Baghdad: The City of Peace and of Blood. A Quick History.

As I gear up for a graduate student conference next month at UCLA, I am reading anything and everything I can sink my teeth into on Arab capital cities. This week I finally finished Justin Maroozi's hefty chronicle on Baghdad. City of Peace, City of Blood- A history in Thirteen Centuries. I have always been fascinated by Iraq and due to the city's importance as one of the historic capitals of the Arab world, along with Cairo and Damascus, I took to reading it. Just as the title claims, the author begins with a clear historical background to the establishment of the city under the Abbasid caliphate and why Baghdad was chosen as the capital city.

To make a very long and gruesome story short, the descendants of the Prophet's uncle Abbas gained traction against the descendants of Muwawia, the Prophet's brother-in-law and governor of Syria who established the Umayyad caliphate in Damascus. The supporters of Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law and cousin, were numerous in the province of Iraq and were unhappy with the tribal inclinations the Umayyads had showed towards the initial Arab converts to Islam. The Abbasids promised a revival of Islam where Arabs and non-Arabs would be equal and united regardless of their origins and the like. The Abbasids spread their message of revolution to the supporters of Ali and his descendants, the Shia, of Kufa in southern Iraq and Khorasan on the eastern ends of Iran and gained military traction to raise a rebellion against the Umayyads. In 750, Damascus fell. In 754, Abu Al Abbas, great-great-grandson of Abbas, the Prophet's uncle, died to smallpox. His brother, Abu Jafar, who took the name Al Mansour (The Victorious) was proclaimed the first caliph of the world-changing Abbasid dynasty which would last for 500 years with its extraordinary achievements, celebrated to this day.

In order to displace the residual loyalty of the Umayyads in Damascus and to preserve his independence from Basra and Kufa in southern Iraq, the two Arab cities that had been founded as military garrisons in the first centuries of the Arab conquests, he established Baghdad in 762 as his capital. Twenty miles to the south of his new capital, lay the ruins of Ctesiphon, the once glorious imperial capital of the Persian Parthian and later Sassanid Empires. Ctesiphon was founded across the river from the even more ancient capital of Seleucia, one of the great cities of the Hellenistic and later Roman eras. The name Baghdad is Persian in origin with several legends attributed to its derivative. A thirteenth-century Syrian author attributed it to Bagh, meaning garden, and Dad, the name of the man who owned it. The twentieth-century Orientalist Guy Le Strange, "laid the matter to rest" that the etymology of the word was indeed Persian, however meaning "Founded by God," Bagh meaning God and Dadh meaning founded or foundation. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of the city, who flocked there in droves, representing one of the most astonishing and rapid urbanizations in history, preferred the name Madinat al Salam, the City of Peace.

It was under the patronage of Haroun al-Rashid of Arabian Nights fame that Baghdad and the Abbasids were at their peak. He had started a club for scientific and medical discovery. The great works of classical Greek, Hindu and Persian were translated into Arabic and disseminated throughout the Empire under official royal and wealthy private patrons. Knowledge was transmitted from East and West to the central capital of Baghdad, which would later be translated back to the West for Europe's birth (not rebirth) during the Renaissance. Science, scholarship, bloodshed, conquest, palatial building in Baghdad and Imperial expenditure was expended in ways never to be repeated in history. On his death in 809, it is said by the Islamic chronicler Tabari that 900 million dirham were left in the treasury. Lest we forget Haroun's staring role in the Arabian Nights both for his scholarly and sexual successes. While it's not the most accurate historical account of Baghdad during this period, it nevertheless provides a vibrant picture of what once was one of the most extravagant, civilized and grand cities in history.

After 500 years of Abbasid rule and severe internal strife that finally took its toll on the fledgling empire, the Mongols invaded and leveled the city to near apocalyptic destruction in 1258. As if Hulagu's devastation in 1258 was not enough, another Mongol leader, Tamerlane, swept in only 150 years later to again annihilate the city to ruin. With the exception of a few Persian conquests of Baghdad under the Safavids in the early to mid-sixteenth century, Baghdad and modern-day Iraq were ultimately under the control of Ottoman Pashas until the dawn of the British in 1917. The early twentieth century was a time of great excitement and rebirth in modern Iraq under the British-backed Hashemite Kings. The Jews, who constituted one-third of the city's inhabitants, especially thrived and helped to raise Iraq's status from a forgotten backwater to a flourishing center of Arabic culture and economic growth. Baghdadis returned to their great heritage of literature that had not been seen since the destruction of the Dar al-Hikma or House of Wisdom under the Abbasids at the hands of the Mongols, where the Tigris was said to bleed black from the ink of all the books tossed into it.

This is where the immortal Arabic quip on literature finds its place: Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads. This statement will be dissected further in coming articles.