In 1090, the minaret of the mosque of Aleppo was built. In 1163 the foundation stone of what would become Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris was set. A decade later, thousands of miles away in Mosul in today’s Iraq, the al-Nuri mosque was completed in 1173.

The cathedral of Notre-Dame and the mosque of Mosul have witnessed great change over the centuries. The adhan, the Muslim call to prayer from both of the rebuilt minarets of Mosul and Aleppo open with the ‘shahada’, the lines where the believers ‘bear witness’ to the existence of a single God.

The minarets of Mosul and Aleppo have borne witness to seismic events, literally, from massive earthquakes to extraordinary shifts in power in the Middle East. Mosul’s minaret watched Genghis Khan’s army reach the city. His purported descendant, Timur-e Leng, or Tamerlane, the Mongol chieftain from today’s Uzbekistan, reached Aleppo in 1400, and launched a lightning offensive, taking the Syrian cities of Hama and Homs, until he reached the outskirts of Damascus. The forces of the Mamluk sultan capitulated to Tamerlane without a battle, with their leader fleeing the city in December 1400. In December 2024, it was the Assad dynasty that collapsed as Aleppo fell and its ‘sultan’ fled to Russia.

The minaret of the mosque of Aleppo was destroyed during to Syrian civil war, collapsing during a battle in 2013. In 2017 the curved minaret of the al-Nuri mosque was deliberately demolished by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as it retreated from the city. In 2019 an accidental fire destroyed the spire of Notre-Dame cathedral and most of its nave.

Within the span of a few months, the minarets in Mosul and Aleppo and the spire of Notre-Dame have once again reached for the heavens, however. UNESCO and Iraq agreed on a $50 million partnership with the United Arab Emirates for the reconstruction of Mosul’s mosque. And, in December, the reopening of Notre-Dame and its new spire was celebrated by world leaders in Paris. Yet there is another dynamic that links all three sacred sites.

The day after the April 2019 fire in Paris, numerous memes emerged of Quasimodo, the fictitious hunchback of Notre-Dame, embracing his beloved cathedral. Iraqis also lovingly call the curved minaret of the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, ‘al-Hadba,’ or ‘the hunchback’. The Aleppo minaret, furthermore, began to curve over time with an inclination of more than 40 centimetres before it was destroyed.

These three ‘hunchbacks’ have each been beset by disasters, deliberate and accidental. Mosul and Aleppo were connected from the days of the Silk Road. In fact, for most of their history, Mosul and Aleppo were bound by ties of trade and blood, more so than even the capitals of Baghdad or Damascus. It was the Anglo-French mandates after the First World War that created a border between the northern cities, raising tariffs on goods from Mosul, such as the fabric muslin, from which it takes its name, hindering its trade with Aleppo.

The Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci, describes the cathedral as a besieged symbol in her lengthy essay, ‘La Rabbia E L’orgoglio‘ (‘The Rage and The Pride’), published in Il Corriere della Sera on 29 September 2001 in response to the 9/11 attacks. In it, she equated the destruction of the Twin Towers to the cathedral of her native Florence, besieged by immigrants moving into the district of the sacred structure. The cathedral, particularly Notre-Dame, has been central to the notion of a clash between civilisations. In 2019, besides quaint images of Quasimodo in cyberspace, commentators on both sides of the Atlantic used social media to mourn the burning of Notre-Dame. Ben Shapiro, for example, an American right-wing pundit with millions of followers, tweeted: ‘a magnificent monument to Western civilisation is collapsing’.

Notre-Dame’s status as a symbol of Western civilisation is complicated, however, by its origins in the cross-cultural exchanges that shaped architectural techniques across the greater Mediterranean. Works such as Diana Darke’s Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe and Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe’s Medieval Monuments reveal how the cathedral’s design, like that of many other sacred sites, reflects a tapestry of shared innovations rather than a stark division between civilisations. These cultural interactions challenge the binary narrative of a conflict between civilisation, underscoring the fluidity and interdependence of architectural traditions spanning Europe and the Middle East.

