The Rock by Kanan Makiya

into strangled grunts as the earth stopped her mouth, of how she had reached up tenderly to touch his face and brush earth from his beard even as he was digging her grave.
    “This,” said Ka’b, “is the music of Satan lamenting the loss of the world.”
    Whereupon Umar suddenly groaned, dropped his head, folded it in his arms, and began to weep uncontrollably. The Caliph wept so hard that day that his tears etched two lines on his face that remained until the day he died.

    (photo credit 9.1)

The Rock of Sacrifice
    T o console his Caliph and stiffen his resolve before the delegation from the Holy City arrived, Ka’b reminded Umar that, in the Age of Ignorance, the father of Muhammad himself had come within a hair’s width of being sacrificed. The kind and generous Abd al-Muttalib, who would protect his grandson in later years from the wrath of those who would not believe in him, wanted ten sons at a time when he had none. He vowed to sacrifice one of them to the gods of the Ka’ba should he be granted his heart’s desire. The wish was granted. It fell upon the future father of Muhammad to pay the old man’s debt.
    “By God! If you do a thing like this there will be no stopping men from sacrificing their sons,” said a shaikh from the boy’s tribe. Abd al-Mutallib was pressed into finding an expiatory sacrifice to save the boy.
    The hand of God took the shape of an old Jewess from Khaybar. She told Abd al-Muttalib what he had to do. His son’s life would be spared in exchange for one hundred camels slaughtered between Isaf and Naila, two lovers who had come to Mecca on a pilgrimage from Jurham in the land of the Yemen and could not control their passion for one another. After fornicating in the Ka’ba, they were discovered the next morning turned into upright rocks. These the Arabs of Quraysh relocated one hundred paces in front of the main door to their shrine, reserving the space between them for sacrifices like that which spared the life of the Prophet’s father.
    The story did not console Umar.
    “Where is the hand of God in what I did to my daughter? Tell me that, Father of Ishaq.”
    “What else brought you here before the altar of the ancients,” replied Ka’b, “if not His guiding hand? Is it a coincidence that He brought you in the first month of spring, the month of the creation of the world and the birth of the prophets? When the blood of a firstborn is sacrificed on this threshold, the new year is purged of all the calamities of the old. Did not God say to the People of the Torah,”
    Thou shalt not put off

the skimming of the first yield of your vats
.
Thou shalt give Me the first-born among your sons
.
Thou shalt do the same with your cattle and your flocks:

seven days it shall remain with its mother;

on the eighth day thou shalt give it to Me
.
    “The Lord placed such an onerous burden upon the Jews?”
    “He did,” said Ka’b. “Just as He commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son, Ishaq, in this very same month in which you stand before the gates of the Holy City. And you ask me about the whereabouts of His hand!”
    Ka’b’s eyes flashed their excitement.
    “A son is the pearl of his father’s eye,” he went on, lowering his voice. “Abraham stood to lose everything by making a burnt-offering of the child of his old age. Not a daughter, mind you, but Sara’s firstborn. Nor was God holding out the promise of a reward as he had at the beginning of Abraham’s prophecy, or asking him to kill his son in order to keep his word. That would at least have turned Abraham into a hero like Abd al-Mutallib. No! That would have been too easy. At the time of the ordeal, not a soul was present; there was no one to witness, much less spread word of, Abraham’s piety! Who would have believed Abraham’s own account? Who could have believed that God would ask him to kill in silence, in utter isolation, out of the purest feelings of love, without hope ofbeing understood by those nearest and