MY LATEST ARTICLE, A BOOK REVIEW, PUBLISHED IN AL-AHRAM WEEKLY TOUSLED ON THE TIGRIS GAMAL NKRUMAH BAGHDAD ART DECO, CAELCILIA PIERI, AUC PRESS BAGHDAD BEGAN WITH A BANG: Look back at Baghdad with raw angst and rumpled bitterness. The city has long been subjected to calamitous invasions, but surprisingly this metropolis often emerged even more surprisingly pulchritudinous in the wake of each Armageddon. Baghdad is bewitching, and historian Caecilia Pieri, senior editor at Editions du Patrimone, Paris, has unlocked some of the secrets of this curiously beauteous belle laide called Baghdad. Baghdad is bagged out, beat up and blowzy. The unkempt appearance reflects the morose mood of many of its inhabitants. Yet Baghdad cannot be ignored. The city is one of the five “bigs” of the Middle East — Istanbul, Tehran, Damascus and Mecca, or is it Jeddah? Cairo, I consider an African city, and so in this context it doesn’t count. Yet, of all the cities cited above, Cairo comes closest in ambiance to Baghdad. Not least because the two cities straddle great rivers — the Nile in the case of Cairo, and the Tigris as far as Baghdad is concerned. The Tigris is the lifeline of Baghdad, even as the Nile is to Cairo. “Each house had its own access to the river, using the guffa, the circulated coracle described by Herodotus and unchanged since Assyrian times,” the author keeps her eye on the Tigris. Mesopotamia, not unlike Egypt, is one of those placenta places in the history of humankind. And, Baghdad is a city that can never be circumscribed. The relatively more clement climate of Cairo by comparison with the Iraqi capital’s continental extremes of chilly winters and the scorching heat of its summers must not detract from the similarities of a rich agricultural hinterland that provides more of the wherewithal of a metropolis. And both cities were respectively the capitals of Islamic empires and the have historically given a peripatetic spatial dimension to their adversaries. “Baghdad was often cruelly destroyed by Persian, Arab, Mongol, Tartar, and Turkish conquerors, but perhaps the foundations of our house are resting on the bricks of Babylon; who knows? For already in the times of Nebuchadnezzar, there existed here a village named Baghdadou, the gardens,” wrote Myriam Harry in 1941. It is impossible to tell today from the suspended vistas of the contemporary city. “Urban time-framers have their own rhythms, which do not necessarily fall into line with the march of history,” Pieri postulates. There was an end-of-an-era feeling in the immediate aftermath of the British invasion and colonisation of Mesopotamia. “When the British entered Baghdad as victors in March 1917, after marching all the way from Basra, Great Britain was already present in Iraq: since 1803 it had two consulates in the country, which was a vital link on the route to its Indian empire,” the author observes. In the aftermath of each historical conquest a desperate and disturbing scenario prevailed. But there is something amiss here, something strident about Baghdad. The British invaders, unlike their contemporary American counterparts, did not sit idly by the Tigris with iPhones while drones dropped destruction. The British deftly unearthed the past ripped from a real, as opposed to a surreal, brutish Baghdad background. Pieri found pathos as well as humour in the Iraqi capital’s architectural Art Deco. Baghdad’s brickwork mesmerised her. And so the foundations were laid for her book. “When the British arrived in 1917, Baghdad consisted of an agglomeration of four entities: Rusafa on the east bank, the main historical centre, was connected in a still informal way with three geographically distinct suburbs. A pontoon bridge to Karkh, opposite on the western bank. A few kilometres to the north, two other conurbations had developed around two of Islam’s greatest shrines, one on each side of the Tigris: to the east Adhamiya, at the foot of a mosque Auble [described as] as ‘very noteworthy for its architecture, where lie the remains of Abu Hanif[a], known as the great Imam, who was a juriconsult famous in the time of Haroun Al-Rashid,’ and founder of the Sunni Hanafi rite. Exactly opposite this neighbourhood, to the west, Kadhimiya is a place of pilgrimage where Shias venerate the seventh imam, Musa Al-Kadhim, who is buried alongside his son Jaafar, his grandson, and Mohamed Al-Taqi, the ninth imam, in a tomb erected by the Safavids at the heart of a vast mosque whose twin cupolas have underscored the iconography of the city for four centuries,” Pieri extrapolates. Baghdad helped her to discipline the eye of her imagination so that she could see aspects of Art Deco architecture not immediately apparent to either locals or Westerners. She needed to partake of that Iraqi encounter with the West. “The first period of relative stability in the urban fabric coincides with the power in 1869 of the governor Midhat Pasha (the