The Rock (9 page)

(photo credit 7.1)

The Stone has been set chest-high above ground where the walls meet, two paces from the only door into the building. The Iraqi Corner, which faces northeast toward Iraq, is followed by the Syrian Corner, facing northwest, and the Yemeni Corner, facing southwest.

The Black Stone is actually reddish black in color, with embedded yellow and red particles. It is much smaller than its counterpart in Jerusalem, never having grown into a proper rock—the size of a large man’s skull when I saw it. But that is, sadly, no longer the case. During the war between Mecca and Jerusalem that has only just ended, the Ka’ba was bombarded with stones from giant catapults placed on the encircling mountain slopes, and the Black Stone broke into three pieces. The pieces, I am reliably informed, have been bound together with a band of silver and mounted in a silver casing shaped like a woman’s vulva.

“The Black Stone is God’s hand in the earth,” Ka’b said as he bent down to touch and kiss the Stone; “he who touches it declares his allegiance to God.” I reached up and followed suit.

We began our prescribed circling from this black corner. The seven circuits complete, we performed our early morning prayers facing the Stone, as the Prophet was wont to do. Only now would my father allow himself to sit down, spread his cloak, and relax.

From where we were sitting, Mount Abu Qubays could be seen in the distance, looming over Mecca. Its summit was as round as a dome and as high as an arrow shot from its foot; in capable hands that arrow might fall beside a stele said to have been erected by Abraham on the mountain’s highest point. The Black Stone was found next to that stele during the Age of Ignorance that preceded the coming of God’s Messenger. In fact, as I heard the story, two distinctive stones had been found on the summit of Mount Abu Qubays by members of the Quraysh, the Meccan tribe from whom the Prophet himself descends.

Unlike the large or oddly shaped rocks that the Arabs worshipped in the Age of Ignorance, these stones did not come from Mecca or her surrounds. They were brighter and more beautiful
than anything anyone had seen before. Naturally, men concluded, they had fallen from the sky. Wanting everyone to admire their find, the tribesmen brought one of the two stones down to the valley.

“What happened to the other stone?” I asked Ka’b.

“It was stolen by followers of ’Amr, son of Luhayy.”

“Who was he?”

“The first to introduce false worship among the sons of Ishmael,” said Ka’b. ’Amr, he explained, had joined a caravan going to Syria for trade. Along the way he saw people worshipping stone idols.

“And why were they worshipping stones?” I exclaimed.

“Because, they said, when they prayed to them for rain, it rained. ’Amr asked if they could spare one or two for him to take back with him to Mecca. He was given a stone called Hubal, which he set up by a well near the Ka’ba. More and more Meccans began to serve Hubal and venerate him. Soon every household wanted an idol of its own to worship.”

Idols, Ka’b said, were very much in demand in the time when the sister of the Black Stone was stolen.

“Until the Arabs stopped worshipping them,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied, “but old habits die hard as Muhammad, God’s Grace Be Upon him and his Household, discovered. The sons of Mudar, for instance, persisted in thinking that a lofty rock in the desert near the shore of Jidda was God. One day one of them took the tribe’s stock camels to the rock named Sa’d. He wanted his animals to stand close to Sa’d so that they would be blessed and give much milk.

“But when the camels, which were of the grazing type and had never been ridden before, saw the rock and smelt the dried blood shed on it over the years, they shied away and fled in all directions. This so angered the tribesman that he seized a stone and threw it at the idol, saying, ‘God curse you! You have scared away my camels and that of all my kin. I came to you to improve the fortune of the sons of Mudar, but you have dissipated it. We will have nothing more to do with you, O Sa’d. You are nothing but a rock! You cannot
make a right or correct a wrong.’’ Only then did the sons of Mudar abandon the worship of desert rocks.”

“To change religion is not an easy thing,” I ventured.

“Like herding camels on a rainy night,” said Ka’b.

The last rays of the setting sun were lighting the summit of Mount Abu Qubays, which shone like a torch as darkness fell.

“Look at it carefully,” Ka’b said, pointing to the Black Stone.

“Do you mean the Stone?”

“You call it a stone!”

“But of course I do. Is it not a stone?”

“In the beginning,” said Ka’b, “it was a jewel that Adam brought down with him—just like the jewel that God plucked from underneath His throne and plunged into the abyss in order to fashion the ground upon which He stood while He went about creation. Later, the first man used it to cut a channel for his tears, which flowed for nine hundred years after the Fall.”

“The same jewel that the tribesmen of Quraysh found on top of Mount Abu Qubays?” I asked, astounded.

“Yes.”

“What kind of a jewel was it?”

“A sapphire,” said Ka’b, “just like its sister on Mount Moriah.”

“Then how did it turn black?”

“Menstruating women touched it in the Age of Ignorance.”

(photo credit 7.2)

M
ecca and Jerusalem, Ka’b went on to say, grew outward from their two Rocks in much the same way as a eucalyptus tree springs from a tiny seed. In fact, Ka’b claimed, the Rocks originally were not separate Rocks, but one Rock, parts of His throne. On both were found inscriptions—the ineffable name of God was chiseled in Hebrew letters on the Rock of Moriah; and on the Black Stone, words in a strange script that could be read only by a Jew. Or so a Meccan seer had told Ka’b.

