In Search of the First Civilizations

by Michael Wood

  In the ninth century, in the south of Iraq, this vibrant mix of Arab and Persian culture, Jewish, Christian and Muslim religion, gave birth to a new mystical movement and some of the world’s supreme religious poets, the Sufis. By this time Baghdad and the cities of Iraq were at the centre of the Islamic world. Industrial and trading cities like Kufa and Basra were hotbeds of intellectual and religious ferment, their trade routes with India and Central Asia, Egypt and the Mediterranean a constant vehicle for ideas and artefacts. Many of the early Sufis from Baghdad and Basra drew on such diverse inspiration. The great mystic and martyr al-Hallaj knew Christian and Greek gnosis and had visited India, where he perhaps encountered the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. Another great Sufi was born at the old sacred city of Nippur: al Niffari, the ‘Man of Visions.’ Through the 950s and 960s, like Hallaj, Niffari wandered in many lands, including Egypt, though always returning to the south, to Basra, Nil and Nippur; scribbling his revelations in notebooks, ‘words committed to him by gift and favour of God.’ Not surprisingly, perhaps, in a place of such immemorial traditions – in the shadow of the ruined ziggurat of Ur Nammu – Niffari’s visions seem to speak to us still in the haunting voice of Old Sumer. ‘I saw fear holding sway over hope, and riches turn to dust, I saw poverty as the enemy, I saw this world to be a delusion and heaven to be a deception, I saw every created thing, and it fled from me and I was left here alone.’

  Most of the communities in early Islamic Mesopotamia survived into modern times. When Nippur finally died in the fourteenth century, the Mandaean community migrated to the deep marshes, to Amara and Suk-esh-Shuyukh and the thirty other villages recorded by early European travellers. There they lived until the twentieth century, when many moved to Baghdad to pursue their traditional craft of gold and metal working. They are still there. Protected by the Koran, along with Jews and Christians, as ‘people of the book,’ the Mandaeans are an astonishing survival of ancient Mesopotamian religious traditions, but they also put us in touch with the baptismal culture out of which Christianity arose. Originating in Palestine, like Jesus they called themselves followers of John the Baptist: mandayye or nasorayya. (Was Jesus Nazoraios, as Matthew calls him, then really not of Nazareth at all, but a ‘Nasorayan’, a baptist ‘gnostic’ or ‘observer’?)

  The Mandaean wedding ceremonies are accompanied by full immersion in the Tigris, which in commemoration they still call the Jordan. The ritual takes place in Mandaic, a dialect of the Aramaic which Jesus spoke. Other customs reflect their near 2000-year residence in Babylonia. When the bishop consecrates a new priest, he must undergo an ordeal in the dark blue tent, the colour of the evil eye: staying awake for seven days and seven nights just as Gilgamesh was required to do in his own failed initiation into the nether world. The Mandaeans are a reminder of how pluralism and tolerance are essential qualities of civilization, and a reminder too, of how ordinary Iraqi people, despite the catastrophes of their history, have down the years tenaciously preserved some of their most ancient traditions. ‘Life is victorious,’ says the Mandaean marriage service, and indeed, what if a man gain the whole world and lose his soul?

  BAGHDAD: ‘FIRST CITY OF THE WORLD’

