The Rock Read Online Free Page A

Therefore it had to be Jesus who was the Messiah. This reply angered the Jewish king. He put a choice before the people of Najran: convert or die. The town chose death.
    After the fighting, Dhu Nuwas had his men dig pits and threw all the survivors into them; some he slew with the sword before tossing their bodies into the fire; others he burnt alive in pits, as the Holy Book bears witness.
    Slain were the Men of the Pit
,
the fire abounding in fuel
,
when they were seated over it

and were themselves witnesses of what they did with the believers
.
They took revenge on them only because they believed in God

the All-mighty, the All-laudable
,
to whom belongs the Kingdom of the Heavens and the Earth
.
God is Witness over everything
.
    They say the king killed twenty thousand Christians that day. Two of Ka’b’s uncles died in the fighting. But later the Byzantines got their revenge. Dhu Nuwas was last seen fleeing an army of Christians come from Abyssinia. As the enemy approached, he drove his horse into the sea, spurring it on through the shallow waters into the deep, where horse and rider vanished.

    B ut after Muhammad’s envoy had spoken, the town, convinced that great benefits would accrue to it, accepted Muhammad’s offer, whereupon they were taught how and in which direction to pray to the Lord of Creation.
    What drove Ka’b to visit Najran? After all, he hated the People of the Cross even more than he feared locusts. “If you fatten your dog, will he not eat you?” he would say about their converts. Was it curiosity about the Prophet, whose followers used to pray in the direction of Solomon’s Temple and fast on the Jewish Day of Atonement? Perhaps Ka’b’s visit was an act of defiance, or a family pilgrimage—his way of paying respect to the memory of his dead uncles.
    I don’t know what happened in Najran on the day of his visit. But afterward, he began to believe that the distance between Judaism and Islam was not very great.
    My father despised the state of weakness that the Jews had fallen into after the vanishing of Dhu Nuwas. “Like goats they take to the rocks for fear of the wolves,” he would say of his own kin. He spoke wistfully of the succession of hopeless rebellions against Byzantine overlords, always followed by unrelenting repression. It was a time when false Messiahs declared themselves all over southern Arabia, and Ka’b’s tale of the madman who proclaimed himself a second Moses left a deep impression on me as a boy.
    The tale was brief. The would-be savior promised his disciples a miraculous journey to the Promised Land. He told them that redemption was imminent, and then he walked them over a cliff to a horrible death on the rocks below.
    “At least he ventured forth,” Ka’b said.
    But my father ached to leave a land whose self-esteem had sunk so low, and nothing angered him as much as hearing a fellow Jew justify his downtrodden position by reference to the curse of Ezra. Travelling all the way from Palestine to the Yemen, Ezra the Scribe had come to plead with his brethren to return to Jerusalem and help in the rebuilding of the Temple.
    “Why should we suffer afflictions once again?” Ka’b’s ancestors had said in response. “It is better for us to stay where we are and worship God.” An angry exchange had taken place, after which Ezra had put a curse on all Jewish heads in the Yemen, forever depriving them of peace.

    K a’b yearned for a savior in the warrior tradition of his uncles, someone like Jabbar, the noble Jewish opponent of the Arab hero Antar. Jabbar is said to have foretold that a Savior would appear to the Jews of Arabia from across a river of sand. He would come riding a white ass followed by a sea of warriors seated on camels and lions. Every fortress besieged by them would collapse; every army would be annihilated. He would make all other religions disappear and renew the Law that God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. Thus would the glory of the Sons of