Far away to the southeast from Iraq, in the oasis trading towns of Mecca and Medina, a new religion was being born. When Islam reached Iraq, it would become interwoven with existing institutions and ideas, transforming both but being transformed itself. Understanding Iraqi history and current events without an appreciation of what it was and what it became is impossible. Here I will single out those elements that are essential to Iraqi history. I begin with Islam’s birthplace, Mecca.
Viewed from Europe, Mecca was almost unbelievably remote. Going there from France or Italy would have been an arduous and dangerous expedition of many months by sailing boat and camel caravan. However, Mecca was not quite as provincial a town as this suggests. Viewed in its own perspective, Mecca was the focal point of a complex of trading routes. Caravans regularly went back and forth to Yemen, where Meccan merchants met traders from India and the Spice Islands. Other caravans crossed the Great Nafud desert to the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers at the Persian Gulf where they met Persian and Central Asian merchants. Some went north to Damascus, where they bartered with traders from all parts of the vast Byzantine Empire and from the new towns of southern Europe. Traffic went both ways. Mecca was at least visited by groups of Christians and Jews. And Arabs came from all over the Arabian peninsula to attend yearly fairs, enter into poetry contests, and worship at Mecca’s shrine, the Kaaba. Judged by the standards of the time and place, Mecca was a cosmopolitan center.
Mecca was also crassly materialistic. It was a merchant community, heedless of its poor and downtrodden, with its eyes firmly fixed on commerce. Until he was about twenty-five years of age, Muhammad was a merchant and presumably shared the values of his colleagues. Then he began to find the attitude of his fellow citizens deeply disturbing. Occasionally, he left Mecca for the desert, to fast and reflect on the sins of mankind.
At this point, the non-Muslim historian pauses to look at Muhammad’s personal experiences and motivations—his knowledge of the world, his alienation from his community, and his mysticism. To a believing Muslim, these personal attributes appear irrelevant: what mattered was that in his unknowable wisdom, God visited Muhammad with his commandments for mankind. Muslim and non-Muslim agree, however, that when he was about forty, Muhammad embarked on his religious mission. As he told his kinsmen and friends, and as the Quran (Koran) confirms, he had a vision of the angel Gabriel, who ordered him to “Recite in the Name of the Lord.” The stunned and frightened Muhammad is said to have stammered, “But, what shall I recite?” Getting no immediate answer, he recounts that he spent a lonely and frustrating period without further guidance. During this time, he often went apart alone in the desert, meditating and fasting. Finally his visions resumed. Then he began to transmit to those who would listen, in a stream of commandments that poured forth until his death in 632, what his followers much later gathered as the Quran.
Muhammad took no personal credit for these commandments: he described himself as merely a messenger (Arabic: rasul) for God’s Word. Other men, his predecessors, he said, were true prophets. They included not only virtuous folk figures of Arabia, but Jews from the Old Testament and, above all, Jesus. Jesus, we learn from the Quran, towers above Muhammad in God’s favor. While the Quran denies that Jesus was the son of God “who neither begets nor was begotten,” it also proclaims that Jesus was so close to God that he alone of all men was allowed to perform a miracle. Islam makes no such claim for Muhammad. What Muhammad says he did was only to bring God’s message, the same message that had been delivered earlier to Moses and to Jesus, to the Arabs in their language, Arabic.
The Meccan oligarchs were furious. Mecca was the center for cults that justified their position in the city and were woven into their commerce throughout Arabia. In their eyes, Muhammad’s message was treason. They decided to kill him. That was dangerous while his close relatives protected him. So the city leaders put pressure on them to repudiate him. When they appeared about to do so, an act that would have made him, by local custom, an outlaw, he fled the city.
Some months later, inhabitants of the little town later known as “the City [of the Prophet],” Medina, invited Muhammad to arbitrate a long-standing local dispute. That invitation gave him and the little group of Meccans he had convinced of his mission a new opportunity. Wisely, Muhammad sent his followers ahead so that when he arrived, it was as a prophet armed.
The town he encountered was far more primitive than Mecca. It resembled the little agricultural and animal-herding towns of Iraq during the Ubaid period several thousand years before. Indeed, it was hardly a town at all. More a scattered collection of hamlets, it had no urban institutions. It was divided, occasionally bitterly, into several clans of Arabs and a small community of Jews.
Muhammad’s first task was to integrate his followers. To do this, he arranged for each immigrant to be adopted as a “brother” by some member of the resident Arab groups. Like most things Muhammad did, this was to set a precedent for the future: all Muslims are enjoined to be brothers (Arabic: ikhwan) one to another. On this basis, he made peace among the Arab clans and the resident Jewish community in an arrangement that has rather grandly been called “the Constitution of Medina.” Both the emphasis on law and the recognition of a protected position for non-Muslims would also indelibly mark Islamic society.
Muhammad’s second task was to protect the town from marauding bedouin. The bedouin, whom as an urban man he profoundly distrusted, were in the pay of the Meccans (who used them to guard caravans) and were accustomed to raiding agricultural lands when they ran short of supplies. Against them in the aggregate, Muhammad had no military capacity. But he knew that they were at war among themselves. This fact not only saved his community then but profoundly influenced Iraqi history up to the present time. It is a part of Arabic history that is not well understood. Briefly, it can be seen as follows.
Because of the limited resources of the desert, no group could be large. The “tribe” of hundreds or thousands was only a theoretical unit. In practice no group larger than fifty or so individuals could stay together because their animals would exhaust the nearby grazing and water. The effective unit, that is, the group that tented together, herded animals in common, and protected one another, was usually made up only of the descendants of a single man over a few generations. Within this “clan” (Arabic: qawm) there could be no fighting, while among clans there could be no permanent peace.
