Modern slavery is not limited to remote corners of West Africa. There are reportedly 1.1 million people living in modern slavery in the US, and 122,000 in the UK. Yet the numbers are clear, with the Arab world, and especially the Gulf, now a hub of modern slavery in the 21st century. Echoed in other corners of the Islamic world, Mali included, it speaks to a practice with deep cultural roots — and to how different societies choose to deal with their past in strikingly different ways.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many Westerners tend to focus on their own historical relationship with slavery. But if the triangular Atlantic trade came strewn with blood, it was far from unique in either scale or timespan. Enduring some 400 years until the 19th century, European slavers turned some 14 million Africans into property. By contrast, the slave trade in the Muslim world has been even more enduring. Beginning in the 7th century, and continuing right into modern times, the institution has overseen the enslavement of up to 17 million souls.

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From early in the Islamic experiment, this behaviour has been justified on religious grounds: via the Quran,, the Sunnah, or traditions of the Prophet, and Shari’a law. To an extent, that’s endured until the present. Indeed the most famous — and shocking — recent example of slavery in the Muslim world came courtesy of the so-called Islamic State. During its short-lived, self-declared “caliphate”, the jihadis glorified in raping and enslaving Yazidi women and children, seeing slavery as an essential component of contemporary Islamic government. In 2014, Dabiq, their English-language magazine, even ran a piece on reviving the practice, likening its slave-trading fighters to the Companions of the Prophet almost 1,400 years before. At the same time, Dabiq gave specific instructions on how to share the human spoils of war. “Yazidi women and children,” it said, are to be “divided” among Islamic State fighters, all in apparent keeping with Shari’a law.

Nor was that all. ISIS also set up slave markets: which essentially functioned like brothels. One woman was sold 14 times, to 14 different men, and was raped by 12 of them. Some women smeared their baby’s excrement on their bodies to avoid being bought, while others claimed to have periods or professed to be sick. Some fought back. Many received punishment beatings, or were separated from their children and locked in basements amid rising sewage and the boiling heat of the Syrian desert. One woman’s five-year-old daughter was even hanged from a window for bedwetting. No wonder many of the victims describe their plight as something approaching hell.

ISIS, of course, is the exception rather than the rule: no one would argue that pro-slavery views are widespread across the Muslim world today. As far back as 1990, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation issued the non-binding Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which denied the legitimacy of the institution. Like the ISIS example implies, meanwhile, contemporary voices in favour of slavery tend to be limited to the conservative or extremist fringe. In 2017, for instance, the Kuwaiti cleric Saalim bin Saad al-Taweel declared on his YouTube channel that slavery was “one of the virtues of Islam” since it provided infidels with the opportunity to convert to the faith. A few years earlier, the Saudi government cleric Sheikh Saleh al-Fawzan offered an unequivocal defence of slavery in a secretly recorded lecture. “Slavery is a part of Islam,” he declared, dismissing those who argued otherwise. “Whoever says such things is an infidel.”

As that clandestine recording implies, ISIS are unusual in defending Islamic slavery openly. Yet it is also true that abolition came relatively late in the day. Some of the last nations to abolish slavery include Iran (1928), Saudi Arabia (1962) and Oman (1970). Even relatively secular Turkey only got round to it in 1964, while Mauritania did so in 1981. The fact is that slavery, modern and hereditary, has lingered uncomfortably in parts of the Muslim world. That’s clear enough in the Gulf, where Asian migrant workers from countries like Nepal and the Philippines routinely end up as forced laborers. They may build the skyscrapers, and drive the cabs, and wait the swanky restaurants from Riyadh to Doha. But ensnared by the so-called kafala system, which forbids them from changing jobs without their employer’s permission, they’re also deeply vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. In the UAE alone, there may be 132,000 such workers.

So how is the Islamic world reckoning with the legacy of slavery? It’s a mixed picture, and not entirely encouraging. There may no longer be “a conspiracy of silence”, as Murray Gordon argued in Slavery in the Arab World in 1989. But a recent study of the life of an African slave in 19th century Iran begins with the words: “The history of slavery in Iran has yet to be written.” Writing last year, Zeinab Badawi came to a similar conclusion. While Arab societies benefited enormously over many centuries from “the blood, sweat and tears of African labor”, there has been no public debate on reparations. “The silence,” Badawi adds, “must be broken.”

