The Rock (8 page)

F
our days shy of his seventy-fifth birthday, Sophronius was elected Patriarch of Jerusalem by local monks, against Heraclius’s wishes. He had only a few months to adjust to the burdens of the office he assumed, in the autumn of the year that the Arabs swore allegiance to Umar, before the armies of Believers came knocking at the city’s gates.

With the flight of his cowardly commander, he was forced to assume military duties on top of his religious ones. Hearing of the favorable terms that had been granted to Christians in Damascus and Homs, he held out the prospect of a peaceful transfer of power to the commander of the Muslim forces, Abu Ubayda—a transfer that would be least injurious to Christian interests in the Holy City while offering the Arabs the kind of legitimacy that no army can win at the point of a sword.

Abu Ubayda was tempted. The old Patriarch could be charming when he needed to be, and their meetings had gone quite well. Or so Abu Ubayda thought. At the very end, however, after everything had been agreed upon, Sophronius threw in one last condition: The dignity of his office required that he hand over the keys of the city to the person of the Caliph. No one else would do.

“That honey-tongued defender of the heresy that Christ is the Son of God and Mary!” Ka’b used to exclaim. “He pulled the wool over Abu Ubayda’s eyes.” The Patriarch was a sworn enemy of Muhammad. Satan himself nested in his head. It had been a grievous error, my father believed, for Abu Ubayda to accord him so much respect. Did not his public utterances exude hate of all things Muslim? And on Christmas Eve, after the town of Bethlehem had fallen to our zealous desert warriors, had not the old man delivered a sermon to his flock in which he said:

“For now the slime of the godless Saracens, like that of the gentiles at the time of David, has overrun Bethlehem and does not yield passage. They insult our cross. They feed human bodies to the birds of the sky. The abomination of desolation foretold by the prophets has descended upon us. What is to be done? For the love of Christ I call on you to stop committing acts that are hateful to Him. If we are beloved of God, we will live to laugh at the fall of our Saracen adversaries. We will witness their destruction. We will see their blood-loving blades enter their own hearts. Their end will furnish a new way for us, clear of hills and thorns. ‘Glory to God the Highest, Peace and Good Will on Earth.’ ”

Unlike my father, Umar held Abu Ubayda in the highest regard. The Caliph often spoke of his courage during the Battle of Badr, of how he was one of the Ten Praised Ones who had been promised Paradise by the Prophet. He approved Abu Ubayda’s instructions to his men not to kill a woman, or a nursing infant, or an old man in battle, nor to cut down trees, or strip palms, or destroy buildings, and to leave men found living alone in caves unharmed. Abu Ubayda lived, the Caliph said, by the code of a holy warrior. Thus it came to be that, on Abu Ubayda’s advice, the normally fiery Caliph, so quick to explode with anger at the suggestion
of a slight, disregarded the Patriarch’s words and came to Jerusalem.

S
orted in small companies, with their bearers, womenfolk, and children in train, Umar and Ka’b were accompanied by a party of four thousand. They left Medina riding north, east of the Valley of the Villages. A mere six years separated the death of God’s Messenger from that journey. I was five years old at the time and in the care of my stepmother and her sons. Our caravan strung itself along the crests of the hill chain that parallels the Red Sea. We looked down upon the coastal wilderness where, according to tradition, Solomon had exiled the demons who helped him build the Temple. Driven at a warrior’s pace through the night until dawn, we slept during the heat of the day. Thus we rode until we reached the Desert of the Wanderings in southern Palestine—so named because it was there that Moses travelled to and fro with his children, looking for the Promised Land. A rock from which water once gushed and saved the Israelites served as our first camp, and my father remembered the words of scripture:

(photo credit 6.1)

Lying between the Red Sea and the Syrian Sea, the desert extends for the distance of a seven days’ march in every direction, and in this land of red sandstone hills and long sandy stretches are found deadly serpents a span long that spring up and hide in the litters of horses and camels, waiting for the right moment to lash out. Here and there the desolate wilderness is interrupted by salt marshes, or dry hollows where the dung of antelopes lies spattered like peppercorns, directing our trackers toward a cluster of palm trees nestled around a spring of fresh water.

Guided by the sons of Judham—Arabs who claimed descent from Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses—we approached the Holy City from the east on the twenty-sixth day of our departure from Medina. A glorious dawn was beginning to break, the light throwing the hills and ridges into sharp relief, bathing them with color. The only gap in the circle of hills surrounding Jerusalem faced Arabia, beckoning us on.

