Reaching Across Boundaries

...It is led by the Sufi Sheykh AbdulRahim, mentor of Sheykh Ibrahim, the ebullient, incorrigibly opportunistic exorcist and healer who became Halevi's "door into Islam...

...Toward that end, he struggles to go beyond the narrow divisiveness of dogma and theology to penetrate, through meditation and prayer, the shared universal experience of the presence of God...

...Certainly it is a surprising undertaking for a seasoned reporter who has witnessed firsthand the intractable violence and relentless woe brought on by religion...

...The narrator is the mosque's architect, Ishaq, whose father, Ka'b, was a prominent convert to Islam from Judaism...

...Makiya is a moderate, and his purpose is to show that Islam seeks "gentleness, forgiveness, and tolerance...

...Reaching Across Boundaries By Tova Reich The reality of September 11 slams with considerable force into two new books, Yossi Klein Halevi's At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land (Morrow, 315 pp., $25.00) and Kanan Makiya's The Rock: A Seventh-Century Tale of Jerusalem (Pantheon, 347 pp., $26.00...

...In a grim sense Halevi had the advantage, having had thrust upon him the necessity of reconsidering and rationalizing his interfaith enterprise because of a sharply changed situation: The intifada that began in Israel in the fall of 2000 brought to an abrupt end his "forays into Islam...

...The new reality also impinges in the literary sense, necessitating a further evaluation of the already deeply blurred line in these works between nonfiction and fiction...

...The book sets out to be a mosaic of the events and personalities surrounding the construction of the magnificent golden-domed mosque on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem atop the Rock where God was said to have manifested Himself on earth at the end of the sixth day of creation before ascending to heaven...

...But when they moved into a house near Mea Sh'arim to be closer to those whom they idealized as the "ultimate Jews," they were not only treated as invaders and missionaries...

...Jews, after all, regularly bolster their claim to Jerusalem by pointing out that throughout their years of exile they have always faced that city in prayer, and that for them no place on earth exceeds in holiness the mountaintop where the Temple once stood (the Rock itself has been much less a specific focus...

...Cynicism and despair would seem to be in order, not a fresh commitment to spiritual renewal...

...Upon that spot as well Abraham is said to have built the altar to sacrifice, according to the Jews, his son by Sarah, Isaac, and according to the Muslims, his son by Hagar, Ishmael...

...He grew up in the Brooklyn Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park at the time 40-odd years ago that it was being converted into a Hasidic enclave...

...More than ever, the goal of a spiritual life in the Holy Land is to live with an open heart at the center of unbearable tension...

...In the long and troubled tradition of Jews or former Jews who gain entry to the highest reaches of power, however, Ka'b the public figure had a mixed reputation...

...Many others who lived there, his own father among them, were traumatized and scarred by the Shoah and a legacy of persecution...

...The agenda is outlined in general terms in the book's subtitle, "A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land," and more specifically in the Introduction when Halevi writes: "The Oslo Accords tried to impose a peace of secular elites on a region whose language and instincts are religious...

...Through the voice of the curiously modern Ishaq, he describes the Rock not only as a beloved object of Islamic devotion worthy of being enshrined in an architectural masterpiece, but also, wifhmournful resignation, as the "sole surviving witness to the passions that have driven men to become little Abrahams on this mountaintop over and over again...

...Others suspected him of being a Jewish opportunist, something of a double agent with dual loyalties...

...Such a stranger would simply have to content himself with access to Judaism through a Yossi Klein Halevi or a similar guide...

...I knew their faces," Halevi writes of the Muslims at the zikr...

...Muslims, these same Jews assert, turn their backs to Jerusalem in prayer, and as for the Dome of the Rock with an inert stone as its centerpiece verging on the idolatrous, it ranks a distant third in the hierarchy of Muslim sacred sites, trailing behind Mecca and Medina...

...to discover points of commonality" at the close of the millennium...

...they were spat upon, called "prostitutes" and finally driven out...

...That is by no means an inferior or inauthentic route, but the ageless and unyielding Jewish hard core would remain absolutely off limits to the outsider...

...What Yossi Klein Halevi takes away with him from Islam and incorporates into his own worship is the exalting joy and release of total surrender through prayer—a "submission," as Kanan Makiya writes, that "is at the core of what Muhammad preached...

...Makiya by no means denies the legitimacy of the Jewish claim, but his message, firmly delivered to the reader wrapped in a veneer of fiction so thin as to seem almost superfluous, is that Islam, too, is a benevolent faith, and it too has a claim that must be acknowledged...

...Nevertheless, whether we like it or not, it is with them that the essential religious energy and continuity reside...