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Yet if much of the Middle East continues to look the other way, a new generation of scholars has been making important inroads, debating slavery, slave-trading and abolition in books, academic articles and journalism. One good example is Nabil Matar, who’s deftly exposed the legacy of Mediterranean corsairing. The pirates captured hundreds of thousands of Europeans — and Europeans captured large numbers of Muslims, in a multifaith free-for-all — right across the early modern period.

Qatar, for its part, has also started to address the issue directly — albeit tentatively. In 2015, and with Doha under fire for exploiting migrant workers ahead of the 2022 World Cup, it unveiled the Bin Jelmood House. A former mansion, whose courtyard once teemed with enslaved Africans waiting to be sold, the site is now a museum exploring slavery in a global context. According to the museum, the story “begins in enslavement but ends in shared freedom and shared prosperity”. Pretty saccharine stuff, in other words, and hardly a genuine reckoning. You hear similar things elsewhere. “What should we have done?” is how one Arab in the Gulf put it to me the other day. “Everyone was doing it. That was business. Without it we would have starved.”

All the while, survivors of slavery across the Islamic world are battling to reclaim their stolen lives. Last year, I was in Nouakchott, the windswept capital of Mauritania and a repeat offender when it comes to hereditary racialized slavery. Here, in a tiny, sand-blown home of breeze blocks and corrugated metal, I met a remarkable woman called Habi. Like Hamey, she too had escaped decades of enslavement, explaining that it was only once she had been rescued, by her brother in 2008, that she realised she had never truly felt human before. “I’ve dedicated the rest of my life to fighting slavery,” Habi said, her eyes blazing with defiance. But given where countries like Mauritania are right now, she may have her work cut out.

***

Captives And Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World is published by Allen Lane.

Start the story at a different moment in time — 1948, say, when the grandparents of today’s Gazans were living in the area, now southern Israel, where Hamas terrorists committed their atrocities — and the crystalline certainties of the scenario above take on a different light.

But there are more than two options. We could begin our story much earlier than 1948, perhaps when the name Gaza was recorded for the first time: during the reign of the mighty, empire-building Thutmose III, 1,479–1,425 BC. By this time, Gaza had already been under the rule of the Pharaohs for several decades. The long view quickly reveals that contest is a constant in Gaza’s history. Wars surge up at intervals in great, seismic eruptions, before the territory settles into an equilibrium which in turn is shattered by another external invader.

Much of this turbulence can be attributed to Gaza’s strategic location. Hemmed in between the Mediterranean and the Sinai and Negev deserts, this coastal oasis has long been a desirable waypoint on the trade routes that criss-crossed the arid region. Both the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, in the 1st century BC, and the Arab geographer Al Muqaddasi in the 10th century AD, commented on its beauty and enviable location. Critically, as the last point before a desert crossing, it was also an essential stopping place for conquerors looking either east from Egypt or west from the Levant. All roads of conquest ran through Gaza.

Enter stage left, from the 12th century BC, among the most historically compelling of Gaza’s many occupiers: the pagan Philistines of Philistia, etymological forefathers of the Muslim Palestinians of Palestine. And here, as the Philistines came to blows with the Jewish tribes of the interior over access to the coast, arose the earliest signs of the conflict that continues 32 centuries later between the Palestinians and Israelis.

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This was the Gaza of the Bible, in which the Israelite warrior Samson was chosen by the Old Testament God to rescue Israel from the Philistines. Tricked by Delilah into revealing the secret of his strength, Samson was eventually undone, his eyes gouged out before he was imprisoned in Gaza and put to work turning a massive millstone around and around in an endless ordeal. But he had the bitter last laugh, as he pulled down the Philistine temple on himself and his persecutors, killing everyone.

This apocalyptic vision of going round and round in circles before wreaking death and mutually assured destruction endures as the defining narrative of Israel and Gaza. Old Testament smiting becomes 21st-century Israeli airstrikes and Palestinian rockets, the violence circular and never-ending.

Gaza has been completely destroyed and emptied of its inhabitants before. Alexander the Great besieged the city in 332 BC. When it refused to surrender, his forces stormed its defences, put its men to the sword, and sold its children into slavery. The Hasmonean siege in 96 BC was another orgy of slaughter and destruction, this time launched by the Jewish king Alexander Jannaeus, ruler of Judaea, to seize Gaza from the Greeks. After these explosions of violence, the transfer of Gaza to Roman rule in 63 BC was comparatively peaceful, but after Rome officially switched to Christianity in 380, and the Bishop Porphyrius became bishop of Gaza in 395, he led a mob to loot and sack a city which had remained traditionally hostile to the followers of Christ. The city’s pagan gods and temples were destroyed in a fundamentalist frenzy. Last Thursday, 17 centuries later, St Porphyrius got his comeuppance when an Israeli airstrike shattered the church, the oldest in Gaza, that bore his name.

