The Rock Read Free Page A

Fixed and the Unalterable, the Great and the Illimitable. These are among His names. Not that mountains are God. They are merely signs of Him from whom revelation and knowledge pour into the mind like water into a valley.
    Only He whom the eye cannot attain knows why Zion was chosen above all other mountains, and why its summit was blessed with a share in His majesty.
    Is a stone thus singled out still a stone? The Rock will always be itself, a plain and humble piece of limestone no different from the other stones upon which this Holy City is built, but in what ways does it partake in the nature and mystery of God? Rediscovering those ways, which began long before they could be told, and which sprang from the source from which all religion springs, was Ka’b al-Ahbar’s most important contribution to the religion of Muhammad.

The Rock of Foundation
    A name, my father used to say, “
is
the thing it names. Did not God teach Adam the names of all things so that he might know them?” Ka’b refused to call the Rock by anything other than its oldest name, the Rock of Foundation.
    “You are like a superstitious midwife,” my stepmother would joke, “who blesses the child she has just delivered with a name at exactly the moment she cuts its umbilical cord, and is then afraid to call him by any other name.”
    Precious Stone. Rock of Atonement. Adam’s Sepulchre. Navel of the Universe. Stone of Stumbling. Rock of Sacrifice. David’s Rock. Holy Rock. Rock of the Holy of Holies. Zion’s Rock. Rock of Calvary. Rock of the Ages. Jacob’s Rock. Peter’s Rock. Rock of the Church. Rock of Salvation. Stone of Consolation. Rock of Fear and Trembling. Rock of Judgment. The Rock has many names.
    So many names. So many carriers of blessing. So many proofs of excellence. Are they a sign of confusion? Perhaps the Rock has been delivered too many times into the world. Perhaps a thing encumbered with this many names has turned into a kind of fetish.
    The names troubled Ka’b.
    “Is the Rock one thing, or is it many things at once?” he asked me one day by way of a challenge.
    “I have no idea, Father.”
    “God, who makes the tongues of the eloquent fall short ofpraising His beauty unless they use the means by which He praises Himself, has at least ninety-nine names. Does that mean God is ninety-nine different things, because He has ninety-nine names?”
    “I suppose not.”
    “You suppose! You don’t know! What is that worthless Shaikh teaching you every day?” he exclaimed, referring to the old man who had come with Umar’s army and now held classes for the children of settlers in a room on the sanctuary.
    Ka’b meant to say that, even if a name is the thing it names, it is not that thing’s whole essence. Each name reveals an aspect of essence, one meaning among many. The elucidation of meaning requires a story, the stuff of religion, a story that lies at the origin of a particular name.
    How much is unquestionably authentic about these stories? Justifications of conquests, apologias of defeats, tales of victory and of woe, rituals of worship, all mixtures of lies and truths have become wondrous stories accumulating around Moriah’s weatherbeaten face since men first fixed their eyes upon it. Women weep for themselves beside the Rock, suffering infinitely, only to leave it transformed in heart and soul, light shining from their faces; brash young men lift their faces to Heaven, guffawing, only to leave the Rock they have seated themselves upon terrified, their bodies twisted and trembling. Sifting through all the debris in search of the Rock’s essence is an unreliable exercise at the best of times.
    But not so for the Rock’s first name, Ka’b said, its most important name, following which all the other names came, in the order of the prophets and the strange and wondrous things that happened to them on or near the Rock.

    F ather, I asked Shaikh Abdallah at school today where God was during creation.”
    “And what