When Syrian preacher Mahmoud Zeidan was growing up in the 1980s, his family used to take him to play at Umayyad Mosque, an architectural masterpiece in the old city centre. Syria is now 18 months into recovery after the fall of Bashar Al Assad.
The colonnaded, ninth-century mosque, replete with mosaics, constitutes the “breathing space” of Old Damascus, said Mr Zeidan. He was appointed the mosque's director after former president Al Assad's downfall.
As children, “we didn't go just to pray but also to play”. He told The National in an interview: “Sometimes our folks would bring food and we would eat a sandwich.” Syria needs as much as $100 billion to rebuild its tourism sector, including its heritage sites.
However, the nation is no longer the international pariah it was under the former regime. The foreign officials and companies now coming to the country to connect with the post-Assad order are often given a tour of the mosque, considered one of the most famous in Islam.
Several of the Prophet Mohammed's companions prayed at the site as Islam expanded beyond Arabia. An Aramaean temple built almost a millennium before Christ, a Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter – one of the biggest in the empire – and a church dedicated to St John the Baptist stood at the spot before the Caliph Al Walid turned the site exclusively into a mosque. What is thought to be the head of John the Baptist, known as the Prophet Yahia in the Quran, is buried there.
In 2001, Pope John Paul II prayed at the Prophet Yahia's shrine, set in the centre of the mosque's prayer hall.
UAE focus
Among recent visitors was an Emirati delegation led by Mohamed Alabbar, founder of the large real estate company Emaar Properties, who also met Syrian President Ahmad Al Shara in May.
Days later, the UAE announced its intention to help restore the mosque, with support from Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, Mother of the Nation, in a boost for ties with Damascus as Syria seeks Gulf support to recover from the civil war (2011-2024). The last time the mosque underwent major renovation was in 1994.
Another UAE-led project in Mosul had restored historic landmarks and erased some of the last remnants of ISIS destruction. The seven-year project in the 2,500-year-old Iraqi city involved the reconstruction of Al Nuri Mosque and its leaning minaret, along with the churches of Our Lady of the Hour Convent and Al Tahera.
Mr Zeidan described the new project as a win-win for both Syria and the Emirates, which is set to “gain a role in a historic edifice”.
An overhaul plan submitted to the Emirati side focuses on “infrastructure and services”, such as central heating and a cooling system, as well as repairs to broken floors and mosaics.
“The mosque is still solid as a structure, however, electricity is old and could cause a fire,” added Mr Zeidan, who also highlighted the need for the ageing pipe network to be relaid. He predicted a relatively quick overhaul, except for the mosaics which involves intricate work for which specialised know-how is rare. In May, the UAE and Syria held their first business forum since Assad's fall.
Forty tonnes of mosaics had covered the walls overlooking the mosque's huge courtyard before the Great Fire of Damascus in 1893. Most of the structure, including the wooden, richly decorated double dome, was destroyed. Fragments of the original remain: gold background mosaics, which depicted the now mostly dried-up Barada, the river that ran through the city; and scenes from Ghouta Gardens, the once-lush hinterland of Damascus, with its almond, fig, pomegranate and cypress trees.
Each piece of the mosaic was angled to catch the light when looking up at the walls. More lavish were the mosaics on the interior walls of the prayer hall, with real gold used to accentuate the details, according to the book Damascus: A History by former Australian diplomat Ross Burns, though these have long-since disappeared.
Expanding empire
The grandeur carried a political message. Caliph Al Walid, one of the most prolific ruler-builders in Islam, sought to project the power of the Umayyad dynasty and its role as a custodian of the religion. He designed the mosque as a seat of power, with large halls where his generals met, while judges held court as the empire expanded, eventually to the shores of the Atlantic and to Persia.
However, the Umayyads lasted less than a century – Damascus never regained its importance under the Abbasids and subsequent rulers of what became Syria in the 19th century.
In the 1960s, members of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, seized power in a coup, setting the scene for the 53-year rule of the Assad regime. One of the last public acts of the former president before the 2011 uprising against his rule was to visit the Umayyad to assert the perceived legitimacy of the Alawite-dominated regime among Syria's Sunni majority. The move proved futile, with the civil war resulting in Sunni political ascendancy that has changed the Middle East.
Syria broke free of Russian and Iranian orbits, and Mr Zeidan, who had fled the country during the war, was one of thousands of the Sunni diaspora who have returned to take up positions in the new system. Nonetheless, Moscow has retained two military bases in Syria.
However, other military presences have disappeared, from Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to Hezbollah and lesser-known proxies of Tehran.
Seven fires
Hundreds of thousands of Shiite, mostly Iranian, used to come to the country. A main item on their itinerary was the northern corner of the Umayyad, where the head of the Imam Hussein, the Prophet Mohammed's grandson, was displayed there after he was killed in the year 780 at the battle of Karbala, in present-day Iraq, in a defeat for forces led by the Umayyad Caliph Yazid.
The hall – where the severed head of John the Baptist was once placed – is the mosque's most complex section, containing antechambers and a shrine for Zayn Al Abidin, who became the fourth Shiite Imam. He was brought to Damascus as a captive after the battle at Karbala. Al Abidin survived captivity and later lived in Madinah, where he was poisoned during the reign of Caliph Al Walid.
Al Walid built Umayyad on the site where the Basilica of St John stood, although he gave the Christians an area in what is now Old Damascus to build another church. He kept most of the outer wall of the Temple of Jupiter. The mosque's pitched wooden roof had to be high to accommodate windows that tower above the imposing walls. They shield the mosque from the noise of the adjacent Hamidya and other nearby markets.
The only noise at the mosque, apart from the regular call to prayer, is that of children playing, just like Mr Zeidan did decades ago.
In 1893, a worker, on an apparent break, was smoking shisha while repairing the roof, which set the mosque and the surrounding market, alight. It was the last and most devastating of the seven fires that plagued the Umayyad, said Kamal Hussain, a mosque official in charge of receiving delegations.
“He was punished,” Mr Hussain said of the unwitting fire-starter.
