Just to the south of the medieval circuit walls of the Old City of Damascus, in Syria, is the Bab al-Saghir Cemetery, where Damascenes have buried their dead for centuries. I visited the cemetery in 2010, about six months before the beginning of the horror of the Syrian War. I had come to see the tomb of the caliph Mu‘awiya b. Abi Sufyan (r. 661–80 ce). Mu‘awiya was a brother-in-law and distant cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, and is usually considered to be the founder of the Umayyad dynasty. Once an extra-mural burial ground, the cemetery was now surrounded by the modern city. It was full of densely packed gravestones, separated only by narrow paths. There were also larger monuments, visible across the fields of smaller grave markers. When I visited, one mid-week afternoon in blazing July heat, veiled women pilgrims surrounded the large domed tomb of the Prophet Muhammad's great-granddaughter, Fatima bt. al-Husayn.

Mu‘awiya's grave was about 100m further along – a modern, pale, concrete cube, about 2m high, encased in green-painted railings and capped by a concrete dome decorated with religious invocations in the same green paint. An inscribed band of Arabic ran around the top of its four walls. The tomb stood in silence, with no visitors. When I got closer, I noticed a large hole broken in the modern inscription, through which the blue and white tiles of an older building showed. The gap seemed unlikely to be accidental damage, since it coincided exactly with Mu‘awiya's name, all but the last syllable of which had been broken away.

As the damage to his tomb suggests, although Mu‘awiya lived more than 1,300 years ago, he and his family still excite strong feelings – often ambivalent and sometimes fiercely negative. This may seem surprising, and not just because of the remote time in which he lived; Mu‘awiya has the prestigious status of a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad – someone who is said to have met the founder of the Islamic religion, and converted to Islam while Muhammad still lived. Furthermore, in the ninety years between 661 and 750, Mu‘awiya, and then thirteen of his relatives from the Umayyad clan, presided over an era of astonishing empire-building on a hitherto unknown scale.