  Baghdad itself had been founded on the west bank of the Tigris by the Arab conquerors of Iraq in the eighth century, one of the last of the great Mesopotamian planned cities. Where Babylon had been a huge rhomboid, Borsippa a square, and Akkad a triangle, the core of Abbasid Baghdad was a vast circle two miles across with zones for trades, crafts, industry and shops spreading out from the royal mosque in the middle. Surrounded by a tracery of canals in the suburbs, this was a city of waterways like Venice. It became the greatest cultural centre in the world: ‘a city of scholars and great riches,’ said the Persian geographer of 982, ‘the most prosperous town in the world, the haunt of merchants, thronging with people.’ Little survives of that time today. Successive destructions of Baghdad have virtually erased all trace, save for the old cemetery and the wind-blown memorial to Hallaj. The medieval walled city stood on the east bank, where fragments of walls and gates and some medieval buildings still stand: chief among them is the mosque of the city’s patron saint, Abd al-Gailani, still a great centre for pilgrimage. It was built at a time when colleges and philanthropic institutions were being created throughout Islam, before the universities of the West, before Oxford, the Sorbonne and Bologna: a grand college-cum-shrine with its kitchens and ancillary buildings in the old style of religious institutions of Mesopotamia. The civilized atmosphere of its courtyards brings to mind the great scholars of the past who learned and taught here, scholars who translated the sacred books of the Jews and Christians, ‘so that,’ as they said, ‘we might better understand the decisions of God.’ Medieval Baghdad was renowned for such open-minded curiosity. Think of al-Nadim, for example, son of one of the 800 humanist booksellers in tenth-century Baghdad, who attempted to write ‘a catalogue of the books of all peoples, Arab or foreign, written in Arabic, dealing with the various sciences, with accounts of those who composed them.’ There was al-Masudi, the historian who interviewed Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, Greeks and even Hindus for his Historical Annals, and whose researches led him from Turkey to the Deccan in India. And what of Al-Razi, the great physician who revolutionized Arab medicine, and who, by-the-by, denied the truth of any prophet? ‘Humane learning,’ wrote one of the best teachers here, Abd al-Latif, ‘leaves an aura, like a ray of bright light shining on those who come after.’

  Baghdad c.800–1000 AD. The Round City was surrounded by suburbs for crafts and trades: the hundreds of booksellers, for example, were to be found between the Sart and Bazzazin canals.

  Inside Gailani’s shrine the visitor is reminded once again of the old customs of Mesopotamian worship, in the glittering holy of holies shimmering with mirrors and prisms, whose magnificence distantly reflects something still of the old pre-Islamic world. Saint, poet and mystic, Gailani was founder of one of the great Sufi orders, the Qadiriya, and to pause for thought in his shrine is to feel what a dynamic force Iraqi Islam – Shia and Sunni – has been through history. The ‘fundamentalist’ Shiism sponsored by Khomeini and the ayatollahs of Iran since the revolution of 1979 may be a very different thing from the traditional Islam of the medieval humanists, let alone the visionary masters like Ibn Arabi or Suhrawardi, but now at the start of the twenty-first century, however much the rich and complacent West may wish it otherwise, Islam is once again a great power in the world, a beacon for the dispossessed peoples of Asia and Africa. It is an ideal for which people still live and die precisely because, in the battle now being fought all over the world between tradition and modernity, it offers an alternative to the modern secular values of the West.

  THE SACK OF BAGHDAD

  From the time of Harun al Rashid (763–809 AD) till the eleventh century, Baghdad was one of the three greatest cities in the world, along with Constantinople and Xian in China. And like them it was one of the great transmitters by which the cultural legacy of the ancients was passed on to the medieval and modern world. The scholarship of the medieval city was helped in no small measure by paper, which was introduced from China in the mid-eighth century, enabling the mass production of books at a low cost. This was a world of correspondence, libraries and bookshops, a book culture. Baghdad was also the great intermediary in the meeting between Persian and Arabic culture which continues to bear fruit even today, and which in the past gave birth to some of the world’s finest art, architecture, philosophy and literature. Also, and this is often forgotten in the West, much of the Greek scientific and philosophical legacy was passed on to us by Arab scholars; transformed in Baghdad by contact not only with Islam, but with the Mesopotamian legacy in astronomy and mathematics, and even gnostic and magical traditions of astrology and alchemy. In this extraordinary melting pot Christian, Greek and Iranian ideas in science, medicine and philosophy were reshaped through Arabic language, culture and scholarship. A transformation of the legacy of the ancients took place as
potent and enriching as the later Renaissance in Europe.

