The Rock (28 page)

Talk about what? Of what use could I be to a new Caliph beset with enemies and problems on every side? Abd al-Malik was in dire need of soldiers and strategists who had knowledge of tribal genealogies and rivalries and feuds that stretched back for generations. Perhaps they could suggest alliances that could help prop up the empire that was collapsing all around him. I knew nothing of such matters.

Abd al-Malik wanted to talk about Ka’b. He wanted to be armed with his wisdom, he said. The truth is that Abd al-Malik had not brought me to Damascus for myself; it was my father’s lore he wanted.

What really happened between Ka’b and Umar in Jerusalem half a century ago? Abd al-Malik asked. He wanted to know the direction of Ka’b’s prayers, and God’s reasons for not allowing David to build a House for Him over the Rock. Was it because God did not want to be housed in a Temple made of cedar, however magnificent? Or was it because of David’s sins? What exactly were those sins? Should a kingdom be bequeathed to one’s sons if there were the danger that it might not remain intact due to the father’s sins?

R
ubbing knees with so attentive a listener as Abd al-Malik for long stretches at a time was not easy. To be sure, he was a tall and handsome man to look upon, with an aquiline nose that added stateliness to a comeliness that not even an attack of smallpox in childhood had succeeded in marring. What could be wrong with being favored by such a powerful and handsome man?

Foul breath. Unfortunately, God had endowed his regal countenance with breath so bad that his wives could not fall asleep in his presence and grew sick from lack of sleep. Whispering tongues say that Sukayna, the daughter of Husayn, the son of Ali, would not
marry Abd al-Malik because of the foulness of the air whenever he was in her presence. But the marriage was a strategic one from the outset, designed to improve the standing of Abd al-Malik’s father among the Hashemites; it would have become untenable after Abd al-Malik fled Medina at the start of Abdallah’s revolt.

The Caliph’s breath earned him the nickname Father of Flies. The hateful creatures forever hovered around his face, attracted by the smell and traces of blood that leaked from his mouth. A courtier accused of using the epithet was once hauled before him in my presence. “My arse contemplates those who talk behind my back,” Abd al-Malik said before ordering the fellow beheaded. Flies were certainly in evidence around that hapless head when it was brought on a platter before the Caliph.

Some people said that the Caliph was afflicted with a disease that gnawed away at his gums, requiring him to have gold bands aligning his teeth. Others said that his bad breath was the price of the curse that the Prophet had laid upon Mu’awiya’s father and his House. More likely than not, Abd al-Malik never picked his teeth with sticks from the tamarisk tree and had too great a fondness for the sugared curd-tarts and pilgrim-cheer pastries which were forever being passed around in his court.

Abd al-Malik talked about his breath to no one. On all matters, he kept his thoughts sealed tight as a clam. Perhaps his economy with words came from his affliction. It is, of course, the height of folly to initiate a conversation with anyone about anything remotely connected with the faculty of smell. Naturally, therefore, I suffered Abd al-Malik’s breath in silence, for as long as it took him to squeeze from me all the stories of Ka’b, stories which I had once spurned.

Abd al-Malik’s interest in the City of the Temple exceeded that of all the Caliphs who had preceded him. But storytelling was not all he had in mind. I was being measured and sized up for another purpose. Or was what I was saying being turned around and laid out for inspection in the back rooms of the Caliph’s mind? Looking into his fathomless eyes gleaming above flashes of gold, I felt as
uneasy as a moth drawn to a lit candle. What did Abd al-Malik have in store for me? Either he was not yet ready to say or did not know himself.

(photo credit 24.1)

“H
ow do you think your father would answer those who claim to see Jewish leanings in his claim that Adam fell in Jerusalem?” he asked toward the end of his first year in office, just before the call to the Sunset Prayer had sounded.

Before I could reply, he waved his hand dismissively in the direction of a group of older, bearded men. “These pious souls say he fell in India, on a mountain called Wasim in a valley called Bahil between Dahnaj and Mandal, carrying with him seeds from the Garden. These Adam spread around. From them came all good fruit, many varieties of which are still found only in India. Eve fell separately, they say, in the environs of Mecca. There, the first man traveled to meet up with her. Neither fell in Jerusalem. What would Ka’b have said to that?”

“If Ka’b is a Jew for thinking that Adam fell in Jerusalem, O Abd al-Malik, then he is in the company of the most notable members of your House. Why, Mu’awiya said as much the day he was proclaimed Caliph in Jerusalem. And what if there is a difference of opinion between the followers of Muhammad on such questions? On no other point concerning Creation do these critics disagree
with my father. Whether Adam landed in India or on the Rock in the Holy City, everyone is in agreement that he carried the Black Stone and landed on a mountain, one that happens to be the closest to Heaven of all the mountains of the Earth.”

“Too close,” interjected a tall, elegantly dressed man often seen by Abd al-Malik’s side, “for I am told that his head poked into Paradise and frightened the angels. Some Rock this is that causes such consternation in the heavens!”

The speaker was a Christian poet from the tribe of Taghlib in Mesopotamia—a court favorite ready to praise or revile anyone to have his mouth filled with gold. Famous for his loquaciousness and flabby ears, either one of which could have earned him the name Akhtal, he knew how to please a paymaster even as he steered perilously close to offending him.