...The moments of spiritual oneness that the Orthodox Jew Halevi achieved in the course of his noble experiment with a handful of willing members of the other two great monotheistic faiths, over which his own is sovereign in Israel, lose to some degree their solid moorings in reality in the wake of the unfolding events...

...it is from our narrator, the seventh-century Muslim builder Ishaq...

...The Rock at the pinnacle of the mountain became for Ka'b "his probe," says his son, "he gave himself up to the Rock...

...Halevi might protest that the traditional guardians of the faith are not necessarily the most representative, that they don't have an inside track to God or a monopoly on the right way to serve Him, and that there is no point bothering with them anyway since they are the least open to external influence and change...

...Makiya's agenda, clearly, is to reaffirm the religious, and by extension political, centrality of Jerusalem for Islam, and to recall the tolerance the city's Muslim rulers demonstrated to other religions in the years when the faith was closest to its wellspring of revelation...

...Propelled by this mission, Halevi embarks on a quest some might dismiss as quixotic or naive...

...Probably few people are more likely than the sophisticated authors to be attuned to the impact of the ongoing erosion of the borders separating the real and the unreal on their work...

...Halevi, with his nonfiction blurring into fiction, speaks for the possibilities of the future...

...It's not that the reader no longer trusts the experiences Halevi recounts, but given the new facts on the ground, they take on the coloring of a subjective truth, of a kind of personal testimony or memoir shaped by intense private longings and needs transmitted with the trappings of fiction...

...One of the sins of the occupation, it seemed to me now, is that it had kept us from respecting the dignity of Islam...

...Halevi must surely know what would happen if a Christian or Muslim on a mission like his own tried to get into a shtibl (one of the small Hasidic places of worship that dot the community) during holiday services, or attempted to take a seat at the rebbe's Sabbath table in the ultra-Orthodox section of Mea Sh'arim in Jerusalem...

...An agenda, when pushed as hard as happens here, has a way of sabotaging the fictional authority of a tale...

...Although the notes make for fascinating reading, they wreak havoc with the "willingness to suspend disbelief" required for fiction...

...Under the aspect of our present, in which the real and the surreal merge like the rising smoke of a conflagration, there is much to be learned from both...

...Both have Islam at their center, and fair or not, they must in some measure be judged by how well they stand up in the light of that event...

...As he tries to gain admittance into the inner worlds of Christianity and Islam, though, Halevi quickly discovers that they are, for the most part, closed to him...

...He summons up the words with some irony to justify what might be construed as his heretical esthetic appreciation of the splendid churches of a faith other than his own...

...In other words, his contacts are largely limited to the colorful characters of every variety of religious experience who are drawn to Israel, most notably to Jerusalem, and inhabit the fringes of their established faiths...

...This is the twofold message Makiya delivers in the guise of fiction with seductive balance and calm, and it is especially resonant in this age of Muslim extremism...

...Makiya's TheRock, too, is ultimately stripped of its pretensions as a novel by the fallout from contemporary developments...

...For each chapter in the unfolding of this story Makiya provides an illuminating list of scholarly references—citing primarily Arab authorities, but also Jewish and Christian—to back up almost every detail and quotation...

...Some regarded him as an invaluable counselor and sage of Jewish scripture in the inner circle of the caliph's court...

...By the conclusion of his pilgrimage, before all access even to the interfaith circuit is cut off by the intifada, Halevi does have bestowed upon him the rare privilege of being welcomed into a genuine zikr, a Sufi ecstatic form of worship involving mystical spinning, swaying and dancing, combined with rhythmic breathing and repetitious chanting to the accompaniment of drums and cymbals...

...That might strike some people as an arcane, petty quibble, but those who follow Middle East politics are acutely alive to the issue of the direction and axis of prayer...

...Both writers are voices for understanding, tolerance and harmony among Christians, Muslims and Jews...

...But what weakens The Rock's claim to fiction above all is the transparent agenda that drives it, "the kernel from which this book was first conceived," as Makiya admits in the sources for the chapter called "Finding the Rock...

...And it has been, in its way, a sort of variation on a theme or minipreview of the vastly bigger, more spectacular assault launched against America in the approaching fall of 2001...

...Ka'b accompanied Umar, "Commander of the Faithful," when the caliph conquered Jerusalem and uncovered the site of the Temple, destroyed about 600 years earlier by the Romans...

...Reporting in the New Republic, Halevi describes himself sitting in a "midtown Manhattan restaurant" on the morning of September 11 (reminiscent of W. H. Auden sitting in "one of the dives/on Fifty-second Street" in the poem "September 1,1939") when he hears the news...

...In the unlikely event that Halevi did not already realize how difficult it would be to penetrate the inner sanctum of another faith from his familiarity with the closed Jewish factions, the insight should have been brought home to him by his acquaintance with what happened to the nuns and monks of the Beatitudes near Bethlehem...

