Building of the Great Mosque of Damascus

The site had been sacred for more than a thousand years: an Aramaean temple of Hadad stood here, then the great Roman temple of Jupiter, whose inner enclosure walls still form the walls of the mosque, and from the end of the 4th century a cathedral, which by the 6th century was associated with the head of John the Baptist. After the conquest the Muslims prayed in a small annex (musalla) of the church. Around 705–706 al-Walid, who needed a congregational mosque for the growing Muslim community, took the rest of the cathedral and had most of it demolished; according to the sources, he compensated the Christians by returning other confiscated churches of the city (another version says that the church was bought). The 10th-century author Ibn al-Faqih put the cost at 600,000 to 1,000,000 gold dinars, and later accounts speak of a workforce of 12,000, with Coptic craftsmen and Persian, Indian, Greek and Maghrebi labourers. The mosque was finished in 711 or, by other accounts, in 715 under al-Walid’s successor Sulayman.

Inside the Roman enclosure the prayer hall was placed against the south wall: three parallel aisles crossed by a central nave with a dome that leads to the mihrab — a plan derived from Christian basilicas that proved highly influential; the columns and arcades of the church were reused. Marble panelling and gold mosaics — about 4,000 square metres, probably the largest such surface in the world — covered the courtyard and the hall, showing landscapes, rivers and buildings but no human or animal figures. The geographer al-Muqaddasi (10th century) wrote that hardly a tree or a notable town was missing from them; many modern scholars see in them an image of Paradise. The 12th-century historian Ibn Asakir says that al-Walid forced the Byzantine emperor to send 200 craftsmen, a story K. A. C. Creswell regarded as a later embellishment; a study of 2022 found that most of the glass tesserae had been made in Egypt.

The mosque was a statement of the permanence of the new faith — the art historian Robert Hillenbrand calls it a “victory monument” — and medieval Muslim writers counted it among the wonders of the world. It was damaged by fires in 1069, in 1401, when Timur burned Damascus, and in 1893, after which the prayer hall and its dome were rebuilt; yet it keeps the plan of al-Walid’s building and remains of its Umayyad mosaics, best preserved in the courtyard, including Umayyad fragments in the large, much-restored “Barada panel” in the western portico. A shrine in the hall is venerated by Christians and Muslims alike as the burial place of the head of John the Baptist (Yahya).