The Weekend. No, not just any weekend. The Weekend. :)

Over this weekend, I was able to accomplish much, elhamdulillah.

On Friday, I dressed up nicely in order to be respectful and went in search of the Sayyida Ruqayya mosque. It’s a relatively big place which seems really small from the outside when you first approach it. There are two doors through which to enter, one is for men and the other for women. Once I entered through the door for women, on the left there was a bin where they had bags for shoes. On the right there was a stand with abayas (black) on it, although the abaya didn’t come into play until I was pretty much into the mosque and about to go into the place where Sayyida Ruqayya herself is buried. Right when I was about to enter, the guy at the door stopped me and told me to go back and get an abaya, which I did. Afterwards, I walked in. I visited Sayyida Ruqayya elhamdulillah, and couldn’t help but cry when I got really close to her resting place. There were many Iranians around, and I could also see inside the tomb itself that there was a lot of Iranian money placed into the shrine, as blessings or luck. You could see some Syrian pounds as well, but mostly it was Iranian money. I apologize; I don’t know the unit of money for Iran so I’m not going to say anything but Iranian money.

A side note here about Sayyida Ruqayya herself—if I read the sign correctly in the mosque, she is the daughter of Hz. Husayn, who was martyred in Karbala. Mostly this is a Shi’a place if I understood correctly, and as I was walking towards the shrine I could see a lot of them had stones. I also prayed, and while I was praying someone placed a stone on top of my bag. It’s usual that a Shi’a have a stone from the earth of Karbala while praying, but I don’t know if this stone was actually from there since there’s a box of stones that is at the entrance to the shrine proper. Either way, I was quite happy to have been there. I couldn’t leave there for a while though, so I sat for some time in the courtyard and just prayed. It was wonderful and peaceful. When I had first walked into the mosque there was a group of Iranians reciting an ode or a prayer, I’m not exactly sure what they were reading, meaning obviously I have to get started on Persian soon. When I walked out and sat in the courtyard there wasn’t anyone doing anything in a group setting, it was just a couple of people spread out through the courtyard sitting together and talking and such, so I was able to just sit there for a while. It was quite a hot day but the courtyard itself was really nice and cool and windy.

After visiting the Sayyida Ruqayya mosque, I then went to the Umayyad Mosque. The Sayyida Ruqayya mosque is quite close to the Umayyad Mosque actually, it’s not even five minutes away by walking. Anyways, I got to the Umayyad Mosque, but they told me that I couldn’t get in without an abaya, so I went to the “Putting on Special Clothing Room” (no joke, that’s the real name of the room) and got an abaya for five Syrian pounds (which is also lira. Have I talked about the money unit here before? If I haven’t, a quick overview now: foreigners usually refer to the Syrian money as Syrian pounds, and Syrians refer to it as lira, and I’ve heard my grandmother refer to it as Suri, to distinguish it from the Turkish lira. So there we are :) ) because I’m Turkish. The guy asked me where I was from because the price changes according to where you’re from. Turks get a lower price apparently.

Having borrowed the abaya from here, which happened to be an interesting gray-brown color, I walked in and just did a walk around the mosque first. Afterwards I started to take pictures, and I will hopefully be able to upload them on a Picasa web album or something and link it to here so that people will be able to see. Words are nice of course but since one picture’s worth a thousand words, one needs to put pictures up as well, and hopefully I will be able to do this.

If you all remember, all of this is happening on Friday, so I happened to be at the Umayyad Mosque right around the Friday prayer time, so I stuck around and listened to the hutba and prayed the Friday prayer. Only after the Friday prayer had been finished do they let women visit the actual prayer site within the Umayyad Mosque, and within this prayer hall is the shrine of Hz. Yahya, or Zacharias as I believe he is called in English. I visited him, elhamdulillah, and then towards the back of the complex you can find one of the shrines for Hz. Husayn, and in the same place they also have a small shrine for Zeynel Abidin. I visited both of these places, and then being really hungry, went home to prepare lunch. When I got home, I found that one of my house mates’ friend was here and she knew the way both to Sayyida Zainab and also to Mohi al-din Ibn Arabi. Originally I had planned on going to Sayyida Zainab after finishing with lunch and whatnot, but I ended up going to Mohi al-din Ibn Arabi’s tomb and mosque with the friend. She is truly a wonderful person.

