The Rock (21 page)

Ka’b knew the power of wagging tongues. Had he not been lifted by them from the status of a bedraggled and vanquished Jew to that of an Arabian seer within a short time of his arrival in Medina? He was visibly shaken at having acquired the dubious reputation of being the first person to have predicted the assassination of a Muslim Caliph. With my stepmother’s encouragement, he cut himself loose from public affairs, refusing all public engagements, including an invitation from Mu’awiya to become his counselor. All he wanted now was to be allowed to live out the rest of his years peacefully in Jerusalem.

I
was apprenticed to a local bookbinder who had learned his craft in the Yemen. The craft was new to Muhammad’s People and in great demand. At first, my duties were to glue sheets of papyrus to the inside of two wooden boards that held the book together. As soon as I proved adept at this, I was upgraded to the outer covering—leather pasted onto the board and embellished in accordance with the book’s importance. I took to this task like a sparrow to flight. In no time I was sewing ornamental leather strips onto the outer leather cover and rubbing or scratching patterns into the surface. By the end of my formal apprenticeship, to Ka’b’s great pleasure, I was tooling leather and doing inlay work that was as good as that of any Greek or Christian craftsman in Jerusalem.

Umar’s successor, Uthman, was the first son of the House of Umayya to govern Muhammad’s People. Eight years had now passed since the conquest. Uthman was loyal to the Prophet. But the House to which he belonged had been of recognized nobility in the days of ignorance and had led the struggle against Muhammad
from Mecca until its defeat in the year that my father and mother arrived in the Hijaz. The House of Hashim, from which the Prophet descended and which brought Mecca into the Muslim fold, had come into its ascendency at the expense of the princes, merchants, and noblemen of Umayya, who had to swallow their pride and mark time.

In the power struggle that now raged between the House of Hashim and the House of Umayya in Arabia, my father chose to ally himself with the latter. He supported the victor, Uthman, against Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet.

Under the rule of Uthman, the very Islam that had been such a thorn in the Umayyads’ side turned into their greatest opportunity. The time had come, they judged, to restore their House to glory. They were on their way to becoming a power to be reckoned with in Syria, especially after Uthman undid all of Umar’s strict edicts against Arab accumulation of wealth and ownership of land outside Arabia. An appetite for reckless spending and lavish display was unleashed upon Syria and the Holy Land.

The problem worsened when Uthman confirmed Mu’awiya as governor—he whose accursed father had fought pitched battles against the Prophet, and whose mother was called Hind the Liver-Eater, because she had eaten the liver of the Prophet’s uncle in front of all the knights of Arabia after the Believers had killed her father in battle. Such was the stuff of which Umayya’s sons were made, among whom I must not forget to include Abd al-Malik, the Caliph I now serve.

Uthman lavished the goods of the Believers on his own kin during the twelve years that he ruled. He gave his great-nephew Marwan, the father of Abd al-Malik, a fifth of Africa’s revenue. Those riches paved his family’s road to power. The Caliph was generous with himself as well; he died a wealthy man with estates valued at over one hundred thousand gold pieces, and large herds of horses and camels. By the end of his reign, he had earned the reproach of good men. To justify his nepotism, Uthman used to say, “Does not the Quran enjoin us to show kindness unto our near kindred?”

Uthman continued Umar’s practice of ruling from Medina. Apart from setting aside the gardens of Silwan for the city’s poor, he did not intervene in the affairs of Palestine. His new governor in Syria, however, more than compensated for this neglect. He encouraged Arabs from Medina claiming descent from the Yemen to settle in the City of the Temple. He also urged his kinsmen to buy land from Christians, especially in the areas adjacent to the sacred precinct. Mu’awiya had the esplanade cleared of what remained of the rubble. He rebuilt some of the walls and repaved the northern part of the platform. There was even talk of ambitious new building plans for the area. Nothing came of them during Mu’awiya’s years, first as governor and then as Caliph. Ka’b eagerly followed these plans, but he was counting on self-interest to drive the House of Umayya to do what was right by the Rock—seeing as how the House of Hashim was too firmly entrenched in Mecca and Medina, and too preoccupied with prophecy and matters of the next world. Ka’b, you could say, adopted a pragmatic stance toward Uthman’s reign, never having experienced himself its pecuniary and grasping nature, which my generation found so odious.

