Authors: Kanan Makiya
Ka’b’s angry assertion that the empire allowed Helena to have her
way and Christianize the world is adapted from the words of Ambrose, the fourth-century Bishop of Milan, and Philostorgius (mid-fifth century), as cited in Jan Willem Drijvers,
Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding the True Cross
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992).
There is no evidence that the historical Sophronius would have told the story of Helena’s discovery of the true cross of Christ in quite the form that I have him telling it. The legendary versions of the story (the only ones that any Christian believed in before modern times) seem to have originated in Jerusalem shortly after the empress’s death in the year 328. I have based Sophronius’s account on a version known as the Judas Cyriacus legend, which originated in or around the Syrian city of Edessa sometime in the fifth century. Of the three versions of the legend identified by scholars, this was by far the most widespread; it is also the only one that is anti-Jewish, a factor which explains its considerable popularity in medieval Europe. All three versions are translated and discussed by Drijvers.
Inside the main frame of the Judas Cyriacus legend, I have made several insertions. Sophronius’s description of the Jewish presence in Jerusalem on the day of the destruction of the Temple is taken from Saint Jerome’s commentary on Zephaniah 1:15. A pilgrim who arrived in Jerusalem from Bordeaux in 333 informs us that Jews, although banned from the city, were still visiting the site of the Temple and anointing the rock. This Bordeaux Pilgrim, as he has become known, has provided the earliest travel account of the emerging Christian geography of the Holy Land. Some anti-Jewish passages spoken by Sophronius are from Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan. Helena’s self-aggrandizing declaration of intent regarding the finding of the cross, in which she compares her role to that of Mary, is also adapted from Ambrose; his account of the discovery of the cross in 395, which is the first official account provided by the Church, is translated in Louis De Combes,
The Finding of the Cross
, vol. 10 (London: International Catholic Library, 1907). Helena’s physical features are based upon a representation of the empress on a medal in the British museum, shown at the end of “The Rock of the Cross.” The prayer of Judas, asking God’s help and promising conversion in return, is found in Drijvers, as is the recounting of the miracle that followed. Cyril, a later Bishop of Jerusalem, claimed to witness the miraculous light that emanated from the cross. He recorded the event
for posterity in a letter to the emperor in 351, believing it to be proof of divine support for the emperor and his military campaigns. Many different variations on this miracle exist in the literature. The verse containing Christ’s prophecy is based on Matthew 23:37–39, 24:29–31. The discovery of the cross under a temple to the Goddess of Love, Venus, is based on
The Life of Constantine
, by the Church historian Eusebius, an eyewitness to the building of the Church who was born in Palestine at the end of the third century. The conversion of Judas and his re-christening as Judas Cyriacus is the origin of the name given to this fifth-century tale of the discovery of the cross—the Judas-Cyriacus legend.
Not long after Helena’s departure, a piece of the cross was carefully mounted in a casket of pure gold and precious stones. It was placed in a silver shrine around which had been built a great mausoleum. On Good Friday of every year, the casket containing the piece of the Holy Cross would be opened. The description of the yearly display and veneration of the wood is taken almost verbatim from the fourth-century observations of Sister Egeria, who witnessed the ceremony (Wilkinson, 1971).
All sources, Muslim and Christian, agree that, when Umar came to Jerusalem, he was intent on seeing a specific site that had nothing to do with the Christian holy places. He wanted to see the place where the Jewish Temple had stood, or what the Quran (38: 20–21) refers to as David’s
mihrab
, or prayer place. Both formulations amounted to the same thing. See Oleg Grabar, “The Umayyad Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem,”
Ars Orientalis
3 (1959), and Grabar,
The Shape of the Holy
(1996). It stands to reason that Umar thought of this site as the first
qibla
, or sacred axis of Islam, which he was visiting for the first time.
