Authors: Kanan Makiya
The idea of knowledge being only with God is a theme in the Quran 46:23. Umar’s refusal to put aside revenues or make monetary provisions for the future is in Tabari’s
History
, vol. 12. Umar is known as “the man upon whose tongue God had struck the Truth,” as used by Ibn Manzur and others. Ibn Sa’d records a tradition that has the Prophet saying, “God put the truth on the tongue and heart of Umar and he is the
faruq
by whom God made the distinction between truth and falsity”; see Bashear, “The Title ‘Faruq.’ “
The valley before which Ka’b and Umar were standing is
Wadi Jahannam
, the Valley of Hell, coming from which the eleventh-century traveller Nasir Khusraw reported: “you may hear the cries of those in Hell”; see Le Strange. The story of James’s death is adapted from the account of the sixth-century pilgrim Theodosius. Ka’b and Umar’s reflections on the stoniness of Jerusalem borrow from Herman Melville’s obsession with the same. See the account in his
Journal up the Straits: October 11, 1856—May 5, 1857
. David’s songs are from Psalm 18 and 22, respectively. See also Psalm 61.
The tradition of Muhammad having men recite to him from the Quran is found in Hujwiri’s eleventh-century
Kashf al-Mahjub li Arbab al-Qulub
(The Unveiling of That Which Is Hidden for People of Hearts). The conclusions regarding David’s sins and the building of the Temple are made by Tabari in his
History
, vol. 3,
The Children of Israel
.
The story of David that Ka’b tells is from 2 Samuel. The account of the blind and the lame defending Jerusalem from the conquering army of David is from 2 Samuel 5. The wrath of God on Jerusalem is found in 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21: 14–17. Isaac Kalimi discusses the Angels of Pestilence and Death, and the presence of ashes from Abraham’s ram, in “The Land of Moriah, Mount Moriah, and the Site of Solomon’s Temple in Biblical Historiography,”
Harvard Theological Review
83:14 (1990). The procession up the mountain and dealings with Araunah can be found in 2 Samuel 24: 10–25. The passage of years have not lessened the importance of the transaction between David and Araunah. In August 1967 Zerach Warhaftig, the ultra-Orthodox Israeli minister for religious affairs, said that, seeing as how David had paid the full price to Araunah all those years ago, the Israeli government legally owned the Temple Mount and all the Muslim structures on it. “The minister went on to say that while there was no doubt that Jewish rights on the Temple Mount overrode those of the Moslems, and while Jews even had a right to raze the mosques there, they had no intention at the moment of actually doing so.” Amos Elon,
Jerusalem: City of Mirrors
(Little, Brown and Company, 1989).
Umar’s words to Ka’b on Solomon’s being kept safe from bloodshed in order to build the Temple are adapted from Tabari’s
History
, vol. 3. Ka’b’s response, that God never wanted a Temple to be built for Him in the first place, are based on Nathan’s prophecy to David warning him against building the Temple, in 2 Samuel 7 (a prophecy which suggests that building a Temple was as controversial among the Israelites in the
time of David as the Dome of the Rock was controversial among Muslims in the time of Abd al-Malik). Tabari attributes to the Prophet the analogy with a horseman who lingers in the shade and departs. See Schroeder,
Muhammad’s People
. The Quran offers many images of Paradise as a garden; see, for instance, 56:28–33.
The story of Umar sacrificing his daughter is of obscure Shi’ite origin. I grew up with it, as have Lebanese and Iranian Shi’ites. It is rejected by Sunni Muslims, but it is in the tradition and so is fair game from this book’s point of view. Reference to the tale and discussion of the practice can be found in Mahmud al-Qimmni’s
Al-’Ustoora wa al-Turath
(Cairo, 1993); he argues that the practice of female infanticide was not economic in origin as has been claimed. Ibn al-Kalbi’s
Kitab al-Asnam
supports this. The description of Umar’s tears can be found in Abu Nu’aim al-Isfahani’s
Hilyat al-Awliya
as cited in Heribert Busse, “Omar b. al-Hattab in Jerusalem,”
Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam
5 (1984). I am indebted to Chris Berdik for translating this article for me from the German. Umar’s language of mourning is taken from the Quran (53:2) and from the Sufi mystic al-Hallaj (857–922), who was tortured to death for his heretical views, and who is said to have described the mournful strains of a flute in the night as “Satan weeping for the loss of the world.”