B
efore my peers and friends, many of whom had been born to followers of Jesus, my father’s hatred of all things Christian was embarrassing. Their illustrated manuscripts, which often came my way in the course of my work, were the models of our vocation. It was from such books that I learned to enclose the chapter headings of God’s Book in a gold frame surrounded by tracery, twisting lines, and geometrical patterns. On one occasion, I returned from work flushed with excitement because I had seen my first picture in a Coptic work, which I was rebinding. It was of a tree with branches curling upward into the sky and different, exquisitely painted birds sitting on each branch.

Ka’b went livid with rage, saying that the copying of living things is strictly forbidden; it is one of the great sins that will be
severely punished on the Day of Judgment. “Even if it is a tree without spirit, or a bird that is not made in His image?” I protested.

“Yes,” he thundered, “because it is an imitation of the Creator’s activity! On the Day of Judgment, the makers of such images will be eternally condemned to try to breathe life into their pictures, and fail. They are like dogs, classed among the worst of creatures. Angels will not enter their houses.” Ka’b was angrier than I had ever seen him. He rued the day that he had put me in harm’s way by apprenticing me to one who dealt in such “Satanic filth,” as he called the book.

We took to arguing. I would needle him with my escapades into the cavernous interiors of the great Church, whose builders, I imagined, must have burned with overpowering love for their work, the kind of love that only the young of heart understand. If the monks would not let me in through the main doors off the Cardo, I crept in through the back to find a spot all to myself, near a pillar or in the shade of an arcade.

I began to explore every nook and cranny of the Christian city around me. The dazzling monuments and churches worked a kind of magic on us children of the first generation of Muhammad’s followers to settle in the Holy City. When I sneaked into the Church of the Resurrection with my friends during High Mass, for instance, the music and liturgies in praise of God made my knees buckle under with emotion.

The Church of the Ascension, crowning the summit of the Mount of Olives and open to the sky to commemorate the place of Jesus’s passage into Heaven, was another favorite haunt. At the center of the tall tower lies a set of Jesus’ footprints, marking the precise point of his ascent. Besides these, carved out of the rock, stands an altar around which Christians gather for their rituals, under the blue dome of the sky. Against the round walls of this remarkable church rise columns; two in particular remind visitors of the men who said “Ye men of Galilee, why gaze ye into the sky?” The monks tell people that, if a man can squeeze between the wall and the column, he will be freed from his sins. There is not a pilgrim who will not attempt this feat after a fast lasting three days.

(photo credit 19.1)

A bright light emitted from lamps placed behind windows set below the tower’s parapet shines fiercely at night, lifting the steps leading into the valley and to the city out of the shadows. Their brilliance would lift my soul along with the shadows, bringing a sense of reverence that was both attractive and alarming. Headstrong as I was, I sought out priests and monks to talk to about these things.

Walking back home after long and stimulating discussion with my Christian peers, I could not help but see the Rock, which I passed on my way, as plain—no different from hundreds of other rocks in a city that was in any case endowed with more than its fair share of them. Its stories, which I all too often had heard regaled, appeared flat and featureless. My father’s zeal for it, I began to think in the waning years of my adolescence, was worthless, the most worthless human activity imaginable.

K
a’b and I had our most bitter exchange after one such ramble through the city. Amid the chickens that my stepmother reared, we were sitting on the roof of our house overlooking the esplanade. The evening sun had intensified the color and size of the surrounding mountains, giving them the appearance of heaving up toward the Holy City, presenting to her the threshold of the Arabian desert immediately above the hills of her own wilderness. The platform in the foreground had been cleared of all of its debris; it lay rolled out flat as a carpet before our eyes, empty and ghostlike, its paving broken by the looming presence of the Rock.

“Father,” I began, “I have been considering what you once said about how the color of the Rock and the Black Stone changed.”

“Oh,” he said. “…  Are you referring to their defilement?”

“Well, yes,” I replied. “Defilement or veneration, I don’t suppose it makes much difference.”

“I don’t follow you,” he said, letting his voice and head drop as though preparing himself for the worst.

“An old man I was talking to in the city said that, if the Black Stone lost its brightness during the Age of Ignorance, it was not because menstruating women touched it, but because the people of Quraysh were in the habit of smearing the Stone with the intestines, excretory organs, and genitals of the animals they sacrificed. Inside these organs, they believed, reside the emotions most closely bound up with religion—remorse, grief, compassion, sex.”