26 ***^ Sunday 1 September 2019 The Sunday Telegraph
T
he clichéd view of
Islam sees it as a
religion of the desert- something that came
out of the sands of
Saudi Arabia, and was
spread by scimitar-waving hordes
on horseback (or camels), who
speedily conquered the stable,
city-based societies of the world
around them. But this is less than
half-true. Yes, the conquests were
rapid, and of course that meant that
existing cities were taken over. The
essential truth, however, is that
Islam has been an urban religion
from the beginning.
Muhammad was not born in a
tent in the desert; he was a citizen
of the town of Mecca. Trained as a
merchant, he was sent as a
teenager on trading journeys to
other towns. Islam is full of rules
for the kind of dense social
existence that takes place in urban
settlements, not nomadic camps.
And it’s significant that whereas
Judaism and Christianity have a
Holy Land, Islam has Mecca and
Medina, the two Holy Cities.
So it was a good idea of Justin
Marozzi’s to write a history of the
Islamic world as a series of
accounts of cities. There are 15
chapters here, each with a city
representing a particular century:
Mecca, of course, for the seventh,
Damascus for the eighth, Baghdad
for the ninth, and so on, until we
reach Beirut (19th), Dubai (20th)
and Doha (21st). At first sight this
may look gimmicky and too neat;
but in fact it works well, as it
enables Marozzi to cover a huge
This deeply engaging and
fascinating book is not a history of
Islam. Theological issues are
mostly noises off; the only one that
impinges heavily on the story here
is the Sunni-Shia split, which
caused murderous conflicts from
an early stage. This is, rather, a
history of the Islamic world and its
civilisation – not a systematic,
joined-up one, which would
probably turn out too much like a
giant encyclopedia article, but an
episodic, impressionistic one that
nevertheless manages to deal
with almost every important
Islamic imperial power at some
stage or other.
And it is also, here and there, a
personal account. Marozzi is an
Arabic-speaking journalist with
decades of experience of the Islamic
world; he is good at evoking the
atmosphere of these places in the
present or the recent past. In Egypt,
he tells us, he has been “pursued
down narrow alleys by incandescent
taxi drivers” and has travelled up the
Nile “in prostitute-filled riverboats”.
Oh well, I concluded, on balance that
must be better than being chased
down the alleys by incandescent
prostitutes, and finding the
riverboats full of taxi drivers.sweep of Islamic history, taking in
such places as Samarkand and
Istanbul on the way. Only the last
two in the sequence, Dubai and
Doha, are a little too samey; Sarajevo
or Jakarta – or Urumqi in China,
where Muslim Uighurs are now
being herded into camps – would
have extended the range.
The title, Islamic Empires, might
also puzzle at first sight: surely this is
a book about cities, not empires as
such? But of course it is about both,
for good reasons. Again and again, we
find that a city was developed by an
imperial ruler: the Abbasid caliph in
Baghdad, the Umayyad one in
Cordoba, the Ayyubids in Cairo. Such
rulers needed capital cities as
administrative centres; they also
needed the wealth that only cities, as
hubs of international trade, could
provide. And a large city could also
sustain an appropriate display of
power in physical form: a huge palace,
a towering fortress, prestige mosques.
The scale of some of these projects
was megalomanic. When the great
Umayyad Mosque complex (roughly
400 by 300 metres) was finished in
Damascus, it took 18 camels to carry
all the building receipts to the caliph.
The huge circular city of Baghdad was
built from nothing, by tens ofthousands of workmen, in just four
years. Cordoba’s palace complex,
measuring a mile by a mile-and-a-half,
employed 17,500 servants. The
colossal citadel of Cairo was built by
50,000 captives. And in Samarkand,
Timur Leng laid out 15 formal parks
and gardens, one of them so large that
when a workman lost his horse there,
it roamed unnoticed for six months.
With the megalomanic projects
come the megalomaniacs. In almostevery chapter here, there is one
overwhelmingly powerful individual:
Saladin in Cairo, Mehmed the
Conqueror in Istanbul, Shah Abbas in
Isfahan. Most overwhelming of all
was Timur Leng (Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine), who devastated many
more cities than he built: Delhi,
Aleppo, Damascus, Baghdad, and also
Isfahan, where he killed 70,000
Isfahanis and used their heads to
build 28 “towers of skulls”.
Such horrifying figures remind us
that, for many centuries, Muslim
cities exceeded most Christian ones
by an order of magnitude. In themiddle ages, when Baghdad had
800,000 inhabitants, Cairo 400,000
and Cordoba 100,000, Constantinople
was the only six-figure Christian city
(though it was down to barely 50,000
by the time it fell to the Turks);
London, Paris and Rome were in the
20-40,000 range. What sustained
such huge urban populations in the
Muslim world was manufacturing
and, above all, trade. So, aside from
the imperial palace, the real heart of
each of these great conurbations
was its bazaar or souk.
This is where Marozzi, who has a
special fondness for lists, comesWhen the Umayyad
Mosque was built,
it took 18 camels to
carry the receipts
From Mecca to
Doha, the tale of
Islam in 15 cities
GETTY IMAGESISLAMIC EMPIRES
by Justin Marozzi464PP, ALLEN LANE, £25,
EBOOK £12.99ÌÌÌÌÌ
NOEL MALCOLM
BOOKS
Cities in the sand: a 20th-print of the sanctuary at Mecca, main; above, Doha Call 0844 871 1514 to order for £20into his own, conjuring up the
amazing variety of the Islamic
mercantile world. From the
medieval Jewish records of Cairo,
for example, we learn that you
could buy “silk turbans from Spain,
slave girls from Abyssinia and
Europe, cheese from Jerusalem and
Baalbek, Yemeni mattresses,
ostrich feathers and hides from
Abyssinia, Armenian rugs, fine
Chinese porcelain, Arabian Sea
pearls, Baltic amber, Indian teak
furniture, copper from Mosul”.
These places were cosmopolitan
by their very nature. Languages and
faiths commingled; Islam
dominated, but no Muslim ruler
could afford to make conditions of
life intolerable for his non-Muslim
subjects. And in most cases the
combination of wealth, leisure and
institutions of learning produced a
rich and varied cultural life, where
Islamic orthodoxy was only one
strand among many.
In another pleasing list, Marozzi
tells us about the ninth-century
Baghdadi polymath known as Jahiz
(“goggle-eyed”): “he discoursed on
the superiority of black men over
whites, pigeon-racing, Islamic
theology, miserliness, the
Aristotelian view of fish, and
whether women should be
permitted to make noises of
pleasure while having sex.”RELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws