The Glory that Was Baghdad (Historical background)

The Wilson Quarterly ^ | Spring 2003 | Jason Goodwin

[quidnunc]

Baghdad has not figured so prominently in the news since the days when the caliph Harun al-Rashid earned his place in the Arabian Nights and Sinbad the Sailor flew to safety on a giant roc. That was 1,200 years ago, and today’s city is no longer a place where Neo-Platonist philosophers lock horns with Islamic theologians and palace ladies eat off jewel-studded golden platters. But Baghdad in the age of the Abbasid caliphs was the greatest of all cities, the political and military heart of the Islamic Empire at its height. Between its founding in A.D.762 and its destruction in 1258, the city was home to a huge advance in the breadth of human knowledge, so that it is remembered today not only as a place of pomp and luxury but as a city of scholarship and philosophy. Endowed with hospitals and mosques, adorned with palaces and gardens, the Baghdad of the Arabian Nights was a site of translation and transformation.

The second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur, chose to create Baghdad on the middle reaches of the Tigris River, whence a dense network of canals stretched the 30 miles to the Euphrates River. He was consciously founding a new dynasty to replace the old Umayyad caliphs of Damascus, whose authoritarian rule had led to their recent downfall, and he had taken great care in selecting the site for the city. Ten thousand years before, farming had begun on the lands between the two rivers, and there in the heartlands of old Sumer, the first cities, Ur and Ctesiphon, Babylon and Agade, had risen and decayed, littering the region with their remains and bequeathing it an intricate web of irrigation canals. The land was level, productive, and cheap. ‘This,” said al-Mansur, “is an excellent place for a military camp,” and in 762 he laid the first brick with his own hands. For the next four years, architects, carpenters, masons, smiths, and construction workers, said to have numbered 100,000, labored to turn his plan into reality. The cost — 4,883,000 dirhams — was scrupulously noted by the small army of accountants whose existence was a significant feature of the Abbasid regime.

The old imperial capital, Damascus, had been a city of the desert, surrounded by Arab tribes, but Baghdad lay like a hinge between the Semitic world of the Middle East and the Turkic and Perso-Indian lands beyond, reflecting the shifting center of Islamic gravity toward central Asia. The Arabs had made repeated efforts to conquer Constantinople, center of Byzantine Christendom, but the Abbasids largely turned from the Byzantine borders. Though Arabic remained the language of the state, the new capital was less obviously an Arab city, for Islam itself had outgrown its purely Arabic origins. Baghdad mirrored the growth of the new, multiracial Islam, shot through with influences from India, Alexandria, and, above all, Persia itself. Even among the caliphs, the Arab blood thinned from generation to generation. Instead of the old, rigid, tribal divisions, with their aristocracy of blood and book, pen and sword, the caliph ruled over a new class of men who lived by their wits. If Baghdad was a city of scholars, it was a city of businessmen, craftsmen, and merchants, too.

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[ChEng]

Your point being? Egypt and many other places were once great. Look at Egypt, Europe and Jersey City today.

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[sd-joe]

Interesting history.

[sully777]

"This too was once darkness" -- Josef Conrad's Heart of Darkness

[Larry381]

Maybe we should just knock off about a thousand years of it's so-called civilization with some of our quite uncivilized munitions and then start over from scratch by repopulating it with Poles, Koreans and Free Cubans. I dare anybody to fu*k with that bunch.

[Colorado Doug]

But in 803 the Barmakids’ happy reign came to a sudden—and unexplained—end. The vizier’s head was struck off and his body cut in two, and the parts were displayed for a year on the city bridges.

Some things never change.

[Cronos]

The 0 was invented in India by Arya something in the 3rd century B.C.

[dix]

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