Authors: Kanan Makiya
The Rock (25 page)
I
n the waning years of Mu’awiya’s rule, a Jewish leather worker, Joseph by name, observed an impression on the surface of the Rock that no one had observed before—a footprint. Greatly oversized, but a footprint nonetheless. Everyone was convinced of the authenticity of his finding. But to whom did it belong?
Joseph, renowned for his piety and trustworthiness among both circumcised and uncircumcised alike, said it belonged to the prophet Jacob during his communication with God while asleep on
the Rock. A footprint was left behind as a sign that God’s Holy House would one day be erected here. The Jews of the city were inclined to agree with Joseph. A pigeon’s neck was wrung as an offering over the impression, and its blood sprinkled over the rest of the Rock’s surface.
The monks of the Church of the Resurrection disagreed. The matter was taken up by their leadership council, which, since the death of Sophronius, had been in charge of Christian affairs in the city. The council had been unable to agree upon a Patriarch to replace Sophronius. Now it found something to agree upon. Amidst great publicity, the council announced that the footstep belonged to Jesus, and that it was made when he used to teach in the old Temple before the coming of the abominations which he foretold would destroy it.
The decree caused an uproar. It looked like the Christians were trying to claim ownership of the very place that they had treated with such contempt. A group of rabbis, newly settled from Arabia, issued a counter-declaration. Couched in abrasive language, it caused spirits to grow even more heated. The argument spread throughout the towns and villages of Palestine. Everywhere, men feuded over the identity of the footprint. Words spilled over into blows. Christians and Jews died. The Holy City was turned into a tinderbox. To avert total disaster, both parties appealed to the Caliph to adjudicate. He agreed and called upon me to help him resolve the dispute.
“Son of Ka’b, know that I do not use my sword when my whip will do. Nor my whip when my tongue will do. Nor my tongue when another man’s tongue will do. Let a single hair bind me to my people, and I’ll not let it snap; when they slack, I pull; but when they pull, I slack. Know these things, and tell me what your father had to say about this footprint.”
Ka’b never mentioned a footprint. Had he suspected there was
such an impression, I would have known about it. I was naive enough to tell this to the Caliph.
Mu’awiya would have none of it. Ideas on the footprint were cropping up daily. An alliance of Muslim and Jewish scholars had started to claim that the footprint was left behind by Abraham, as he was preparing to strike his son with the knife. When challenged as to how a mere mortal could leave an impression on stone, they replied that in the days of Abraham the Rock was soft, like clay, as evidenced by the shells and sea animals impressed on similar types of rock in the vicinity. Why then was there only one footprint? retorted the incredulous. Why did the son’s feet not leave an impression next to his father’s? The scholars replied that after the Rock had hardened, God erased all the other footprints. No one was convinced.
Mu’awiya’s real problem was not this alliance but Yasar, a former slave turned tailor from Medina, who was making a name for himself because as a young boy he had heard the Prophet preach.
Yasar was going around Damascus claiming that the Rock was the spot from which the Messenger of God had ascended to Heaven. The footprint bore witness, Yasar said, to a miraculous journey he had heard Muhammad describe, from Mecca to Jerusalem and back again in one night, during which, he alleged, the ascent occurred.
Yasar was busy showing crowds of people gathered around one corner of the Rock what it felt like to touch the precise imprint of the Prophet’s heel who, he said, was not wearing sandals at the time.
Lifted up on his father’s shoulders, the young Yasar had supposedly heard the Prophet tell throngs of people:
“While I was sleeping near the Black Stone of the Ka’ba one day, the Angel Gabriel came and stirred me with his foot. I sat up but saw nothing and lay down again. He came a second time and stirred me with his foot. I sat up but saw nothing and lay down again. He came to me the third time and stirred me with his foot. I sat up and he took hold of my arm and I stood beside him and he
brought me out to the door of the mosque and there was a white animal, half mule, half donkey, with wings on its sides with which it could propel its feet very fast.”
When the Prophet tried to mount this extraordinary creature, it shied away from him. This made Gabriel upset. He grabbed the creature’s mane, and shouted,
“Are you not ashamed to behave in this way? By God, none more honorable before God than Muhammad has ever ridden you before.”
The creature was so ashamed that it broke out into a sweat and stood still until Muhammad mounted. With the help of this steed, Muhammad and Gabriel were able to cover the distance between Mecca and Jerusalem in the blink of an eye, stopping at Mount Sinai on the way.
Upon arriving at David’s Sanctuary, the Prophet found himself welcomed by an assembly made up of all the prophets from the past.
