the site of Babylon and other ancient cities. It has
a population of approximately 5 million people
in a country composed of 28 million. Most of the
city’s residents are a
rab
Muslims, but it is also
home to small numbers of other Iraqi ethnic and
religious groups: Kurdish Muslims, Turkomans,
Arab Christians (including Assyrians and Chal-
deans), Mandeans, and Jews. There are at least 2
million Shii Muslims living there, many in Sadr
City, a low-income neighborhood on Baghdad’s
northeastern perimeter.
According to early Muslim histories, in 762
Abu Jafar al-Mansur, the second
caliph
of the
a
bbasid
c
aliphate
(750–1258), traced the founda-
tions of the city of Baghdad with flaming cotton
seeds and eventually built, through the labor of
100,000 builders, architects and engineers from
around the empire, a perfectly round city, a form
unprecedented in Islamicate
architectUre
. This
new capital, called the Madinat al-Salam (City of
Peace), housed within its three concentric circles
of baked brick walls the caliph, his court, soldiers,
citizens and markets. Within a decade, the grow-
ing population and its palaces and markets had
spilled outside the original walls, and the legend-
ary city of
gardens
, canals, and floating pontoon
bridges rapidly became the cultural and religious
center of Islamdom. The medieval city boasted
a host of famous personages in Islamic history.
h
arUn
al
-r
ashid
(r. 786–809), a figure made
famous by the a
rabian
n
ights
, and his son Abu al-
Abbas Abd Allah al-Mamun (r. 813–833), helped
build a thriving intellectual center where scholars
gathered from around the world in a library called
the House of Wisdom. There, in addition to the
development of the sciences such as engineer-
ing,
mathematics
, and astronomy, foreign works
of philosophy and literature were translated into
Arabic. The Nizamiyya
madrasa
at its height had
a population of 10,000 to 20,000 students seeking
higher
edUcation
from noted scholars, jurists, and
philosophers, including a
bU
h
amid
al
-g
hazali
(d. 1111), who, before retiring into a mystical life
and writing his famous The Revival of the Religious
Sciences, was the principal of that school. The old-
est, most liberal, and currently largest of the four
Islamic law schools, the h
anaFi
l
egal
s
chool
,
was founded in Baghdad by Abu Hanifa (d. 767).
Beginning as early as the ninth century, a series
of citywide upheavals, political and religious
power struggles, floods, and plagues left the city
vulnerable to the Mongol attack of 1258, which
decimated much of the population and urban
infrastructure. The 14th through the early 20th
centuries were punctuated by foreign occupations
and leadership changes, most notably by the Safa-
vids (1507 and 1623), the Ottomans (1534 and
1638), and finally the British in 1917.
In 1932, Iraq gained its independence, and
the University of Baghdad, one of three modern
universities in Baghdad, opened in 1957. During
the 1970s and 1980s,
oil
revenues were allocated
to a building campaign of new city monuments,
palaces, and ceremonial avenues. Three of the
most noted monuments are the Hands of Victory
arch, the Monument of the Unknown Soldier,
and the Martyr’s Monument, with its split tur-
quoise dome 190 meters in diameter that recalls
the famous green dome that once towered over
al-Mansur’s original city. All three were designed
to commemorate the country’s war against Iran
(1980–88) and the Iraqi soldiers who died in
it. For more than three decades, Baghdad also
served as the headquarters for the Arab Baath
Socialist Party, which governed the country until
it was overthrown when the United States and its
coalition forces invaded Iraq in March 2003. The
Republican Palace of the deposed Iraqi leader,
s
addam
h
Usayn
(r. 1978–2003), which stands on
the west bank of the Tigris not far from where
Mansur’s round city once stood, now serves as the
headquarters of the American occupation.
See also b
aath
p
arty
.
Margaret A. Leeming
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