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The Round City: Baghdad in the Arab Cultural Imagination
| Article
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19196 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
3,956 Words |
| Author
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Dina Rizk Khoury
Dina Rizk Khoury is assistant professor of history at George
Washington University. She is currently researching and
writing a book on Ottoman Iraq. |
The fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258 is described in apocalyptic terms in most Arab historiographical writings. In one surviving tradition, the caliph's chief minister accompanied by a Nestorian Catholic warned Hulago, the Mongol chieftain, that if the caliph is killed and Baghdad sacked, "the whole universe is disorganized, the sun hides its face, rain ceases, and plants grow no more."
Seven centuries later, the United Nation's report on the destruction of Iraq uses equally strong language: Iraq has been bombed into the "pre-industrial age," and there has been "near apocalyptic" destruction. While Baghdad may not have been as heavily damaged as other parts of Iraq, the destruction of its infrastructure, and hence of any semblance to modernity, has been complete.
The destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols live in the cultural imagination of Iraqis, as it does for most Arabs, as a turning point in their history. It is only then that the Arab Empire is totally defeated (never mind that by that time the empire was only a shadow of its old self).
The recent bombardment of Baghdad by the Allied forces has made a strong, largely negative, statement to many Arabs about their relationship to the West and the value and cultural system it claims to inherit. How this will affect the cultural discourse between the two worlds is yet to be determined.
Baghdad in the twentieth century
Baghdad's inhabitants, like those of every other city in the twentieth century, have experienced a number of changes that have led to major social dislocations and created what amounts to a crisis in identity. The contradictions and nuances wrought by these changes are encapsulated in three firsthand accounts of life in Baghdad during different decades of the twentieth century.
Baghdad Sketches of the 1930s. Freya Stark, a British journalist who lived in a Shi'ite slum in Baghdad in the 1930s, wrote of her experience in her book Baghdad Sketches. She shared her rooms (overlooking the courtyard of the local mosque) with her maid, a Christian Iraqi woman who spent her time complaining about their Muslim neighbors--as they did about her. The house had no running water, so the maid, like everybody else in the neighborhood, obtained fresh water from the well in the mosque. The house had no modern sewage disposal system and the smells emanating from the pit of her home's
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