For a time, Byzantine prosperity succeeded the Pax Romana, before wars with the Persians brought renewed strife. While these two elderly leviathans slugged it out, in surged a new, nimble and faith-filled force. Muslim Arabs conquered Gaza in 637, only five years after the Prophet Mohammed’s death; a flurry of Levantine cities, including Damascus and Jerusalem, were taken during the same campaign. In time, Gaza became a significant intellectual and commercial centre — before an Arab civil war in 796 ruined it altogether. That Muslim-on-Muslim conflict was just one among many early harbingers of the deep intra-Arab tension and disunity — Arabs call it fitna — which would bedevil Middle Eastern politics from the 20th century. But after the devastation of the Crusader conquests, Saladin restored Muslim pride and prosperity to Gaza, ushering in a long period of Mamluk and then Ottoman rule, which persisted until 1917.

But so many of these earlier wars and conquests seem like here-today-gone-tomorrow disturbances when compared with the devastation of today. Ancient disputes have, in the past century or so, sharpened into arguably the world’s most tragically intractable and bloody conflict, in which victims are aggressors and aggressors victims.

Lustick chose 1948 to begin his summary of the current conflict, but one could equally start a few decades earlier, with the British seizure of Palestine from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in 1917. That moment ushered in a new iteration of a conflict that has arguably never ended. Energetically lobbied by the Zionist movement, which wanted a Jewish homeland, Britain made a fateful decision that year. London’s Balfour Declaration which — in the words of the writer Arthur Koestler “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third”— promised “a national home for the Jewish people” in the land the Biblical God had promised to Israel. Mass Jewish immigration followed, accelerated by the rise of the Nazis: around 250,000 Jews came to Mandate Palestine between 1929 and the outbreak of the Second World War.

Hounded out of Palestine by the Jewish Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists in 1947, the British were unable to deliver on the second principle of the declaration: that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. Much — Palestinians would say everything — was then done by Israel to prejudice Palestinian rights. All-out conflict in 1948 led to triumph and statehood for Israel, and wholesale dispossession and disaster ­— the notorious nakba — for the Palestinians. Around 750,000 fled into exile or were expelled — mostly to the West Bank, controlled by Jordan, or Gaza, then in Egyptian hands. Prevented from either entering Egypt proper, which did not want to take in such enormous numbers, or returning to their homes in Israel, overnight they became stateless refugees.

In 1947, the UN’s partition plan, rejected by the Arabs, had proposed a Jewish state occupying 55% of the country. By 1949, Israel controlled 78% of Mandatory Palestine, leaving the Arabs occupying West Bank and Gaza, which together represented just 22% of the original territory.

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Our story of Gaza takes another tragic turn at this point. Following its victory in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, Israel occupied Gaza, prefiguring a rise of Jewish settlements, illegal under international law, in the territory. Tensions escalated to the boiling point of the 1987 intifada, violent protests which killed more than 2,000 and which came to be emblematic — as Gaza itself has become — of Palestinian resistance. Further intifadas — killing more than 4,000 in the 2000s, and 273 in 2015–16 — surged out of the failure of the long-awaited 1993 Oslo accords to bring peace.

Meanwhile, into Gaza’s political arena stormed Hamas, making mincemeat of its secular rival Fatah. Hamas has no interest in politics or development. It clings to the dream of the destruction of Israel and has risen to power and prominence to become the face of Palestinian resistance in Gaza and beyond. As Ian Black writes in Enemies and Neighbours, a history of Israel and Palestine from 1917–2017, the Gaza Strip is “a permanent, festering — and often violent — reminder of the unresolved conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land”.

Bald statistics confirm the reality of its immiserated population. Of the 2.2 million Gazans, 68% are refugees. The poverty rate is 61%, unemployment over 46%. Over 73% of households receive humanitarian assistance, with more than 68% citing it as the main source of their income. This is what Palestinians mean when they talk about the daily violence of life under a blockade which has been in force since Hamas took power in 2007, leaving most Gazans shut in, their airspace and coastline controlled by Israel. There is no question of freedom or autonomy. This is fertile territory for resistance and hatred.