What Muhammad did was to recast the incipient Muslim community into the form of a clan. As in a kinship-based clan, in his new religion-based clan, there could be no fighting; “brothers” had the obligation to protect one another. But, unlike a traditional clan, which had no way to align itself with other clans, the new society welcomed adherents provided they professed Islam. The new society, the “religious clan,” soon became larger than any kinship clan. What happened then was almost mechanical: the entire force of the new Islamic society was brought to bear on single nomad clans, one after another. Each clan found itself unable to resist its traditional rivals, other bedouin clans, and the Muslims. Since it knew of no customary way to amalgamate with traditional rivals, it risked being crushed between them and the new Muslim society. The only way it could protect itself was by joining the only side that was prepared to welcome it: the Muslims. Each new addition made the Muslims even more overwhelmingly powerful. So, like a desert sand storm, Muhammad’s followers swept across Arabia. When he died in 632, eleven years after he had fled Mecca, almost all Arabia belonged to his “clan.”
Spectacularly successful as the rise to power had been, its collapse was likely to be even more rapid. The bedouin looked upon Muhammad as they looked upon clan patriarchs. Loyalty was owed to him, not to the new religion. As the Quran chastises the bedouin, they were merely those who “submit” (Arabic: muslim) not those who really “believe” (Arabic: mumin). Although Muhammad must have realized how fragile his community was, he did not plan for what he must have realized would happen upon his death. For their part, his inner group of followers apparently so venerated him that they were shocked, almost numbed, by it. They had no precedents upon which to draw.
What happened then was partly accidental. Muhammad’s closest associates knew that he had been planning a foray northward into Byzantine territory. They decided that they should honor his plan. The raid was to go ahead. It did and was successful. When the raiding party returned, they found nearby bedouin on the point of attacking Medina. We do not know exactly what happened then, but apparently the bedouin were so astonished by the booty the raiders had brought back that they quickly rediscovered their loyalty.
The implications were not, of course, lost on Muhammad’s followers. They recognized that they must find a leader to continue at least the civil aspects of Muhammad’s activities. To this end, they selected the man who had occasionally led the daily prayers when Muhammad was indisposed. He was the person who “stood in front” (Arabic: imam). So this man, Muhammad’s father-in-law, Abu Bakr, was named as his “successor” or caliph (Arabic: khalif). Abu Bakr immediately decided to repeat the gambit that had saved Medina, a raid on the rich lands of the north.
Raiding the rich lands of the north was traditional among the hungry, threadbare bedouin of the Arabian deserts. To stop their raiding completely was impossible. The bedouin were highly mobile: on their camels, they could attack, plunder, and retreat into the desert before the cumbersome infantry of the Byzantine Romans or Sasanian Persians could muster defenders. So both of the great empires had opted for a sort of patrol (Arabic: badia) composed of Arabs to police the desert frontier. The Byzantines recognized and subsidized a group known for their leaders as the Ghassanids that ranged along the settled boundary in what is now Syria and Jordan, while the Persians did the same with a group known as the Lakhmids who headquartered at the little town of Hira in Iraq. This arrangement was cheaper and more effective than stationing garrisons everywhere the bedouin might strike.
The system worked well for generations, but in the early years of the seventh century, the two empires had fought each another to an exhausted standstill. In 611 the Persians had invaded Byzantine territory, and in 614 captured Jerusalem; the Byzantines had rallied and fought back. Doing so disrupted tax collection, destroyed crops, and displaced or killed large numbers of people. Both empires were so short of money that they cut the subsidies they had paid to their Arab “policemen.” The Persians dispensed with the Lakhmids altogether and appointed a Persian as governor of Hira. That was shortsighted at best, but what the Byzantines did was worse. They had long tolerated the sect of Christianity, Monophysitism, practiced by their Ghassanid clients, but in a sharp reversal, Byzantine authorities tried to force upon them Greek Orthodoxy. Neither the Byzantine Arabs nor the Persian Arabs were willing to defend their old patrons. What had been planned as a barrier became a bridge.
After a series of probes had revealed these weaknesses, the Arab invasions began in earnest in 633. In a lightning raid, using tactics the bedouin were good at, surprise and mobility, they rode to the outskirts of the Persian capital, Ctesiphon, just outside modern Baghdad, and then made straight across the desert to Damascus. Astonishing the Byzantine garrison, they looted the city. Then, hovering around Byzantine forces, the Arabs defeated them piecemeal. Combats, retreats, raids, and sieges went on month after month. While the Byzantine forces were depleted by the constant marching and fighting, the Arab forces grew with each encounter because bedouin were being lured from Arabia by tales of vast riches ripe for the taking. The climactic battle took place in the middle of the summer of 636 when the Arabs destroyed a Byzantine army led by the emperor himself on the Yarmuk River in what is today Jordan.
Probably as astonished as the emperor by the event, the caliph came to Jerusalem, whence Muhammad had dreamed he had ascended to heaven, to organize the conquests. Abu Bakr’s only precedent was what Muhammad had done in Medina, and he essentially copied that model. Submitting Arabs were to constitute the Muslim community while non-Muslims—both Jews and Christians, “People of the Book [the Bible]”—were to live in peace, managing their own affairs and following their own religions, under the protection of the Muslims. No attempt was made later there or in Iraq to proselytize. As the Quran had said, Islam was the religion of the Arabs that Muhammad had brought to them in their language, Arabic. In any event, they were too busy conquering the world to spend much time on religion. Turning east, Arab tribal forces defeated a Persian army and captured the Sasanian Persian capital at Ctesiphon. Persian rule in Iraq collapsed.
