The Epic of the Great Umayyad Mosque: When Stone Became Memory, Light Became Prayer

The Great Umayyad Mosque tells its own story and asks not to be asked its age, since it measures its life in layers of stone, in the civilizations that crossed its courtyard and in the kings who believed themselves immortal and then vanished. It remembers the sacred center of Aramaic Damascus, the columns and gateways of Rome, the great church tied to John the Baptist and the arrival of the Muslims, until al-Walid gathers builders and carpenters to raise a mosque worthy of an imperial capital and its walls are clothed in gold, green and blue mosaics of rivers, palaces and gardens. It speaks of the courtyard where time changes after the noise of the market, the minaret that tells the walker to raise his head, and the shrine of the Prophet Yahya, revered by Muslims and Christians alike. Then it recalls its wounds and its witnesses: fires that blackened its walls again and again, Nur al-Din’s dream of Jerusalem, Saladin’s tomb nearby, scholars such as Ibn Asakir and Ibn Taymiyyah beneath its arcades, Timur’s army, Ottoman pilgrim caravans setting out for Mecca, and the people of Damascus coming back each time to rebuild. In its last chapters it tells modern architects to learn technology without making it their god, insists that it is alive and no museum, confesses that it is tired of fires and sultans though never of people, and ends as a long prostration rising from stone toward heaven.