The masked knight

This is Damascus, God's paradise on earth. It is imagined with its green meadows and flower gardens, and with its breeze that rises and makes bodies wake up, and leaves that souls cheer for, and the footsteps pass by and the flowers cling to his tail, and these are its streams that run in a sweet trickle that harmonizes with the birds' songs, separating and meeting, thus depicting life between despair. And hope, and then it continues to stumble among the brush, descending until it meets the Barada River, and its overwhelming darkness engulfs it... This is Damascus, with its high domes, its lofty palaces, and its minarets that extended to the sky, as if they were asking for something in the sky.
This is Damascus in the year ninety-two AH, in the days of its great caliph, Al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik. Greatness, authority, broad dominion, and power that subjugated the Persians, and Byzantium knelt before it, humbled, throwing the reins in humility and submission, and messengers walked to it from the farthest parts of Europe and the East, seeking favour, and begging a look of contentment that humbled them. Their hearts are in their places, and its battalions marched across the earth as a conqueror. Victory does not depart from its banner, and time does not descend except at its word. Then there was politics, cunning, and mastery of governance with which the Umayyad state filled the hearts with fear and terror, or sincerity and love, and stripped every sword of its sheath from its possession, and sacrificed the soul cheaply to expand its territory.
This is Damascus, where the events of this historical novel by the poet and writer Ali Al-Jarim take place