WALTER DENNY: This beautiful room was created originally for an upper-class dwelling in Damascus, Syria, in the eighteenth century. This is a reception room, a beautiful room that was designed to impress visitors and to provide the people who owned the house with a luxurious place where they could retreat from the outside world, enjoy music, enjoy good food and the company of their guests.

As you can see, it's on two levels; the lower level, and the upper level, where the walls are lined with cushions, these low cushions from which we get our words ‘sofa’ and ‘divan’ in various Islamic languages. All the senses were engaged in this room – the sound of the water in the playing fountain, the smell perhaps of incense in an incense burner or vases of flowers that would have been kept…in the built-in shelves in the walls. Flowers bloom on the walls of this room every month of the year. The poetry, represented in inscriptions in the room, not only calls on blessings on the owner but also recalls in the poem the gardens of Paradise, the flowers of Paradise, making this room in effect a metaphor for heaven on earth. Living well has been an important part of every great civilization. And in this, Islam is no exception.