The story of Abd al-Muttalib’s sacrifice is recorded in Ibn Ishaq’s
Life
, in words that suggest it was a religious offering. The would-be sacrifice is recorded as having taken place near the two idols Isaf and Na’ila until the Quraysh came out of their assemblies and stopped it. The Arabs gave the large or oddly shaped rocks that they worshipped until the advent of Islam names. The story of two such rocks, Isaf and Na’ila, is found in both Ibn Kalbi’s
Kitab al-Asnam
and Ibn Ishaq’s
Life
. The Prophet’s favorite wife Aisha seems to have been particularly taken with the tale. Ibn Ishaq reports her as saying: “Isaf and Na’ila were a man and a woman of Jurham who copulated in the Ka’ba. That is why God transformed them into two stones.”
Ka’b recites Exodus, 22: 28–29 regarding the sacrifice of firstborn sons. Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac is from Genesis 22. I have benefited from, and followed in broad outline, Jon Levenson’s masterly treatment of the subject in
The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity
(Yale University Press, 1993). From this book, I have also cited at the
end of the chapter a poignant midrashic conversation between Rabbis Phinehas and Benaiah, in which Phinehas says that Abraham prayed asking God to regard his sacrifice of the ram, “as though I had sacrificed my son first and only afterwards sacrificed this ram.”
Sacrifices on the rock of Mount Moriah, perhaps even the early tradition of child sacrifice, have been connected to the worship of Melchisedek, a legendary Canaanite priest-king of Jerusalem who is thought to have anticipated monotheism. Hebrew scripture depicts Melchisedek standing on the sacred stone of Jerusalem, consecrating an altar to El-Elyon, the “god most high,” whom the Israelites would name Elohim, “Lord;” Thomas Idinopulos discusses this in
Jerusalem Blessed, Jerusalem Cursed: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Holy City from David’s Time to Our Own
(Ivan R. Dee, 1991).
The Quranic account of Abraham’s sacrifice, found in Sura 37: 102–107, does not mention the name of the son, and his identity was debated by Muslim scholars in the early centuries of Islam. Among the earliest Muslims, however, the
dhabih
, or sacrificed one, was more often than not portrayed as Isaac (Ishaq), not Ishmael (Isma’il or Ishmael). The scholar Qutb al-Din explicitly states that this was the view of Umar ibn al-Khattab and Ali ibn Abi Talib. Ibn Qutayba and Tabari shared the view that Isaac was the son almost sacrificed by Abraham. Later Muslim opinion, however, converged on Isma’il (Ishmael), the son of Hagar and the ancestor of the Arabs, as having been the son in question. Al-Kisa’i, in his
Qisas al-Anbiya’
, cites Ka’b al-Ahbar as his source for Isaac, the son of Sara, as the son in question. Kisa’i alludes to the debate that was still alive in the eleventh century; he attributes to Ibn Abbas the view that it was Isma’il (Ishmael), and to Ibn Umar ibn al-Khattab, Hasan ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib, and Husayn ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib his own view that it was Isaac.
Al-Waqidi, in his ninth-century
Futuh al-Sham
, writes that the formal opening of Jerusalem to the army of Umar ibn al-Khattab took place on Palm Sunday and began on the Mount of Olives, where Umar and his army had made camp and where the Christian community gathered with their Patriarch to carry out their procession into the city on the following day; on this issue, see Busse, “Omar b. Al-Hattab in Jerusalem” (1984). The observance of rituals following the order of events of Christ’s passion during the Great Week of festivities described by my narrator, Ishaq, first evolved in Jerusalem in the fourth century. See the account
by Egeria, a nun probably from a western province of the Roman Empire on the Atlantic coast, who visited Jerusalem between 381 and 384; Wilkinson translates her diaries in his
Egeria’s Travels
(Ariel Publishing House, 1971). See also Wilkinson’s
Jerusalem Pilgrims
(1977). Incidentally, there is no evidence that Ka’b ever met Sophronius. But it is plausible that he did.
The guarantee of security and property to Christians is part of the so-called Covenant of Umar, a treaty of capitulation between the Muslims and Christians concerning Jerusalem. The text of this agreement appears in one of its fullest forms in Tabari’s
History
, vol. 12. One clause of the document—that continuing the Roman and Byzantine policy of excluding Jews from Jerusalem—is contradicted by all other evidence, and modern scholars have generally tended to discount it as a later forgery; F. E. Peters addresses this issue in
Jerusalem
(Princeton University Press, 1985). The terms of surrender for Jerusalem as set out in Tabari emphasize the poll tax; they do not include the details concerning comportment, dress, weaponry, and spying that I have added. Such restrictions are found in other deeds of surrender from the same period, reported in Baladhuri and Ibn ’Asakir. These were negotiated with the locals of Damascus and other Syrian cities. See Schroeder and Moshe Gil,
A History of Palestine 634–1099
(Cambridge University Press, 1992).
