The Rock Read Online Free

Christians
    U ntil he reached puberty, my father once told me, he thought Jerusalem was a place in Heaven, not on Earth. “Rabbi Salih taught me otherwise.”
    Rabbi Salih taught my father that Mount Zion was a real place that had not been destroyed by the Romans. He taught him that the Rock of Foundation was the last remaining vestige of Solomon’s Temple, that it was the highest point of the mountain, and that it used to project three fingerbreadths above the floor of the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple. He taught him that the Ark was situated at the center of the Rock, facing east toward the Mount of Olives.
    These teachings instilled in my father the desire to see that which Rabbi Salih had described.
    Every young Yemeni Jew with aspirations to scholarship yearned to go to the Holy City and see the capstone of creation. But the city was in Christian hands. And Ka’b had to feed and clothe his newly acquired wife, who was but twelve years old and had been betrothed to him since childhood. Under such circumstances, yearnings were not enough.
    It was fear that eventually drove my father out of the Yemen.
    Attacking in swarms like flies on the Day of Resurrection, locusts ate up the fruits and vegetables, and then made their way into unshuttered houses and shops. They left carcasses of menlying scattered in the streets like dung on an open field. My mother, nevertheless, thought of them as a source of food, even a delicacy. She could count eight kinds of kosher locust, and whenever she was in one of her nostalgic moods, I am told, she would say, “A locust in my mouth is better than a fattened lamb. And it is kosher!”
    She ate her fear, but my father never could because he said locusts caused epilepsy. As soon as anyone but mentioned “locust,” he would begin a painstaking description of what the body of a man consumed by famine looked like, his skin shrivelled upon the bones, or swollen and transparent like glass. His words left the impression that he had run away from the Yemen, not because there was nothing to eat, but because of his horror of locusts.
    Ka’b was by then already an old man, and the star of the Yemen had long since been on the wane. The land was tired, its spirit broken; agriculture was in ruins, the population beset by famine. Christian ships sailed the Red Sea. Why had my father waited for the knife to cut through to the bone before tearing up his roots and dragging my unwilling mother along, going to Medina?
    First, there were the locusts. And then there was the fear that, once he left and was far away from the land he knew well, he might become so filled with anxiety about what lay ahead as to want to go back. Travelling was a test that he imposed upon himself—an ordeal not all that different from the one pilgrims undergo as they travel further and further away from all they know in order to get closer to God.
    By contrast with the Yemen, Arabia’s star was on the rise. Mecca had become the religious center of the Hijaz, and people increasingly travelled there for trade. And there was news of a desert prophet who lingered in the surrounding mountains, who heard voices coming forth from the rocks. His name was Muhammad.

    K a’b began taking an active interest in the Prophet, God’s Blessings Be Upon Him, after he heard that he had sent an envoy to thepeople of the nearby town of Najran, inviting them to accept Islam and guaranteeing their safety if they did so.
    The pork-eating people of Najran had heard this before when, thirty years prior to the birth of Muhammad, Dhu Nuwas, the last Jewish king to rule the Yemen, sought to convert them. Ka’b’s father and uncles had believed that Dhu Nuwas was the Messiah, and had fought by his side like wild lions. But the Christians of Najran would have nothing to do with Dhu Nuwas. They said that it was Jesus who raised the dead. It was Jesus who healed the sick. It was Jesus who declared the unseen. It was Jesus who was the Son of God.