City of Peace

City of Peace August 26, 2014

Justin Marozzi’s recently released Baghdad vividly recounts the glory and anguish of a city that was, for several centuries, considered the “most prosperous city in  the world.”

It’s name has been variously translated as “Gift of God” or “Founded by God.” Founded by the Abbasid Caliph Mansur in the eighth century, the circular city was a marvel of engineering and culture. The area had already been settled by Nestorian monks, and there had been a small settlement before the Nestorians got there. But nothing like the city that Mansur created.

In his Best Division for the Knowledge of the Regions, the medieval Arab geographer Mukaddasi called it “the city of well- being; in it are the talents of which men speak, and elegance and courtesy. Its winds are balmy and its science penetrating. In it are to be found the best of everything and all that is beautiful. From it comes everything worthy of consideration, and every elegance is drawn towards it. All hearts belong to it, all wars are against it and every hand is raised to defend it. It is too renowned to need description, more glorious than we could possibly portray it, and is indeed beyond praise.”

Not everyone was equally impressed. Writing much later in the seventeenth century, Samuel Purchas claimed that the city got its name “Citie of Peace” from “a Monke called Baghdad.” As the capital city of the Caliphate, it was in Purchas’s eyes “the Devil’s Jerusalem.”

In Marozzi’s view, Mansur’s complex character prefigured the history of the city, at once refined and brutal. Tabari’s History of Prophets and Kings records that his favorite phrase as “Cut off his head.” Tabari wonders how Mansur had any time to do anything but execute, so numerous were the executions. A macabre tales is told that after Mansur’s death, a hidden crypt was discovered, thought to be full of treasure in fact full of the rotting corpses of Shia enemies, each with a tag in the ear identifying the body.

Marozzi takes the story of the city right through to the present. He details the evacuation of the Christian population over recent decades, and the virtual extinction of Jews. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews made up nearly a third of the population, and 40% in 1917. Now only seven or eight Jews remain (not a misprint).

It’s a tragic tale, and leaves the reader wishing that Baghdad’s future will not be more of the same.


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