Damascus

The walled precinct at the centre of Damascus has been a place of worship for close to three thousand years without interruption of use. An Aramaean temple of the storm god Hadad stood there in the first millennium BCE; the Romans rebuilt it on a monumental scale for Jupiter Damascenus, and the outer enclosure wall of that sanctuary is still the wall of the mosque. In the Christian centuries a church of John the Baptist occupied part of the site.

The Umayyad caliph al-Walid took over the whole precinct and built the congregational mosque between 706 and 715, and it became the model for much of what a great mosque would be: a broad prayer hall of three aisles running parallel to the qibla wall, a courtyard, and a facade of glass mosaic showing rivers, trees and palaces with no living figure in it. Enough of that mosaic survives to show what early Islamic art looked like when it was new. A shrine inside the prayer hall is venerated as holding the head of John the Baptist, called Yahya in the Quran, and it is honoured by Muslim and Christian visitors alike.

The city kept its layers afterwards. Saladin is buried in a small tomb against the north wall of the mosque. The Andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi died in Damascus in 1240 and his tomb in the Salihiyya quarter became a shrine with an Ottoman mosque built over it, while Ibn Taymiyya, who spent his life attacking exactly that kind of veneration, died in the city's citadel prison in 1328 and is buried a short walk away.

Acts tells the story of the road to Damascus three times, which is a measure of how much weight the book puts on it. Saul is travelling to the city with authority to arrest believers there, meaning a community already existed; he is blinded, led in, and lodged in a house on the street called Straight, where a disciple named Ananias is sent to him against his own better judgement. The Roman street survives as the long straight axis of the old city, and a small underground chapel near its eastern end is venerated as the house of Ananias. Paul's own account adds the detail that he left the city let down the wall in a basket, escaping an official of the Nabataean king Aretas rather than a Jewish crowd.

Damascus remains a patriarchal seat. The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East resides in the old city, and the Syriac Orthodox patriarchate moved its seat here in the twentieth century, so two of the successions that trace themselves to Antioch are administered from Damascus.

South of the city stands the shrine of Sayyida Zaynab, venerated by Twelver Shia as the burial place of the daughter of Ali and sister of Husayn, who was taken captive to Damascus after Karbala and is remembered for confronting the caliph in his own court. The shrine draws pilgrims from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and the Gulf, and a Shia quarter has grown around it. A second shrine within the walls, that of Sayyida Ruqayya, commemorates a child of Husayn's household who died in captivity there.