ripe for the picking, and that they were going to be thanked for taking it by the People of the Torah.

Overnight his words reached Muhammad’s followers all over the Hijaz. It helped that he was among the finest speakers of Arabic of his generation. Young men lined up in droves just to talk with the new seer of Arabia. Established traditionists like Abu Hurayra, whose knowledge of the Torah was not in doubt, came all the way from Mecca just to meet with my father.