After visiting and paying respects to Mohi al-din Ibn Arabi, we stuck around for a while because the men were actually doing a zikr. They were in a small room though off to the side, and the people working at the mosque wouldn’t allow us women to sit downstairs close to the room so we had to go upstairs, but once we sort of pasted our faces and ears to the window, we were able to hear much of the zikr elhamdulillah.

After the zikr, we decided on meeting at 6:30 am on Saturday morning to go to Sayyida Zainab.

The morning of Saturday, I woke up, got ready, but I was running sort of late so I didn’t have time to eat breakfast (bad idea not eating breakfast. Always eat breakfast). Anyways, I booked it to the bridge where we were going to meet, and we met up and then went to the top of the bridge to catch a microbus to go to a certain point on the way to Sayyida Zainab. From that certain point, we caught another microbus to go to Sayyida Zainab. It took quite some time to get there, but elhamdulillah, we were able to reach Sayyida Zainab and visit her. They gave me an abaya there as well. By the way, I say “they gave me an abaya” but what I really mean is I borrowed the abaya, I didn’t actually get to keep it. Having taken the abaya, we entered the complex, which is absolutely amazing. The outside is full of blue and green and yellow tiles that are arranged in the most beautiful and intricate flower designs courtesy of Iranians who really know what they’re doing when it comes to pretty designs.

The inside was actually much like the Sayyida Ruqayya mosque, just Sayyida Zainab was much larger and honestly I felt like although the inside was quite well taken care of, the outside areas could definitely use more looking after. And I don’t fully know why, maybe it was because I was with someone but I didn’t have the same feeling in Sayyida Zainab as I did in Sayyida Ruqayya. I will have to go to visit her again insha’allah, and we’ll see how things are when I go back. Maybe it’ll be different being alone. We’ll see.

After visiting Sayyida Zainab, we walked around the area a little bit more and visited other important sites. We walked into a cemetery and I found the tomb of Ali Sheriati, which I was completely surprised to come across, it was a pretty small affair and not well taken care of but it was there. I finally bought an abaya—Moroccon style abaya, in Syria, yes, thank you very much. The social unacceptability continues full-blast. I also got my first taste of true hospitality when we were doing the walking around. My friend wanted to find the mosque for one of the first martyrs from the Sahaba, which happened to be in the Palestinian refugee neighborhood of the city, so while we found the mosque we also found that it was locked, and a nice Palestinian man helped us get in touch with the imam so we were able to go inside and see the maqam of the martyr and also walk through the mosque. Side note again—the mosques here are amazing and they sort of disguise themselves. You think they’re going to be pretty small due to their door size, but then you walk inside and it’s an amazing, light-filled place, quite large, too. This was exactly the case with this mosque we visited.

We went back home for lunch, and I decided on eating pizza this time, so I went and got pizza. The guy is amazing but the pizza crust is interesting, the dough isn’t like the dough in America. Then again, not even the ketchup is similar so can’t exactly expect the pizza dough and whatnot to be similar. Still delicious, but the pizza dough is more like pastry dough. Anyways.

I ate lunch, and then afterwards I walked up to Mohi al-Din Ibn Arabi for asr prayer. We had asked yesterday and the people at the mosque said that they held zikr sessions after asr prayer, and we both wanted to go see how that would be. My friend couldn’t come because she had things to do but either way, I walked up there and prayed asr and then sat and listened to the zikr. It was quite wonderful to hear; I’d listened to other zikrs before so I had an idea of what it would be like but that had always been in a pretty private setting with a set number of people. This time was different though because it was just a community full of people I’d never seen before and whom I also assumed didn’t see each other on a regular basis. They were all quite comfortable with simply sitting next to each other and praying and doing zikr. I admire their ability to be Muslim and be completely okay with it, no problems, and no assumptions attached.

All in all, quite the productive weekend. I was quite happy with what I was able to accomplish, elhamdulillah. School starts again on Sunday, so we’ll see how this week goes. See you all at the next post! :D