  But this tremendous adventure in pluralism and intellectual inquiry on which medieval Islamic culture embarked did not bear fruit in transforming the traditional societies of the Near East. Riven by internal struggles and social unrest, twelfth-century Baghdad was no longer the city it had been and Iraq was already in economic decline. Then there took place another of those cataclysms which have shifted the whole course of Mesopotamian history. Still looked upon as one of the greatest tragedies in the tragic history of Iraq, the long period of high culture in Baghdad was ended by the devastating Mongol attack of 1258, when the city was totally destroyed and its irrigation system ruined. The destruction of its libraries alone was an incalculable loss to the modern world. To mention but two, Nadim’s autograph copy of his gigantic catalogue, the Fihrist, which at least survives in a partial copy; and Masudi’s master work, the Annals, which was lost forever. In the aftermath, one of the survivors left this poignant note in a dog-eared and water-stained pocket commentary on the Koran which is still in the Gailani Library:

  ‘I recovered this book from the River Tigris where it was thrown by the Mongols, Year of the Hejira 656. (1258 in the western calendar.) I am poor for the mercy of God, Mohammed Abdul Qadir from Mecca.’This is a testimony to enduring faith, not only in God but in the power of the written word to create civilization: one of the quintessential beliefs of Mesopotamian civilization from its very origins.

  The Persian poet Saadi of Shiraz was in Abadan when he heard the news of the destruction of ‘the first city of the world.’ Looking out from his lodgings over the Tigris, in his mind’s eye he saw the river running with blood. ‘You ask me,’ he wrote, ‘about the sack of Baghdad? It was so horrible there are no words to describe it. I wish I had died earlier and not seen how the fools destroyed these treasures of knowledge and learning. I thought I understood the world, but this holocaust is so strange and pointless that I am struck dumb. The revolutions of time and its decisions have defeated reason and knowledge.’

  INTO THE MODERN WORLD

  The destruction of Baghdad in 1258 and the wrecking of the irrigation canals was a turning point in the history of the Middle East. ‘There is no doubt,’ said a Persian writer in grimly prophetic words, ‘that even if for a thousand years to come, no evil befell Iraq, it will not be possible completely to bring back the land to the state it was before.’ By the end of the sixteenth century, Iraq, the cradle of civilization, had sunk to the lowest level. The old cities of the south were dead, the land had returned to desert; even the new foundations of the Islamic period, Kufa and Wasit, had gone. Baghdad, although still active as a trading town, was a shadow of its former self, behind mudbrick walls in the quarter east of the Tigris, the city of the Caliphs now a vast ruin on the other side. In the south, only the port of Basra and the university and pilgrim city of Najaf still thrived. Four hundred years of Ottoman rule left the land plundered by a greedy military. The great events of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the discovery of the New World, passed it by. So, after all its great achievements, Iraq reached the modern age like a society stopped in time. Right up until the 1920s, its ancient towns looked no different from those of the third millennium BC. The extraordinary aerial photographic record made of Iraq in the 1920s by the British gives us a last image of this older Iraq, especially of the Shiite holy cities Samarra, Najaf, Kerbala and Khadimain. Here Najaf lies shimmering in the desert like a vision from the past; still entirely contained within its great mudbrick walls, outside which lie the baked Euphrates plain and the escarpment of the western desert. In the centre of the city the mosque of Ali looks for all the world as we might imagine the ancient temples of Uruk or Eridu. In close-up at the north-west corner of the shrine are winding alleys, souks, gabled houses with roof gardens and oriels, the warren of tenements still unlit by the morning sun. At this moment Najaf was still like an echo of the medieval world, with its craftsmen’s guilds, its manuscript copiers, its bookshops and hostels, its holy men, teachers and pilgrims.

  This spellbinding vision of an older world of Iraq survived till our own time, especially in the holy cities. Here the rich medieval Shia traditions of philosophy and jurisprudence were maintained with honour. Even in the 1960s the old culture of the booksellers and hand copiers was alive in Najaf. But all has been shattered now by the events of the last forty years, by a ruthless drive to modernize on the part of the Baathist regime, and especially by the Gulf wars of 1980–88 and 1991, the war in Kurdistan, and the invasion of 2003.