In 644 a Persian prisoner took revenge. He assassinated the second of Muhammad’s successors, the caliph Umar. Again the inner circle of Muhammad’s followers met and selected as Umar’s successor a weak and aged man who was quickly co-opted by his kinsmen, Muhammad’s old enemies, the Umayyad clan, who constituted the Meccan oligarchy. Proving that blood is thicker than faith, the caliph Uthman began to distribute much of the booty being gathered by the victorious Arab armies as well as key governorships of provinces to his kinsmen. Muhammad’s followers were outraged. Within a few years, rebellions had to be suppressed in Iraq and elsewhere. Finally, in 655, a group of discontented Arabs assassinated Uthman.
This group may be taken as representing the generation that had grown up in twenty years since Muhammad’s death. Probably much of their discontent arose from their feeling that others had profited more than they. But there was a more significant reason. The nature of the Islamic “clan” had changed. Grown far beyond its original scope, it had become a community (Arabic: ummah).
The basis of new community, as Muhammad and his successors envisaged it, of course, was Islam. Joining was made easy. But the assumption of Muhammad and his first followers was that those who joined would be Arabs. When they said “Muslim,” they also meant “Arab.” Muslims should not seek to convert non-Arabs but should encourage them to become like the Muslims in their own communities. That was the basis of toleration of Jews and Christians.
Toleration certainly did not satisfy those who saw that the main beneficiaries of the new order were Arabs. To join the dominant community became a major aim of the conquered peoples. Some of those who converted were the children of Arab fathers and alien mothers, while others were Greeks, Persians, and peoples of other ethnic groups who were beginning to speak Arabic and follow Arab customs. The traditional Arab way for individuals to join a society was to become its “clients.” For this status, the Arabs had a number of terms. The one that became widely used in the time of Uthman and later was mawali. Although their position could be explained in a traditional manner, the mawali actually occupied an unprecedented position: as converts to Islam, they were “accepted” as fellow Muslims, but, as non-Arabs, they were clearly not a part of the ruling elite. Those with the greatest skills and with access to important information, such as Persian bureaucrats, were often confirmed in their positions with associated privileges. But the vast majority did not have these attributes. They were relegated to a secondary status.
For those of the “marginal” people who were the offspring of the Arab invaders and Iraqi women, discrimination was particularly obnoxious. Some were men of high culture who resented illiterate bedouin waxing fat off what had been the land of their maternal ancestors. Their resentment would become a major force in future events. Residues linger even today. It was in this sullen atmosphere that the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad tried to establish his caliphate.
In the context of his times, Ali was a moderate. He was opposed by three parties, fundamentalists who became known as the “those who went out” (Arabic: Kharijis), a few rivals from the Muhammad’s early followers, and the Umayyad clan who had profited from Uthman’s rule. With relative ease, Ali overcame the old guard. The fundamentalists were a more serious threat. They had initially supported him but demanded that he condemn Uthman as a “tyrant” and so justify his assassination. When he would not do exactly as they demanded, they deserted his army. Without them, his army was no match for the Umayyad clan. Its leading member had been made governor of Damascus by Uthman. Muawiyah was a skillful administrator and had used his time as governor well; he alone commanded a well-organized army.
The major scene of action was in Iraq, where Ali had gone to try to recruit the Arab tribes who had settled there. Ali needed an army, but he realized that a crushing victory, even if possible, would destroy the very objective he sought. So he tried to use a shifting combination of fighting and negotiation, and, as is often the fate of moderates, he was misunderstood and opposed by both factions. After a series of pitched battles, truces, and conferences, he was murdered by a fellow Muslim in the new capital of Iraq, Kufa, in 661.
Ali’s death cleared the way for the Umayyad clan, and they seized their opportunity. Drawing on the model of the Byzantine client kings of the Ghassanids, they created a vast new “Arab Kingdom,” in which they legitimized and popularized their rule by a series of brilliant military campaigns across Africa, southern Europe, and Central Asia. Outwardly, the Umayyad caliphate achieved a military success rarely matched by any empire. Inwardly, the story was quite otherwise. The discontents that had begun in the generation after the death of Muhammad spread and grew more bitter. The conquered peoples, particularly those of Iraq, were attracted to Islam but were repelled by the Arab government. They expressed this in two ways: on the one hand, they asserted strongly their belief in Islam, but an Islam they defined in a non-Arab fashion, and on the other hand, they became involved in revolutionary movements.
Their opposition to the state focused on the caliphate. After the murder of Ali, Muawiyah held power virtually unopposed and arranged that upon his death, in 680, his son Yazid would succeed him. Since Yazid had no relationship to Muhammad, his followers, or his faith, revolts broke out in Iraq. There Arab tribesmen and their half-breed progeny invited Ali’s son Husain, a grandson of Muhammad, to come to Kufa, where they promised to support him. He got little support and was soon besieged by troops supporting Yazid. When he refused to surrender, he was killed. The date of his death, the tenth day of the lunar month Muharram in the Hijrah year 61 (the Islamic year dates from Muhammad’s flight from Mecca), has become the most important date in the calendar of the “Partisans of Ali” (Arabic: Shiis) ever since. For them, it is a day of unremitting shame: the time when they failed to support the man in whose body resided “the spirit of God.”
Husain’s death did not stop the revolt against Yazid; sieges of Medina and Mecca ended in the execution of many of Muhammad’s closest companions. With them out of the way, Yazid was able to solidify the Umayyad dynasty. It was to last almost another century. But it was a century of periodic revolt and clandestine revolutionary activity in which the most dedicated were the “partisans” of Ali. Among them, the “martyrdom” of Husain unleashed emotional forces that were to have profound and lasting effects. Husain became the poignant figurehead of the revolutionary movement that would overthrow the Umayyad caliphate, the Hashimiyyah.
