The Rock (10 page)

His own past was no longer a precedent for anything that Umar now found himself having to do.

Ka’b may have had a vision, but he had no plan. Calculation was not in his nature. He had taken things as they came, making adjustments according to circumstance. But the obstacles to the realization of his vision in Medina were now looming in his mind, like the stunning but unfriendly layers of rock spread out before his eyes.

(photo credit 8.1)

S
tanding alone on the Mount of Olives, the Caliph and his counselor admired the walled hilltop city with its twenty-six towers, six gates, and towering stone walls that rose out of the narrow gorge known as the Valley of Hell.

“There are more stones on this mountain than there are people in Arabia,” Umar mused, looking onto the sheer drop before him. He was standing next to a round church and the tomb of James, the brother of Jesus, which he shared with two Jewish prophets, Zacharias and Simeon. Across from him, on the other side of the valley, was the pinnacle of the southeastern boundary of what used to be the Temple. James had been tossed into the valley from on top of that meeting point of the southern and eastern walls, his body ripped to shreds on the stones below.

“The stones of Jerusalem impress themselves on all who wander among them,” Ka’b replied.

Umar and Ka’b were looking for the pit into which the prophet Jeremiah had been dispatched. It could not be seen from where the two men were standing, the view being obstructed by a cascade of massive boulders down the slopes of the valley.

The stoniness of the landscape exceeded anything that even men accustomed to the desert had seen before—homes, roads, tombs, everything was either rock or made of rock. Heaps of stones were piled up here and there—in fact, wherever one looked. Many
walls and fences looked as though they had been thrown together for no reason other than to get stones out of the way. Such disciplining of the landscape was always in vain, the removal of one stone serving only to reveal others lying just below the surface.

“To each rock, large or small, rough or smooth, there corresponds a list of things we choose either to remember or to forget,” Ka’b said. “Patterns made by boulders that have held up armies, pebbles that have felled giants, tell stories that in other places are told by tea leaves. Did you know, O Caliph, that blue-eyed David was enamored of rocks?”

“How did his infatuation begin?” the Caliph inquired.

The seeds were planted early, Ka’b said, when God concealed the stripling from Saul’s jealousy inside the hollows of mountains, amidst the swarming sea of stones that was Jerusalem’s landscape.

“I take refuge in him, my rock, my shield, my stronghold, my place of refuge,” David, future king of Israel, had sung in gratitude.

“Music is the Devil’s own work, Ka’b!” cried Umar. “Beware, lest it turn your head.”

“Did not Muhammad choose men to recite to him from the Holy Book because he liked the sounds of their voices?” Ka’b said. “The Lord of the Worlds,” he continued, looking toward the Temple Mount, “gave David arts of sweetness to sing the primordial waters under those ruins back to their right level. He blessed His servant, wanting to transport him out of the grime of this world, and to have his actions be guided by a higher purpose, one made accessible through beautiful sounds.”

“And yet in the end,” replied Umar, “David, Peace be Upon Him, was denied the Temple, however much he ached to build it.”

“He was denied it, O Umar,” said Ka’b, “because of his sins, which were written on his hands until they rode roughshod over his art. When he was brought a goblet to drink, he could drink only half its contents because the action of raising a vessel to his lips exposed the wrongs held against him in the Heavenly Register. God’s chosen wept, they say, until his joints were dislocated and the goblet had refilled with tears. On that occasion, he uttered these words:

Umar was now as visibly agitated as his counselor. He stood up abruptly and started pacing up and down alongside a boundary wall that overlooked the gravestones of seventy thousand prophets. “A worm? He spoke of himself as a worm! Tell us the story, Ka’b. Leave nothing out.” And so Ka’b began.

David was anointed king in Hebron, where Abraham was buried, but he wanted to be king in Jerusalem because its stones had given him refuge and were a byword for impregnability and fortitude. The Jebusites were Jerusalem’s rightful rulers, being the descendants of Heth, to whom Abraham had promised the Holy City in return for his burial place. Within earshot of David’s army, the city’s Jebusite defenders mocked the impudence of the fiery king: “David will never get in here,” they said. “Our blind and our lame are enough to hold him off.” Whereupon David placed a reward upon the head of every Jebusite. Then he took the city. As for the blind and the lame, David hated them for the rest of his life.

David called Jerusalem by his own name, and began to overreach himself. Temptation sought him out in the shape of a woman. From his rooftop, he spied Bathsheba bathing. She was very beautiful to look upon. And the king was veiled from the Will of God by his desire for her. He lay with her, impregnated her, and then had her husband, Uriah, a holy warrior, sent to the forefront of the hottest battle to be killed. Bathsheba became his wife and bore him a son.

But what David had done displeased God.

