The Great Mosque of Damascus

In 7th and 8th centuries, the caliphs of the Umayyed dynasty carried the revelation of the Prophet Mohammed out of the deserts of Arabia and into the fertile crescent here in Syria, turning a new religion into a new civilization. One of them, Al-Walid, built the Great Mosque of Damascus, which to this day is the symbol of the city, a mixture of the scared and the worldly.

When I first passed through Damascus in 2003, backpacking my way to Baghdad, I had a "You're Not In Kansas Anymore" moment when I entered the Great Mosque and was overwhelmed by the the green shrine lights, the smell of damp stone and stale feet, and the feeling that I'd just started a journey for which I was totally unprepared. The place is endowed with an air of mystery worthy not just of its status a one of the holiest monuments of Islam, but as a site where humans have worshiped gods of one sort or another for thousands of years. Here stood a Byzantine cathedral, a temple to the Roman god Jupiter, the Greek god Zeus, and the semitic god Haddad.

But for all its otherworldliness, the Great Mosque is a living, playful place. When it isn't raining, the rectangular arcaded courtyard becomes like a city commons or town square. Children slide upon the slick marble floors in their socks, soldiers on leave walk hand-in-hand looking at girls, and everyone tries not to put their shoeless feet on pigeon droppings. Inside the building, the mosque has none of the hierarchical arrangement of space common in medieval churches, where those of rank and status occupied elevated positions of honor. The undifferentiated space of the Umayyed mosque resembles an ancient colonnaded barn with a vast expanse of carpeted floor. Take a seat wherever you want, pray, read the Koran or the newspaper, just make sure to take pictures because everyone else is snapping away too.

Today the mosque serves as much as a political institution as a religious one. The sermon at Friday prayers is a perfect occasion to receive state-sanctioned divine guidance. Yesterday, a mullah read a prepared (and almost certainly vetted) speech -- simultaneously broadcast on state radio -- which called for Islamic values and national unity under President Bashar Al-Assad.

What's interesting is that Arab nationalism and Islam at one point in time were contradictory things. Pan-Arabists such as the Ba'ath party were once avowedly secular -- because not all Arabs are Muslims -- while Islam is a universal religion, not the property of one ethnic group or country. So contradictory, in fact, that in the 1980's the Syrian government waged a civil war with the Muslim Brotherhood -- an Islamic groups that wanted to turn Syria into an Islamic state -- and kept tight control over all religious activities for a long time afterwards. But now that religious feeling is rising once again in Syria, the government is trying to co-opt religion rather than fight it. President Assad now publicly celebrates religious holidays, kisses the Koran, and has allowed religious schools to open around the country. Al-Walid would be proud. What secular Syrians think is another matter.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus