Justin Marozzi - Islamic Empires, The Cities That Shaped Civilization: From Mecca to Dubai

ISLAMIC
EMPIRES

THE CITIES THAT SHAPED CIVILIZATION:
FROM MECCA TO DUBAI

JUSTIN MAROZZI

To J
I could not have done it without you

Photographic acknowledgements are given in parentheses.

Many of these maps draw data from OpenStreetMaps. The ancient city of Mecca () is not mapped.

Is it to be Mohammed, Muhammad or Mahomet? Should it be the Quran, Koran or Quran? Transliterating Arabic is fraught with danger, and can be a pedants paradise. There are various systems for precise Arabic transliteration, but they are generally very complicated and have little to recommend them aesthetically. My aim has been to make things as simple and comprehensible as possible for the general reader. I do not wish to throw diacritical marks all over the text like confetti, a dot beneath an s and an h here, a line above an i or an a there, apostrophes and hyphens crowding in like unwelcome visitors. Asked to choose between T r kh al-Ir q bayna I til layn (Abbas al Azzawis History of Iraq Between Two Occupations ) and Tarikh al Iraq bayn al Ihtilayn , I choose the latter without hesitation.

I have transliterated the guttural Arabic letter qaf or as q, rather than k unlike in my last book, where I did the opposite, so am already guilty of inconsistency. I have chosen to ignore altogether the problematic letter ayn or virtually unpronounceable for those who do not know Arabic, and which tends to be variously rendered a, aa or even 3 because what does an apostrophe, or for that matter 3, really mean to the reader who does not know Arabic or the complexities of Arabic pronunciation? Arabic experts will surely know what is meant, and others will hardly notice its absence. So the caliph Mamun becomes simply Mamun and Iraq becomes Iraq. I prefer not to hyphenate the definite article, so I have Al Mansur and Al Amin rather than Al-Mansur and Al-Amin at the first mention, Mansur and Amin thereafter.

There are, I know, a number of other departures here from the most rigorous modern scholarly practice. Responding to a plea for clarity from the much put-upon editor of Seven Pillars of Wisdom , T. E. Lawrence replied tartly: There are some scientific systems of transliteration, helpful to people who know enough Arabic not to need helping, but a wash-out for the world. I spell my names anyhow, to show what rot the systems are. I would not dream of suggesting these systems are rot, but less brazenly I have followed his example. And, to answer the question with which I began, the Prophet is Mohammed and the holy book revealed to him by Allah is the Quran.

Im embarrassed to be an Arab these days, a Tunisian friend said to me recently. Everywhere you look theres chaos, fighting, bloodshed, dictatorship, corruption, injustice, unemployment. The only thing were leading the world in is terrorism.

That is indeed much of the perception in the West today, as well as in the Arab world itself. But of course it is far from being the whole story and it wasnt always like this. A thousand years ago, Islamic civilization bestrode the world. For an Arab Muslim, pride in occupying the very summit of the global pecking order, rather than shame and embarrassment at languishing in its nether regions, was the order of the day. Many of the magnificent cities of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia were architectural, intellectual and economic wonders in their own right. From Damascus, Baghdad and Cordoba to Cairo, Fez and Samarkand, the capitals of successive Islamic Empires were famed and frequently feared across the world. They represented an exhilarating combination of military might, artistic grandeur, commercial power and spiritual sanctity. They were also powerhouses of forward-looking thinking in science, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, cartography, calligraphy, history, geography, law, music, theology, jurisprudence and philosophy, each metropolis a superbly humming engine room of innovation and discovery. Outgunned, out-peopled and out-thought, Christian Europe looked south and east with envy, dread and hostility. While Baghdad could boast of a population of about 800,000 in the ninth century, London and Paris by contrast were minnows of just 20,000 in 1100. Islamic cities, then, were the embodiment of a superior civilization.

The word civilization springs from the Latin civis , a citizen, which is in turn related to civitas , a city. From these etymological origins, it is only a short step to argue that a city civilizes it removes men and women from a savage, barbarian life and that without cities there is no such thing as civilization. It is within cities, rather than among deserts, wildernesses, steppes, mountains and jungles, however beautiful and spirit-soaring, that humankind has realized its greatest potential: excelling in the arts and sciences, exploring the human condition and leaving an indelible literary legacy.

When it comes to the geographical origins of civilization, however, Latin offers us little guidance. Our gaze must move 3,000 miles east of Rome, to what today is Iraq, and which for much of its millennial history Ancient Greeks knew as Lower Mesopotamia, the fertile, irrigated land between the life-giving Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It was here, from Sumerian times in the sixth millennium BC through the Babylonian, Assyrian, Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian, Roman and Sassanid periods, that successive empires, civilizations and great cities such as Akkad, Assur, Babylon, Ur, Uruk, Nineveh, Nippur and Nimrud first flourished. These ancient cities rose in mud-brick splendour from the Mesopotamian plain, lorded it over the world around them and wrote their names into posterity. Most had subsided into crumbling ruins by the time Islam arrived in the seventh century.

If Mesopotamia gave the world its first cities, the Islamic Empires that followed in the region bequeathed some of the most glorious and resplendent capitals ever seen. This book looks at fifteen of them, focusing on a single city in each of the fifteen centuries of Islam from the time of the Prophet Mohammed and the birth of the new faith to the present day. In its own way each has contributed decisively to the history of the Dar al Islam, or Muslim world.

Islamic Empires traces a history of this world through some of its greatest cities and during some of its most important and dramatic moments, focusing on what Herodotus, the fifth-century BC Father of History called great and marvellous deeds. It begins in the seventh century and ends in the twenty-first, with intermittent forays into the present day.

Our story necessarily starts in Mecca, where the history of Islam first began amid the parched Hijaz desert of Arabia, and which remains to this day the holiest place for the worlds 1.5 billion Muslims, the lodestar to which they turn five times a day in prayer. It is also unique within the Muslim world for prohibiting non-Muslims, a tradition fiercely upheld ever since the new faith seized it from pagan hands, and which is scrupulously maintained to this day. Unlike every other city in this book, it is by definition an exclusive city, a sanctuary of complete purity from which outsiders are excluded. It is, to that extent, an emblem of Islams superiority complex.