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And when Gazans consider the future, it’s hard to discern a ray of hope. They can hardly look to the occupied West Bank for a model settlement. Abandoning the armed struggle, recognising Israel and accepting 22% of historic Palestine has brought the West Bank Palestinians little in the way of dividends. Its 87-year-old “leader”, Mahmoud Abbas, head of the corrupt, enfeebled and incompetent Palestinian Authority, is known derisively in some Israeli circles as the mayor of Ramallah. Meanwhile, the two-state solution is dead and the extremists in power on both sides are dancing on its grave.

“Peace between Israel and Palestine can assume neither meaning nor substance except in Gaza, which will be both the foundation and the keystone,” wrote Jean-Pierre Filiu, Professor of Middle East Studies at Paris’s Sciences Po in 2012. A decade later, Gaza finds itself once again a cauldron of conflict. Khaled, a Palestinian friend, messages me. He fears the worst for this refuge of refugees. “For me, the unbearable human suffering experienced by Gaza is made worse by the real threat of a repeat of the historical traumatic displacement of Palestinians that Gaza embodies.”

Today, as Gaza crumbles beneath the relentless barrage of strikes, braced for another deadly invasion, a new story will begin. One can only hope, in the words of the late Lebanese poet Nadia Tuéni, writing about her beloved Beirut in 1986, that Gaza will survive: “Elle est mille fois morte, mille fois revécue.”

Abd al Rahman al Ghafiq was exhilarated. Allah had just favoured him with the most exalted victory over the infidel Franks in the heart of Europe. His Arab army, according to the eighth-century Mozarabic Chronicle, had remained “immobile as a wall” against the enemy’s advances and had held together “like a glacier”. Then, “In the blink of an eye, they annihilated the Franks with the sword.”

The Muslim army, once again, was victorious, and in frenzied hand-to-hand fighting the Frankish leader was hacked down and beheaded. His name was Charles, duke and prince of the Franks. A few hours later one of his senior commanders presented the governor with his blood-smeared trophy. He nodded with satisfaction. “Praise to God. It is done.”

There could be no doubt that God was on the Muslims’ side. Ever since the Prophet Mohammed had first unified the squabbling pagan tribes of the Arabian Peninsula under the banner of Islam, the new faith and its warriors had never looked back. Mohammed had died in 632, a century before the Battle of Tours, and the procession of victories had begun immediately after his death.

In 634 Damascus had fallen, and three years later the hoary old Patriarch of Jerusalem surrendered the Holy City to the Muslim caliph Umar, and by 641 Byzantine Egypt had folded. In 651, Yazdgird III, Persian King of Kings, was killed at Merv in Turkmenistan and the once mighty Sasanian Empire had been toppled. The Byzantines were flattened, too. Out of nowhere the Islamic Empire was rampant and resplendent — but there was more, much more, to come.

From the 670s, Muslim armies fanned across North Africa and swathes of Central Asia. In 711, the Berber commander Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Straits of Gibraltar with Muslim forces and landed on the Iberian Peninsula. Within five years the majority of it acknowledged Muslim authority. Coins were issued with a Latin inscription proclaiming the Islamic creed, modelled on Byzantine issues in North Africa: In nomine Dei Non Deus Nisi Deus Solus Non Deus Alius. In the Name of God, There is no God but God.

The Muslim victory at Tours was a turning-point. Had the Christians prevailed at the battle, the 14th-century Egyptian historian Maqrizi imagined, an Arabian fleet might never have sailed unchallenged into the Thames. “Perhaps the interpretation of the Bible, not the Quran, would still be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a God-fearing people the sanctity and truth of the Holy Trinity,” he wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Infidels.

Tours was no one-off raid on the Franks — it marked instead the beginning of Islamic consolidation and expansion in western Europe. For the Iberian Peninsula that the Arabs had travelled through to fight at Tours, the consequences were profound. Starting in the eighth century, droves of Christians converted to the new faith and the sound of church bells tolling became a thing of the past. Jews remained a tolerated minority for centuries to come; they were not hounded out of the Peninsula by the resurgent kingdoms of Castile, Léon, Navarre and Aragón because there was no Reconquista, and there was no Spain. The formerly Christian Hispania of Romans and Visigoths remained proudly Muslim Al Andalus.