I saw him appear in court one day, drunk and flaunting a huge gold cross on a chain on his chest. Irritated, Abd al-Malik demanded that Akhtal embrace Islam. He offered ten thousand gold pieces in return for an instant public conversion. “If I accept,” Akhtal replied with extraordinary effrontery, “will you allow me to continue drinking wine?” He had a reputation for needing drink to compose.

“What is the use of your wine,” Abd al-Malik replied. “Its beginning is bitter, its end intoxication.”

Whereupon Akhtal smacked his lips and said, “That may be so, but all in between is such that, compared with one properly mellowed draught, deepened to amber with time, your whole empire counts as a drop of water from the Euphrates licked off the fingertip.” Abd al-Malik burst into laughter, and the same man who could carry on a discourse on the likeness of God gave Akhtal the money without making him convert.

I was new to court and kept quiet at Akhtal’s taunt. He was not a man to trifle with. One scathing line of verse could make my life hell. Men’s ears tingled with anticipation of them from Arabia to Egypt. Abd al-Malik, however, was in good humor and egged on the conversation himself.

“I expect of our poets to show more reverence for the point of creation of the universe and the place where our angel ancestor fell.”

“I don’t dispute that Adam fell there, O Caliph. Perhaps he even lived on the Rock. But like myself, he did not have in him the ascetic temperament,” Akhtal said, stroking his sumptuous silk attire with the palms of his hands in a clownish gesture.

“By the way,” he added as though he had just had an afterthought, “have you seen the Rock?”

“Of course, many times during my governorship.”

“Well, then, you know what a bare and unwelcoming thing it is. How would you like to have Ka’b’s Rock staring at you day in and day out like the cold, gray eye of an embittered old man? No wonder Adam became so irritable and bitter. Perhaps its unforgiving, diabolical shape suggested to the Jews their ghastly theology. Better, I say, for the Caliph of Muhammad’s People to have nothing to do with it.”

There is no more intoxicating draught than anger swallowed down for God’s sake. My insides were seething. But I kept silent. Who, I thought, does this Akhtal think he is? At heart he is a descendant of those pagan bards so beloved by the Arabs. From time to time, he divorces his wife, returns to the desert, remarries, and throws himself into a tribal feud. Having replenished his virility, he comes back to court, where the princes of Umayya swaddle him in luxury, loving the way he vents his wild Bedouin nature in poetry. Personal piety had imposed restraints on the first generation of Muhammad’s followers, who were now all gone. Syria’s cities today turn out singers, not fighters, Arab men—and women, God forbid!—who set passages of Bedouin lore to music for dancing girls. Every luxury and new experience is eagerly sought, to be experienced vicariously through court jesters like Abd al-Malik’s poet.

What does Akhtal know of religion to insult Ka’b? A Christian, he may think he is. Sophronius would certainly not have thought him one. He grovels before a priest one day, and makes fun of
another the next. Once, I am told, a priest passed by his house. Akhtal instructed his pregnant wife to run after him and touch his robe. He thought to bring the poor woman luck. But she could not run fast enough and only succeeded in touching the tail of his donkey. “Don’t worry,” Akhtal said to her, shedding his piety as quickly as he had adopted it. “There is not a great deal of difference between him and his donkey’s tail.”

Can a man seek revenge through his work? Was I going to let myself be driven into the arms of an Umayyad Caliph by Akhtal and everything such so-called poets represent—I, who had carried a deep distrust of the House of Umayya since my youth?

Abd al-Malik, however, was not the kind of man that Akhtal took him to be—and that Abd al-Malik wanted him to think he was. Nor was he like the other members of his House. He belonged to the first generation brought up from birth in the religion of Muhammad, not in the desert by Bedouin women with reckless instincts. He grew up in the first God-fearing city, Medina, where every person was a deeply devout and committed follower of the Prophet. Until he assumed the Caliphate, he was considered one of the four most trustworthy scholars of law and religion of his day.

This was a man who was being serious when he bantered with his court jester to people’s amusement. He had the ability to do both things well at the same time. So why did he bring a book illustrator to Damascus from Jerusalem? What was the connection between Ka’b’s stories and his plotting to turn the troubles of a kingdom around? Since no one around the Caliph could see a connection, they assumed he was as flighty and irresponsible as they were. I, too, was attracted and repelled, intrigued and confused—not knowing in which direction to turn or what it was the Caliph was seeking from me. However intimate my knowledge of him eventually became in the course of time, I never made the mistake of thinking that I understood this Caliph’s mind.

When his soldiers first appeared, making such a commotion outside my house, no one outside Damascus would acknowledge Abd al-Malik as their Caliph. By the end of seven years, however,
Believers from Africa to Khurasan were falling over one another to do so. They cheered him on in the very year that he flattened the Ka’ba, toward which every one of his acclaimers prayed five times a day. Why did so few mourn the fate of Abdallah and God’s most ancient House? What arresting stroke of genius on a man’s part can so quickly change the hearts and minds of people toward him?