  It was the discovery of oil, the second largest reserve in the world, which changed the course of Iraqi history. After the break-up of the Ottoman Empire the independence of the new state of Iraq became conditional on alliance with greater and more distant powers than had intervened in Mesopotamia in the past, still playing off the states and peoples of the region against each other in order to keep hold of the natural wealth of Mesopotamia. And so Iraq once again became a name on the world stage; the split between Shia and Sunni once again a matter of the greatest moment in Near Eastern history. Once more, in the 1980s, Iraq waged war against an enemy beyond the Zagros, the Persians; once more the land of the Two Rivers suffered foreign invasion.

  THE DESTRUCTION OF SUMER, 1991

  In 1991, a new war was fought in the south of Mesopotamia, in the desert where the first cities arose, another war over the natural resources of the earth, another war for civilization against barbarism. And once more, as in the ancient laments, we have seen smoke ‘hanging like a shroud’ over Sumer.

  In the aftermath of the war of 1991 the Shiites of the south rose against their Sunni masters in Baghdad as they had done so often since the Middle Ages. Then Kerbala and Najaf, the sacred cities of Sumer, were sacked once more, and their shrines desecrated. Mosques and prayer halls were demolished, teachers executed or imprisoned, libraries destroyed, and manuscripts burned or looted.

  After the uprising in 1991, the marshes of southern Iraq, home to the 5000-year-old culture of the Marsh Arabs, were ravaged and then partially drained; settlements were destroyed, a quarter of a million people displaced as the fire penetrated even the deep marshes. The long war fought by the government in Baghdad against the majority of its own people had finally reached the heart of the marshes, along with the devastated villages of Kurdistan and the brutalized and persecuted holy cities of the Shia. A systematic attempt to destroy the traditional native cultures of Iraq was reaching a climax; and this in the land where civilization had first defined its humane objectives, making law to moderate naked power, as the ancients said, ‘to cause justice to prevail in the land, that the strong may not oppress the weak.’ Ancient Babylonian scholars believed that history was not progress. Rather, they saw it as recurring cycles of human achievement which could be ended at any time by unforeseen disaster. Each time humanity must rebuild and start again: ‘Once upon a time, Sumer, the great land of divine laws, had all that was needed for life. You, Sumer, set the ideals of civilization upon humankind, lofty ideals, robed in enduring light. Once upon a time … when there was no fear, no terror.’

  THE LEGACY OF IRAQ

  The ancient civilization of Iraq was based on the city as a centre of economic and political life. It depended on international trade, on a diversified economy, and on thoroughgoing control of the environment. It used writing and written law to record and order transactions involving large numbers of its population. Theirs was a pluralistic society, as far as we can tell, multiracial from its earliest period. In tone, it was a pessimistic civilization, albeit a ‘confident pessimism’ as the Shia like to say: a vision deeply rooted in a harsh landscape where all that people worked for was often destroyed by war or nature, and still is.

  The Mesopotamians conceived of civilization as separate from nature, set in an artificial environment of man’s creation, which could insulate human society from the threats of primal nature (a contrast for example which lies at the heart of the Epic of Gilgamesh). And
monotheism, the spiritual expression of Near Eastern culture, would see nature in the same light, the creator-god standing outside his creation, imparting its laws. Mesopotamian city civilization then represents a dramatic break with the cultural continuum of the prehistoric world which had lasted for tens of thousands of years, and which, as we shall see, would inform the classical cultures of India, China and the Americas. It was only the Near East which made this leap forward: in technology; in large-scale trade; in irrigation; in the use of writing for economic purposes; in the idea of the territorial city state prevailing over allegiance to traditional clans and lineages; in the cosmological revolution which separated gods from nature. Why this happened only in the Near East towards 3000 BC is one of the great questions of history. For these ideas were transmitted to the later civilizations of the West, developed there and became enshrined as universal experience by the West in the last three centuries: coupled with theories of individual freedom, these are now seen as the driving force of history.