The Hashimiyyah was the most extreme of a number of anti-Umayyad, mainly Shia, movements that grew up primarily in southern Iraq in the early years of the eighth century. From Kufa the movement spread over the entire eastern part of the Umayyad empire among both Arabs and mawali who had converted to Islam but who were still strongly influenced by the Zoroastrianism or Buddhism of their ancestors. Through them, mystical religious ideas and practices were woven into the revolutionary movement. The very mystery of the movement lent it an emotional appeal that was lacking in rival movements. People flocked under its black banners from all over Persia and Iraq. By 747 it had become unstoppable. Town after town fell to the advancing rebels on the roads to Iraq. In 749 they crossed the Euphrates to advance on Kufa, where their movement had begun.
Then something peculiar happened. On the road to Kufa, the revolutionary movement was hijacked. While its adherents had marched to restore the Party of Ali to the caliphate, suddenly that objective was replaced by the aim of promoting a different branch of the Muhammad’s kinsmen. How this happened, we do not know, but we do know that those who had fought for the Shia cause felt they had been cheated of the fruits of their victory. That would become a persistent theme in Shia experience over the centuries that followed.
The winners were the branch of Muhammad’s family known from one of their ancestors as the Abbasids. The change was much more significant than merely the substitution of one branch of the clan for another: no sooner had the first leader of the Abbasids taken power than he revealed that he was not a Shii but a Sunni. Lest this seem merely a recondite matter, we should compare what happened in Iraq to a similar struggle between Catholics and Protestants in England: convulsed by religious conflict, the Protestant winners beheaded King Charles I and put Oliver Cromwell in power. When the monarchy was restored, Charles II and James II secretly espoused Catholicism. Their action, in turn, provoked the Protestant “Glorious Revolution.” In seventeenth-century England as in eighth-century Iraq, politics was defined by religiosity so that the personal faith of the ruler became supremely important, even vital, to his followers and opponents. Both quickly learned that truth.
Having proclaimed his true belief, the first Abbasid caliph suppressed the Hashimiyyah and other Shia movements in Iraq while his armies drove the Umayyads out of Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. He had accomplished these tasks when he died four years after seizing Kufa. It was his brother, Mansur, who then in 754 began to organize the regime. During the quarter century of his reign, he created a new administration patterned on the old Sasanian Persian system and headed by a family recently converted from Buddhism, the Barmakids. Despite, or perhaps in part because of, the revolutionary past, Mansur turned the Abbasids away from the relatively open, Arab style of the Umayyads toward the more monarchical court ritual of the Persians and, despite his emphasis on Sunni orthodoxy, favored Persian converts (Arabic: mawali) for government office. To house his regime, Mansur built a new imperial capital, which he named “the City of Peace” (Arabic: Madinatu’l-Salam) but the old name, Baghdad, stuck and has been used ever since. It wasn’t only the name that proved enduring: the city was built atop ruins dating from Babylonian times and the area in which I lived in the 1950s, known as Bustan al-Khass, dates from Mansur’s era. Through fire and flood, invasion and plague, the city endured. It is one of the most striking features of the Iraqis that, even when they forget their past, they preserve or recreate it.
Founded as a palace complex, Baghdad soon developed into a huge and flourishing manufacturing and commercial center. Like the ancient Sumerian cities and like medieval cities in the Middle East, China, and Europe, it was divided by trade and profession so that leather workers were in one area, carpenters in another, and so on. Each of these districts was really a town within the city; several were enclosed in separate walls, served by separate mosques, schools, baths, and markets. In their districts, the protected “People of the Book,” Jews and Christians, were governed by their own officials, collected their own taxes, and worshipped in their own synagogues or churches. While their lives were often not easy, the minorities lived a far freer and certainly a safer life than contemporary Jews or Muslims in Europe. Even Zoroastrians, remnants of the old Persian religion who were not “People of the Book” and so not officially tolerated, also still lived in Baghdad. They were not many, but their numbers perhaps give a wrong impression of their influence. Even among orthodox Muslims, Zoroastrian customs remained popular. The Persian feasts of Nõ Rõz in the spring and Sada in the fall were widely celebrated. Even goods that were deplored or banned in formal Islam were openly sold and actively sought.
In some fields, Baghdad became preeminent. During the Dark Ages when few Europeans could read or write, it was famous for its manufacture of what was then a rare and esteemed luxury item, fine-quality paper. Some was shipped to still-literate Byzantium, but most was consumed locally in its thriving book trade. Far more literary than the city I knew in the 1950s, Baghdad then had more than a hundred booksellers at the Suq al-Warraqin (the paper sellers’ market). Much of what is today known of early Arabic literature and even of the grammar and syntax of the Arabic language dates from that period and was produced by scholars of whom some were Persian.
Merchants and craftsmen were organized, as in contemporary Europe, in guilds. The guilds were supposed to maintain the quality (and honesty) of their trades, to ensure that taxes were paid, and to care for their poorer members. Their ability to organize protests and to close their shops gave them a certain amount of protection against government rapacity. A strike in 1123 forced a caliph not only to drop an unpopular tax but also to return the moneys already collected. The same tactic is used today: merchants can paralyze a town by closing their shops.
Other than through the guilds, little attention was paid to the “upward” push of politics. Orders came down from above with little attention to the desires or fears of the inhabitants. But, from time to time, we see attempts to ameliorate conditions. One was an echo, unintended no doubt, of Roman practice. What the Romans attempted in the office of tribunus, something like an ombudsman, the Baghdadis tried through an official called a rais.
