The Umayyad Mosque: When Stone Puts History on Trial

The Umayyad Mosque tells its own story, beginning before its name, when the ground in the heart of Damascus carried successive religious layers and people kept coming to the same place to ask who they were before the universe. Al-Walid watches his great workshop rise and asks the stone at night whether it will remember him, only to hear that time is building him too; when the gold mosaics catch the light, the mosque tells him it has not yet become beautiful, because beauty needs a human being to look at it. Under its arches scholars teach, and Ibn Asakir, who wrote Damascus in books, becomes the colleague of a building that writes the city in space, shadow and footsteps. Nur al-Din asks it the road to Jerusalem and is told to begin with himself, Saladin follows and Jerusalem returns after Hattin, Timur learns that the mosque fears for children, books and craftsmen and has no fear for him, a fire with no banner burns its timber, and the Ottoman sultan Selim declares Damascus his while the mosque laughs at a sentence it has heard many times. On a last night of trial History asks caliphs, sultans and conquerors what remains of them, then turns to an ordinary Damascene who came to the courtyard with his father, then his son, then his grandson, and the mosque calls this everything, since time erased the speeches and kept the prayer of an unknown woman.