The messenger sent to bring the Umayyad caliph Hisham ibn Abd al Malik the stirring news of the victory at Tours failed to find the leader of the Islamic world in his palace in Damascus. He was instead besporting himself in his vast desert palace-fortress of Qasr al Hayr al Sharqi, near Palmyra, where he loved to hunt, listen to music, drink copious bumpers of red wine and seek pleasure in the arms of his concubines. The caliph appeared unimpressed by the Muslim triumph almost three thousand miles to the west.

“It is well,” he said, waving the messenger away. “Let them continue north.”

They followed his command and did just that. After Tours, the Umayyad army under Abd al Rahman al Ghafiq, swelled by defectors, pressed north and east. Over successive  generations, Muslim armies continued the jihad. Many Christians converted at the point of a sword, many more — together with growing numbers of Jews — took up the faith voluntarily.

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Born a decade after Tours, Charles’s grandson Charlemagne grew up in its shadow. As king of the Franks from 771, his energies were consumed not so much by imperial and religious expansion — uniting all the Germanic peoples into one kingdom and converting his subjects to Christianity — but in desperate attempts to resist the mighty Islamic wave crashing over western Christendom. Exalted in his aims, however, he was unsuccessful on the battlefield.

He lived just long enough to see Paris fall to Muslim forces. A year later, in 814, the self-styled Emperor of the Romans died, plunging his embattled kingdom — and much of Europe — into internecine strife, energetically stoked by Umayyad leaders. Bruges fell in 847. By 900 Rome, Genoa, Milan, Florence and Venice had either fallen to the Muslims after fighting or had surrendered voluntarily to avoid further bloodshed. Puppet popes, shorn of real power, henceforth were the order of the day.

There was no Carolingian Renaissance to illuminate the continent. Instead that role fell to those fortune-seeking Muslim scholars who followed in the wake of the Arab warriors. After their lightning campaigns across the continent, the great European monasteries, formerly illustrious centres of learning, were either torched or converted to Islamic madrassas, colleges where students learned the sacred truths of the Quran and fikh, Islamic jurisprudence.

Arab science, medicine and mathematics broke new ground in Muslim Europe. Beginning in the tenth century, Rome, once the fortress of western Christendom, emerged as a powerhouse of Islamic philosophy, law, astronomy, history, geography, cartography and calligraphy. Scholars from as far afield as Damascus, Cairo and Baghdad flocked there to find imperial patronage, translating some of the great works of classical Greek, Hindu and Persian scholarship into Arabic. Seminal works by Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Hippocrates, Galen and others found their way onto the bookshelves of generations of Umayyad Muslim emirs (princes) in their Roman palaces.

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Portraiture became virtually unknown in Europe. Learned scholars spoke mysteriously of ancient Persian miniatures depicting images of men, women and animals, but these were frowned upon as the impious works of artists who had lost their way and departed from the true faith. Sculpture died out completely and, led by the Arabs, artistic life focused on architecture, calligraphy, mosaics, pottery, embroidery and carpet-weaving.

Over several centuries, Umayyad power expanded across Europe. Christendom found itself increasingly hemmed in and hard-pressed within the southeastern rump of the continent, harried by ever more damaging Ottoman incursions. Christians no longer looked to compromised Rome for spiritual leadership and salvation, but east to Constantinople, last independent bastion of the faith. There were no Crusades in the Middle East because there were no Christian armies left to fight them.

Then, in 1453, calamity struck. Constantinople had resisted foreign invaders for more than 1,000 years. The long line of would-be conquerors included Attila the Hun (447), the Avars (626), the Umayyad caliph Muawiya (674–678) and the Russians (860). But on 29 May, the 21-year-old Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II finally succeeded where all before him had failed. The Byzantine emperor Constantine XI, “Constantine Palaiologos, in Christ true Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans”, to give him his official title, was killed and beheaded in a frantic defence of eastern Christendom’s millennial headquarters.

Orthodox Constantinople, “City of the World’s Desire”, became Muslim Istanbul. The Balkans, much of which had already been conquered, were completely overrun. From one end of the continent to the other, the Muslim crescent, rather than the Christian cross, now dominated the skyline.

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Those who had prayed that peace and prosperity might finally flow from a united Sunni Muslim Europe soon discovered that their hopes and dreams had been illusory. True, there were no sectarian wars pitting Catholics against Protestants, but far worse was to follow.