The pointed arch, a defining feature of Gothic architecture, was pivotal to the design of Notre-Dame. This innovation allowed the cathedral to support greater weight, enabling the construction of thinner, soaring walls and vaulted, ethereal ceilings, which evoke the heavens. Its origins, however, lie in the Middle East.

The lineage of the arch in France can be traced back to Abbot Suger, who was instrumental in the 1135 renovation of the abbey church of St Denis in Paris, famed as the birthplace of Gothic architecture. He was probably inspired by the Abbot Hugh of Semur’s renovations of the abbey of Cluny in southern Burgundy and its pointed arches. Hugh’s inspiration in turn came from a visit to the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino, in the south of Italy, a structure replete with Middle Eastern architectural motifs, including the pointed arch, as a result of its proximity to the Italian port city of Amalfi, which had extensive trading networks in the Middle East, particularly during the Crusades

The similarities in style were alluded to by Sir Christopher Wren, architect of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, who wrote: ‘This we now call the Gothic manner of architecture… I think it should with more reason be called the Saracen [Arab] style… If any one doubts of this assertion, let us appeal to any one who has seen the mosques and palaces of Fez or some of the cathedrals in Spain built by the Moors.’

Architectural techniques, styles, and innovations are not the exclusive legacy of either the West or the East. Instead, they reflect a synthesis forged within the interconnected cultures of the greater Mediterranean and the broader Eurasian landmass, where pre-Christian and pre-Islamic Roman and Persian craftsmen collaborated and exchanged ideas. Muslims borrowed from Christians who then borrowed from Muslims again. Examining how techniques flowed over time reveals that the great mosques of Mosul and Aleppo and the cathedral of Notre-Dame were products of an artistic trajectory intertwining Europe and the Middle East.

On a rhetorical level, claiming Notre-Dame as a loss for the West denied the universalism of sacred structures that are built from a wider heritage. The destruction of all three – in Paris, Aleppo and Mosul – were poignant examples of the bonds between sacred architecture and local inhabitants, national identity, and global patrimony.

If Victor Hugo’s work was instrumental in fostering an appreciation of what was then a decrepit Notre-Dame, it was the Iraqi writer Ahmed Zaidan from Mosul who lamented that the city’s skyline would never be the same with the destruction of the minaret, just as it had been said for the spire of Notre-Dame. Zaha Hadid, the famed architect from Mosul, incorporated Middle Eastern motifs into her modern structures. She died in 2016, a year before the tragic destruction of the mosque that was the symbol of her native Mosul.

The Mosul minaret has been rebuilt to conform to its original ‘hunchback’ shape. Notre-Dame’s spire was also rebuilt to mimic its original design that its Hunchback would recognise today. These are once again no longer static structures of stone and mortar, but spaces that are alive, embedded in the urban and rural religious fabric of these communities, sentimental to the local, yet part of a global heritage. In this vein the efforts to rebuild destroyed sacred architecture in Iraq, Syria, and France are symbols of resilience.

For example, the UAE’s Minister of Culture, Noura Al Kaabi, said in 2022 that: ‘The reconstruction of Al Nouri Mosque and its minaret carries peace and coexistence importance in a multi-religious society, doctrines and cultures.’ The UAE had also restored two churches in the vicinity of the mosque. While fears that the Islamist element among the Syrian rebels might prejudice the nation’s Christians, the new government, the Arab Gulf states such as UAE, and the international community, particularly UNESCO, have the potential to work together to restore sacred architecture in the nation. After all, the Umayyad mosque of Aleppo is said to store the remains of Zachariah, John the Baptist’s father, revered by both Christians and Muslims. The head of John the Baptist, decapitated by Herod, is said to be housed in the Umayyad mosque of Damascus, demonstrating the mutual reverence of these figures across two Abrahamic faiths. Both sites are in need of continued renovations. Thus, this destruction can bring together diverse communities in a common cause of rescuing global patrimony. What the recent reconstruction of the Paris, Aleppo and Mosul sites symbolised is that all sacred structures are part of a global human heritage and should be mourned and now celebrated regardless of one’s faith or religiosity. They are a rebuke to the idea clashing difference between religions and cultures, edifices of connection cemented in mortar and stone.