Baghdad

Baghdad is one of those cities whose name carries more history than almost any building left standing in it can now convey. For five centuries it was the intellectual and political capital of the Islamic world — a city of libraries, hospitals, observatories, and markets that drew scholars, merchants, and diplomats from across Eurasia. At its height under the Abbasid caliphate it was, by most estimates, the largest city on earth, home to somewhere between one and two million people at a time when London was a modest town of a few tens of thousands. The House of Wisdom it contained was not a metaphor but an institution — a centre of translation, scholarship, and scientific inquiry that preserved Greek philosophy, advanced mathematics and astronomy, and produced original work in medicine and optics that would not be surpassed in Europe for centuries.

Very little of that city survives. What does survive is concentrated in four historic areas: Old Rusafa, the primary historic centre on the eastern bank of the Tigris; Al-Karkh on the western bank, where the original Abbasid circular city once stood; and the districts of Al-Adhamiya and Al-Kadhimiya, each containing significant religious architecture and traditional urban fabric. Old Rusafa covers approximately 5.4 square kilometres and contains nearly 15,700 buildings in various states of condition, ranging from carefully maintained historic structures to buildings so deteriorated they no longer safely support occupation. Within it, 132 monuments are formally listed, of which 21 date to the Abbasid period and the remainder to the Ottoman era.

What makes Baghdad's heritage situation distinctive — and in many ways more difficult than other threatened sites — is that the threats here are not primarily environmental or geological. They are political, institutional, and economic, which means they respond to different kinds of intervention and are considerably harder to address through the conservation tools that work elsewhere.

Prehistoric and Ancient Era — The Land Before the City

The site of Baghdad sits in the heart of Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that is among the earliest cradles of urban civilisation on earth. Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian cultures developed within this landscape over millennia before Baghdad existed, and the agricultural and hydraulic infrastructure they developed — the canal systems, the flood management works, the settled agricultural communities — formed the foundation on which everything that came later was built. Baghdad did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from one of the deepest wells of continuous civilisation in human history.

762 CE — Al-Mansur Founds the Round City

The Abbasid Caliph Al-Mansur selects a site on the western bank of the Tigris and constructs what becomes known as Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace — laid out in a perfect circle with the caliph's palace and the great mosque at its centre and four axial roads leading to the cardinal gates. The circular plan is not merely aesthetic but cosmological, placing the seat of Islamic political authority at the geometric and symbolic centre of the world. The city grows rapidly, attracting population from across the empire, and within decades the original round city is already being expanded and supplemented by new quarters on both banks of the river.

786 to 809 CE — The Golden Age Under Harun al-Rashid

The reign of Harun al-Rashid represents the peak of Abbasid power and Baghdad's status as the undisputed capital of the Islamic world. The city's population reaches extraordinary size for the pre-modern world. The House of Wisdom, Bayt al-Hikma, functions as a library, translation bureau, and research institution without precedent, gathering scholars from across the known world to translate Greek, Persian, Indian, and Syriac texts into Arabic and to produce original scholarship across every field of knowledge. The Baghdad of this period is the Baghdad that appears in the Thousand and One Nights, and while that literary image is romanticised it is not entirely fictional.

1227 CE — Al-Mustansiriya School Opens

Caliph Al-Mustansir completes the construction of the Al-Mustansiriya, a madrasa that teaches all four schools of Sunni jurisprudence under one roof alongside medicine, mathematics, and other sciences. It is one of the earliest institutions that can reasonably be described as a university in the modern sense, providing structured education across multiple disciplines to students from across the Islamic world. Its library held an initial collection of 80,000 volumes given by the Caliph, said to have grown to 400,000 rare books and valuable volumes. It still stands, still in its original location, still identifiable as the building it was when it opened nearly eight centuries ago.

1258 CE — The Mongol Sack

The Mongol army under Hulagu Khan arrives at Baghdad in January 1258 and lays siege to the city. The Caliph Al-Musta'sim, the last Abbasid caliph, surrenders and is subsequently executed. What follows is one of the most catastrophic urban destructions in medieval history. The city is systematically looted and burned over several weeks. The House of Wisdom and its library are destroyed. The irrigation canals that sustain the agricultural economy of the surrounding region are deliberately wrecked. Contemporary accounts describe the Tigris running black with the ink of destroyed manuscripts and red with the blood of the dead. Baghdad never fully recovers the position it held before 1258, and the destruction of that moment defines the boundary between the city's golden age and everything that follows.

1638 CE — Ottoman Conquest and New Beginnings

After centuries of reduced status and repeated conquest by different powers, Baghdad comes under Ottoman control under Sultan Murad IV. The Ottoman period brings relative stability and sustained investment in the city's built fabric. The mosques, traditional houses, commercial buildings, and urban infrastructure that constitute the majority of Baghdad's surviving historic architecture date to this era. The Ottomans develop the eastern bank of the Tigris — the Rusafa side — which becomes the main commercial and administrative centre of the city and remains the focus of the historic urban area today.

