Baghdad’s decline, fall – and rise?

Baghdad was once a shining light of the civilised world but has just been named as having the lowest quality of life of 239 world cities. Does it have the capacity to rise again?

One thing the Arab world has in abundance is grand cities. From Kairouan in Tunisia, through Cairo, Damascus, Sanaa and Jerusalem, there is scarcely an Arab country without one or more World Heritage sites. As other Arab cities have risen, most of these cities have, sadly, faded from their former glory, either through war, occupation, economic hardship or political mismanagement.

In recent decades, Baghdad has suffered from all four. The news over the weekend that a consulting group had ranked Baghdad at the bottom of a list of 239 cities for quality of life seemed to prove what the residents of this contested city have long known: that life in one of the region’s most storied and glorious capitals has been in decline for decades.

In the great singer Fairuz’s hymn to the city, Baghdad and the Poets, she recalled the days of its glory, “its sweet scent” and the “joyful life” of its past. And indeed Baghdad can comfortably claim, at the height of the Abbasid empire, to have been among the greatest cities on Earth.

Yet the real tribulations of Baghdad have come in the last century. The story of Baghdad over the past 100 years has mirrored the story of the Middle East, of the flourishing of a region cut short by wars, occupation and political stagnation. Iraqis have ruled their own country for only about half of the past century.

Baghdad was an important part of the cultural renaissance, the Nahda, of the late 19th and early 20th century, a time of intellectual and artistic flourishing across the region. It was abbreviated in Iraq by the British occupation from the 1930s, though it continued in Egypt and the Levant for a decade longer until the Second World War.

Later, after the July Revolution of 1958, the city again became a centre of modernisation and even today Iraqis look back at that period with wistful fondness. Baghdad rapidly became the Middle East’s most cosmopolitan city, rivalled only by Cairo and Beirut. The infrastructure of the city was updated and beautiful buildings (of the prevailing architectural style) sprang up. A more forward-looking attitude also took hold as the city became a centre for travellers and business.

The end of that period came with the rise of Saddam Hussein and his decades-long domination. Under his rule, the country stagnated, although, as many Iraqis today point out, there was law and order and a degree of prosperity. The period of turmoil ushered in by the Iraq war of 2003 and the subsequent occupation continues today.

It is no wonder that residents of Baghdad lament the loss of their city. And yet Baghdad has been through worse days (though that is scant comfort for its residents today) and, as it has over the centuries, risen again.