When Umar arrived, writes Jamal al-Din Ahmad, “There was over the Rock of the Holy City a great dungheap, which completely masked the Mihrab of David, and which the Christians had put here in order to offend the Jews, and further, even, the Christian women were wont to throw their cloths and clouts.… Now when Umar had come to the Holy City and conquered it, and saw how there was a dungheap over the Rock, he regarded it as horrible and ordered that it should be entirely cleared. To accomplish this they forced the Nabateans [native peasantry] of Palestine to labor without pay. On the authority of Ja’far ibn Nafir, it is related that when Umar first exposed the Rock to view by removing the dungheap, he commanded them not to pray there until
three showers of heavy rain should have fallen. It is related … that Umar entered by the Gate of Muhammad, crawling on his hands and knees, he and all those with him, until he came up to the Court of the Sanctuary. There he looked around to right and to left, and, glorifying Allah, said: ’By Allah, verily this—by Him in whose hand is my soul!— must be the Mosque of David.” (Le Strange, 1890). With the exception of the last sentence, which I attribute to Ka’b, not Umar, I have stuck closely to the spirit of this “classical” Muslim account, which, as Peters (1985) notes, “appears to embody … some very early Muslim perceptions about Jerusalem.”
I surmise that the gate through which Umar and Sophronius would have entered the Temple Mount, the Gate of Muhammad in the
Muthir
, was the Double Gate facing Mecca on the southern edge of the sanctuary. This gate, whose construction dates to Herodian times, was blocked in the Middle Ages and has since remained useless as a means of access to the Haram. More on the gate can be found in Rosen-Ayalon (1989). Busse (1984) makes important observations on the prayers of Umar on the Temple Mount in his “Omar b. al-Hattab in Jerusalem.”
On other details in this chapter: The phrase “Heaven is as close as one’s sandal-straps, and so is Hell” is attributed to the Prophet, not to Umar, in the tradition. The legend of the pillars of the Temple, carried off by Titus’s soldiers, weeping every year on the ninth of Ab can be found in Vilnay’s
Legends of Jerusalem
. Other legends in this chapter from Vilnay are associated with the existence of a perfect heavenly counterpoint to the Temple. The description of Titus’s persecution of the Jews takes from Mujir al-Din, medieval Jerusalem’s Muslim historian writing in 1496. Mujir al-Din records Helena’s singling out of the rock for desecration by designating it as a dumping ground for manure. The theme of desecration through sewage and waste, particularly women’s menstrual cloths, is constant in Muslim sources. It should be noted that, to this day, one of the Gates to the Haram is called the Dung Gate.
Christian sources incline to the view that Umar chose the Temple Mount to build upon based on Christian advice. According to Said Bitriq, Umar said to Sophronius, “You owe me justice and a guarantee of safety. Show me where I can build my mosque” (Busse, 1984). Eutychius, the later patriarch of Alexandria who wrote toward the end of the ninth century, suggests in his account of the Muslim takeover that Sophronius persuaded Umar to build in the general area of the Jewish Temple in exchange for leaving the rest of Jerusalem free of mosques. A large area was needed, and Umar was committed by treaty to not confiscate
churches; the abandoned empty space of the Temple would have been a suitable location from both parties’ point of view. However, I am not convinced that this “utilitarian” approach fully resolves the religious tensions involved. In a collection of edifying tales, for instance, collected by a monk named Anastase of Sinai between 630 and 690, the archdeacon Theodore, a contemporary of Sophronius and eyewitness to the construction, tells Anastase: “Atheistic Saracens entered the Holy City of Christ our God … in punishment of our negligence which was considerable, and, running, they reached the place called the Capitole [the Temple Mount]. Some men they took with them by force, others with their full consent, in order to clean this place and to build this damned thing intended for their prayers which they call a mosque.” From an article by Bernard Flusin, “L’Esplanade du Temple a L’Arrivee des Arabes, D’Apres Deux Recits Byzantins,” in
Bayt al-Maqdis: Abd al-Malik’s Jerusalem
, part 1, edited by Julian Raby and Jeremy Johns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). The most intriguing glimpse into Umar’s mindset, however, comes from the exchange between him and Ka’b that ends with Umar’s rebuke, and the decision to build south not north of the rock. The earliest version, to whose spirit I have remained faithful (but in which Sophronius is not present) is in Tabari’s
History
, vol. 12. This exchange, often interpreted as a conscious Muslim repudiation of its Jewish antecedents in the very place where it most needed doing—the site of the Temple—is the kernel from which this book was first conceived.
