{"id":408,"date":"2007-09-13T23:28:13","date_gmt":"2007-09-13T22:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2007\/09\/13\/the_threat_to_ruin_damascus"},"modified":"2025-10-10T10:39:22","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T09:39:22","slug":"the_threat_to_ruin_damascus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2007\/09\/13\/the_threat_to_ruin_damascus","title":{"rendered":"The threat to ruin Damascus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A new edition of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.islamicamagazine.com\/\">Islamica Magazine<\/a> is on the shelves in London now (try Borders) and there&#39;s a disturbing article about a plan to demolish large areas of the old city of Damascus involving a company with links to the Asad r&eacute;gime; the mayor calls the buildings &quot;garbage&quot;.  They include the second-oldest mosque in Damascus, Jami&#39; al-Tawba, and a number of ancient residential districts are under threat also.  Among the schemes is to clear residential properties in order to expand a mosque of particular interest to Shi&#39;ites, who come in large numbers on pilgrimage from Iran, and to build a car park and a big road to it from the airport.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.islamicamagazine.com\/issue-20\/old-damascus-a-plan-to-destroy-paradise.html\">Old Damascus: A Plan to Destroy Paradise<\/a> by Rana Kabbani<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new edition of Islamica Magazine is on the shelves in London now (try Borders) and there&#39;s a disturbing article about a plan to demolish large areas of the old city of Damascus involving&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-muslim_world"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-6A","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=408"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41980,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408\/revisions\/41980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}