So it was that a second sanctuary—paired with the Dome of the Rock—came to be enshrined once and for all as a fit object of pilgrimage for the faithful. This much seems clear enough. Beyond that, however, everything is obscurity and murk. Was Abd al-Malik the first Amir to renovate the site, or did he follow in the footsteps of Ibn al-Zubayr? Where had the sanctuary demolished by Al-Hajjaj stood—at Bakka or at Mecca? What had it been more important for the victor to establish—continuity with the past or a clean break? Certainly, more than a century after the time of Abd al-Malik, a vague sense still lingered that the House of God might not always have stood rooted to the spot in Mecca. “At the time of the Prophet, may God save him and give him peace, our faces were all turned in one direction—but after the death of the Prophet, we turned ourselves hither and thither.”35 So one Muslim scholar would recall. Others, in the reports given of Mecca itself, might betray similar anxieties. It was not only the Ka’ba, in these stories, that was forever being demolished and rebuilt—so too was the mosque that enclosed it. A sacred well was lost and then miraculously rediscovered on no less than two separate occasions. Most bewildering of all, perhaps, was the sheer range of sacred stones associated with the holy site, and which were forever being shifted or discovered. There was the Maqam Ibrahim, for instance, which had been carried along by a flood. Then there was the rock uncovered by Ibn al-Zubayr, and which had been stamped with the name of God. Finally, and perhaps most enigmatically of all, there was the much-venerated “Black Stone,” which enjoyed a prominent position in the wall of the Ka’ba. Some claimed that Adam had found it, whereupon it had gobbled up the parchment on which was written his contract with God. Others insisted that it was Abraham who had excavated it, and that he and Ishmael had then lugged it all the way to Mecca. Still others claimed that Ibn al-Zubayr had placed it in an ark, of the kind used by Moses to transport the Torah around the desert. The Black Stone, it seemed, was not only fabulously ancient—it was surprisingly mobile as well.
And as such, hardly unique. For any ruler who wished to veil the parvenu status of a recent foundation behind a sheen of class, a talisman like the Black Stone had long been an essential prerequisite. Antiquity, after all, spelled class. This was why Constantine—if the story that had him pilfering the Palladium from Rome were to be trusted—had brought to his upstart capital a touch of antique Troy. It was also why the mowbeds, back in the reign of Peroz, had no sooner lit the Fire of the Stallion amid the desolate peaks of Media, than they were insisting that its flames were, in fact, eternal and had originally roamed the world. The claim, within a mere couple of generations, had worked a spectacular magic. Zoroastrians appalled by Heraclius’s destruction of the Temple had certainly had no idea that it might have been in existence for a mere century and a half. The past attributed to a sanctuary, especially if a lonely one, might bear witness, not to the preservation of authentic customs, of authentic traditions, of authentic memories, but to the polar opposite: bold innovation.
And certainly, in his determination to shape the world as he saw fit, Abd al-Malik was nothing if not a revolutionary. Even before his final victory over Ibn al-Zubayr, he had been plotting how to stamp his vast empire as he had already stamped Jerusalem: as hallowed by the authentic religion of God. In 691, the coins that had given Arculf the reassuring delusion that Palestine still belonged to a Christian order had been re-minted with images that owed nothing to Constantinople: a spear in a prayer niche, Abd al-Malik himself girt with a whip. Meanwhile, in Iraq, a matching programme of reform saw the erasure from the coinage of every last trace of the House of Sasan. Nothing or no one was permitted to obstruct this policy. All the coins were to be standardised, and all were to promote the authority of Abd al-Malik’s new religion. “Long have you pursued a course of faction and followed the path of waywardness—but now, by God, I will beat you as one does a camel not of the herd at the watering-hole.”36 So thundered Al-Hajjaj, following his appointment to the governorship of Iraq in 694. The warning was issued to a crowd of rebellious Basrans, but it might as well have been delivered to the Greek- and Persian-speaking elites. Unsettling though they had found Abd al-Malik’s initial reforms, far worse was brewing. An even more outright declaration of war against the past was about to be delivered. In 696, a radically new style of coin began to be minted, one that featured no images at all, but only writing—and Arabic writing, at that. Nothing, to bureaucrats long accustomed to regard the language as a marker of barbarism, could possibly have been more shocking. The world, however, as Abd al-Malik did not stint in emphasising, had been turned upside down. Coins were not the only expression of the new linguistic dispensation. So too were passports, and tax returns, and contracts, and laws, and receipts: everything, in short, that made for the running of a global empire.
To functionaries who suddenly found themselves with no prospect of employment unless they spoke or wrote in their master’s language, this was an upheaval that shook the foundations of their entire world. To Abd al-Malik himself, of course, it was something much more. Arabic, in his devout opinion, was the proper language of empire because it was also the language of God. Adorning the walls of the Dome of the Rock, fashioned out of cubes of brilliant gold, inscriptions proclaimed the core tenets of the Amir’s faith: the prophethood of Muhammad, and the sheer folly of believing, as did the Christians in their blindness, that God might conceivably be Three. Much of what was written consisted of excerpts patched together from the Prophet’s own revelations: the earliest surviving examples of phrases from the Qur’an. Posterity would claim that it was Uthman, decades previously, who had first collected and pieced these together, to compile what was from that moment on a fully formed scripture—but the snatches of verse patched together by Abd al-Malik on the Dome of the Rock suggest something rather different. So too, of course, does the resounding lack of even a single Qur’anic inscription dating from the reigns of his predecessors; and so too do the scattered hints from contemporaries. Christian scholars, noting for the first time the existence of writings attributed to Muhammad, described them not as a single book but rather as a jumble of fragments with such titles as “The Cow,” “The Woman” and “God’s She-Camel.”c If true, then who might have been tracking down these various scraps of text, and piecing them together? Certainly, that Abd al-Malik’s reign had indeed seen the Qur’an subjected to a state-sponsored makeover was something that no Muslim scholar would subsequently think to deny. In the vanguard of this editing process, as of so much else, was Al-Hajjaj. Peerless warrior, formidable governor, he would also enjoy a splendid posthumous reputation as a proof-reader of the Qur’an. Some traditions, however, would ascribe to him a role infinitely more intriguing. Rejecting the presumption that God, in the wake of Muhammad’s death, no longer permitted His purposes to be known through the agency of mortals, Al-Hajjaj is said to have retorted, “I work only by inspiration!”37 Ever the loyal servant, though, he always emphasised that his own role in collecting, collating and distributing the revelations of Muhammad—heaven-sanctioned though it might be—was as nothing compared to that of Abd al-Malik. In fact, so Al-Hajjaj declared flatly, his master “stood higher in God’s view than did the angels and prophets.”38