In 670, Bishop Arculfus, a pilgrim to the Holy City, left this description of the mosque that Umar built in the location today occupied by the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Haram: “On the famous place where once stood the temple, the Saracens worship at a square house of prayer, which they have built with little art, of boards and large beams on the remains of some ruins.” The travels of Arculf were recorded by Adomnan, the seventh-century Abbot of Iona, as included in Wilkinson (1977). On Umar’s policies and bias toward non-Arabs, see Wilfred Madelung,
The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The continued expansion of Islam ended the possibility of Umar’s desire for a pure, untainted Arab state. S. D. Goitein notes the shift from purely Arab dominance to the growing influence of other nationalities, especially Iranians, in his “A Turning Point in the History of the Muslim State,” in
Studies in
Islamic History and Institutions
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966). A fragment of Ibn Ishaq’s
Life
includes Umar’s quote that, “Two religions cannot subsist together.” A passage in Muhammad al-Dhahabi’s
Ta’rikh al-Islam
(The History of Islam), tells us that Ka’b al-Ahbar helped convert forty-two Jewish scholars,
ahbar
, to Islam during the days of Mu’awiya who were granted subsidies and grants (Gil, 1992).
Umar’s debate with Ka’b concerning the direction of prayer draws on many Quranic verses (20:112; 42:5; 2:144; 13:37). The decisive verses recited by the Prophet, making the change, are in Quran 2: 138–139. Ibn Ishaq’s
Life
records that the change took place in the seventeenth month after Muhammad’s arrival in Medina, and that it posed an existential problem for Believers as expressed in the inquiry into the condition of those who had died before the change took place. My account ignores the detail preserved by tradition that has the revelation descending on the Prophet near Medina, in a small outlying village called al-Quba. I have translated the phrase
ahl al-qibla wa ‘l-jamma’a
into “the People of the Sacred Direction”; see
EI2
under “Ahl al-kibla.” The verses just preceding the story of Bara’’ come from the Quran 2:136. I have taken the story of Bara’ from Ibn Ishaq, although I have changed the characters and eliminated a few details. Muhammad’s ambiguous response when asked to rule against Bara’ is included as it appears in Ibn Ishaq’s
Life
. It is interesting to note Tabari’s observation in his commentary on the Quran on the reasons for the change: “The first injunction which was abrogated in the Quran was that concerning the
qibla
. This is because the Prophet used to prefer the Rock of the Holy House of Jerusalem, which was the
qibla
of the Jews. The Prophet faced it for seventeen months after the Exodus in the hope that they would believe in him.” This the Jews of Medina did not do.
The early debate in Islam over the direction of prayer is part of a larger competition between Mecca and Jerusalem as sites of veneration and pilgrimage. In the late seventh century many Muslims thought of the two cities as equally holy. The poet al-Farazdaq (d. 728), for example, places them on a par in a poem. Writing in the fourteenth century, Ibn al-Hajj al-Abdari in
Madkhal al-shar’ al-Sharif
points out that there were still Muslims who prayed from behind the rock in order to combine the
qibla
of the rock and the
qibla
of Mecca. M. J. Kister discusses these debates in his important article, “ ‘You Shall Only Set Out for Three Mosques’: A Study of an Early Tradition,” in
Studies in Jahiliyya and Early Islam
(London: Variorum Reprints, 1980).
Other details: Ka’b’s statement, “those who can see lift their eyes
to the heavens.… Those who cannot see look at the onions in the ground,” is attributed to the first-century Hellenized Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus, as cited by E. M. Forster in
Alexandria: A History and a Guide
(London: Michael Haag, 1986). The lashing of Umar’s son, on his father’s orders, for having a taste of wine is in Ibn Asakir’s
Tarikh Dimashq
.
The death of Umar at the hands of Abu Lu’lu’a is from Tabari’s
History
. The image of oaths as screens for misdeeds is from the Quran 58: 15–18. Ka’b’s “prophecy” of Umar’s assassination in Tabari’s
History
reads: “Ka’b al-Ahbar came and said to [Umar], ‘O Commander of the Faithful, make your will, for in three days you will be dead.’ ‘What tells you this?’ asked Umar. ‘I find it in the book of the Almighty God, in the Torah.’ ‘What, do you find Umar ibn al-Khattab in the Torah?’ ‘By God, no, but I find your description and features, and behold your span is ended.’ ” Whereupon follows the tale of his murder.