and the naqib al-ashraf. He served as a link between the imperial government in Constantinople and the elites of Damascus and was a key shaper of public opinion in the city. By 1650 members of the mercantile and scholarly Mahasini family held the position, retaining it for much of the 18th and early and mid-19th centuries, partly due to their links with the Shaykh al-Islam in the imperial capital. In the late 19th century, another Damascene family with connections in Constantinople, the Khatibs, vied for the position. After the death of the Mahasini preacher in 1869, a member of the Khatibs succeeded him. The mosque's prayer hall was once again ravaged and partly destroyed by fire in 1893. A laborer engaging in repair work accidentally started the fire when he was smoking his nargila (water pipe). The fire destroyed the inner fabric of the prayer hall and caused the collapse of the mosque's central dome. The Ottomans fully restored the mosque, largely maintaining the original layout. The restoration process, which lasted nine years, did not attempt to reproduce the original decoration. The central mihrab was replaced and the dome was rebuilt in a contemporary Ottoman style. The rubble and damaged elements from the fire, including some of the original pillars and mosaic remains, were simply disposed of. Until 1899 the mosque's library included the "very old" Qubbat al-Khazna collection; "most of its holdings were given to the German emperor Wilhelm II and only a few pieces kept for the National Archives in Damascus." It is the burial place of the first three officers of the Ottoman Aviation Squadrons who died on mission, in this case the Istanbul-Cairo expedition in 1914. They were Navy Lieutenant Fethi Bey and his navigator, Artillery First Lieutenant Sadık Bey and Artillery Second Lieutenant Nuri Bey. Modern era The Umayyad Mosque underwent major restorations in 1929 during the French Mandate over Syria and in 1954 and 1963 under the Syrian Republic. In the and in the early , Syrian president Hafez al-Assad ordered a wide-scale renovation of the mosque. The methods and concepts of Assad's restoration project were heavily criticized by UNESCO, but the general approach in Syria was that the mosque was more of a symbolic monument rather than a historical one and thus, its renovation could only enhance the mosque's symbolism. In , Mohammed Burhanuddin constructed a zarih of the martyrs of the Battle