The position of women in Baghdad was less open than among the earlier Arabs. Sequestering of women has a curious history. In roughly contemporary times, women in widely differing civilizations were segregated in either place or dress, or both. Japanese women were hidden behind screens; Byzantine women were usually veiled; and Western European women wore the clothing that until recently we associated with Catholic nuns. What seems to have happened in Islamic society was that the Arab invaders saw that aristocrats sheltered their women, whereas peasants allowed them to walk free. As they fell under Persian influence, the Arabs increasingly restricted their women. But, as late as the twelfth century, women in Baghdad gathered with men at least in mosques and probably in other public places. Those who wished to assert women’s rights quoted a tradition of the Prophet Muhammad to the effect that in the law, men and women were equal; the tradition was patently false. However, quoting traditions was the customary way of justifying current behavior. So possibly women were freer than the existing chronicles tell us. Certainly women owned property and at least some played a role in politics. It is another of those characteristics of Iraqi history that Iraqi women became the most liberated in the Islamic East—well educated, engaged in all the professions, occupying senior government positions, and even serving in the armed forces during the twentieth century.
What we know of medieval Iraq comes from chronicles whose authors paid little attention to such “social” issues as the position of women but concentrated on the person of the ruler. The Abbasid caliph best known in the West, and indeed also among Arabs, is Harun ar-Rashid. The image we have of him comes mainly from numerous translations and movies derived from The Arabian Nights. His exploits, particularly his alleged penchant for wandering the streets of Baghdad in disguise to learn what the common people were doing and saying, became part of the folklore of later rulers. Even Saddam Husain was said to have tried occasionally to copy Harun.
What Harun did of more lasting consequence was to destroy the central command of his vast bureaucracy, the Barmakid family. Without them, the empire weakened. Province after province broke away under local dynasties that paid lip service instead of taxes to Baghdad. More important, Iraq’s complex irrigation system was allowed to fall into disrepair: dams broke and canals silted. Without proper drainage, much of south Iraq became the vast swamp it remained until the end of the twentieth century.
When Harun died, the previously suppressed split between the Persian and Arab wings of Abbasid supporters came into the open in the struggle for power of his two sons. Even the son who was strong enough to win, Mamun, was not able to stop the slide toward ruin. In the twenty years of his rule, the revenues of the central treasury declined drastically. As they did, provincial landlords and tax farmers squeezed the peasantry ever more tightly, and to replace the former “citizen soldiers” who had created the dynasty, foreign mercenaries were imported. In less than a century, the real rulers of the empire were not members of the Abbasid dynasty but Turkish soldiers from Central Asia.
In 836, in an attempt to escape the very soldiers he had brought into Iraq and the hostility of the citizens who quickly learned to hate these foreigners, the Caliph Muatasim moved out of Baghdad and began to create a new capital, indeed a refuge, for himself and his court on the site of a settlement dating back thousands of years to Ubaidian times at Samarra and not far from the capital city created by Sargon. There he built a sort of Iraqi Versailles, with vast gardens, a mosque three times the size of St. Peter’s basilica and palaces. Imperial grandeur was another of those themes that would be picked up by later rulers and carried to the extreme by Saddam Husain. Grand as Samarra was, it offered only a respite from unruly Baghdad. Soon caliphs fell like wheat to the sickle: in 861 the Turkish praetorians murdered a caliph and in short order imprisoned and then killed four of his successors. Samarra proved to be more of a jail than a refuge. In 892 the caliph and his court gave up and moved back to Baghdad.
While Baghdadis from caliphs to craftsmen were bossed by the Turkish soldiers, the peasants were left alone to dig and plow their small plots as they had done since Ubaidian times. Having little, they were not robbed. Remote and scattered, they were impervious to what happened in the capital. Their poverty would protect them for most of the next thousand years.
Very different was the experience of a new people who were brought into the far south. There, in the sweltering heat and high humidity, were minerals to be mined. To perform the heavy labor, Baghdad entrepreneurs began to import black slaves from Zanzibar. For the Zanj, as these people were known in Arabic history, life was miserable and short. They rose in revolt in the 870s. As with slaves in the Roman Empire a few centuries earlier, desperation made them competent soldiers. Not finally defeated until 883, they left a tradition of revolt against government and landlords that reverberated through the centuries down to our times.
In the decline of central administration and the loss of income from distant provinces, government revenues are believed to have fallen to only a few percent of those available to the first Abbasid caliphs. In a desperate effort to squeeze more out of the system, we hear of such macabre bits of bureaucracy as the “Office of Bribes” and the “Office of Confiscations.” We have no contemporary records of how the common people reacted, but the record shows that they did all they could then and until the present to avoid any contact with government. For them, government always equated to taxes and often meant ruin.
From its position as one of the mightiest empires of the world, the Abbasid caliphate became itself an object of plunder. Two groups deserve at least brief mention. From the northern Iranian highlands near the Caspian came the Buyid Shiis. Unlike the Turkish praetorians, they actually invaded Iraq and took Baghdad in 943. Under them the caliphate became a largely ceremonial institution resembling Momoyama Japan when its emperors similarly lived under the military elite we know as the shoguns. The Buyids were to dominate at least the capital of Iraq for more than a century until replaced by a new Turkish group, the Seljuks, who established an empire partially under the shadow of the caliphate.
