Survival instinct of Iraq’s battered, beating heart

 
Business as usual: Baghdad has been a hub for traders for centuries (Picture: Getty)
Getty Images
Michael Burleigh22 May 2014

Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood by Justin Marozzi (Allen Lane, £25)

Baghdad was often confused with Babylon, the ancient city that stood on a site about 55 miles from the modern Iraqi capital. In fact, Baghdad is of relatively recent provenance, an eighth-century AD upstart in the fertile area between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris that had hosted ancient Akkad and Uruk. The alluvial fields were rich enough to support people who earned their livings doing something else, such as trading along rivers that debouched into the Persian Gulf.

The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur, ruler of a vast empire that stretched from present-day Morocco to Central Asia, founded Baghdad in 762, outlining its plan by using a stick to trace outlines in cinders. Three concentric mud-brick walls and a moat led into a central royal enclosure, with the Golden Gate Palace and the Great Mosque symbolising the union of temporal and spiritual authority. As with many other cities, new suburbs spread beyond the walls.

Justin Marozzi’s history of Baghdad combines his deceptively easy grasp of complex scholarship (much of it in Arabic) with astute ground-level — one is tempted to say ground zero — observations made while working in Baghdad after the 2003 coalition invasion. The result is a triumph of subtle evocation, easily surpassing a more lurid recent account of Jerusalem that drew much attention.

Baghdad’s literary legacy is more pertinent since the city of peace and blood has also always been a city of mud, with the baked bricks all too often subsumed by the café crème-hued waters that swirl beside and through it. For the skill in his book is to paint the city largely from its literary remains, in line with an Arab saying: “Cairo writes, Beirut prints and Baghdad reads”. Much older Indian or Persian tales were translated and conflated with those from the time of Caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809), the just ruler who prowls around his capital at night, forming a corpus that combines eroticism with slapstick humour. The city experienced a golden age in the arts and sciences but also much hedonistic sensation, with its dervishes, eunuchs, lavish feasts, and all-dancing and singing slave girls.

All of history’s urban settlements on the land between the two great Mesopotamian rivers were vulnerable to invaders. Baghdad was no exception. Its later rulers made the mistake of responding with braggadocio to a request for submission — the Mongol Khan Hugalu, without hyperbole, warned: “If you refuse to accept it, I will show you the meaning of the will of God.”

In 1258, Hugalu’s doughty horsemen swept into Baghdad, burning the city to the ground and slaughtering many of its residents. The brazen caliph who defied Hugalu was rolled up in a carpet and trampled to death by horses. Barely had the city recovered than in 1401 it was visited by more nomads, under Temur the Tatar, better known in the West as Tamerlane. Foolhardy resistance to this self-styled Emperor of the Age (who had already sacked Abbasid Damascus) only irked him; his soldiers had orders to bring him two Baghdadi heads each, for the 120 towers of skulls he left, which were higher than the city they systematically flattened.

Thenceforth, Baghdad became an object of contention for Ottoman and Persian rulers, who ruled Baghdad remotely from their much mightier capitals at Istanbul or Isfahan. This greatly diminished Baghdad rarely impressed early modern foreign travellers who, surveying its low-rise expanse, almost crushed beneath the torpid heat, must have wondered where the Baghdad of legend had gone, especially since they imagined it stood on Babylon.

Despite recurrent outbreaks of plague, Baghdad revived under late Ottoman rule, although Iraq was increasingly a cockpit for rival British, French and German imperialisms, a sort of Shanghai on the Tigris. After a brief halcyon period under a British-sponsored monarchy, a quick succession of military rulers were usurped in 1979 by Saddam Hussein, a Baath Party activist who had killed his first man at 15 and his second at 20. This was by way of warming up for murdering people on an industrial scale, often after tortures that make the mind recoil, like making parents watch their naked children locked in with swarms of bees.

Oil revenues were squandered on architectural kitsch, such as the Crossed Swords arch (commemorating the “victory” over Iran) whose 20-ton forearms were cast in Basingstoke, Marozzi informs us.

For suddenly we are plunged into a Baghdad that is horribly familiar: of the Green Zone and blundering US administrators; of daily sectarian mayhem; and a Baghdad long emptied of its industrious Jews but about to lose any remaining Christians too. The unwritten next chapter may be of an ethnically cleansed Baghdad as the capital of a rump Shia Iraq, shorn of its Sunni west and the Kurdish north. Either way, the bravely intrepid Marozzi, one hopes in his Kevlar vest, will be just the man to chronicle it.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £20, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK P&P

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