Some said they knew why: God had changed the sacred direction because the Jews did not accept Muhammad as a Messenger. Woe unto them, they would say, who have cried lies to the signs of God.
Why, thought others, should the perfidy of the Jews make God change His sacred axis? Surely, no sin is big enough to change the fundaments of creation, which He willed into existence before the first man was fashioned out of the Rock’s dust. The Rock stands as an admonition to our inconstancy; either it carried the Truth yesterday and still carries it today or it never carried it. Truth is profound; it is foundational. That much reason Ka’b succeeded in instilling in me.
I don’t know why there are two sacred axes, not one. Can anyone know that which God’s Messenger himself, Peace Be Upon Him, never claimed to know?
To know belongs to God alone
.
Certain things, on the other hand, it is given to us to know. I know, for instance, that the prayer on the Mount of Olives terrified Ka’b because it forced him to turn his back on the Rock. To be compelledby force of circumstance to thus direct himself, and on the very threshold of the Holy City, was hard. And the effort magnified the task that lay before him, driving home the chances of failure—the price of which, he realized, would be borne by him alone.
The Arabs had done their part, as he had foretold. The armies of the uncircumcised had been routed. There remained only the conclusion of the vision that had made Ka’b so famous throughout Arabia—the return of all of Abraham’s children, followers of Moses and Muhammad alike.
“No more shall they be kept from David’s Sanctuary,” Ka’b had said in Medina. And he would remind his listeners of God’s words to Muhammad in the loneliness of his Exodus:
Surely He who gave thee the Book to be thy Law
will bring thee home again
At the time, that choice of words rang as clear and true as a bell. People woke up. But what did they sound like now that the Arabs were camped upon the place of Christ’s ascent to Heaven, separated from the City of the Temple by a mere valley, all the while praying in the direction of the Black Stone with their backs to the Rock? How could a lowly southerner from the fallen star of the Yemen hope to convince these proud sons of the desert, upon whose good will he was dependent, to align themselves with a Rock different from the one they considered their own?
The initial flush of excitement at being so close to the City of the Prophets had long since passed, and Ka’b had recovered from the agitation he had felt when he first laid eyes on the ruins of the Temple. Then the waters had risen to the very seat of his breath. Now he was beginning to drown in a new kind of inner turmoil.
Would Umar allow the Jews back into liberated Jerusalem? For that matter, would they want to go back? Ka’b’s kith and kin had rejected the appeal of the prophet Ezra to do so, finding the whole business of uprooting themselves and moving into the unknown too arduous. “Happiness is not all movement and change,” my motherhad said to Ka’b. “Even rushing water must settle down before it can be cleared of silt.”
And who would pay for a new Temple? Not Umar. He forbade the accumulation of monies in the treasury for any purpose, preferring instead to assign the wealth of the Believers in the form of annuities to the Companions and family of the Prophet and to the fighters and families of those who had fallen in God’s cause.
“I will not lead those who come after me into temptation,” Umar had said, in response to urgings that he put aside revenues against times unforeseen. “Come what may, the only provision I will make against the time to come shall be obedience to God and His Apostle! That obedience is provision enough; it brought us here.”
To such a man, a sumptuously decorated Temple was the Devil’s own work.
On the other hand, my father must have thought to himself, might the man upon whose
Why, thought others, should the perfidy of the Jews make God change His sacred axis? Surely, no sin is big enough to change the fundaments of creation, which He willed into existence before the first man was fashioned out of the Rock’s dust. The Rock stands as an admonition to our inconstancy; either it carried the Truth yesterday and still carries it today or it never carried it. Truth is profound; it is foundational. That much reason Ka’b succeeded in instilling in me.
I don’t know why there are two sacred axes, not one. Can anyone know that which God’s Messenger himself, Peace Be Upon Him, never claimed to know?
To know belongs to God alone
.
Certain things, on the other hand, it is given to us to know. I know, for instance, that the prayer on the Mount of Olives terrified Ka’b because it forced him to turn his back on the Rock. To be compelledby force of circumstance to thus direct himself, and on the very threshold of the Holy City, was hard. And the effort magnified the task that lay before him, driving home the chances of failure—the price of which, he realized, would be borne by him alone.
The Arabs had done their part, as he had foretold. The armies of the uncircumcised had been routed. There remained only the conclusion of the vision that had made Ka’b so famous throughout Arabia—the return of all of Abraham’s children, followers of Moses and Muhammad alike.
“No more shall they be kept from David’s Sanctuary,” Ka’b had said in Medina. And he would remind his listeners of God’s words to Muhammad in the loneliness of his Exodus:
Surely He who gave thee the Book to be thy Law
will bring thee home again
At the time, that choice of words rang as clear and true as a bell. People woke up. But what did they sound like now that the Arabs were camped upon the place of Christ’s ascent to Heaven, separated from the City of the Temple by a mere valley, all the while praying in the direction of the Black Stone with their backs to the Rock? How could a lowly southerner from the fallen star of the Yemen hope to convince these proud sons of the desert, upon whose good will he was dependent, to align themselves with a Rock different from the one they considered their own?
The initial flush of excitement at being so close to the City of the Prophets had long since passed, and Ka’b had recovered from the agitation he had felt when he first laid eyes on the ruins of the Temple. Then the waters had risen to the very seat of his breath. Now he was beginning to drown in a new kind of inner turmoil.
Would Umar allow the Jews back into liberated Jerusalem? For that matter, would they want to go back? Ka’b’s kith and kin had rejected the appeal of the prophet Ezra to do so, finding the whole business of uprooting themselves and moving into the unknown too arduous. “Happiness is not all movement and change,” my motherhad said to Ka’b. “Even rushing water must settle down before it can be cleared of silt.”
And who would pay for a new Temple? Not Umar. He forbade the accumulation of monies in the treasury for any purpose, preferring instead to assign the wealth of the Believers in the form of annuities to the Companions and family of the Prophet and to the fighters and families of those who had fallen in God’s cause.
“I will not lead those who come after me into temptation,” Umar had said, in response to urgings that he put aside revenues against times unforeseen. “Come what may, the only provision I will make against the time to come shall be obedience to God and His Apostle! That obedience is provision enough; it brought us here.”
To such a man, a sumptuously decorated Temple was the Devil’s own work.
On the other hand, my father must have thought to himself, might the man upon whose
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