same one who ordered the partial demolition of the ramparts). Intent on urban extension and modernisation, this Ottoman, imbued with European culture, undertook a series of measures whose effect was to ‘energize Baghdad that had become a provincial backwater’,” the author quotes Ihsan Fathi’s Protection du patrimoine, 2006. Ghettos are characteristic of cities that attract hordes of armies and waves of wanderers. And Baghdad is a city of ghettos. It certainly was in the distant past, in medieval times and under the Ottomans and the British. It was not so under Saddam Hussein, but the ghetto impetus is at work again today. “The Christians were grouped around the Armenian church, in the vicinity of Maydan Square, a neighbourhood that took on the name of their exile after 1916: Camp Al-Arman, The Camp of the Armenians. Europeans, for their part, established themselves on the east bank in the Sinak neighbourhood, around the first British Embassy, where they had new houses built. The opening of this embassy in 1905 was the catalyst for a noteworthy development of the neighbourhood,” Pieri notes. HULEGU AND HISTORY: Baghdad was for a more than half a millennium the capital of the Abbasid Empire, since its inception more Persian than Arab, if not strictly-speaking in language then in art and architecture. Like Babylon, Baghdad was a city of landscaped gardens, mosques as opposed to pagan temples, and palatial mansions. Archeologists concur with historians that it was Hulegu, the Mongol tyrant and descendant of Genghis Khan, who brought Baghdad’s Abbasid opulence to an abrupt end. The city never fully recovered from the ravages of the Mongol hordes, even under Ottoman rule, until the British invaded. But when Baghdad did revive architecturally it was with a Western facade. The Oriental Ottoman touches persevered and a hauntingly exquisite hybrid blossomed. The author validates the truism that Baghdad’s architectural heritage was among the clearest and the most beautiful examples of Art Deco architectural creations. But to ascribe this particular trend, one is inclined to dig deep into this particular gory episode of Mesopotamian history. At first, it appeared like any other invader of Mesopotamia, but the Mongols were different and the devastation of Baghdad was one of the worst in many disastrous calamities to visit the city. To begin with, Hulegu asked the Abbasid caliph, Al-Mutasim, the thirty-seventh of his dynasty, to recognize Mongol sovereignty as his predecessors had once accepted the rule of the Seljuk Turks. The Emir of the Faithful, presumptuous, and he imprudently sent word to Hulegu that if he dares attack Baghdad, he would mobilize the entire Muslim world, from India to Africa. Not in the least impressed, the grandson of Genghis Khan proceeded to besiege the city. Towards the end of 1257 he and, it would appear, hundreds of thousands of cavalry began advancing towards the Abbasid capital. The Mongol hordes sacked the Assassin’s bastion Alamut and destroyed the library of inestimable value, thus making it impossible for future generations to gain any in-depth knowledge of the doctrine and activities of the Assassins. The penny dropped at last and the caliph finally realized the extent of the Mongol threat, he acquiesced and was obliged to negotiate. He proposed that Hulegu’s name be pronounced at Friday sermons in the mosques of Baghdad and that he be granted the title sultan. But it was too late, for by now the Mongol had definitely opted for force. After a few weeks of courageous resistance, the prince of the faithful had no choice but to capitulate. On 10 February 1258 he went to the victor’s camp in person and asked if he would promise to spare the lives of all the citizens if they agreed to lay down there arms. But in vain. As soon as they were disarmed, the Muslim fighters were exterminated. The slaughter soon metamorphosed into a macabre massacre. Such is the complexity of Baghdad’s history and the city’s inhabitants have taken up to six centuries to reclaim vestiges of the Abbasid architectural legacy. The Mongol horde fanned out through the prestigious city demolishing buildings, burning neighbourhoods, and mercilessly massacring men, women, and children — nearly eighty thousand people in all. Only the Christian community was spared, thanks to the intercession of the Khan’s wife, a Nestorian Christian. Ironically, today the mass exodus of the Christians of Iraq sent shock waves throughout the Christian communities of the Middle East. The Abbasid caliph was strangled to death a few days after his capture. With the tragic end of the Abbasid caliphate, Baghdad never retrieved its former glory, even under the Ottomans. It was only with the arrival of the British colonialists that the modern city began to take shape. The dreadful drama of Al-Mutasim was re-enacted in 1958 when the Iraqi Hashemite royal family was massacred, literally machine-gunned in the