Sacred stories of peace

If you're a believing Jew, Muslim or Christian, and your religion provides you with a sacred history of the world that stretches with smooth inevitability from the dawn of creation to the present moment, lending meaning to your daily actions, giving you the secure sense that your belief rests on ancient foundations, then going to Jerusalem is a very peculiar experience. There you are, in the place that all three religions assign a central place in the sacred story, and instead of it being the core of your certainty, it makes everything you believe seem more doubtful than before.

You're surrounded by people who are sure that your sacred story isn't the story; suddenly, disturbingly, your story of the world is just a story, one of three candidates that are similar, but not the same.

There are secular reasons why Jerusalem is smouldering this spring, why its neighbourhoods emit screams, gunfire and explosions. But the three-way tussle of the sacred stories is in there too, constantly tempting the warring sides towards an over-compensating fanaticism, one which would resolve the uncertain meaning of the city by denying all resemblance between the stories, making them mutually exclusive.

In 2000, for example, a Palestinian negotiator denied that the Jewish Temple had ever stood on the flat-topped mount now occupied by the Islamic Dome of the Rock.

So, anything that can help navigate the competing stories is urgently desirable right now. This remarkable book does just that. By the Iraqi architect who wrote Republic of Fear under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil, it is, in theory, a historical novel. But its novelistic qualities are not the point. The 60 pages of notes at the back are as essential as the more vivid text at the front. The Rock is an intervention in Jerusalem's clamour of competing stories by someone who understands how stories sometimes create, sometimes limit, sometimes exclude truth.

And it has a story of its own to tell, of a forgotten continuity between Judaism and Islam.

It's about the very early decades of Islam, when the Koran, in its authoritative form, was still being compiled, and it had not yet become a point of doctrine that the Jewish Torah was a dangerously corrupted work that a Muslim should not read. Since Islam was consciously intended by the Prophet to be an inheritor religion to Judaism, proclaiming its great monotheistic insight in a de-ethnicised form adapted to the Arabian cultural landscape, the very first Muslims were eager to learn all they could about the tradition of which (they believed) God had made them the heirs. They listened to isra'iliyat, stories about the Israelites, and particularly to stories about King David and King Solomon. They prayed towards Jerusalem, until Muhammad had a revelation reorienting the faithful toward Mecca.

The central figure in The Rock, Kab al-Ahbar, is as marginal in the memory of modern Islam as is this whole period of deference to the Jewish past. Ka'b - meticulously documented by Kanan Makiya - was a Yemeni Jewish convert to Islam who served as conduit of isra'iliyat to Umar, the stern Caliph who, around 635AD, conquered Jerusalem from the Christian Byzantines. Ka'b is known to have been at Umar's shoulder as he toured the city of Solomon. What Makiya has uncovered is a forgotten struggle by Ka'b to get Umar to share his sense of the city as central to a combined Jewish-Muslim project. He didn't entirely succeed; Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam, not the first. But he didn't entirely fail either.

Makiya shows that early Muslim fascination with the city, from Umar on, focused on the Temple Mount, and on the possibility that Judaism's successor could rebuild what Solomon had once put there. When Abd al-Malik, Caliph at the close of the seventh century, commanded the construction of the Dome of the Rock, the building was designed by Ishaq, son of Ka'b al-Ahbar, guarded by special Jewish custodians, and celebrated by the issue of a coin of Al-Malik's with a menorah on the back. In other words, not only did early Muslims accept that the Jewish Temple had stood on Mount Zion: they put it back, as a mosque.

Makiya weaves together Jerusalem lore from all three religions in The Rock. He shows a fine imaginative civility towards the Jewish and Christian strands in his fabric. But on his own account he seems calmly aligned to the faith inscribed on the inside of the Dome, where it is declared that God has no sons, and Muhammad is His prophet, as well as Moses. This is a Muslim work of historical imagination and understanding.

And in that lies its value. Something of the kind is required from all three monotheisms if Jerusalem is ever to share its stories in peace.