The Glory that Was Baghdad
By Jason Goodwin
As printed in the Wilson
Quarterly, Spring 2003
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.
Baghdad
stood for a new kind of imperial, Islamic
unity that transcended the old racial connection
between the Arabs and their faith to embrace
people of many different races and backgrounds.
As the home of the caliph, it was to be
the center of a world that would be incorporated
by degrees into the dar ul-Islam, the Realm
of Peace, for which the city was first and
officially named. Perhaps it was to express
the notion that Baghdad stood as the point
around which all the world revolved that
al-Mansur first laid out his plan for the
city in ashes, and revealed it to be a perfect
circle.
The Round City, few traces
of which remain, was a company town 1,000
cubits (about 500 yards) in diameter-a moated,
gated, crenellated bastion of government,
a bunker for the high command. The merchants
were soon expelled beyond its walls, and
the palaces of the empire's grandees crept
closer to the Tigris. AT the city's core
lay the mosque and the first palace, known
as the Golden Gate, which captured the popular
imagination. Its halls were roofed in soaring
domes, the largest of which was green and
130 feet high. The city walls were 40 feet
wide and 90 feet high, with ramps for horsemen
to reach the top; they were quartered precisely
by gates high enough to let a lancer pas
through without lowering his lance, and
secured by gates of iron so heavy that a
company of doormen was required to open
and close each of them.
Almost everyone in Baghdad
was on the caliph's payroll-army men, members
of the imperial family, and officials-and
on their salaries the city spread rapidly.
It grew toward the Tigris, incorporating
the irrigation canals, throwing up palaces,
mosques, bazaars, ad houses for the common
people. The City became, over the years,
a city within a city, a citadel. As Baghdad
grew, it ceased to be merely a bureaucratic
capital and center of military power and
became a city of extravagant fortune, linked
to the ends of the earth by land and sea.
It took rice, wheat, and linen from Egypt,
glass from Lebanon, fruits from Syria, weapons
and pearls from Arabia, minerals and dyes
from India, perfumes an drugs from Persia,
silk and musk from China, slaves from Africa
and central Asia. It is still remembered
as the home of that mythic traveler and
trader, Sinbad the Sailor, whose story first
appears in the pages of that quintessential
product of Baghdad, the Arabian Nights.
Baghdad was a party town,
and some of the most sumptuous entertainments
were laid on by the Barmakids, a family
whose name became synonymous with openhanded
generosity. Under the new office of vizier,
a position the Barmakids monopolized for
three generations, the Abbasids established
a powerful bureaucratic elite to supervise
the gather in g of taxes and revenues. Highly
iterate and urbane, these officials were
frequently men of Persian origin who wrote
and spoke inn Arabic, the language of the
state and the Quran. Under the Barmakids'
patronage, elements of Iranian thought and
literature were drawn in to the Islamic
mainstream. The Barmakids grew fabulously
rich and entertained their friends and allies
in grand palaces constructed on the eastern
side of the capita. They endowed mosques
and built canals and established a kind
of arts council to reward poets. 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.
Power, after all, lay with
a single family, and it was the fourth and
most famous of the Abbasid caliphs, Harun
al-Rashid (ruler from 786-809), who set
the Baghdad style. The marriage of his son
al-Ma'mun to the daughter of a governor,
for example, was marked by a party at which
ambergris candles lit the palace, the couple
sat on a golden mat studded with sapphires,
and everyone of distinction received, as
a going-home present, a ball of musk in
which was tucked the deed to a valuable
piece of land or to a slave.
But Baghdad's contribution
to history went well beyond the frivolity
inspired by huge wealth. The rapid growth
of the Islamic Empire brought Muslims into
contact with peoples of other faiths and
traditions whose intellectual future was
more refined and who presented a lively
challenge to Islamic orthodoxy. Under the
patronage of Harun and his son al-Ma'mun,
the scholars drawn so the city began to
release some of the intellectual currents
of the ancient world into the mainstream
of Islamic thought. Just as Baghdad was
an entrepot for the world's goods, so it
became a clearing-house for the higher sciences
of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, law,
and astrology.
In
Baghdad, three of the four schools of Islamic
jurisprudence were established Arabic numerals
(which the Arabs, more correctly, call Hindi
numerals) were adopted, and zero, that elusive
concept so vital to mathematical calculation,
was probably invented. Under the great Persian
physician al-Razi, Baghdad's hospital set
new standards for hygiene. The Muslims also
took to philosophy. Al-Kindi, the first
and perhaps the greatest Arab Neo-Platonist
philosopher, served as a tutor to al-Ma'mun's
son and heir. He was the mathematician and
a physician, a musician and an astrologer,
who wrote dozens of books on subjects as
varied as optics and health and once used
music to cue a neighbor's paralysis. In
an effort to synthesize Platonic and Quranic
explanations of the world, he fell back
on the idea that truth was double edged:
A simple religious truth brought comfort
to ordinary people, and a higher, interpretive
truth was vouchsafed to the learned. AS
one of his successors, Avicenna, remarked,
"Religious law makes it illegal for the
ignorant to drink wine, but intelligence
makes it legal for the intellectual."
