Baghdad, Oh, Baghdad.

The round city of Al-Mansour

Baghdad. 1870

Opening of Baghdad brige.1902

Bab Al-Muadam. 1910

Baghdad 1930

In Iraq, all roads lead to the capital Baghdad (the name is probably a combination of two Persian words meaning "Founded by God",arabs call it "The City of Peace" a city with a glorious past and magnificent futher.

The founding of Baghdad by Caliph Abu Ja'far Al-Mansour, came about in this way : the first Abbasid Caliph, Abu Al-Abbas, had built a palace on the river Euphrates at Anbar, but it didn't suit Mansour, who at once began to seach about for somewhere more centrally placed from which to administer the new Empire. Soon the site of Sassanian village on the west bank of the river Tigris caught his eye, and in the spring of AD 762 the lines were traced out.
     The first Baghdad took four years to build and Mansour employed one hundred thousand architects, crafsmen and workers from all over the Islamic world. Thus came into being the famous Round City of Mansour, with double brick walls, a deep moat and a third innermost wall ninety feet high. Four highways radiated out of four gates and at the hub of everything was built the Caliph's palace with a green dome.
     A certain amount of judicious stealing went on: many of the stones for the palace - the centre of the universe - came from the ruins of the Persian city of Ctesiphon not far away; a wrought - iron gate was taken from Wasit, another from Kufa. And a man who did more than most to help Mansour built his new city was the Imam Abu Hanifa, whose tomb you can see in Baghdad to this day.
     Soon merchants built bazaars and houses round the Basra (southern) Gate and formed a district of their own called Karkh, and this was joined by a bridge of boats to the east bank of the Tigris - where most of modern Baghdad stands in the district of Rasafa. Two cemeteries grew up - one in Adhimiya and another where Kadhimain now houses the shrines of two of the twelve Imams.
     Of course, the ancient Baghdad we all read about as children is the Baghdad of Haroun Al-Rashid, who took things over after Al-Mansour's two sons had come and gone. His wazir was Yahya, son of Khalid Al-Barmaki (the Barmecide of the Arabian Nights), a Zoroastrian (persian) priest captured by a previous Caliph. He was succeeded by Jafar
Al-Barmaki who practically ruled the empire so influential did he become. Under Haroun, the lands of Islam enjoyed unprecedented glory and wealth. Baghdad become the richest city of the world. Its wharves were lined with ships - from China bringing porcelain ; from Malaya and India with spices and dyes ; from Turkestan with lapis  lazuli and slaves ; from East Africa with ivory and gold dust ; and from Arabia with pearls and weapons. An Arab even in those days could cash a cheque in Canton on his account in Baghdad.
     Jafar the Barmecide spent a million gold pieces on his palace and had as many slaves as the Caliph him self. His hospitality was well known : 'As generous as Jafar,' people said. Zubeida, Haroun's wife, spent enormous sums of money on refurbishing Mecca before she travelled there on pilgrimage.
     Confident in his power and glory, Haroun sent a message to Nicephorus I, of Constantinople demanding tribute : 'From Haroun, Prince of the Faithful, to Nicephorus, the Roman dog. I have read your latter, you son of a heathen mother. You will see and not hear my reply, '- and an army of one hundred and thirty-five thousand men soon followed the letter to devastate Asia Minor to the Mediterranean. Later, the Caliph Al-Muqtadir watched emissaries from Byzantium parading before him with 'one hundred and sixty thousand horsemen and footmen, seven thousand black and white eunuches and seven hundred chamberlains ...  and hundred lions.'
     Haroun's sons started a series of destructions of their father's glorious city when they battled for the Caliphate after his death. But his victorious son Al-Mamun's fourteen-year reign brought the city to the peak of intellectual splendour. Mathematics developed - the Baghdadis introduced the ZERO and the system of numbers we now use ; Aristotle and Plato were translated ; Al-Mamun built an astronomical observatory where savants measured the earth's surface six hundred years before Europe admitted it was not flat!. Haroun had already inaugurated a free public hospital, and no doctor was allowed to practise without a diploma from a medical school.
     The Baghdad of Haroun, the most glorious contemporary of Charlemagne (Karl den Store), was a nest of singing bards - of whom the most ostentatious was Abu Nawas, who was born in AD  747 in Ahwaz, Persia, lived in Basra, become Haroun's jester and poet, and died in AD 810.
     All the old gates of Baghdad, except one, have disappeared. They had beautiful Arabian Nights names like, Gate of the Willow-Tree, Gate of Darkness, Gate of the Moon. The one survivor is the Central or Khorasan Gate, also known as Bab Al-Wastani. The caravans passed through it on the Golden Road that led across Persia to Samarkand.
     The Kadhimain : one of the most important monuments in Iraq or even in all Islam. A huge gilded dome on a circular drum. Four minarets. Kufic inscriptions. Canopied balconies. Glinting mirror mosaics and lustrously glazed tiles. Floors of marble. Originally built in AD 799, it is the double-tomb of the Imam Musa and his grandson Mohamed Jawad, who died in AD 799 and 835 respectively. Rebuilt by the Turkish Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, in 1534. Added to by the Persian ruler, Shah Abbas. A high and abominable external wall has recently been built round this famous mosque.