Once again, as in the rise of Islam, Iraq was to be affected by events far afield. To understand why the Seljuks went to Iraq, we have to look right across Asia. Turks played a major role in Chinese history. It was a Turkish general who ended the Tang Dynasty in 907 and Turkish officers who established the “Five Dynasties” that preceded the Song Dynasty. The reestablishment of a strong, centralized rule in China in 960 by the Song closed the northeastern frontier to Turkish tribal incursions. Blocked in the east by the Chinese and under attack from the Mongol Ch’i-tan, the Turks turned west toward the Islamic world. Not as individual warriors, as in earlier centuries, they now came as whole tribes under their own leaders and intended to stay. In 1055 they captured Baghdad. For them Baghdad was only a camping ground; most of their activities were outside Iraq but in one area they left a lasting impact on Baghdad. It resulted from the actions of a Persian by the name of Nizam ul-Mulk, a prime minister to the Seljuk kings, who created one of the most impressive educational systems in the world of his time. He aimed to establish a college of higher learning in every significant city in the empire to train a competent civil service. His example stimulated others, and for a while there was a sort of mini-renaissance throughout Iraq and Persia. Nizam ul-Mulk was certainly one of the most extraordinary men of the Middle Ages, East or West. He planted in the minds of successive rulers an ideal of a government that could be measured by its dedication to education. Thus, even in the dictatorships of modern Iraq, leaders such as Abdul Karim Qasim and Saddam Husain applied themselves in his tradition.
Throughout these turbulent years, Iraq and particularly Baghdad evinced a remarkable tenacity. Rulers came and went; invasion followed invasion; floods drowned parts of the city and much of the countryside; dikes were broken and canals were allowed to silt. Mamun’s “City of Peace” had little peace, but the city continued to thrive despite all that men did to destroy it. Recovering somewhat, the caliphate itself seemed to draw new energy from the city. But, unpredictably, infinitely worse was to come.
Far off across Central Asia, the greatest conqueror of all time was born in 1155. Genghis Khan almost did not survive a violent youth. He spent it fighting first for survival and then for control of nomadic Mongol tribes. In early adulthood, he launched his by then powerful armies across Central Asia and deep into China. In 1220, just seven years before his death, one of the Mongol armies swept into western Asia, capturing and destroying the great city of Bukhara. Next the Mongols took Samarqand, looted it, and enslaved what they regarded as the useful members of the population, its craftsmen. The rest they massacred. The story is told that one woman sought to buy her life by giving her captors a large pearl. They agreed and demanded the pearl. She replied that for safekeeping she had swallowed it. They immediately disemboweled her. Finding several pearls in her stomach, they reported the incident to Genghis Khan. He then ordered that all the bodies of the fallen be cut open and checked for hidden treasure. Everywhere they went, the Mongols cut down the people, burned or leveled towns, and destroyed irrigation works so thoroughly that for hundreds of years the areas they swept across remained deserted. Some have never recovered.
The horror of this invasion disheartened the people of Iraq: what could they expect but death and destruction? The same terror swept through Europe and, probably, through those portions of China not yet invaded. Except for the Russians, who were already conquered, the Europeans were lucky, and the Iraqis had a short reprieve. Genghis Khan died in 1227. Then the invasions began afresh. In 1251 Genghis Khan’s grandson Mongke sent his brothers, Qubilai (Kublai Khan) to finish the conquest of China, and Hulagu westward into the Islamic countries. Hulagu focused on Baghdad, still one of the greatest cities in the world, with a population of about a million people. To beat down the walls, he brought a corps of Chinese siege specialists, but his main force was his disciplined cavalry armed with powerful compound bows. It was these mounted archers he turned on those troublesome peoples of the Iraqi-Persian mountains, the Kurds. Not for the last time would invaders seek their total destruction. Then he moved on toward Baghdad. There, Caliph Mustasim—whose name appropriately means in Arabic “one who seeks refuge”—asked for a truce. Hulagu’s answer was to storm the city.
Three Mongol armies completely surrounded Baghdad in January 1258. Bravely but foolishly, the caliph’s main force sallied forth from the walls. As they usually did, the Mongols pretended to retreat. Then they flooded the area behind the attacking Baghdadis, counterattacked, and slaughtered them. A few days later, the Mongols began their attack on the city, and in less than a week had breached its defenses. On February 10, in an incredible act of courage, Mustasim walked out of the city to surrender. He found no refuge. He was forced to order the inhabitants to lay down their arms and follow him. As they did so, the Mongols mercilessly cut them down.
Taking the caliph back into the city, Hulagu asked him where he kept his treasury. Then, probably something like the fanciful account of a chronicler actually happened. Upon being shown the contents of the treasury, Hulagu is said to have placed a tray heaped with gold before the terrified caliph and ordered him to eat. When the caliph replied that he could not eat gold, Hulagu taunted him for failing to use it to organize a better army. Resigned to his fate, the caliph is said to have mumbled that what he did was God’s will. Well, then, said the Buddhist Hulagu, your fate is also God’s will.
God’s will as interpreted by Hulagu came swiftly. Mustasim was allegedly rolled in a carpet and stamped to death. This was the Mongol custom to avoid shedding royal blood. Mustasim’s family and untold thousands—the contemporary guess was eight hundred thousand—of the townspeople were then killed, and the city was given over for a week of looting.
With that resilience we have witnessed in our own times in war-destroyed cities, those Baghdadis who were still alive set about recapturing as much as they could of their “normal” lives. What happened in Baghdad in the aftermath of Hulagu was comparable to what happened in Hiroshima after the atomic blast. Bricks were piled up again, goods were bought and sold, young people got married, children were born, life went on. But, unlike the people in modern disasters, the Baghdadis had no organized society to fall back on. For years following the actual massacres, starvation and disease took immense tolls.