In Baghdad, Syrian scholars
with a profound knowledge of Greek oversaw
the translation of most of the treasures
of ancient science. If not for the scholars,
those treasures would certainly have been
lost. Ptolemy 's work on astronomy, translated
into Arabic in 829 by a member of a pagan
Syrian sect that worshiped the stars, became
the Almagest; it survived in Arabic long
after the Greek original had disappeared
and laid down the structure of astronomy
up to the time of Copernicus. The works
of Euclid and Archimedes, Galen the herbalist,
Hippocrates the doctor, and the philosophers
Plato and Aristotle became known in translation
to the Arab world centuries before they
filtered to the West through Muslim Spain.
One newfangled doctrine of
the period held that although the Quran
was the word of God, it had been created
in time and was not coeternal with him-a
position suggesting that the Quran might
be reinterpreted, even modified, for anew
age. The later Abbasids embraced this doctrine,
which allowed them considerable room for
maneuver. But their religious heterodoxy
added to the discontents that were already
roiling the caliphate. In 836, during al-Mu'tasim's
reign, the Abbasids abandoned Baghdad for
anew capital at Samarra, 80 miles to the
north, under the protection of an army of
Turkic horsemen recruited from the steppes.
In Baghdad itself, opposition to the regime
was marked by the renewed veneration of
Muhammad (d.632) and a barrage of scholarly
inquiry into the hadith, a compendium of
his doings and sayings. Sunni orthodoxy
developed out of his reaction.
The caliphs returned to Baghdad
some six decades years later, after years
of factional fighting and civil war had
severely weakened the machinery of the state
and damaged the intricate irrigation systems
on which the region's prosperity depended.
Unable to match their revenues to their
expenditures, the caliphs were forced to
give away more and more rights and lands
to the distant rulers who were nominally
under their dominion. The breakup of the
empire across the Muslim world was mirrored
locally by the rise of warlords such as
ibn-Ra'iq, who in 936 was handed complete
control of Baghdad and invited to take over
the administration of the empire.
The caliphate became the pawn
of the powerful military adventurers who
reduced the Abbasids to figureheads, and
the rich lands around the city fell into
relative decay. Spain had slipped from Baghdad's
control as early as 756, central Asia went
after 820, and Egypt was lost to the rival
Fatimid dynasty in 909. A century and a
half after the founding of Baghdad, the
basis for a single Islamic empire under
Arab rule had disappeared. Baghdad itself
became storied: The legendary generosity
of the Barmakids, the luxury of the Golden
Gate, the rovings of Sinbad, the wisdom
of Harun al-Rashid, the tales of the philosophers,
all passed, almost in a twinkling, into
the realm of memory and myth.
In
1258, a huge Mongol army out of the steppe,
drilled in the ways of victory and pitilessness,
massed before the city gates. Baghdad was
already out of shape. "This old city," wrote
the Andalusian traveler ibn-Jubayr in 1184,
"still serves as the Abbasid capital…but
most of its substance is gone. Only the
name remains…The city is but a trace of
a vanished encampment, a shadow of a passing
ghost." The legacy of Baghdad's science,
translations, philosophy, and religious
teachings had been spread from Spain to
the borders of China, and its military genius
had been transmitted to the Turks, who eventually
spawned the empire of the Ottomans and carried
Islam not only across the walls of Byzantium
but deep into eastern Europe.
Genghis Khan and his Mongols
had already swept through the old Islamic
cities of Bukhara and Samarkand when his
grandson Hulagu opened the siege of Baghdad.
There was, it seems, no on e in this great
military camp left to defend it. The last
Abbasid caliph offered an unconditional
surrender, but Hulagu refused to hear him.
A breach was opened in the walls on February
10, 1258, and Hulagu's army poured into
the defenseless city to slaughter everyone-the
caliph and the Abbasid family, the court
officials, the mullahs, and the people in
the streets. The chronicles number the dead
at 700,000. Libraries, houses, palaces,
and mosques were set ablaze. Books that
would not burn were thrown into the Tigris,
whose water ran black for days. When the
stench of death grew overpowering, the invaders,
in classical Mongol fashion, removed themselves
from the charred and ruined city-to return
in the weeks that followed to cut down the
survivors.
But the place continued to
exist. Its shattered remains, and those
who lived among them, were devastated again
by Tamerlane in 1401, and for the next 500
years the town served as a minor provincial
capital within the Ottoman Empire. A Frenchman
who visited in 1651 drew a map of the ragged
town that hardly differs from the maps the
British prepared when they occupied it in
1917, but so utterly had Baghdad been forgotten
in his day that the Frenchman called the
place Babylon instead.
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