Free The Rock by Kanan Makiya

tongue God had struck the Truth think differently once he had come to grips with his responsibilities as the new master of the City of the Temple?
    His own past was no longer a precedent for anything that Umar now found himself having to do.
    Ka’b may have had a vision, but he had no plan. Calculation was not in his nature. He had taken things as they came, making adjustments according to circumstance. But the obstacles to the realization of his vision in Medina were now looming in his mind, like the stunning but unfriendly layers of rock spread out before his eyes.

    (photo credit 8.1)

The Sins of David
    S tanding alone on the Mount of Olives, the Caliph and his counselor admired the walled hilltop city with its twenty-six towers, six gates, and towering stone walls that rose out of the narrow gorge known as the Valley of Hell.
    “There are more stones on this mountain than there are people in Arabia,” Umar mused, looking onto the sheer drop before him. He was standing next to a round church and the tomb of James, the brother of Jesus, which he shared with two Jewish prophets, Zacharias and Simeon. Across from him, on the other side of the valley, was the pinnacle of the southeastern boundary of what used to be the Temple. James had been tossed into the valley from on top of that meeting point of the southern and eastern walls, his body ripped to shreds on the stones below.
    “The stones of Jerusalem impress themselves on all who wander among them,” Ka’b replied.
    Umar and Ka’b were looking for the pit into which the prophet Jeremiah had been dispatched. It could not be seen from where the two men were standing, the view being obstructed by a cascade of massive boulders down the slopes of the valley.
    The stoniness of the landscape exceeded anything that even men accustomed to the desert had seen before—homes, roads, tombs, everything was either rock or made of rock. Heaps of stones were piled up here and there—in fact, wherever one looked. Manywalls and fences looked as though they had been thrown together for no reason other than to get stones out of the way. Such disciplining of the landscape was always in vain, the removal of one stone serving only to reveal others lying just below the surface.
    “To each rock, large or small, rough or smooth, there corresponds a list of things we choose either to remember or to forget,” Ka’b said. “Patterns made by boulders that have held up armies, pebbles that have felled giants, tell stories that in other places are told by tea leaves. Did you know, O Caliph, that blue-eyed David was enamored of rocks?”
    “How did his infatuation begin?” the Caliph inquired.
    The seeds were planted early, Ka’b said, when God concealed the stripling from Saul’s jealousy inside the hollows of mountains, amidst the swarming sea of stones that was Jerusalem’s landscape.
    “I take refuge in him, my rock, my shield, my stronghold, my place of refuge,” David, future king of Israel, had sung in gratitude.
    Who is a rock but our God?

Blessed be my Lord, the Rock, who girds me with strength
,
who gives me vengeance
,
who makes my way free from blame
,
who set me on a rock too high to reach
,
who subjects whole peoples to me
.
    “Music is the Devil’s own work, Ka’b!” cried Umar. “Beware, lest it turn your head.”
    “Did not Muhammad choose men to recite to him from the Holy Book because he liked the sounds of their voices?” Ka’b said. “The Lord of the Worlds,” he continued, looking toward the Temple Mount, “gave David arts of sweetness to sing the primordial waters under those ruins back to their right level. He blessed His servant, wanting to transport him out of the grime of this world, and to have his actions be guided by a higher purpose, one made accessible through beautiful sounds.”
    “And yet in the end,” replied Umar, “David, Peace be Upon Him, was denied the Temple, however much he ached to build it.”
    “He was denied it, O Umar,”