and when the brick was examined, it was found to have swallowed up thousands of dinars’ worth of gold.
The architect said: “Commander of the Believers, we shall need so-and-so many thousand bricks of this size. If you possess enough gold for that, we can proceed.” Once al-Walid was convinced of the man’s accuracy, he released him and gave him fifty dinars (1).
[He also said, “I am not incapable of what you propose, but it would be sheer extravagance and a waste of wealth in a manner unbefitting it. For us to spend that sum in the path of Allah and to return it to the weak among the Muslims would be better.” He then completed the dome exactly as the architect had advised.]
When al-Walid roofed the mosque, they made the outer roof gabled, while its underside was a flat surface adorned with muqarnas and entirely gilded. One of his relatives remarked, “You have burdened those who come after you with the yearly task of mud-plastering these roofs.” Al-Walid therefore ordered that all the lead in his dominions be gathered to replace the clay, for it would be lighter on the roof. Lead was brought from every part of Syria and the other provinces, yet they still lacked enough, until they discovered that a certain woman possessed great quantities of it, measured in qintars. They bargained with her,
but she said, “I will not sell it except for its weight in silver” (2).
They wrote to the Commander of the Believers, and he replied, “Buy it from her even for its weight” (3).
When they offered her that price, she said, “Since you have said so, I give it as charity for Allah to be placed in the roof of this mosque.” The sheets were therefore stamped with the seal, “For Allah.” It is said that she was an Israelite woman, and they inscribed on the sheets taken from her, “This is what the Israelite woman donated” (4).
Muḥammad ibn ʿĀʾidh said: I heard the elders say, “The building of the Mosque of Damascus was completed only through the faithful discharge of trusts. A worker might have a surplus—by which they meant a single copper coin or the head of a nail—and he would come and place it in the treasury.”
Some Damascene shaykhs said, “There is no marble in the mosque except the two slabs in the maqām; they came from the throne of Bilqīs, and all the rest is alabaster” (5).
Others related that the Commander of the Believers, al-Walid ibn ʿAbd al-Malik, bought the two green columns beneath the eagle from Ḥarb ibn Khālid ibn Yazīd ibn Muʿāwiyah for one thousand five hundred dinars.
Duḥaym reported, on the authority of al-Walid ibn Muslim: Marwān ibn Janāḥ told us from his father that there were in the Mosque of Damascus twelve thousand marble-setters.
Abū Quṣayy reported from Duḥaym, from al-Walid ibn Muslim, from ʿAmr ibn Muhājir al-Anṣārī: They calculated what al-Walid spent on the vine-work in the qiblah of the mosque, and it amounted to seventy thousand dinars (6).