Battles refracted through the lens of faith continue to rage, often on the selfsame sites they did 1,500 years ago: Palestine, Jerusalem, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Libya. To take just one example, the city of Damascus was not besieged in just the 630s; it was assaulted by the armies of the Second Crusade in the 1120s, was besieged by Muslim Mongols and Turks in 1400, suffered religious massacres in the 1840s and 1860s, was bombed by the French in the 1920s, and has been fought over bitterly by the various factions of the present-day Syrian civil war.
