The Rock (4 page)

Rabbi Salih taught my father that Mount Zion was a real place that had not been destroyed by the Romans. He taught him that the Rock of Foundation was the last remaining vestige of Solomon’s Temple, that it was the highest point of the mountain, and that it used to project three fingerbreadths above the floor of the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple. He taught him that the Ark was situated at the center of the Rock, facing east toward the Mount of Olives.

These teachings instilled in my father the desire to see that which Rabbi Salih had described.

Every young Yemeni Jew with aspirations to scholarship yearned to go to the Holy City and see the capstone of creation. But the city was in Christian hands. And Ka’b had to feed and clothe his newly acquired wife, who was but twelve years old and had been betrothed to him since childhood. Under such circumstances, yearnings were not enough.

It was fear that eventually drove my father out of the Yemen.

Attacking in swarms like flies on the Day of Resurrection, locusts ate up the fruits and vegetables, and then made their way into unshuttered houses and shops. They left carcasses of men
lying scattered in the streets like dung on an open field. My mother, nevertheless, thought of them as a source of food, even a delicacy. She could count eight kinds of kosher locust, and whenever she was in one of her nostalgic moods, I am told, she would say, “A locust in my mouth is better than a fattened lamb. And it is kosher!”

She ate her fear, but my father never could because he said locusts caused epilepsy. As soon as anyone but mentioned “locust,” he would begin a painstaking description of what the body of a man consumed by famine looked like, his skin shrivelled upon the bones, or swollen and transparent like glass. His words left the impression that he had run away from the Yemen, not because there was nothing to eat, but because of his horror of locusts.

Ka’b was by then already an old man, and the star of the Yemen had long since been on the wane. The land was tired, its spirit broken; agriculture was in ruins, the population beset by famine. Christian ships sailed the Red Sea. Why had my father waited for the knife to cut through to the bone before tearing up his roots and dragging my unwilling mother along, going to Medina?

First, there were the locusts. And then there was the fear that, once he left and was far away from the land he knew well, he might become so filled with anxiety about what lay ahead as to want to go back. Travelling was a test that he imposed upon himself—an ordeal not all that different from the one pilgrims undergo as they travel further and further away from all they know in order to get closer to God.

By contrast with the Yemen, Arabia’s star was on the rise. Mecca had become the religious center of the Hijaz, and people increasingly travelled there for trade. And there was news of a desert prophet who lingered in the surrounding mountains, who heard voices coming forth from the rocks. His name was Muhammad.

K
a’b began taking an active interest in the Prophet, God’s Blessings Be Upon Him, after he heard that he had sent an envoy to the
people of the nearby town of Najran, inviting them to accept Islam and guaranteeing their safety if they did so.

The pork-eating people of Najran had heard this before when, thirty years prior to the birth of Muhammad, Dhu Nuwas, the last Jewish king to rule the Yemen, sought to convert them. Ka’b’s father and uncles had believed that Dhu Nuwas was the Messiah, and had fought by his side like wild lions. But the Christians of Najran would have nothing to do with Dhu Nuwas. They said that it was Jesus who raised the dead. It was Jesus who healed the sick. It was Jesus who declared the unseen. It was Jesus who was the Son of God. Therefore it had to be Jesus who was the Messiah. This reply angered the Jewish king. He put a choice before the people of Najran: convert or die. The town chose death.

After the fighting, Dhu Nuwas had his men dig pits and threw all the survivors into them; some he slew with the sword before tossing their bodies into the fire; others he burnt alive in pits, as the Holy Book bears witness.

They say the king killed twenty thousand Christians that day. Two of Ka’b’s uncles died in the fighting. But later the Byzantines got their revenge. Dhu Nuwas was last seen fleeing an army of Christians come from Abyssinia. As the enemy approached, he drove his horse into the sea, spurring it on through the shallow waters into the deep, where horse and rider vanished.

B
ut after Muhammad’s envoy had spoken, the town, convinced that great benefits would accrue to it, accepted Muhammad’s offer, whereupon they were taught how and in which direction to pray to the Lord of Creation.

What drove Ka’b to visit Najran? After all, he hated the People of the Cross even more than he feared locusts. “If you fatten your dog, will he not eat you?” he would say about their converts. Was it curiosity about the Prophet, whose followers used to pray in the direction of Solomon’s Temple and fast on the Jewish Day of Atonement? Perhaps Ka’b’s visit was an act of defiance, or a family pilgrimage—his way of paying respect to the memory of his dead uncles.

I don’t know what happened in Najran on the day of his visit. But afterward, he began to believe that the distance between Judaism and Islam was not very great.

