The Epic of the Umayyad Mosque: Memory of Blood and Spirit

Speaking as the place that preceded its name, the Great Umayyad Mosque of Damascus begins beneath Mount Qasioun and its legend of Cain and Abel, then remembers Aramean Damascus, the Roman sanctuary of Jupiter, the church of John the Baptist, known in Islam as Yahya, and Paul escaping through an opening in the city wall in a basket. It recalls the Muslim entry into Damascus with Khalid ibn al-Walid and Abu Ubayda, the city becoming the Umayyad capital, and al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik's decision to build, then gives the stage to an unknown builder who tells the historian that his name was forgotten, to mosaics that become another sky, and to a courtyard filled with sky. Al-Walid dies, the Umayyads fall, fire strikes and restoration returns as an act of love, while Nur al-Din, Saladin, Ibn Asakir, Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Arabi and the traveler Ibn Jubayr pass through, followed by Timur's destruction, the Ottoman pilgrimage caravans, a later great fire and the Damascus of Nizar Qabbani, which became a woman in his poetry. The mosque tells an architect that he knows its dimensions without yet knowing it, welcomes a poor man who prays in its shade, and hears a child ask whether al-Walid built it alone. Refusing to sanctify blood, it says spirit kept it from becoming a graveyard, leaves its counsel to architects and to the modern city, watches a last worshipper weep and prostrate at night, and ends at dawn with blood falling toward the earth and prayer rising toward heaven.