The horror of the destruction and its aftermath still numbs the mind. Why did the Mongols do it? The best answer, I believe, is that they were trying to reduce the whole of Asia to the only kind of economy they knew, nomadic herding. For them, the cities, their populations, and, above all, their irrigation works were obstacles rather than assets. The vastness of China would eventually tame those who went south with Qubilai; Iraq was not large enough to tame those who rode with Hulagu.
After a turbulent century in which various rulers fought over the offal and the bones the Mongols had left behind, another worthy successor to Hulagu arrived on the scene. Baghdad was still high on his list of targets, although it had little of the riches or population of previous times. If Timur (Tamerlane) killed fewer, it was largely because there were fewer then alive. But he did the best he could with what he found. He is said to have slaughtered about ninety thousand Baghdadis in 1401. Like many of the great cities of western Asia, Baghdad had become a cemetery.
A century later, almost literally from the ashes, a new dynasty arose in Iran, the Safavids. As Shiis, they were attracted to Iraq because it was already the object of pilgrimage to the graves of their “saints.” So the new Safavid shah made a triumphal tour of the holy cities and, to celebrate in the now accustomed manner, massacred many of the leading Sunnis.
It is useful here to dilate on the difference between what Sunni Islam and Shia Islam had become in Iraq and Iran. Mongol massacres were far more devastating than the catastrophe contemporary Europeans suffered in the Black Death. Destruction of the physical infrastructure was beyond repair. But, even more important, defeat after defeat at the hands of the Mongols and their successors occasioned a loss of that sense of divine favor that worldly success had imparted to Islam. This loss particularly affected the Sunnis, who for centuries had been supreme. Decline of Sunni prestige and power opened the way for the quite different thrust of mysticism. Whereas the Sunni rulers had emphasized law, formal theology, and rationalism, the common people in their misery and fear hungered for the comforts to be got from mysticism and otherworldliness. Sufism spread rapidly even among the Sunni upper classes. Pilgrimage to holy places, veneration for holy men, and the cult of saints virtually reshaped Islam. In short, what had always existed as folk religion came to the fore. It was, in part, this groundswell that explains the rise of the Safavids and their fascination with Iraq: the emotional thrust embodied in the passion of the imam Husain had been mingled with the mystical forces of the pre-Islamic Persian religion, Zoroastrianism.
Many of these tendencies also affected the population of the newly created Ottoman Empire. Sunni mysticism and Shiism spread widely throughout Anatolia. But they did not affect the Ottoman rulers. Traditionalists, they were completely out of sympathy with mysticism or otherworldliness; for them, God’s message was embodied in order and authority. Thus it happened that when one of the most powerful and violent of the Ottoman sultans—known as Salim the Grim—came to the throne in 1512, he reacted to the rise of Persian Shiism and the Safavid ruler Shah Ismail’s proclamation of it as Iran’s state religion much as the Catholic king of Spain reacted to Queen Elizabeth’s English Protestantism. The main difference was that Sultan Salim’s “armada” moved by land.
Taking the shah’s massacre of his Sunni coreligionists in Baghdad as an excuse and angry that Persians were inciting subversion in his empire, Salim decided to conquer Iraq and humiliate Persia. Against the religious conviction of the Persians—then as in the 1980s chanting a battle cry that proclaimed their desire for martyrdom (Arabic: shahadah)—the Ottomans employed cannon, disciplined infantry, and superior numbers. In the battle of Chaldiran in midsummer of 1514, the Persian army, which had few if any firearms, was shattered. The Turkish victory was complete—the new shah narrowly missed capture when even his harem was overtaken by the Ottoman troops. But logistics were against the Turks. So both sides accustomed themselves to centuries of intermittent, wasteful, and unwinnable frontier wars in which Iraq was the spoil and the battleground.
This long period of Turkish-Iranian hostility washed over the peasants and tribesmen but affected urban Iraqis in two ways: it slowed or prevented economic recovery, and it solidified the division of the population between Sunnis and Shiis. Urban Sunnis tended to identify with the Ottoman government, while urban Shiis identified with the Iranians. But the differences were far more profound than this statement suggests. Since they were generally the suppressed party, the Shiis drew tightly together as a community; in it, religion and politics were united under “guides,” as the Persian Zoroastrian tradition mandated. These jurisconsults of religious law (Arabic: mujtahids, literally those who go deeply into matters) formed a collective leadership known as the authority (Arabic: al-marjiyah) that took upon itself the tasks of embodying the tradition of the community, teaching their successors and guiding their flock. While separate from government, they actually carried on many of the functions we ascribe to government, running the educational system, collecting taxes, judging disputes, and issuing legal decisions (Arabic: fatwas). Since they looked upon Sunni government as illegitimate, they sometimes employed their own quasi-military forces to defend themselves or to attack others. They still do. In the eyes of the government, of course, such actions constituted terrorism and were often ruthlessly suppressed. This conflict continues in present-day Iraq, where the marjiyah is a shadow government.
Nothing comparable to the marjiyah existed in Sunni Iraq. It wasn’t needed. The Ottoman government spoke in the name of all Sunnis. But it spoke with a muted voice. Having reverted to the primitive, almost pastoral society of Ubaidian times, Iraq was too poor to be of much interest to the empire. So the Turks thought of themselves as the shepherds and the Iraqis as their flock. Without wasting resources that they needed for their invasion of Europe and their control the far richer land of Egypt, they sought merely to shear the sheep. (“Sheep” was actually the term they employed.) Otherwise, they spent as little money and effort as would maintain a minimum sense of order.
Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, Iraq began to undergo a number of changes that would permeate its society for the next century. The most important of these was the transformation of “tribal” society from seminomadism to settled agriculture. The Ottoman government promoted this change because farmers were easier to control (and tax) than bedouin: the “sheep” were easier to shear when confined to a smaller area.
