The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem by Kanan Makiya

The seventh-century Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (pictured) is, undisputedly, one of the world's most beautiful buildings. Its construction was a stunning achievement for its time; and it was the first, perhaps still the finest, of all Islamic monuments.

It also has one of earth's most complex, entangled, bloodiest histories. Control over the site remains at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When exiled Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya first visited in 1990, the precincts were still spattered with dried blood: 13 young Palestinians had been killed by Israeli bullets a few days before. Theirs were the latest of a myriad lives sacrificed for possession of the Rock. They have not been, and will not be, the last.

Blood and sacrifice mark the site's legendary history from the start. This, according to tradition, is where Abraham went to offer up his son; where Solomon's Temple was built; where Jesus preached; where Muhammad ascended to heaven. Before all that, it is where Adam first came to earth. At the end of all things, this will be the place of Judgement. The naked expanse of hilltop limestone around which Caliph Abd al-Malik's dome was built is the very centre of the world.

Most of these traditions are widely shared among Christians, Jews and Muslims. But today that commonality is obscured. There have been plots by Israeli fanatics to destroy the Dome – so that the Jewish Temple can be rebuilt on its site. Some Palestinians (including, reportedly, Arafat) respond with denial that Jews have any historical link to the Rock: the Temple must have been somewhere else. And Muslim tradition systematically forgets that the Dome's design was inspired by nearby, earlier Christian churches: quite likely, the architects and stonemasons were Christian.

Kanan Makiya's purpose is to recall this intertwined history. Through that, a wider argument is made: that in the early years of Islam the three great monotheisms were not fixed in separation, let alone in antagonism. There were pervasive mutual influences, cultural borrowings, constant traffic to and fro. Discussing The Rock with me just prior to its British publication, Makiya stressed the "fluidity and openness of identities" in the seventh-century Middle East. "You could be a Jew and a Muslim at the same time."

That fluidity is what he wants to recapture, even help to recreate. More, he feels that secular Arab intellectuals – a category in which he firmly places himself – have never really dealt with Islam, but have tended to ignore or scorn the appeal of its traditions. Going back to the faith's origins is both an exploration of his own roots, and a settling of accounts. Above all, it offers lessons in interdependence.

The Rock has, then, a didactic aim and a historical method. It is based on extensive research into the histories and legends of seventh-century Muslims, Jews and Christians. Its detailed story of the Dome's construction also owes a lot to the author's architectural training.

Yet The Rock is a novel, however closely based on historical sources. The main protagonist is Ka'b al-Ahbar, a Yemenite Jew who has embraced Islam, and who struggles to bridge the widening gulfs between the two faiths – and the schisms emerging among Muslims after the Prophet's death. The narrator is Kab's son, Ishaq (or Isaac), the designer of the Dome and a troubled, sardonic observer of his father's theological contortions and of the petty vanities and hardening dogmas around him.

Yet, Makiya suggests, "I wanted the Rock itself to be the central character of the book". In another sense, though, the story's dominant personality is God. Or rather, the multiple ideas of deity jostling in seventh-century (and 21st-century) Jerusalem: the incommensurable demands placed on Him, the agonised doubts about what He really wants of us. Should He be glorified in great artworks, or is this to elevate our narcissism over His simplicity? Is He faced in prayer when looking toward Jerusalem, or toward the Black Stone of Mecca? Within Jerusalem, could the Jews' and Muslims' stony hilltop somehow be brought together with the one Christians revered: the nearby rock of Calvary?

But 1,300 years of bloody history have not healed Jerusalem's divisions, nor reconciled it with Mecca. "Desires and memories washed over both holy cities until the descendants of Abraham could not tell the one apart from the other," says Makiya's Ishaq. "Sons of the same father began to conspire against their own souls."

Makiya believes passionately that those of us who share none of those warring faiths must confront, and in some way transcend, their legacies. On his first visit to the Dome he found also, taped on its wall, a poem by the sister of one of those just killed there. She linked her brother's death to that of Islam's "first martyr" on the same spot, Abraham's almost-sacrificed son. That poem was, he says, the first germ of his book. But much else in his life – many other useless sacrifices – had prepared the way.

Makiya was born in Baghdad in 1949. His father Mohamed, also long exiled from Iraq and now living in the Cotswolds, is one of the Arab world's leading architects. His mother Margaret is English. He was active in Arab Marxist and pro-Palestinian politics in the Seventies, then turned to analysing, and organising against, Saddam's regime. His first books, Republic of Fear in 1989 and The Monument in 1991, appeared under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil.

The first was a little-noticed indictment of Saddam's tyranny, before the war over Kuwait made its cause fashionable. The second, centred on the self-glorifying public monuments which Saddam had erected throughout Iraq, saw in them a terrifying alliance of brutality and kitsch which summed up the psychology of dictatorship.

Cruelty and Silence, in 1993, ranged wider. The title's silence was that of the intellectuals – Arab and non-Arab – whose anti-imperialism led them, in Makiya's eyes, to shameful evasion or outright apologetics towards Saddam and other Arab dictators. Bitter disputes ensued, centring on Makiya's harsh judgements on figures like Edward Said and Noam Chomsky. His conviction that the Iraqi regime must be destroyed, by American invasion if need be, further estranged him from former comrades. Today, with a new Iraqi war looming, that remains his belief – though he worries that the Bush administration does not listen to Iraqi democrats.

The Rock seems far away from those current agonies and anxieties, and from Makiya's previous work. But it is driven by the same concerns. Going back to the roots of Islam, we discover something more inclusive, more fluid, more hopeful than today's accretions of hatred and misunderstanding. Cleaning away those accumulated enmities, as the early Muslims cleared the mounds of refuse covering the Rock, we may discover something on which we can still build. E

Stephen Howe's most recent book is 'Ireland and Empire' (Oxford University Press)