Islamic Empires: Fifteen Cities That Define a Civilization, by Justin Marozzi
Islamic Empires: Fifteen Cities That Define a Civilization
Like a desert whirlwind, Justin Marozzi whisks us through 15 centuries of Islam, with a look at 15 cities ruled by the glorious and infamous in its name.
Starting with the seizure of Mecca by the Prophet Mohammed in AD 630, we are taken to Damascus and Córdoba under the Umayyads, the Samarkand of Timur, Isfahan under the Safavid Abbas the Great, Constantinople conquered by the Ottomans, the Kabul of Babur, Tripoli the pirate kingdom of the Corsair buccaneers and Beirut the playground of the Orient in the 19th and early-20th centuries.
The journey ends in this century with two cities whose outward and visible form seems to owe as much to Mammon as to Mohammed – Dubai, financial hub of the United Arab Emirates, and Doha, capital of Qatar, whose citizens have the highest per capita income anywhere in the world.
It is an astonishing achievement. Each account is crammed with detail – the footnotes are as tightly woven as a Baluch rug. Marozzi plays to all his strengths as scholar, adventurer and itinerant journalist in a breakneck narrative – exciting, illuminating and eccentric.
Each city is described at the height of its glory and power. Generally, though not always, the story begins with conquest and egregious bloodshed. Prime examples are Timur arriving at Samarkand; Abbas at Isfahan; Mehmet II finally taking Constantinople, after decades of attempts by the Ottomans.
The pits are dug, mass graves prepared, and skulls piled in pyramids by the thousand. Yet even the bloodiest became the greatest patrons of arts and crafts, music and poetry, seeking and tolerating talent and skill, irrespective of race and faith. Most of the tyrants were especially tolerant towards Jews and Jewish scholars. It didn’t stop with the love of letters and the arts – the early Islamic imperial cities were awash with wine and trysts involving either sex, according to taste.
‘A hash-hish party never goes well with a wine party,’ muses Babur, the creator of the Mughal Empire that brought Islamic rule to India. Babur emerges as one of the more endearing of the outsize warriors and patrons. His passion was horticulture, and this made him choose Kabul as his burial place – his ‘light garden’. The garden and the tomb are still there, just about, though the city has been smashed in bouts of war civil and uncivil. The original tomb covering was shattered, but it has been restored with discretion, with surrounding pergolas of roses, under the care of the Aga Khan Foundation.
Many of the great monuments and townscapes are now destroyed or abandoned, as Marozzi meticulously catalogues. But much remains, if you know where to look. There is little left of Timur’s Isfahan, but his architectural legacy persists in smaller monuments across his former empire. Though depleted, the two tombs of Timurid descendants, with much of the delicate tiling intact, and 11 or so survivors of more than a hundred minarets in Herat still take the breath away. These were the grand objectives of travel for Robert Byron in his Road to Oxiana (1937), one of the greatest travel books of the last century and a half – as Marozzi acknowledges.
Present-day anecdotes and snapshots punctuate the historical narrative. The rebuff in 2010 of two Muslim tourists trying to pray in Córdoba’s Great MosqueCathedral started as a minor incident, but has become increasingly major.
The absence of contemporary analysis and appraisal makes the portrait of Beirut one of the least satisfactory chapters. This is perhaps odd as Beirut was the city where the author’s parents met. Much of his depiction of the high life of resort Beirut – its highly coloured, Belle Époque casino life and literary culture – is brilliant.
But he underplays the dark side: the sectarian divisions continually aggravated by foreign meddling and invasion. Beirut saw the rise of Hezbollah, pioneers of the suicide car and truck bombs. But Marozzi writes very little about Islamists and militant political Islam. Hezbollah, Isis and even the Muslim Brotherhood are hardly mentioned. Yet they are in the toxic mix of Arab and Islamic politics today – new caliphates in their own terms.
These are minor quibbles about a wonderful book. And, of course, the story of Islamic empires continues.