palace courtyard, and King Faisal II died on the injuries he sustained. The monarchy was abolished and the golden years of Baghdad Art Deco architecture came to an end. After a decade of military coups and counter-coups, political intrigue and instability the Arab Socialist Baath Party came to power in 1968 paving the way for Saddam Hussein who usurped power in 1979. By that time the classical age of Baghdad Art Deco architecture was supplanted by Soviet-like and Stalinist-inspired architectural monotony. BACK TO THE BRITISH: As the dust settled, and an ever increasing number of Europeans and westernized Iraqis began to build Victorian style buildings designed to withstand the heat and dust of Baghdad. Simplifying and streamlining European architectural forms, Baghdad Art Deco soared upwards like the Tower of Babel. It borrowed from all the styles of Baghdad’s rich past and especially the architectural traditions of the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations. Pieri rightly gives plenty of space for photographs to illustrate her point. Baghdad At Deco reached the apex of its popularity between the two world wars. European architectural designs were adapted to be functional in the climatic conditions of Iraq. Baghdad was one of two Ottoman provinces in Mesopotamia, contemporary Iraq, before the British arrived and there was no sense of national identity, let alone a national architectural flavour. Aristocratic families, Arab and Turkish alike, senior civil servants and wealthy Iraqi businessmen constructed mansions with multiple inner courtyards. Christians and Muslims, Sunnis and Shias, Kurds and Turks began to live side by side in the wealthy Baghdad neighbourhoods. Well-to-do Jews, too, moved to Baghdad from other parts of Iraq. The inhabitants of Baghdad for the first time set up house where their incomes and salaries permitted, the very notion of a ghetto based on race or religion became a thing of the past. “This new and comparatively mixed kind of neighbourhood was especially apparent in the newest southern suburbs, like Battawin, built from the start along almost ecumenical lines... and not only mosques, but churches and synagogues were built. More startlingly, this tendency spread into older neighbourhoods, like Sinak, inside Rusafa on the east bank of the Tigris, where Jews and Christians moved in, or Kraymat, at the heart of Karkh on the west bank, where a whole neighbourhood of sumptuous patrician residences was built, with the British embassy at their centre,” Pieri extrapolates. “Even more surprisingly, the territorial symbolism of the two Muslim confessions themselves did not escape the effects of modernization — or at least of social evolution: the Sunni district of Adhamiya adopted the new urban pattern for its growth, and although it attracted big Sunni families, its neighbours in Raghiba Khatu to the east and northeast were a community of Armenian refugees from Turkey,” she notes. The author was inspired by the earlier works of such academicians as Khalis Al-Ashab, whose 1974 Urban Geography of Baghdad based on his doctoral thesis. “Kadhimiya itself, with its population of Shia described by Al-Ashab as ‘both Arab and non-Arab’ (that is Iranian) was now intermingled with Christians,” Pieri points out. The demolition of alleyways or the traditional zuqaq ensued with the straightening out of of the old street layouts. The ancient shanshabil houses were outmoded and eventually abandoned altogether and Western-style windows, as opposed to the traditional mashrabiyas became an essential feature of modern Baghdad homes. Art Deco architectural styles blossomed at this particular point in time, between the first and second world wars. A riverside residence metamorphosed into the ideal. BAGHDAD IS NOT BEIRUT: The development of Art Deco architecture in Baghdad had a distinct flavour, and followed a different course, from the cities of the Levant, such as Beirut. The master builders in Beirut were modelling their designs after the architecture of Mediterranean French cities such as Marseilles. Baghdad was inspired by the architecture of antiquity. The architectural genius of the developers of Art Deco in Baghdad demonstrated a differentiation between structural and decorative elements. Babylon and the Baghdad of the Abbasid Caliph Haroun Al-Rashid and his Scheherazade were the inspiration of the contemporary city’s Art Deco. The facade was as critical as the foundation. The local idiosyncratic specificity of Baghdad include details of door handles and other minutiae. Plant motifs incorporated into the architectural designs since time immemorial in Mesopotamia once again came into vogue. Art Deco in Baghdad was never purely aesthetic. The scorching summers of Baghdad dictated otherwise, and so did the blinding sandstorms protection from which necessitated supporting and supplementary functions of certain architectural features, decorative features