...This book, then, is an attempt to help redress that fateful omission...

...The original "kernel" Makiya refers to is Umar's decision, over Ka'b's objections, to build the mosque so that prayers would be directed toward Mecca rather than Jerusalem—a move "often interpreted," Makiya observes, "as a conscious Muslim repudiation of its Jewish antecedents...

...It evokes in him "this terrible, inevitable Israeli thought: Maybe now they'll understand...

...Still, whatever the fine line that is drawn between fiction and nonfiction in these books in the first instance, the distinction is confounded even more by the fact of 9/11...

...they never entirely trusted the sincerity of his dedication to Islam even though almost every Muslim was at the time a convert from a different faith...

...Furthermore, in an essay entitled "A Historical Note on Ka'b and the Rock" that Makiya appends to the book, he takes to task the Palestinian negotiator who "asked his Israeli counterpart in the summer of 2000 how he knew that his Temple had been located on the Haram...

...A few include small errors evident to this reader, such as the implication that Adam died at age 950 rather than 930 as recorded in Genesis, and, in a separate explanatory essay, the dates given for the destruction of the First and Second Temples—5 86 BCE not 597 and 70 CE not 135, respectively...

...Journalist Yossi Klein Halevi, one of the most grounded on the Israel beat, makes generous use of the devices of fiction for narrative drive and to bring characters to life in his nonfiction account of his pilgrimage toward what some might regard as an increasingly illusory, improbable objective—"to encounter, as an Israeli Jew, my Christian and Muslim neighbors in their intimate devotions...

...Each has since written about the external and internal landscape-altering terrorist attacks from their individual perspectives as committed Jew and identified Muslim...

...other men and women of the Book"—italics added) that the suspension of disbelief he endorses for church viewing is inevitably undermined where the total effect of the fiction is concerned...

...Makiya, with his fiction seeping into nonfiction, meditates on a lesson from the past...

...Islam, the third great monotheism," he writes, "saw its mission as healing the damage caused by the previous division into two...

...Of course, Yossi Klein Halevi's book also has an agenda, but it is absorbed more organically in a work that is officially nonfiction, albeit laced with fiction's accoutrements...

...Sheykh Abdul-Rahim oversees a run-down mosque across from a graveyard in the Nuseirat refugee camp of Gaza, where some years earlier, while on reserve duty with the Israeli Army, Halevi was struck by a stone and fell unconscious...

...A somewhat marginalized Christian "community devoted to reconciliation with the Jews," these nuns and monks were not discovered when they dressed up in the garb of ultrareligious Jews in order to pray on a Friday night in a Hasidic synagogue...

...But I'd never seen them in their white holiday robes and green caps, drinking tea from delicate cups and reclining like royalty...

...Tova Reich, a fiction writer and literary critic, is a longtime contributor to The New Leader...

...That quote, by the way, is not from the 19th-century English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge...

...I tell myself," Halevi writes ruefully in the Epilogue to his book, "that it is precisely in times like these that the beautiful teachings of faith become either real or mere sentiment...

...As a narrator, Ishaq's voice is so formal and tradition-bound on the one hand, while his sensibility is so contemporary, so ecumenical and pluralistic on the other (for example, the delightfully p.c...

...Her novels, Mara...

...A thing belongs to the one who remembers it most obsessively...

...These men with bad teeth and gray skin were our gardeners and waiters...

...With rare exceptions, this remains true throughout his search, obliging him to "make do" with using New Agers, interfaith fellow travelers, and those known on the Israeli scene as "freaks" to gain access to the available mystics, charismatics, ecstatics, hermits, and so on...

...Writing in the Observer of London, Makiya ardently presses the argument that the terror unleashed by fanatics on the United States "is not Islam any more than the Ku Klux Klan is Christianity...

...Maybe we won't feel so desperately alone anymore...

...With similar ambition, the respected Iraqi writer and exile, Kanan Makiya, meticulously deploys a wide range of historical detail, scholarly sources, photographs, and art to fashion a contrivance that he calls "a fiction of assembly" about an actual "encounter that took place between Muslims, Christians and Jews in Jerusalem" in the seventh century of the Common Era...

...In any case, it wears its garb rather thinly, for as Makiya himself says, it is a fiction that "has stepped into the breach" when scholarship was unable to do justice to the story...

...Yet Halevi is driven by a personal need for the full richness of a spiritual life, which he insists on defining by the light of his own inner vision...

...The barriers should not have come as a shock to Halevi...

...Master of the Return and The Jewish War, have all recently been reissued in paperback by Syracuse University Press...

...It is an offering to the future, one scenario for avoiding holy war and interreligious apocalypse...