Arabs and Ottomans may both have been Muslim, but that was all that bound them together. During the Forty Years War, which began in 1460, Arab armies fought repeated campaigns against the Ottomans as Islamic Europe tore itself apart. Muslims, alongside those Jews and Christians who had chosen to retain their faiths and remained dhimmi protected persons in return for payment of the jizya capitation tax, watched aghast as the continent immiserated itself.

There was no Reformation and there was no Renaissance. Western Europe had been gobbled up by Arab Muslim armies, Eastern Europe had succumbed to Ottoman steel and artillery and now the two Muslim forces battled it out for supremacy. For many Europeans, whatever their religion, it seemed as though the Dark Ages had returned.

Justin Marozzi is the author of Islamic Empires: Fifteen Cities that Define a Civilization, published by Penguin.

And build on they did. It took them four back-breaking years, slogging away in the fiercest summer temperatures of Iraq, to complete the job, and by 766, it was done. Mansur’s city was an architectural marvel from the start. “They say that no other round city is known in all the regions of the world,” wrote Al Khatib al Baghdadi, the eleventh-century author of the comprehensive History of Baghdad.

Four straight roads ran from four gates in the outer walls towards the city centre, past vaulted arcades containing the merchants’ shops and bazaars, past squares and houses. At the heart of the circular city was a vast royal precinct almost 2,000 metres in diameter, empty apart from two monumental buildings. The Great Mosque stood alongside the caliph’s Golden Gate Palace, a classically Islamic expression of the union between temporal and spiritual authority.

Built on the west bank of the Tigris, the imperial capital spread swiftly to the east, where it grew at breakneck pace. The famous Barmakid family, well-heeled viziers to the Abbasid caliphs, spent 20 million silver dirhams building an opulent palace there, and another 20 million furnishing it (to put that in perspective, a master-builder working on the construction of Baghdad was paid 1/24^th of a dirham a day).

Wisely, in an age when men could lose their heads with a caliph’s nod to the ever-present executioner, it was presented as a gift to Al Mamun, son and heir of the great caliph Harun al Rashid, and became his official residence in the early ninth century, glittering centrepiece of the Dar al Khilafat, the caliphal complex that was home to future generations of Commanders of the Faithful.

All this was mightily impressive, but very quickly the architectural pre-eminence of the Round City became the least of Baghdad’s merits. Flush with money, the capital  presided over a cultural revolution every bit as remarkable as its burgeoning political, military and economic power. Poets and prose writers, scientists and mathematicians, musicians and physicians, historians, legalists and lexicographers, theologians, philosophers and astronomers, even cookery writers, together made this a golden age, Islam’s answer to Greece in the fifth century BC.

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To put it in perspective, more scientific discoveries were achieved in Baghdad during the ninth and tenth centuries than in any previous period of history. Never mind its meteoric rise to the cultural zenith of the Islamic world, within a century of its construction the city was the intellectual capital of the planet.

“Seek knowledge even to China,” the Prophet Mohammed had urged his followers and the greatest minds in the Muslim world flocked to Baghdad in their droves to do so. Their movement across continents to seek knowledge — as well as fortunes — was scarcely less extraordinary than the world-changing Arab conquests of the seventh century. Hardly surprising, then, that the geographer Al Muqaddasi should call Iraq “the fountainhead of scholars”.

Ninth-century Baghdad emerged as the scientific powerhouse of the world. The celebrated Bait al Hikma, the House of Wisdom, became the nerve centre of Abbasid intellectual activity, part-lavishly endowed royal archive, part-learned academy, library and translation bureau, with a staff of scholars, copyists and bookbinders. By the middle of the century, it was the world’s largest repository of books, the seed from which the golden era of Arabic science flourished.

There were pioneering scholars like Mohammed ibn Musa al Khwarizmi, a master of arithmetic and astronomy whose ground-breaking work Al Kitab al Mukhtasar fi Hisab al Jabr wal Mukabala (The Compendium on Calculation by Restoring and Balancing) bequeathed the world the dread term algebra, scourge of children’s schooldays for more than a thousand years to come.

His Book of Addition and Subtraction According to the Hindu Calculation introduced for the first time the decimal system of nine numerals and a zero. Within a century it led to the discovery of decimal fractions, which were then used to calculate the roots of numbers and calculate the value of pi to sixteen decimal places. Those of us who never want to see quadratic and linear equations again can remember Khwarizmi instead in the word “algorithm“.

