Baghdad, 2014
Book Details
Justin Marozzi
BAGHDAD
City of peace, city of blood
512pp. Allen Lane. £25.
978 1 84614 313 6
Reuven Snir
BAGHDAD
The city in verse
384pp. Harvard University Press. £20 (US $29.95).
978 0 674 72521 8
A history of violence in the City of Peace
NADIA ATIA
As British and Indian troops stood poised to make an ill-fated attempt to occupy the city of Baghdad in the winter of 1915, Lord Crewe, Secretary of State for India, reflected that the city held a special place in the world's imagination. Baghdad was uniquely placed to impress both Oriental and Occidental alike: "nobody will dispute the . . . glamour attaching to the capture of the most famous city" he wrote, "even in the European mind, and still more in the Eastern". Despite the fact that by the early twentieth century Baghdad was a shadow of its former glory, perceived by many Britons to be a neglected Ottoman backwater, governance of this evocative city still held the potential to restore British prestige after the devastating recent losses on the beaches of Gallipoli. Even before Galland's editions of the Arabian Nights made Harun al-Rashid's jaunts about this fabled city accessible to millions in eighteenth-century Europe, Baghdad's libraries, its reputation as a cultural hub and its fame as the seat of one of the world's greatest empires was well established: a prize for many a would-be conqueror. A mixed blessing indeed, as these two impressive books deftly illustrate.
Mansur's eighth-century round city would become fabled for its wealth, opulence and grandeur. Such was the power of Galland's visions of glittering minarets that in March 1917, when they finally entered the city victorious, British troops still saw in Baghdad's civilian population echoes of Ali-Baba's thieves. But it is not Scheherazade's Alf layla wa-layah that twenty-first-century Baghdad evokes; the contemporary city is defined by many in terms of violence, haunted by the legacy of Saddam Hussein. The carnage and destruction wrought by two Gulf wars bracket years of sanctions which crippled the Iraqi economy and starved its people of food and medicine. Such hardships seem to hide any vestige of the city's former glory.
Justin Marozzi and Reuven Snir offer us a chance to see beyond the bloodletting of the past century; each narrates the story of the City of Peace through the ages. Though it may seem that a history of Baghdad that takes bloodshed as its central theme would only serve to reinforce a short-sighted, violence-oriented view of the place, there is much hope to be found in Marozzi's sympathetic and thoughtful account. Far from simply emphasizing the city's melancholy fate, in pages that vividly capture centuries of heartbreak Baghdad: City of peace, city of blood offers a much-needed sense of perspective. Marozzi is not the first to see Baghdad through the prism of violence. As one of the epigraphs to his study reminds us, Richard Coke's 1927 history of the city described it as a place plagued by misfortune: "where there is not war, there is pestilence, famine and civil disturbance". The City of Peace, Marrozi shows, was ironically marked by violence from the start:
In 634 . . . an army of the first caliph, Abu Bakr, swooped on Souk Baghdad . . . plundered every piece of gold and silver they could find before galloping off into the desert and leaving the devastated community to sink back into obscurity, until Mansur's epoch-making arrival in 762. It was the first recorded instance of the violence, bloodshed and slaughter that would become tragically dominant features of the city's life in the centuries to follow.
In a history that takes death and destruction as its central premiss, one might expect Coke's conclusions to resonate. It is more surprising, perhaps, that in a collection of verse on Baghdad, Snir concludes his introduction with exactly the same passage. "More than eighty-five years later", Snir writes, "one cannot maintain that Coke was wrong in his historical judgment of Baghdad. In other words, the glorious Baghdad is only an image and memory of the remote past; the Baghdad of the present evokes only sadness, distress and nostalgia for bygone days." It is no surprise that violence and nostalgia should be so paired in Snir's study; both are intimately linked with pain.
Nostalgia, a term coined by Johannes Hofer in 1688 for a disease from which young Swiss soldiers had died, wasting away deprived of their homeland, has pain embedded within its etymology. The word combines the Greek Nostos, "return to the native land", with "Algos, [connoting] suffering or grief". Hofer wished to capture from the "force of the sound Nostalgia . . . the sad mood originating from the desire for the return to one's native land". Nostalgia haunts many modern Iraqi reflections on Baghdad and is central to Snir's collection of verse. Unsurprisingly, it is a particular feature of the work that has been translated into, or originally written in, English, much of which is written by migrant Iraqis: exiles, refugees, forming a growing diaspora of nearly 5 million from the last war alone, according to UN figures quoted by Marozzi. In Dreaming of Baghdad (2009), Haifa Zangana's memoir of torture and brutality in Saddam's Iraq, an exiled, traumatized woman observes the emergence of an unexpected new emotion. "For years I believed I was immune to emotion, nostalgia, and dreams of returning to the places of my childhood. Now I am sitting here alone . . . waiting apprehensively for the next news bulletin on TV. Yes, after the ads, the newscaster will read a few items about the Iran–Iraq war." Salah Al Hamdani's Baghdad Mon Amour (2008) is a lament for a lost homeland. Nostalgia marks much of Al Hamdani's verse, aptly combining the pain of longing with the pain of torture and fear which has driven so many Iraqis from their homeland: "As for me, the bird about to take flight / Nostalgia plucks at my soul / Like the victim of the torturer".
Reuven Snir is particularly attuned to this longing for home, or – more accurately – the longing for a now-lost idea or memory of home. The collection is partly inspired by his own Iraqi Jewish father's love of his homeland's poetry, instilled in Snir from an early age. Part of a generation of Jews who were forced to leave Baghdad in the mid-twentieth century, Snir's family emigrated to Israel. "I was", he writes, "suffering from thirst but unable . . . to quench the deadly thirst with water so readily at hand." As he suggests, the object of nostalgia is always elusive; the real city will never be what the nostalgic heart longs for.
In both of these books Baghdad stands, like so many capital cities, as a metonym for the nation as a whole. All nations, as we know, are "imagined communities" in Benedict Anderson's familiar phrase. Marozzi's Baghdad essentially tells the story of regime change and its ramifications in Iraq from the founding of the city to the present day; it is as much a history of Iraq in that sense as it is a history of the city. In Snir's collection, too, verse about Iraq as a whole stands alongside evocations of Baghdad. In a nation as heterogeneous – or as fragmented – as Iraq, this metonymy may be perceived as more problematic than most. But especially in Marozzi's history, the inclusion of seemingly extraneous material is useful. He includes salient details of the massacre of Kurds in the north of the country, for example, to illustrate the way in which Saddam's government terrorized its own people. Nevertheless, the interchangeability between Iraq and Baghdad in lines such as "I am longing / for her. 'Iraq,' I cry!" in Badr Shakir al-Sayyab's "Because I am a Stranger", a poem that makes no mention of Baghdad itself, may be seen as unacceptable by many a non-Baghdadi.
Marozzi's history may have bloodshed at its core, but his book ends with hope, not despair. He leaves the final words to an Iraqi friend: "the cycle that sees Baghdad lurching between mayhem and prosperity has been long and gory, but of course we must have hope. May the City of Peace live up to its name before we ourselves depart to eternal peace". Whether in the voices of poets captured in Reuven Snir's impressive new translations, or in Justin Marozzi's evocation of the city's highs and lows, there is a faith that just as the city rose from the ashes of Hulagu's disastrous invasion in 1258, just as it recovered from the towers of skulls left by Temur's troops, so it will recover from its more recent calamities.