“I have never seen a man more like myself than Abraham,” Yasar reports Muhammad as saying of this encounter. “Moses was a ruddy-faced man, tall, thinly fleshed, curly-haired with a hooked
nose. Jesus, Son of Mary, was a reddish man of medium height with many freckles on his face and lank hair as though he had just stepped out of a bath. One would suppose that his head was dripping with water, though there was no water on it.”
The assembled prophets asked Muhammad to lead them in prayer. Gabriel told Muhammad that this meant he had been guided to the most primordial of all the religions of the Book. Following the prayer, the Prophet was led by Gabriel to climb onto the Rock’s hard, flat surface. As he reached its summit, the Heavens began to open up in preparation for his ascent. The Rock even tried to rise with him, which it might very well have done were it not for the quick-thinking Gabriel. He grabbed hold of the massive platform from two of its sides, and pulled down on it with all of his strength, crying out:
“Your place, O Stone, is on earth. You have no further part in what the Prophet must do.”
The long ridges along the edges of the Rock of Ascension, as Yasar had taken to calling it, are the traces of Gabriel’s fingers as he clutched at the formidable hardness, terminating its rise, and eventually fixing it back in place on top of Mount Moriah. Muhammad’s ascent, it turned out, was to be by means of a ladder of light, just like Jacob’s. The ladder came down from the Heavens and rested on the Rock. Muhammad described the ladder as “that to which the dying man looks as death approaches.” The footprint was left behind as Muhammad pressed down hard to spring up with the other foot.
The two companions travelled through the Heavens, meeting and conversing with various angels and prophets. Gabriel informed the Guardian of each heavenly gate that his companion had been sent for. The Guardian was always helpful. Eventually the pair reached the highest Heaven and were in the presence of God. The encounter turned out to be something of an anticlimax the way Yasar spun out the story, because its only outcome was the imposition of an obligation of fifty prayers a day upon the followers of Muhammad.
At this point in Yasar’s telling of the tale, someone in his rapt audience wanted to know how the fifty had been reduced to the customary five. Whereupon Yasar claimed to remember word by word Muhammad’s reply:
“On my return from the highest Heaven I passed by Moses. He asked me how many prayers had been laid upon me. When I told him fifty, he said, ‘Prayer is a weighty matter and your people are weak. Go back to your Lord and ask him to reduce the obligation on your community.’ I did as he recommended and God reduced the number by ten. Again, I passed by Moses who still thought the number was too high; so I went back, and God reduced the number by another ten prayers a day. So it went on until only five prayers for the whole day were left. Again, Moses gave me the same advice. But this time I told him that I was ashamed to go back to my Lord and ask him to reduce the number again.”
N
othing good would come of Yasar’s story, Mu’awiya said; the man was inspired by the Devil. Lines of anxiety creased his face when he spoke of him. No one could predict the alliances that might unfold amid such allegations. Yasar had no learning. But,
Mu’awiya realized, he had animal cunning and a sense of timing which more than compensated for it.
By turning a Messenger from God—a mere warning that the beginning of the end was nigh—who himself rejected every superstition regarding his person, into a miracle-worker, Yasar was challenging both the Jews and the Christians in their city, and laying down a new, purely Muslim, claim to the Holy Rock. The uproar that had already claimed lives could get worse. Nothing a Christian could say about Christ’s ascension into the Heavens from a different spot on the Mount of Olives could compete with a Muslim’s description of Muhammad’s visit to Paradise and Hell, and his return in body and spirit to tell everyone about it.
Yasar had the tailor’s gift of weaving entirely separate pieces of cloth into a whole so seamless that the customer did not even notice that his beautiful new tunic was made of rags. And he was hard to suppress, given that he claimed no prophetic powers.
But what was the Caliph to do? Seal off the Rock from the throngs that were daily gathering around it to see and hear the famous tailor of Damascus—even as he deployed the rest of his soldiers to keep Jews and Christians from scratching each other’s eyes out? That would only add to Yasar’s credibility. The Caliph would be seen as afraid of him.
A story is as good as its chain of transmission, I suggested to Mu’awiya. Not all transmitters can be trusted. There was nothing wrong with hearsay, when passed on by a transmitter of good character and reputation. My father, I said, had never mentioned anything about a night-journey and ascension in spite of spending the last years of his life seeking out the great storytellers of his generation. Perhaps Yasar was simply a fraud trying to further his own interests. Mu’awiya should investigate his background and motives, and then expose him.
