setting sun were lighting the summit of Mount Abu Qubays, which shone like a torch as darkness fell.
“Look at it carefully,” Ka’b said, pointing to the Black Stone.
“Do you mean the Stone?”
“You call it a stone!”
“But of course I do. Is it not a stone?”
“In the beginning,” said Ka’b, “it was a jewel that Adam brought down with him—just like the jewel that God plucked from underneath His throne and plunged into the abyss in order to fashion the ground upon which He stood while He went about creation. Later, the first man used it to cut a channel for his tears, which flowed for nine hundred years after the Fall.”
“The same jewel that the tribesmen of Quraysh found on top of Mount Abu Qubays?” I asked, astounded.
“Yes.”
“What kind of a jewel was it?”
“A sapphire,” said Ka’b, “just like its sister on Mount Moriah.”
“Then how did it turn black?”
“Menstruating women touched it in the Age of Ignorance.”
(photo credit 7.2)
M ecca and Jerusalem, Ka’b went on to say, grew outward from their two Rocks in much the same way as a eucalyptus tree springs from a tiny seed. In fact, Ka’b claimed, the Rocks originally were not separate Rocks, but one Rock, parts of His throne. On both were found inscriptions—the ineffable name of God was chiseled in Hebrew letters on the Rock of Moriah; and on the Black Stone, words in a strange script that could be read only by a Jew. Or so a Meccan seer had told Ka’b.
The message on the Black Stone was this: “God is the Lord of Mecca.”
Unlike the words written on Jerusalem’s Rock by Ahithophel, King David’s counselor, no one knows who wrote these words, or why. But for Ka’b, the messages of the Rocks confirmed the order behind all things.
None is like unto Him Who is the Hearer and the Seer
.
“He intended the universe,” Ka’b continued, “as a consonance of different parts, similar in ways and dissimilar in others,” and then, in the clearest formulation of his great passion, he would add: “My work is to fit them back together again in the right way so that they return to harmony.”
“But what is left that is harmonious between peoples who face different Rocks in prayer?” I asked. “What if dissonance, rather than consonance, is what we ought to learn to live with and work our way around?”
Ka’b would not entertain such a thought. God abhors the manifold forms of nature worship, he said. He wants us to search for His One transcendent essence.
But what if our feebleness is such that, in proportion to God’s exaltation, to the fact that He is not a force of nature but Creator of all of nature’s forces, He becomes cold and aloof, unapproachable to those who would worship him? Out of despair we turn first to this witless rock and then to that, knowing that the rock’s soul is a mindless void. A mystery is its hatred, or its grace. Surely it is wiser not to care—to accept His variety without anger, and without love.
Such talk made Ka’b entirely lose control. “There
has
to be a connection,” he thundered. “Never doubt it! It cannot be otherwise!”
In the end, I came to accept that, just as the idea of a flower is more enduring than the flower itself, the idea of the Rock was a more enduring reality for my father than the Rock itself. By endlessly contemplating it and instructing himself on its history, he was reaching to grasp that fleeting essence. Reality was not the Rock for Ka’b; it is through the Rock that He became real. Meanwhile, time was working, on him and the followers of Muhammad, a fatal substitution: Even as the Rock of my father’s dreams was daily acquiring a life in the mind of Believers, was slowly but surely becoming real and strong for them, his knowledge of their passion for a different Rock was growing in clarity.
The Turmoil of Ka’b
W hy do the Peoples of Moses and Muhammad face different Rocks in prayer? Men talked about the question in the early days.
“Look at it carefully,” Ka’b said, pointing to the Black Stone.
“Do you mean the Stone?”
“You call it a stone!”
“But of course I do. Is it not a stone?”
“In the beginning,” said Ka’b, “it was a jewel that Adam brought down with him—just like the jewel that God plucked from underneath His throne and plunged into the abyss in order to fashion the ground upon which He stood while He went about creation. Later, the first man used it to cut a channel for his tears, which flowed for nine hundred years after the Fall.”
“The same jewel that the tribesmen of Quraysh found on top of Mount Abu Qubays?” I asked, astounded.
“Yes.”
“What kind of a jewel was it?”
“A sapphire,” said Ka’b, “just like its sister on Mount Moriah.”
“Then how did it turn black?”
“Menstruating women touched it in the Age of Ignorance.”
(photo credit 7.2)
M ecca and Jerusalem, Ka’b went on to say, grew outward from their two Rocks in much the same way as a eucalyptus tree springs from a tiny seed. In fact, Ka’b claimed, the Rocks originally were not separate Rocks, but one Rock, parts of His throne. On both were found inscriptions—the ineffable name of God was chiseled in Hebrew letters on the Rock of Moriah; and on the Black Stone, words in a strange script that could be read only by a Jew. Or so a Meccan seer had told Ka’b.
The message on the Black Stone was this: “God is the Lord of Mecca.”
Unlike the words written on Jerusalem’s Rock by Ahithophel, King David’s counselor, no one knows who wrote these words, or why. But for Ka’b, the messages of the Rocks confirmed the order behind all things.
None is like unto Him Who is the Hearer and the Seer
.
“He intended the universe,” Ka’b continued, “as a consonance of different parts, similar in ways and dissimilar in others,” and then, in the clearest formulation of his great passion, he would add: “My work is to fit them back together again in the right way so that they return to harmony.”
“But what is left that is harmonious between peoples who face different Rocks in prayer?” I asked. “What if dissonance, rather than consonance, is what we ought to learn to live with and work our way around?”
Ka’b would not entertain such a thought. God abhors the manifold forms of nature worship, he said. He wants us to search for His One transcendent essence.
But what if our feebleness is such that, in proportion to God’s exaltation, to the fact that He is not a force of nature but Creator of all of nature’s forces, He becomes cold and aloof, unapproachable to those who would worship him? Out of despair we turn first to this witless rock and then to that, knowing that the rock’s soul is a mindless void. A mystery is its hatred, or its grace. Surely it is wiser not to care—to accept His variety without anger, and without love.
Such talk made Ka’b entirely lose control. “There
has
to be a connection,” he thundered. “Never doubt it! It cannot be otherwise!”
In the end, I came to accept that, just as the idea of a flower is more enduring than the flower itself, the idea of the Rock was a more enduring reality for my father than the Rock itself. By endlessly contemplating it and instructing himself on its history, he was reaching to grasp that fleeting essence. Reality was not the Rock for Ka’b; it is through the Rock that He became real. Meanwhile, time was working, on him and the followers of Muhammad, a fatal substitution: Even as the Rock of my father’s dreams was daily acquiring a life in the mind of Believers, was slowly but surely becoming real and strong for them, his knowledge of their passion for a different Rock was growing in clarity.
The Turmoil of Ka’b
W hy do the Peoples of Moses and Muhammad face different Rocks in prayer? Men talked about the question in the early days.
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