We can put together a mosaic of life in old Baghdad from travellers' tales. For instance, a very early traveller, Benjamin of Tudela, has described the scene when the Caliph went from his palace to the Great Mosque for prayer 'at the fast of Ramadhan'. This was in 1173 (I blive that was the reign of Caliph
Al-Mustadea Bi Aamr Allah 1170-1180).
« the Caliph was riding a mule, dressed in his royal robes:but over his rich turban, a black veil as a mark of humility, and to suggest to beholders that all the sumptuous magnificence with which he was then surrounded would one day be covered with the shadows of death. He was followed by all the chiefs of the Arabs, magnificently dressed, and mounted on the most beautiful horses ; and the road from the palace to the mosque door lined with populace, and dancers, singers, musicians crying ' peace be upon thee, O! Our Lord and King! '. The Caliph replied by lifting his hand to his mouth and forehead and extending his hand to the crowd as if to say, 'On you be peace'». 
     A later traveller, Dr.Leonard Rauwolff, a German doctor and trader, was in Baghdad in 1574 (the 18th. sultan in the 1.Turkish ruling period, Sultan Al-Wind Zada Ali Pasha, 1574-1586) when:
« there arrived twenty-five ships with spice and other precious drugs here, which came over sea from the Indies ... where they load their goods into smaller vessels, and so bring them to Baghdad, which journey taketh them up forty days. In case of trouble with Persians or other marauders they keep pigeons chiefly at Balsara (Basra), which ... might be sent back again with letters of Bagdat (Baghdad).»
     Shortly before Rauwolff, an Englishman, Ralph Fitch, saw:
« a towne not very great but very populous, and of great traffike of strangers, for that is the way to Persia, Turkie and Arabia : and from thense doe goe Caravans for these and other places '. There was a bridge of boats tyed to a great chaine of yron, which is made fast on either side of the river ».The biggest buildings, he adds, were palaces, barracks, public baths, mosques and roofed bazaars. Otherwise, he saw shabby, huddled, one-storeyed houses, with blank windowless walls on the narrow winding alleys.
     When the great Danish/German Explorer Carsten Niebuhr (a royal explorer sent by King Fredrik V of Denmark) entered Baghdad on jan/1766, he described the town as such: 
... coming soon ...

Then J.S.Buckingham, an English traveller and writer, arrived in Baghdad in 1827, he noticed white asses saddled and bridled for passengers-wheeled carriages of any description being unknown. Buckingham noted:
« the wall by which Baghdad is surrounded bears marks of having been constructed and repaired at many different periods... It has large round towers at the principal angles, on which were planted batteries with brass cannon. All the buildings, public or private, were made of trees, so that Baghdad looked like a city arising from a grove of palms. The streets were narrow and unpaved.»
And Buckingham mentions that Baghdad then contained about thirty khans, or caravanserais, of which one was undoubtedly the magnificent KhanMirjan, built in 1359 and now restored and transformed into one of the city's best restaurants.
     Gertrude Bell (known as Miss.Bell) wrote that just before the First World War, by far the most interesting relic of the age of the Caliphs was the line of the enclosing walls with its gates. Two gates - because Bab Al-Tilism survived in those days as well as Bab Al-Wastani (or Khorasan Gate), now the only survivor.
Both gates consisted, she remarked, of a domed octagonal chamber outside the wall, connected to the city by a low bridge, with walls on either side, that led across the moat. Perhaps the general aspect of the older parts of Baghdad still reflects the sort of things that Buckingham saw in the early nineteenth century.

The history of Baghdad is one of unrivalled glory giving way to appalling administration, invasion, massacre, and a final decline through four hundred years of stagnant Turkish rule until the early twentieth century. The west bank of Baghdad was so badly damaged in the civil war following Harun Al-Rashied death in AD 806 that the Round City of Al-Mansur completely collapsed and disappeared. People crossed the river to try again and the east bank city grew up. More civil disobedience drove the Caliph Al-Muaatasim to the extraordinary length of moving the capital to Samarra. Then, after the five hundred years of Abbasid rule, the Mongols raced down from Asia to destroy and pillage.
The year 1258 heralded centuries of disaster. Hulagu, grandson of Ghenghis Khan, put the last Caliph and two of his three sons to death after a six-days siege of the capital. He slew Baghdad's poets, traders scholars and divines.
Eight hundred thousand non-combatants are said to have been killed by the Mongols, and his soldiers stacked a mountain of jewels round Hulagu's tent. But his worst act was the destruction of the irrigation system which made the country rich. Almost overnight the golden city of the Abbasids, Baghdad, become the capital of the poor and insecure province of the II Khan kings called Al Iraq Al Arabi. Even then, the Mongols hadn't done their worst.
Tamurlane, massacred thousands more Baghdadis in 1401 and destroyed mosques, houses, schools. With the coming of the Safawid Emperors of Persia things improved for time;  Shah Ismail, for example, revived commerce with Baghdad. Later came the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, who rebuilt in 1534 a number of buildings including the mosques of Abu Hanifa, Kadhimain and Sheikh Abdul Qader Al-Gailani, the founder of a dervish sect who died in 1253. (The Sheikh Abdul Qader shrirn owns a library of thirty-five thousand volumes, including a fine collection of Korans).
     But in spite of these admirable interludes of construction and restoration, they remained, generally speaking, interludes. For example, Baghdad was attacked and blockaded by the Persians alone in 1587, 1604 and 1605. And when, in 1638, sultan Murad's vengeful soldiers entered through the Bab Al-Muadham Gate:
« they were so hot upon staying and plundering that they killed all they met, the whole night that this sacking lasted... In short, there were in Bagdat, one and thirty thousand pick'd and choise Soldiers, and Twenty thousand Volunteers, all of whom we have put to the sord, not one having escaped to carry the news to the other Towns of Persia »
Murad then energetically repaired Baghdad's mosques. From then on, Baghdad had to tolerate a succession of Turkish Pashas (governors).

TO BE CONTINUD SOON!

BAGHDAD, The golden age of Arab & Islamic culture. Caliphs, rulers, kings, and its presidents, since its
foundation in year 762 A.D. (145 H).

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