Like King David and Nebuchadnezzar before him, the Caliph took his first view of the Holy City from the Mount of Olives just outside the city. And there we set up camp, before a ravine filled with vineyards and caverns, cascading pieces of twisted rock, churches, the cells of anchorites and hermits, and many other remarkable things besides.

Across the ravine in the distance, a fortified town, vaguely square in shape, its spires and domes glistening in the sunlight, stretched westwards. The walls dictating the shape of the city contradicted the contours of the landscape, introducing another level of order, a higher order, which lorded over its surrounds. Inside the eastern wall sat the grand pile of what used to be the Temple—a mound of undecipherable stones baking in the sun.

Umar had come to the Holy City intent on seeing the place where David had sought forgiveness of his Lord, and where his son Solomon had later built the Temple. His inscrutable demeanor revealed not a sign of what he was about to do. My father, on the other hand, was overcome with sorrow; he pulled and tore at his clothes and had eyes only for the ruins of the Temple.

Umar and Abu Ubayda had to intervene forcibly. “You will perish of sorrow,” they told him. “Restrain yourself!”

This is my earliest memory of the City of the Temple—my distraught father, an old man twisting and turning with grief like a reed in the wind against a backdrop of translucent blue.

An enormous assembly of the men and women who accompanied Umar on his thirty-day trek had started to form. Men discarded their weapons, laid them carefully aside, and lined up in rows; women took up the rear. A crowd of bare heads and undifferentiated limbs spread itself out slowly like the sea. Umar found himself at its head. Exhaustion and hunger were put aside as the Caliph led the daybreak prayers on the mountain summit.

And as he did, the crowd silently turned away from the Holy City before whose gates they had just arrived, turned away from the Rock, toward the titanic desolation of the desert across which they had just marched. They turned to face a different Holy City, at whose heart lay the Black Stone.

W
hen our angel ancestor was cast out of the Garden and landed upon the Rock, he was carrying the Stone toward which Umar and his people now prayed. Eve had fallen separately, in central Arabia. Adam traveled to find her, carrying the Stone with him. A month’s camel-ride away, he caught up with her at the foot of Mount Abu Qubays, the tallest mountain in Arabia. After climbing the mountain, the first man set his precious load on its cone-shaped summit, and not wanting the Stone to remain exposed to the ravages of the weather and wild beasts, he decided to shelter it with cloth. Adam’s tent was the first sanctuary to be established on Earth, and the predecessor of the most ancient house of the Ka’ba, whose origins lie in our father Adam’s desire to protect the Stone from harm.

Two winters after Umar’s conquest of Jerusalem, during the pilgrimage season, my father and I visited Adam’s Stone.

Mecca sits flat and low, in a plain girdled by high and rugged mountains, destitute of all trees. Nothing of the city could be seen upon our approach, until suddenly we were on top of an area measuring two arrow-shots square, filled with houses jostled up against one another made of mud mixed with straw, a far cry from the dressed stone I had grown accustomed to in Jerusalem. God’s most important words had been revealed to Muhammad here, Ka’b said, but all I could think of was the suffocating heat and the clouds
of flies swarming around my head while the sun was still low in the sky.

Neither heat nor flies nor the throngs of unveiled women making the pilgrimage in the hope of finding someone to marry perturbed my father. He had eyes only for the Ka’ba, built by Abraham and his son, Ishmael, ancestor of the Arabs, over the Black Stone.

The Ka’ba is a cube whose walls are made of alternate layers of stone and wood draped in black cloth. Abraham, like Muhammad after him, had carefully placed the Stone in the southeastern corner of the cube, where pilgrims today begin their prescribed progressions around the building. When Muhammad was a young man, the old Ka’ba burned down when a woman was careless lighting incense. It is said to have been roofless with walls no higher than a man. The Ka’ba I saw was twice that height, its roof being made by a Christian carpenter from the planks of a Byzantine ship that had been cast ashore. Its door was placed high above the ground, so that you had to use a ladder to enter. Unwelcome visitors, Ka’b said, were pushed down from the high threshold. While it was being built, the people of Mecca quarrelled among themselves as to who should have the honor of putting the Black Stone in its place. Muhammad took off his cloak and convinced each head of a tribe to take one end. He then placed the Black Stone in the southeast corner because he liked to face that corner in prayer.