The message on the Black Stone was this: “God is the Lord of Mecca.”

Unlike the words written on Jerusalem’s Rock by Ahithophel, King David’s counselor, no one knows who wrote these words, or why. But for Ka’b, the messages of the Rocks confirmed the order behind all things.

“He intended the universe,” Ka’b continued, “as a consonance of different parts, similar in ways and dissimilar in others,” and then, in the clearest formulation of his great passion, he would add: “My work is to fit them back together again in the right way so that they return to harmony.”

“But what is left that is harmonious between peoples who face different Rocks in prayer?” I asked. “What if dissonance, rather than consonance, is what we ought to learn to live with and work our way around?”

Ka’b would not entertain such a thought. God abhors the manifold forms of nature worship, he said. He wants us to search for His One transcendent essence.

But what if our feebleness is such that, in proportion to God’s exaltation, to the fact that He is not a force of nature but Creator of all of nature’s forces, He becomes cold and aloof, unapproachable to those who would worship him? Out of despair we turn first to this witless rock and then to that, knowing that the rock’s soul is a mindless void. A mystery is its hatred, or its grace. Surely it is wiser not to care—to accept His variety without anger, and without love.

Such talk made Ka’b entirely lose control. “There
has
to be a connection,” he thundered. “Never doubt it! It cannot be otherwise!”

In the end, I came to accept that, just as the idea of a flower is more enduring than the flower itself, the idea of the Rock was a more enduring reality for my father than the Rock itself. By endlessly contemplating it and instructing himself on its history, he was reaching to grasp that fleeting essence. Reality was not the Rock for Ka’b; it is through the Rock that He became real. Meanwhile, time was working, on him and the followers of Muhammad, a fatal substitution: Even as the Rock of my father’s dreams was daily acquiring a life in the mind of Believers, was slowly but surely becoming real and strong for them, his knowledge of their passion for a different Rock was growing in clarity.

W
hy do the Peoples of Moses and Muhammad face different Rocks in prayer? Men talked about the question in the early days. Some said they knew why: God had changed the sacred direction because the Jews did not accept Muhammad as a Messenger. Woe unto them, they would say, who have cried lies to the signs of God.

Why, thought others, should the perfidy of the Jews make God change His sacred axis? Surely, no sin is big enough to change the fundaments of creation, which He willed into existence before the first man was fashioned out of the Rock’s dust. The Rock stands as an admonition to our inconstancy; either it carried the Truth yesterday and still carries it today or it never carried it. Truth is profound; it is foundational. That much reason Ka’b succeeded in instilling in me.

I don’t know why there are two sacred axes, not one. Can anyone know that which God’s Messenger himself, Peace Be Upon Him, never claimed to know?

Certain things, on the other hand, it is given to us to know. I know, for instance, that the prayer on the Mount of Olives terrified Ka’b because it forced him to turn his back on the Rock. To be compelled
by force of circumstance to thus direct himself, and on the very threshold of the Holy City, was hard. And the effort magnified the task that lay before him, driving home the chances of failure—the price of which, he realized, would be borne by him alone.

The Arabs had done their part, as he had foretold. The armies of the uncircumcised had been routed. There remained only the conclusion of the vision that had made Ka’b so famous throughout Arabia—the return of all of Abraham’s children, followers of Moses and Muhammad alike.

“No more shall they be kept from David’s Sanctuary,” Ka’b had said in Medina. And he would remind his listeners of God’s words to Muhammad in the loneliness of his Exodus:

At the time, that choice of words rang as clear and true as a bell. People woke up. But what did they sound like now that the Arabs were camped upon the place of Christ’s ascent to Heaven, separated from the City of the Temple by a mere valley, all the while praying in the direction of the Black Stone with their backs to the Rock? How could a lowly southerner from the fallen star of the Yemen hope to convince these proud sons of the desert, upon whose good will he was dependent, to align themselves with a Rock different from the one they considered their own?

The initial flush of excitement at being so close to the City of the Prophets had long since passed, and Ka’b had recovered from the agitation he had felt when he first laid eyes on the ruins of the Temple. Then the waters had risen to the very seat of his breath. Now he was beginning to drown in a new kind of inner turmoil.

Would Umar allow the Jews back into liberated Jerusalem? For that matter, would they want to go back? Ka’b’s kith and kin had rejected the appeal of the prophet Ezra to do so, finding the whole business of uprooting themselves and moving into the unknown too arduous. “Happiness is not all movement and change,” my mother
had said to Ka’b. “Even rushing water must settle down before it can be cleared of silt.”

And who would pay for a new Temple? Not Umar. He forbade the accumulation of monies in the treasury for any purpose, preferring instead to assign the wealth of the Believers in the form of annuities to the Companions and family of the Prophet and to the fighters and families of those who had fallen in God’s cause.

“I will not lead those who come after me into temptation,” Umar had said, in response to urgings that he put aside revenues against times unforeseen. “Come what may, the only provision I will make against the time to come shall be obedience to God and His Apostle! That obedience is provision enough; it brought us here.”

To such a man, a sumptuously decorated Temple was the Devil’s own work.

On the other hand, my father must have thought to himself, might the man upon whose tongue God had struck the Truth think differently once he had come to grips with his responsibilities as the new master of the City of the Temple?