To facilitate investment and tax collection, a reforming governor, Midhat Pasha, attempted to codify the various rights to land that had accumulated through the long sequence of kingdoms and empires and that were superimposed haphazardly on customary rights that went back into the first Ubaidian settlements. Midhat’s work was given impetus by the growth of the export trade, particularly in rice and dates, which encouraged city merchants and tribal leaders to invest in land reclamation, canal digging, and dam building. Those with marginally better skills and/or connections quickly found ways to increase their holdings and, with the occasional help of government soldiers, their control over the formerly independent tribesmen. This began a process that the British encouraged during the First World War and that was to reach its culmination during the 1930s, when the tribesmen became virtual serfs.
As cash crops came into vogue, agricultural land, particularly in the well-watered south of Iraq, doubled in extent. Then, lured by a new sense of regularity of life—bluntly put, by the possibility of having full bellies throughout the year—large numbers of bedouin, most of whom had already raised some crops when sporadic rainfall had made that possible, gave up their nomadic life to become full-time farmers. Fearing government and city merchants, both of whom were Sunni, many became Shiis. They are the ancestors of the southern Iraqis of today.
Foreigners had little to do with these developments. As they began to arrive or pass through Iraq in the eighteenth century, they found Iraq too poor to be of interest. The British, however, discovered a use for it: the Euphrates formed a link in the route from their growing empire in India to England. For this link, they recreated the system employed by the ancient Persians and Mongols, a postal service mounted on camels. Using the “British Dromedary Post,” Englishmen in India could communicate with London in a matter of weeks instead of the months required to sail around the Horn of Africa. Following the Euphrates was also safer than risking the shoals of the Red Sea in ships powered only by sails. To maintain the route, the British set up consulates in Basra in 1764 and Baghdad in 1798; they kept the route reasonably safe, but the post still was often delayed and sometimes failed to arrive. In 1800 a senior British official in India complained that he was “nearly seven [his emphasis] months without receiving one line of authentic intelligence from England…Speedy, authentic, and regular intelligence from Europe is essential to the conduct of the trade and government of this empire.” So a few years later, in 1834, the British imported the first steamboats on the Euphrates and Tigris.
What the British began, other Europeans took up. From about 1840, a scheme to build a railroad began to be discussed. A railroad would have solved the problem of speed, but it made no economic sense, given the small Iraqi population. So, in 1872, an Austrian engineer suggested a solution: settle 2 million Germans along the Euphrates. That was not done, but, to the horror of the British, in 1899 a concession to build the railroad from Istanbul to Basra was given to a German company.
Fear of Europeans advancing toward India along the Euphrates had been a British nightmare since 1798 when Napoleon landed thirty-eight thousand French soldiers in Egypt. A year later, he began the conquest of Palestine and Syria as stepping stones toward India. He was defeated by an outbreak of plague. Realizing that they could not always count on plague, the British sent an army to hasten the French withdrawal. But their real worry was not that the French would keep Egypt so much as that they would move into Iraq. As early as 1798, the British secretary of war wrote that “Bonaparte will, as much as possible avoid the dangers of the Sea, which is not his element, but…by marching to Aleppo, cross the Euphrates, and following the example of Alexander, by following the River Euphrates and the Tigris, and descending to the Persian Gulf will march on India.”
As the French challenge receded, it was seen to be replaced first by a Russian threat (which was mainly played out in the covert war known as the “Great Game” in Afghanistan but also affected Iraq through events in the Ottoman Empire) and then by Germany. When Germany was united in 1870, it undertook an aggressive foreign policy. In the Iraqi part of this policy, it pressed for a railway concession in 1899—the “Berlin to Baghdad” line—and began a steamship service to the Gulf in 1906. Alarmed, the British forbade the shaikh of the little trading port of Kuwait from giving the Germans any facilities for their ships and began the process that would make Kuwait a separate state. Kuwait was to be the “cork” in the Iraqi bottle. To be sure that the cork stayed tight was the essence of British policy in the Gulf.
But events in Iraq soon created two new aims for British policy. Discovery of a huge deposit of oil in Iran, to the east of Abadan, in 1907, led the British to believe that Iraq might also contain oil. Every reader of the Bible knew of the “fiery furnace” that, surely, was in Iraq. And with the Royal Navy just converted to burning oil instead of coal, the British had conceived a “vital national interest” in oil. Oil was the wave of the future: those who controlled it, the British believed, would rule the world or at least not lose the empire. As the eminent British statesman Lord Curzon later said of the First World War, “the Allies floated to victory on a wave of oil.”
Britain also began to think of another possible value of Iraq. It is one that again takes us back to the beginning of our story with the agricultural revolution: “Babylonia,” they thought, might indeed again become the Garden of Eden. On the eve of the First World War, one of those eccentric Englishmen who were drawn to the East, Canon J. T. Parfit, called it “the key to the future.” The most influential adviser to the British government on the Middle East at the time, Sir Mark Sykes, wrote that “There is no doubt that the land [of Iraq] is the richest in the world.” Even sober engineers became nearly poetic when they described Iraq. The leading English authority on irrigation wrote in 1910 that as soon as the Tigris and Euphrates were brought under control, the millions of “surplus” Indians then dying of famine in British India could be settled along the Tigris and Euphrates. There, as farmers, they could produce as much wheat for food and cotton for industry as required by the whole British Empire. Iraq could, he said, “attain a fertility of which history has no record.” And so Iraq was poised in the summer of 1914 to enter a new era, to become “British Iraq.”