were never arbitrary. The Tigris is to Baghdad what the Bosphorus is to Istanbul, or the Mediterranean to Beirut. The river gives Baghdad its very character and essence of being. The facades of some buildings are deceptively plain and in others one can detect the rudiments of masonry. A city composed of confessional quarters were soon transformed into a cosmopolitan potpourri. Exclusive Sunni and Shia districts turned into more accommodating spatial hodgepodges. The wealthy of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s were not particularly budget conscious. British architects abounded in the late 1920s. Indeed, even by the late 1950s there were very few indigenous Iraqi architects. The first architectural school was inaugurated in 1959. Indigenous master masons worked alongside British architects in a traditional fashion, drawing from a rich cultural legacy that dated from ancient Mesopotamian times. Floral imagery and Islamic motifs predominated and were lavishly taunted as eye-catching effrontery and certain aspects of Art Deco architecture in Baghdad between the wars were, alas, kitsch. Yet, as the author deliberately peppered her book with photographs, some of Baghdad’s Art Deco architectural treasures are truly exhilarating. Pieri had first ventured to Baghdad in connection with organising an exhibition of paintings, with no intention whatsoever of writing a book on Baghdad’s Art Deco architectural heritage. She instantly fell in love with the sculpted brickwork facades. Pieri interacted with Iraqi families and her hosts obliged. Most of the buildings were and still are inhabited as family homes. She literally knocked on the doors of the resident of Baghdad. And, Iraqis appreciated a Westerner who was genuinely curious about the country’s architectural heritage and fascinated with the Art Deco legacy of their capital city. “It was from the Assyrian and Abbasid past that the Baghdadi usta [master masons] traditionally drew the inspiration and know-how that were his pride,” Pieri expounds. Architectural traditions that survived over several millenniums mixed with modern European ones. Yet, Baghdad had a distinctive architectural specificity. Baghdad was never Beirut, and by the same token was never Basra. “The bourgeoisie of all ranks set itself up on land carved out of palm groves, whose products were never as highly valued in Baghdad as in Basra, where dates were made into one of the essential riches of the country,” Pieri extrapolates. With the beginning of the British mandate barriers were broken — Shia and Sunni, Christian and Jew, Kurd and Armenian lived side by side for the first time in Iraqi’s history. It is regrettable that many of the districts of contemporary Baghdad are now beginning to go back to the pre-Art Deco period of confessional segregation with predominantly Sunni Adhamiya and overwhelmingly Shia Kadhimiya. Suicide bombers terrorize innocent bystanders at random at a checkpoints because they know that a suburb is a Shia district in Baghdad and another is a Sunni one. In the 1930s the wealthy in Baghdad imported brightly coloured tiles from Europe, an intricate mixture of styles emerged — as ever inextricably intertwined with the past. Detached and imperious Assyrian goats, balconies covered with leaf-motif volutes and three-dimensional calligraphy. The juxtaposition of Western ideas with indigenous Iraqi designs created a curious architectural concoction. “From the thirties onward, wrought iron became an integral part of the [Baghdad] house and was used with increasing frequency and impact to enliven facades and interiors. The same mass produced details were inserted into all possible places: a particular favourite in Baghdad was the peacock feather motif, which appears in balconies and window supports, in roof parapets and on staircase bannisters and gallery railings,” Pieri elucidates. Baghdad made important contributions to the golden age of Art Deco, and the city was irrevocably changed from an architectural standpoint. The wealthy newcomers and the old money, old-timers made use of a potpourri of Western and Oriental architectural elements and designs. Baghdad’s new buildings in the aftermath of the British occupation displayed bold, monumental gestures hitherto unknown. Particularly inspired were the manner in which “domestic architecture bowed to the sobriety of a functional aesthetic”. In the 1930s, sculpted detail in the brick architecture of arch and column had reached a degree of virtuosity that was testimony to the Baghdadi usta’s creativity. The pathos-laden Baghdad that had survived over the millenniums many Armageddons had come into its own. In Pieri’s words “the ustas of Baghdad wrote a new page of the city’s history in brick”. Reviewed by Gamal Nkrumah Print Email Share/Bookmark
Posted on: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 10:37:39 +0000
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