The caliph Mamun wanted to test the accuracy of the ancients’ measurement of the world’s circumference and commissioned the Banu Musa brothers to investigate. They were a prodigiously wealthy family of astronomers, astrologers, engineers and experts in geometry who founded the Khizanat al Hikma, Treasury of Wisdom, a library-cum-hostel for scholars. Their experiments hammering in pegs on cords across the plain of Sinjar, north-west of Baghdad, concluded that the ancients had got it right, and the circumference of the world was indeed 24,000 miles (not bad, the precise figure is 24,902 miles).

Mamun, royal emblem of the outward-looking, intellectually inquisitive spirit of the time, also commissioned his famous world map in which the Atlantic and Indian oceans became open bodies of water, rather than Ptolemy’s landlocked seas, and in which the Mediterranean was far more accurately measured.

Great minds roved freely in Abbasid Baghdad. In the field of medicine Nestorian Christians and their Muslim descendants led the way, none more brilliant than Hunayn ibn Ishak, head translator in the House of Wisdom and chief doctor to the ninth-century caliph Mutawakil. By the age of 17 he had translated On the Natural Faculties, one of many titles by the second-century Greco-Roman physician Galen, whose scientific theories dominated European medicine for 1,500 years.

Hunayn was a distinguished scientist and author in his own right. His Ten Treatises on the Eye includes one of the first ever anatomical drawings of the human eye and is considered the first systematic textbook of ophthalmology.

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Then there was Al Razi, the tenth-century physician and philosopher, author of numerous medical tomes, better known in the West as Rhazes, the greatest physician of the medieval world. His classification of substances into the four groups of animal, vegetable, mineral and derivatives of the three rejected pseudo-philosophical alchemy in favour of laboratory experiment and deduction, preparing the way for the later scientific classification of chemical substances.

His understanding of the nature of time as absolute and infinite, requiring neither motion nor matter to exist, was centuries ahead of its time and has been likened to Newton’s much later theories.

Science was only part of this urban marvel. Baghdad also welcomed polymaths like Al Jahiz, a peerless prose stylist who gravitated from Basra to Baghdad in the early ninth century and over the course of an astonishingly productive career rattled off 231 works, among them the encyclopaedic Book of Animals, which drew heavily on Aristotle and, some would argue, contained the seeds of Darwin’s much later theory of natural selection. The breadth of his interests and output was gloriously, quintessentially Abbasid, ranging from the superiority of black men over whites, pigeon-racing and Islamic theology to miserliness, the Aristotelian view of fish and whether it was permissible for women to groan with pleasure during sex.

Poets were in on the action, too, always eager to dash off a sycophantic verse in the hope of receiving a purse of gold coins from an appreciative caliph. Perhaps the most transgressive of this unruly lot was Abu Nuwas, a wine-quaffing, boy-seducing libertine whose poetry celebrated illicit sex with a fearlessness that would have had him killed in parts of the Arab world today. Abu al Atahiya was another transcendent voice from the eighth century, a penniless pot-seller-turned-poet who somehow managed to keep his head attached to his neck during the reigns of half a dozen caliphs.

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But a golden age cannot last forever. That is part of what makes it so special. Baghdad’s time in the sun lasted several world-illuminating hundreds of years but by the thirteenth century the glory days had long gone. The once omnipotent caliphs had retreated behind their palace walls to become indolent, garden-tending puppets controlled by outsiders.

Then, in 1258, the apocalypse came. It arrived in the terrifying form of Hulagu, warlord grandson of the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan, and his bristling army bent on plunder. The decadent Abbasid regime was no match for his hordes, who wreaked havoc and destruction; after the feeble caliph Mustasim had surrendered, several hundred thousand Baghdadis who had been promised mercy, including scholars and scientists, were hacked down in cold blood.

Then the city was torched. The great Abbasid palaces were consumed by the inferno alongside mosques, law colleges, royal tombs, markets, libraries, and street after street of homes. The Tigris ran red with blood and black with ink from all the books hurled into it. Baghdad, once the most sophisticated civilization on earth, went up in smoke and plunged into the abyss. It never dominated the world stage again.

For all its troubles today, for all the war and sectarian strife brilliantly documented in the BBC series Once upon a Time in Iraq, Baghdad remains a great, resilient city. It may be a shadow of its former, world-beating self, but let us celebrate its continued survival. Happy 1,258^th, dear Baghdad. Just don’t mention 1258.

Justin Marozzi is the author of Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood and Islamic Empires: Fifties cities that define a Civilization.