The discussion of separation as ordained by God and defining what is holy draws upon Mary Douglas’s argument in
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). The collection of sayings and stories of the saints compiled by Sophronius is entitled
Spiritual Meadows;
it was jointly authored with John Moschus, Sophronius’s mentor and companion on his travels through Egypt. Moshe Gil contends that Sophronius arrived in Palestine in 619, while the country was still in Persian hands, and became Patriarch in the autumn of 633. The description of seventh-century Alexandria, as discussed by Umar and Ka’b, is based on a variety of Muslim descriptions of the city. The term “Greek” is used in the story for the benefit of the modern Western reader. Practically the only Arabic term used in Muslim sources to describe the people of the Byzantine Empire is
al-Rum
, the Romans. The description of the ordinary people of Alexandria and their obsession with theological debate is adapted from the words of the late-fourth-century church father Gregory of Nyssa, who described the population of Constantinople in the words that Sophronius uses; see Speros Vryonis,
Byzantium and Europe
(Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), and Idinopulos.
The description of Umar’s clothing when meeting Sophronius is recorded in many sources. The details vary, but the gist is as Ishaq has it in his account. See Idinopulos (1991), Schroeder (1955), and Busse (1968). Tabari tells a nice tale, not included in Ishaq’s narrative, of how Umar began to stone his commanders in Syria upon arriving from Medina and finding them dressed in brocade and silk. Grabar, in
The Shape of the Holy
, argues that a man like Sophronius would have been able to speak the local Arabic or Aramaic dialect of Jerusalem. However, in the beginning of such a formal occasion as the meeting of the Patriarch and Umar, Sophronius would probably have spoken through a translator. Sophronius’s formal greeting to Umar is adapted from the text of a letter sent in the third century by Rome to the Churches of Africa, as recorded in
The See of Peter
, ed. J. T. Shotwell and L. R. Loomis (Columbia University Press, 1927). Umar’s expression of concern over whether he is a caliph or a king occurs in a conversation with Salman al-Farisi, not Abu Ubayda. See Schroeder.
The politics of dress in the encounter between Umar and Sophronius is apparent in the
Chronographia
of the eighth-century Greek historian Theophanes, whose version of events is historically the closest to the actual Muslim takeover of Jerusalem. As translated by Le Strange (1890), Theophanes writes that “Umar entered the Holy City clothed in camel-hair garments all soiled and torn, and making a show of piety as a cloak for his diabolical hypocrisy, demanded to be taken to what in former times had been the Temple built by Solomon. This he straightaway converted into an oratory for blasphemy and impiety. When Sophronius saw this, he exclaimed: ‘Verily, this is the abomination of desolation spoken by of Daniel the Prophet, and it now stands in the Holy Place’; And the Patriarch shed many tears.”
In the
Formation of Islamic Art
(Yale University Press, 1987), Oleg Grabar makes the observation that Eastern Christianity “had always liked to use the emotional impact of music and the visual arts to convert ‘barbarians.’ That such attempts may have been effective with the Arabs is shown in the very interesting, although little studied, group of accounts dealing with the more or less legendary trips of Arabs to the Byzantine court in early Islamic times, or sometimes even before Islam. In most cases the ‘highlight’ of the ‘guided tours’ to which they submitted was a visit either to a church … or to a court reception.” I have lent this important insight to Sophronius, who, after all, invited Umar to come to Jerusalem, according to the sources.
That Umar deeply desired to visit the place of David’s repentance (Quran 38:15–24) is well attested to; see Peters’s account, based on the
authority of al-Walid ibn Muslim. On the many parallels between Umar and David in the sources, see Busse (1984). Sophronius’s response to Umar’s request, describing Jerusalem as “the happy Church on which Our Lord, the Son of David, poured forth all his teaching,” includes language adapted from the African theologian Tertullian, as cited in Eamon Duffy,
Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes
(Yale University Press, 1997). Sophronius’s reflections on his monastic past are based on the words of Pope Gregory (540–604), as included by Duffy.