Seventy thousand of David’s men were cut down by the Angel of Pestilence. He was followed by the Angel of Death, who came to raze Jerusalem to its foundations. The king saw Death coming, colossal and irresistible, his drawn sword stretching over the city. As the angel reached the summit of Mount Zion, David and the elders of Israel, all dressed in sackcloth, fell to their knees. And David cried out: “God, O my God! I was the one who sinned. I was the one who acted wrongly. But these, the flock, what have they done? Let your hand lie heavy on me and on my family, but spare them!”

The prophet Muhammad, God’s Blessings Be Upon Him, was fond of saying that David’s remorse after that day was not like that of other men. Each one of his tears equaled a tear from all the other creatures that walked upon the earth.

But no amount of tears would deter the Angel of Death. As he was about to descend upon the city, he saw the ashes of Abraham’s ram lying in a pile at the altar’s base. They had lain there undisturbed for generations. It was at that very moment that a voice from up high thundered, “Enough now! Hold your hand!”

God stayed the hand of His wrath over the Rock as He had once before, over the same spot, stayed the hand of Abraham over his son.

Then He asked of David to go and raise an altar to Him on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. In those days Mount Zion lay outside the walls of the Jebusite city, dominating it from the north. A farmer owned the windswept summit, using the wind to winnow his wheat.

Dressed only in a loincloth, David obeyed, leading a procession of thirty thousand people up the mountain. They carried the Ark containing the broken stone tablets of God’s words atop an oxcart refurbished for the occasion. The procession made music, and David danced for all he was worth the whole way up the mountain. At every step he sacrificed an animal to God. By the time he reached the top, the king was drunk with ecstasy, drenched in blood.

Araunah, who had been busy with his threshing, was horrified at the sight and prostrated himself at David’s blood-soaked feet, saying, “Why has my king come to his servant?”

“To buy your threshing-floor,” said David, “to build an altar to the God who has defeated your God.”

“O King,” said Araunah, “take my threshing-floor and make what offerings you see fit. Here are the oxen for the burnt offering, the threshing sleds, and the oxen’s yokes for the wood. I am your loyal servant.”

But David refused, saying, “I will not make an offering to God from a place that has cost me nothing.”

So Araunah accepted the sum of fifty shekels for the Mountain’s summit, and David placed the Ark of the Covenant on the Rock’s surface. And there he built an altar as had Abraham before him, and fire came down from Heaven and consumed his offering, just as it had Abraham’s.

“S
o David was forgiven,” said Umar once Ka’b had finished. “Why then was the gift of the Temple denied him, to go to his son Solomon through Bathsheba, he whom the Lord kept safe from bloodshed and made king after his father?”

“David was never forgiven completely,” exclaimed Ka’b. “His hands were too stained with blood. Nor did Almighty God want a Temple, O Umar. David set his heart on one because kingship had gone to his head. He wanted to be like the kings he had vanquished
in battle, all of whom built Temples to their gods. And God disapproved:

The hour was getting late. A cold west wind was blowing. Ka’b examined the Caliph’s face; it was strangely expressionless and withdrawn. Umar looked tired, not like a conqueror who was about to take over Christendom’s crown jewel, not like a hard-hearted man whose piety made him contemptuous of all frivolity. The flesh hung loosely from his sallow, sunken cheeks. It was not clear what, if anything, would be the consequences on the morrow of David’s actions all those years ago. Umar, the Separator of Right from Wrong, as Muhammad had named him, whose shadow alone sent indolence and idleness scuttling like beetles in a campfire, looked unsure of himself.

And he said: “Would that Muhammad take me to that bountiful Garden where he must now be lying, underneath the spreading shade of a thornless lote-tree.”

“That is surely your destination,” said Ka’b.

“Not unless I die in God’s cause.”

“God forbid!”

“What have I to do with this world, O Father of Ishaq?” Umar said. “I am like a horseman who halts a little while in the shade and departs. A curse is upon his journey and all things along the way, save those signs that help him remember God. Perhaps the Lord mingled sin with the clay he used for the peopling of the Earth.
Think you that David sinned in his life more than we have done in ours?”

There was silence. And when Ka’b finally spoke, his voice was gentle. “David’s sins were many and grave. But what do you, whom the Prophet always praised, have to be ashamed of?”

“One thing, old man, which still haunts my nights.”

“Unburden yourself then, by this hallowed valley watered by the tears of the living and the dead. There is no better place.”

And Umar unburdened himself. He told Ka’b of how he had made an offering of his six-year-old daughter to a stone in the days before Muhammad had come to light up the world, of how he had buried her alive under a pile of stones, of how the sounds of her fading screams turned into strangled grunts as the earth stopped her mouth, of how she had reached up tenderly to touch his face and brush earth from his beard even as he was digging her grave.

“This,” said Ka’b, “is the music of Satan lamenting the loss of the world.”

Whereupon Umar suddenly groaned, dropped his head, folded it in his arms, and began to weep uncontrollably. The Caliph wept so hard that day that his tears etched two lines on his face that remained until the day he died.