The Rock (7 page)

D
reams are the measure of a man’s age. Like the wind, they are in the air that everyone breathes. Just as men don’t know anything is in the air until it brushes past their face, so they don’t know what is in their dreams until it is pointed out to them.

Ka’b’s words meant something to everyone. But they meant one thing to Believers who were there when he spoke them, and they meant something else entirely to those who heard them exaggerated a hundredfold off the lips of other men. Then they meant yet a different thing to those who heard them after the Holy City had fallen to the armies of Khattab’s son, he whom men, following in Ka’b’s lead, now took to calling “the Redeemer.”

The greatest excitement was caused by Ka’b’s prediction that the first holy axis of Islam, the city that David had brought to True Belief, was going to fall into the hands of the sons of Ishmael. Fighting bands of stalwarts raised in the desert had been probing the Byzantine defenses for years. Raiding parties had sacked many a
village and town. But Ka’b was predicting the fall of Syria and the defeat of the most powerful empire the world had ever known. He was saying these things at a time when not a soul in the length and breadth of Arabia had yet dared to dream them.

Much later, after the death of Umar, my father’s enemies accused him of being just another oracle-mongerer who happened to strike it lucky. All of his prophesying was a ruse, they said; Ka’b was pretending to be a Believer in order to get into Umar’s good graces and accompany the Caliph to Jerusalem. What evidence was there that he was no longer a Jew? If the tribe that provided him protection was Muslim, not Jewish, that only showed how duplicitous the man was. Ka’b knew, they claimed, that the Prophet had expelled two Jewish clans from Medina, and that he had ordered the heads of hundreds of men from the tribe of Qurayza cut off because of their treachery during the Battle of the Trench. How could a Jew come to Medina after such an event without an Arab cover? Especially one who by his own admission was intent on using Arabs to liberate the City of the Temple to absolve Jews of their own sins!

Ka’b’s detractors made no headway in the early years because of the circles into which my father had been drawn. Respect and affection had developed between him and Umar the son of Khattab. But there was another, more important, reason why mud would not stick to Ka’b in the early days. He was performing a service by showing how the Prophet was completing the work of the entire line of prophets who had come before him, beginning with Adam. The story of the salvation of the world had reached its terminus in Muhammad’s revelation. Ka’b was providing Believers with the tools they needed for understanding themselves as inheritors of the mantle of past revelations. Umar, who dared to follow in the path opened by Muhammad, understood that this was what Ka’b was saying.

In those days, there was no agreement about the content of the Holy Book. The first Muslim sages were accustomed to granting authority to the Torah and the Christian Bible as long as those texts did not contradict what, in their opinion, was the revelation made
to Muhammad. Many of Muhammad’s closest Companions—great Muslims like Ali the son of Abu Talib, Salman the Persian, the son of Abbas, and Abu Hurayra—ardently sought stories from Jews and Christians that amplified or explained God’s words to Muhammad. Zayd the son of Thabit was instructed to learn Hebrew in order to read scrolls about Abraham to Muhammad. Later, the Prophet himself, often in the company of Abu Bakr and Umar, made visits to the Hebrew Temple in Medina to talk about what he had heard Zayd read with its learned rabbis and caretakers.

My father dropped into all of this as though out of the sky. He spoke eloquently of the connections between Muhammad and David, of how the Arabs were going to bring peace and prosperity to an Arabia torn to shreds by its feuds, of how they were destined to bring the City of the Temple into the fold of True Belief. Always he had answers, even to questions that had not yet been asked. And in no time at all had employed his prodigious powers to memorizing all the revelations that had descended upon the Prophet in the loneliness of Mecca’s mountains, after which he took to clinching every argument with the words of God:

I
n spite of the support of the Prophet’s Companions, Ka’b’s detractors found fresh arrows for their bows in the bitterness of my mother, who never took her husband’s conversion seriously.

“You are an old man!” she would shout in the street so that everyone could hear. “Whoever heard of a man in his sixties changing his religion! Leave that for the boys, and stick to the ways of your ancestors.”

I was born in a maelstrom of anger and resentment. To my mother’s irritation, Umar was invited to our house on the day of my birth. “Surround your newborn with the blessings and protection of the prophets,” the future Caliph advised, “for on Doomsday he will be called by his name and the name of his father.” Then he rubbed the roof of my mouth with some dates that he had chewed, invoking God’s blessing, and asked that I be named Ishaq in recognition of my father’s abandonment of the name Jacob. Naturally, Ka’b agreed, whereupon Umar bent down and pronounced the call to prayer in my right ear. From that time onward this was the custom in the naming of Muslim newborns.

The final straw for my mother was Ka’b’s resolve to remarry. I must have been about four years old at the time, because my only memory of my mother dates to the terrible fight that ensued between them.

“Did not all the great patriarchs and prophets have two, three, even four wives?” thundered Ka’b.

But my mother could only see a man who was daily becoming someone else before her eyes. Until now, his Jewish self had remained dimly discernible through the fog of new prophets, customs, forms of speech and dress, even a new name. Had Ka’b been younger, or in need of softer, whiter flesh between his sheets, it might have been a different story. She had been taught that God in His wisdom had put it in the constitution of men to love dalliance and the society of women. And she knew that the taking of several wives was common, as common among the Jews as it was among the Bedouins. Nor did it necessarily imply a diminution of the first wife’s status and power over her husband—especially if the second wife was still young and malleable.

