Minaret of Jesus, Great Mosque, Damascus

Middle East and N. Africa By David D. Pearce

As the Colosseum is to Rome, and the Parthenon to Athens, so too is the Great Mosque of the Umayyads to Damascus. This pencil drawing is of the southeast corner, one of the least visited but historically most interesting parts of the mosque compound. The Minaret of Jesus (‘Issa) is the highest of the three minarets of the mosque and Muslim tradition holds that it is here where ‘Issa, the son of Maryam, will come down before the Day of Judgement to fight the Anti-Christ. The minaret, and its companion tower on the SW corner of the mosque compound, are likely among the earliest in Syria. To the right is the main prayer hall. Before its conversion to a mosque in 706 AD, the building was a cathedral dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, whose head was believed to have been buried there. Behind the double-arcaded eastern wall, left, are some Roman-era rooms where the Umayyad Caliph Yezid reportedly brought the head of Hussein ibn ‘Ali, grandson of the prophet Muhammad, whom he defeated and decapitated at the battle of Kerbala in 680 AD. Kerbala marked the beginning of the Sunni-Shi’a rift in Islam and the martyrdom of Hussein is commemorated annually in Shi’a religious observance. This spot, the Mashhad Hussein, thus became a major point of pilgrimage for Shi’a faithful, from Iran and elsewhere. I have included in my drawing some of these religious pilgrims, both in the background area of the colonnade near where one enters the Mashhad Hussein and also resting under the Dome of the Clocks, foreground. The cupola of this small Ottoman-era structure rests on eight recycled Roman columns and was so called because it used to house the mosque’s clock collection.

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