My father despised the state of weakness that the Jews had fallen into after the vanishing of Dhu Nuwas. “Like goats they take to the rocks for fear of the wolves,” he would say of his own kin. He spoke wistfully of the succession of hopeless rebellions against Byzantine overlords, always followed by unrelenting repression. It was a time when false Messiahs declared themselves all over southern Arabia, and Ka’b’s tale of the madman who proclaimed himself a second Moses left a deep impression on me as a boy.

The tale was brief. The would-be savior promised his disciples a miraculous journey to the Promised Land. He told them that redemption was imminent, and then he walked them over a cliff to a horrible death on the rocks below.

“At least he ventured forth,” Ka’b said.

But my father ached to leave a land whose self-esteem had sunk so low, and nothing angered him as much as hearing a fellow Jew justify his downtrodden position by reference to the curse of Ezra. Travelling all the way from Palestine to the Yemen, Ezra the Scribe had come to plead with his brethren to return to Jerusalem and help in the rebuilding of the Temple.

“Why should we suffer afflictions once again?” Ka’b’s ancestors had said in response. “It is better for us to stay where we are and worship God.” An angry exchange had taken place, after which Ezra had put a curse on all Jewish heads in the Yemen, forever depriving them of peace.

K
a’b yearned for a savior in the warrior tradition of his uncles, someone like Jabbar, the noble Jewish opponent of the Arab hero Antar. Jabbar is said to have foretold that a Savior would appear to the Jews of Arabia from across a river of sand. He would come riding a white ass followed by a sea of warriors seated on camels and lions. Every fortress besieged by them would collapse; every army would be annihilated. He would make all other religions disappear and renew the Law that God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. Thus would the glory of the Sons of Israel become more dazzling than ever before.

Hope is a medicine that needs continual administration. God, in His infinite wisdom, presses down on us when we breathe. Then He expands and fills our chests by releasing us from pressure. His mystery is present in both motions.

“A prophet has appeared among the Arabs,” Ka’b said, testing the waters with an old friend. “They say that he is proclaiming the coming of the anointed one. What say you, dear Abraham?”

“That he is an impostor,” Abraham replied, groaning at the prospect of the conversation he knew was about to transpire. “Do the prophets come with sword and chariot? There is no truth to be found in this so-called prophet, only bloodshed. It is written of his ancestor, Ishmael, that his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him. Mark my words, Ka’b: Should those sons of locusts become a swarm covering the surface of the earth, their only purpose will be plunder.”

“What if the Holy One is raising them up in order to save us from the Kingdom of the Cross? Have you thought of that, Abraham?
God puts a prophet in their midst to bring them to greatness, following which a great terror will be unleashed between this prophet’s followers and the Christians.”

“How can we know that these happenings in Arabia are our salvation and not harbingers of even greater hardship?” replied Abraham. “You are talking about a people who give the large and oddly shaped rocks they see around them names! They are rock-worshippers, my friend!”

“Hardship,” said Ka’b, “is the nurse of salvation. Did not Isaiah hear in a vision, come to him while his loins were racked with pain, that the deliverance of Israel would come from a man mounted on a camel followed by a man mounted on an ass?”

“He did.”

“And was it not the habit of the prophet Elijah to appear in the guise of a desert Arab?”

“It was.”

“The rider on the camel is a prophet whose coming heralds that of the rider on the ass, the Messiah. Did not Isaiah hear our Lord Yahweh say,

“Enough, Ka’b! My patience is at an end. You will bring a terrible retribution on all our heads. Do not force me to repudiate you. I will hear no more of this talk.” And with that, Abraham turned his back on my father and stalked out of the room.

O
n a night that had dropped over the Yemen like a stone, my father, with my unhappy mother in tow, left for the city of Medina. They arrived shortly after the unification of Arabia, in what became known as the Year of the Delegations, a momentous year in the annals of Believers. As tribes from all over Arabia were streaming in to swear allegiance to Muhammad, an air of excitement and unfulfilled promise hung over the dusty streets. It had taken Ka’b a long time to overcome his fears and leave; time had crawled like a worm. In Medina, it began to fly like a flushed bird.

The beardless, fiery Syrians who live on my street and grew up under Caliphs from Abd al-Malik’s House think they know everything about those early years in Medina. They are like experts on the desert who have never seen a valley bare as an ass’s belly, much less lived in one. They cannot imagine that a man might bear witness to Muhammad’s prophecy and remain a Jew at the same time. But that was the practice in Medina when Ka’b, then known as Jacob, first arrived. He remained a Jew in that he prayed, observed the Sabbath, dressed, and in all other respects behaved and looked like a Jew. His friends thought him one. And even the rabbis I have consulted, however much they disapprove of calling Muhammad a prophet, say there is nothing un-Jewish about thinking it.