But the anxiety that choked at my mother’s throat lay in her realization that Ka’b was too old for those to be his reasons for
wanting a second wife. After all, the woman he had chosen was only ten years younger than herself. She was already spiced with her own flavor of maturity. My mother could see that her husband’s desire to remarry was of a piece with his new role as seer of the Arabs, and with his dream of travelling to the land of milk and honey.

My stepmother was a widow of noble Bedouin stock with two sons from her former marriage. Her husband had been an early Believer who was martyred in the Battle of the Trench, the failed counteroffensive of the Meccans against Muhammad and his followers. Part of her fascination for me as a young boy was that halo of a fallen man’s approval that she carried through her widowhood, and which she composed into a famous lament:

As a consequence of her husband’s martyrdom and her eloquence, my stepmother was granted a handsome annuity from the spoils of holy war. But she felt hemmed in by the expectations of widowhood and yearned to move more freely in the new space that marriage opened up for her. In time, she grew very fond of Ka’b, and, I think, he of her.

Ka’b’s motive was strategic. My mother was right about that. He had become a public figure by then, one to be reckoned with, especially if he was bonded through marriage to an important tribe
of the Hijaz. My stepmother-to-be lived in the same quarter of Medina as Umar. Ka’b, never one to overlook his opportunities, had made his approach through his new friend. No one was going to refuse the Prophet’s esteemed Companion, and no one was going to forget that Umar had been the intermediary in the making of the new alliance.

Umar handled all the arrangements; it was he who suggested that my care be entrusted to Ka’b’s new wife. Thus was my father bound closer to Umar, even as he became irrevocably estranged from my mother. But the cruelest cut came when my father decided to take his new wife, her two sons, and me with him to Jerusalem, leaving my poor mother behind.

Ka’b was resolute. His first wife had become a burden. She reminded him of all that he wanted to leave behind; she seemed the very incarnation of Ezra’s curse, forever deprived of repose and peace. He would not be dragged down with her, to wallow in guilt because of an ancient transgression. Ka’b was no longer lowly and impoverished like his kinfolk in the Yemen. He was on his way to the city of his dreams, the Holy House he had once thought resided only in Heaven. Through chance and circumstance, he had become a respected counselor to the Caliph. Nothing was going to stop him from walking with the son of Khattab “in the footsteps of the prophets,” as he liked to put it.

As for my mother, when Ka’b returned to Arabia the following year leading a caravan load of Muslims on pilgrimage and looking for Jewish families to take back with him to resettle in Jerusalem, she was gone. “She joined a caravan headed for San’a,” Ka’b was told. I was about six years old at the time. I never saw my mother again.

She left behind a letter for my father, dictated to a friend who had scrawled it on a scrap of leather. I have it still, kept in the same chest that Ka’b used to preserve the scrolls he had brought with him from the Yemen:

“As long as this wheel of fortune turns, nothing remains in its accustomed state, except for the one to whom God grants a respite.
May the Creator spare you and me the hostilities of time and its vicissitudes. May you never taste, or even witness, anything like that which I have gone through. May He accept what I have suffered as an atonement for your sins.”

U
mar’s age was come, and with him a faith unknown before that was sweeping empires off their feet.

Inside the great hall of the Persian King of Kings, where a golden crown studded with rubies and emeralds had once hung, a pulpit stood. Meanwhile, Heraclius, the Emperor of the Christians, was being tormented by a dream in which he saw his defeat at the hands of a circumcised man who called out to his men: “Ride, ye horsemen of God! Lo, the Garden lies yonder before you! Paradise rests in the shadow of your swords!” A multitude rode with him, their numbers stretching into the flatness of the desert, welding it to the sky. Stricken by the clarity of the dream, powerlessness seeped from the dreamer into his armies. By the banks of the Yarmuk, four hundred thousand Byzantines broke ignominiously under the blows of the men of Khalid—that brave son of Walid who would not stop until the going down of the sun. Fifty thousand of the emperor’s men lost their lives to an army one-fifth their number. Awestruck, non-Believers took to whispering to one another in every town and village of Syria.

Fear of the Arabs had fallen upon the land.

Heraclius acknowleged defeat as he embarked for Constantinople, saying, “Farewell, Syria, and forever! Ah! that so fair a land should become my enemy’s.” To those left behind, he cried out, “O men of Byzantium, you are going to be slain on a dungheap because
you have desecrated the sanctity of the Holy City. It will be with you just as it was with the Children of Israel, who were slain for shedding the blood of John the Baptist.”

In the City of the Prophets that the emperor had now deserted, the commander in charge of defenses, a nasty Greek with a reputation for flogging deserters until they expired on the post, ran away like his master. The lords and princes to whom he was beholden abandoned their villas and rural retreats, all of which fell to our zealous warriors without a casualty. Communication and supply lines were in Muslim hands. The city was ripe for the taking on almost any terms that Umar, Prince of True Believers, cared to name. In the previous two years, an army of Believers had cut through the hosts of Persia and Byzantium like a sickle through a sheaf of wheat. The towns of Iraq and Syria, and those along the coastal plains of Palestine, had one by one accepted Muslim sovereignty.

Ka’b’s prophecy was being realized. And, indeed, everything that Ka’b had prophesied four years earlier in the Prophet’s mosque in Medina would have come true exactly as he had foretold, had it not been for the stubbornness of an old man.