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Historical Complicity
Heidi Kingstone
An Iraqi academic�s accountof the building of the Dome of the Rock illuminates a world in which Muslim and Jewish traditions were deeply intertwined
Strange patterns appear on the platform upon which the Dome of the Rock sits, in the center of what Muslims call the Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount. And at each intersection of the crisscrossing streaks lies a potted plant. The stark beauty of the scene never left exiled Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya when he first saw it in October 1990, three days after a major confrontation between Palestinians and the Israeli army on the Temple Mount in the wake of Iraq�s occupation of Kuwait.
For an Arab, who along with his generation had been politically molded by the Palestinian question, this first journey to Jerusalem was laden with emotion and meaning. But as with so much that concerns Israelis and Palestinians, Muslims and Jews, things in Jerusalem are rarely what they seem. The plants had been left there to memorialize the spots where 13 young boys had been killed.
The burgundy swirls on the stone espla-nade were dried blood. Within a week of his visit to the Mount, Makiya went to visit the site of a different horror in West Jeru-salem, that of an Israeli citizen who had been killed in the Baka neighborhood by a knife-wielding Palestinian. There too he found another plant pot, commemorating the death of a Jew this time, not a Muslim.
What struck the 52-year-old writer then, and it is a theme he is drawn to over and over again in his book, �The Rock: A Seventh Century Tale of Jerusalem,� are the multiple correspondences and ironies that interweave the history of these two peoples and tie them inexorably together, not only to the same bits and pieces of terrain but to each other. The �Rock� of the title is a reference to the sakhra of Muslim tradition, or the even shatiyah (Rock of Foundation) of Jewish tradition. This limestone outcropping at the summit of Mount Moriah is no ordinary piece of real estate. It is perhaps the most sacred and fought-over site in the entire human experience. And around it was built the first and oldest monument of Islam, the Dome of the Rock.
So whose rock is this that lies at the heart of what makes Jerusalem so holy to three great monotheistic traditions? The rock of Moses or Muhammad? And why did Muslims of the 7th century choose to celebrate it with the first great major aesthetic statement of Muslim civilization?
Makiya gathers together the stories, legends and beliefs that define the rock � the place where Adam landed on his fall from Paradise and where Abraham attempted to sacrifice his firstborn; where Solomon�s Temple stood and where Jesus preached; the rock from which Muhammad ascended to heaven � and transforms them into a fictionalized narrative solidly rooted in Muslim, Jewish and Christian sources. His account of the building of the Dome of the Rock reconstructs the paths of the actual individuals whose spiritual journeys revolved around the rock�s seventh-century lore. The chief protagonist is Ka�b al-Ahbar, a learned Jew who, according to Muslim tradition, accepted the prophecy of Muhammad, and who accompanied the Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab during his conquest of the Holy City in 638. The story is narrated by Ka�b�s son, Ishaq (Isaac), who, years later, as drawn by Makiya, is commissioned to design this first Muslim monument.
At bottom, �The Rock� is about the deep-rooted complicity that knit together Islam and Judaism in the formative 7th-century, the first century of Islam. Ancient, sometimes long-forgotten, Jewish tales come alive in new Muslim forms over and over again in this book, revealing a common core of legends upon which these traditions have been built. �It is almost a necessary, even a foundational act, to want to tell and retell the same story. What does it mean to have the prophet David cleaning the refuse of the ages from the site of the rock in a 2nd- or 3rd-century Midrashic tale, next to a structurally identical Muslim tale of the Caliph Umar, another conqueror of Jerusalem, clearing away Christian and Roman refuse from a site that the Empress Helena in the 4th century had turned into the city dump?� asks Makiya, speaking to The Jerusalem Report in London. �In all likelihood the answer is unknowable today. Which is all the more reason to want to return to that seminal first century of Islam and think about it. I find such parallels intrinsically fascinating, perhaps because of their very unknowability, and I want them remembered today.
�The sad thing is both sides have actively erased this original complicity from their respective histories,� says Makiya, a longtime advocate of �peace between peoples,� who was a pioneer of exposing the Iraqi regime�s slaughter of the Kurds in the late eighties. In 1988, he wrote �Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq,� which became a bestseller after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. His TV documentary, �Saddam�s Killing Fields,� won him an Edward R. Murrow award in 1992.
According to Makiya, who teaches an interdisciplinary course in the modern Middle East at Brandeis University and directs the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard, the Dome of the Rock was built on the site of the Temple of Solomon precisely because it was a holy Jewish location. Building a mosque there was a way of revering that spot. �That much,� he claims, �is evident from the sources. We are in another world in the 7th century, one in which all the roles are reversed from what we would expect, looking at the abysmal state of Arab-Israeli relations, and Muslim-Jewish relations, today. I find that very interesting, a source of hope even.�
What is sad is that the idealism that has informed all of Makiya�s books has become dislocated from the world of the Middle East today. The searing question that resonates for him is what it means to be an Arab in the 21st century, a question that has taken him 34 years, since he left Baghdad, to begin to ask. As he finds himself isolated from other Arabs, arguing as he has begun to do since September 11, that �Muslims and Arabs have to be on the front lines of a new kind of war, one that is worth waging for their own salvation and in their own souls.� The Arab world, Makiya says, �finds itself facing a challenge of civilization such as it has not had to face since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.�
The voice of Makiya's rock is a learned Jew from the Yemen (who might even have been a rabbi). Ka�b al-Ahbar acted as the Caliph Umar�s counselor and adviser on the holy sites of Jerusalem. He was a greatly respected figure of the first generation of the Prophet�s followers who had just converted to Islam.
�Better than anybody else Ka�b symbolizes the Jewish-Muslim nexus. Before him, I suspect, the rock was simply an abstraction representing the first direction of prayer from Mecca. Muslims, of course, used to pray toward Jerusalem until they went to Me-dina. But only a few would have visited the city and known it personally. Ka�b, who also did not know the city in any real tangible sense when he arrived there, knew it through the words of the Bible. And that was the kind of knowledge that Umar was looking for.�
Makiya�s rock is a metaphor for Jerusalem, for the intractability of the Arab-Israeli conflict, for all that is common and contested between the three monotheistic religions. Perhaps even, it is a commentary on the nature of religious faith itself. Although Makiya emphasizes that his new book is not political, and despite the comparisons that one might make to Salman Rushdie�s �Satanic Verses,� Makiya hopes somewhat naively not to offend anyone. Jew and Muslim must find some way to live together at a time when there seems not even one point of connection, he says. For Makiya it will take a leap of faith, much like his first foray into the Holy Land.
(November 19, 2001)
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