1917 — British Occupation and the First Major Interventions

British forces occupy Baghdad during the First World War, and the period of British administration that follows introduces the first systematic interventions in the historic urban fabric on a modern planning model. Al-Rashid Street, opened between 1915 and 1917, cuts a new commercial artery through the traditional city, demolishing historic fabric to create a European-style boulevard. The street is lined with new buildings in a hybrid Ottoman-European style that has its own architectural interest but whose creation requires the sacrifice of older fabric. It is the first of many such interventions over the following century, each of which takes more from the historic city than it returns.

1932 to 1958 — Independence and Modernisation

Iraqi independence in 1932 and the monarchy period that follows bring continued modernisation pressure. The discovery of oil revenue funds ambitious development programmes that see new roads, government buildings, and modern infrastructure inserted into and around the historic urban fabric with limited consideration for what is displaced. The influx of population to the capital creates housing pressure that is resolved, repeatedly, through the demolition of traditional courtyard houses and their replacement with higher-density modern construction.

1958 — The Revolution and Its Aftermath

The 1958 revolution that ends the Hashemite monarchy inaugurates a period of republican and eventually Baathist government that brings further waves of modernisation. Development pressure on the historic areas intensifies. The traditional communities that had sustained the historic neighbourhoods — including significant Christian and Jewish communities whose presence in Baghdad dated back centuries — begin to leave. A survey conducted in the 1970s finds over 5,000 heritage houses in reasonable structural condition. By 2009, fewer than 400 remain.

1980 to 1988 — The Iran-Iraq War

Eight years of war consume Iraq's resources, damage infrastructure throughout the country, and create conditions of economic stress that accelerate the deterioration of the historic urban fabric. Buildings that needed maintenance do not receive it. Institutions that might have managed heritage conservation are diverted to war-related functions. The conflict does not directly destroy much of Baghdad's architectural heritage, but it creates the conditions in which that heritage continues to decline without intervention.

1991 — The Gulf War

Coalition bombing during the Gulf War causes direct damage to parts of Baghdad's infrastructure and built environment. The economic sanctions that follow have consequences for heritage conservation that are in some ways more severe than the bombing itself, cutting off access to materials, expertise, and institutional resources for over a decade.

2003 — The Iraq War and Its Aftermath

The 2003 invasion and the years of conflict that follow represent the most severe crisis Baghdad's heritage has faced since the Mongol sack. Direct damage from military operations affects parts of the historic city. The collapse of institutional authority in the immediate aftermath enables looting and opportunistic demolition at a scale that is still not fully documented. The security situation in subsequent years makes systematic heritage work dangerous and in many periods impossible. Sectarian conflict drives further displacement of the communities whose continued presence in the historic areas had been one of the factors sustaining those areas, however inadequately.

2009 to Present — Assessment, Advocacy, and Continuing Loss

Researchers and conservation professionals begin producing systematic assessments of what remains and what has been lost. The picture these assessments reveal is sobering: over 20 percent of Baghdad's historic fabric destroyed since 1917 through planned interventions alone, with far more lost through neglect, abandonment, and the cumulative effects of conflict. More than 50 percent of buildings in surveyed historic areas are in poor or very poor structural condition. The pace of loss has not stopped. It has simply changed character — from active demolition to slow deterioration, which is less visible but no less final.

Baghdad holds an At Risk to Critically Threatened classification — a range that reflects genuine uncertainty about the current state of a city where systematic assessment remains difficult and conditions vary considerably across different historic areas.

Warfare and Political Instability remains the most severe and episodic threat. The Mongol sack of 1258, the Gulf War, and most comprehensively the Iraq War of 2003 and its aftermath have each caused irreversible losses. The damage from active conflict is compounded by the institutional collapse that follows — when the authorities responsible for heritage protection are absent or overwhelmed and the vacuum is filled by looting, opportunistic demolition, and accelerated deterioration.

Uncontrolled Urban Development — the insertion of modern high-rise construction within historic areas, the widening of roads through traditional neighbourhood fabric, and the demolition of courtyard houses for commercial development — has proceeded without the planning controls that would exist in a functioning heritage management system. The pressure driving this development is real, but the way it has been resolved has consistently prioritised short-term development over irreplaceable historic fabric.

Urban Decay and Infrastructure Failure compounds the structural vulnerability of buildings already weakened by age, neglect, and previous damage. Poor sanitation and drainage allow moisture to penetrate historic structures. The absence of reliable utilities makes the historic areas less attractive for occupation by residents with the resources to maintain buildings, while making them more attractive for uses — informal storage, temporary accommodation, commercial conversion — that accelerate deterioration. The cycle of infrastructure failure and population displacement is self-reinforcing.

Community Displacement of the families whose presence in the historic areas had sustained those areas — however imperfectly — is not merely a social tragedy but a conservation one. Occupied buildings, even imperfectly maintained ones, deteriorate more slowly than empty ones. The social knowledge embedded in long-resident communities — of building traditions, maintenance practices, and neighbourhood organisation — is not replaceable once it is gone.

Climate Change and Urban Heat — Baghdad is one of the cities most severely exposed to the climate trajectory the Middle East is on. Maximum temperatures are projected to rise from current peaks of around 38°C to over 40°C by 2050, compounding an urban heat island effect that already makes the dense historic areas significantly hotter than surrounding areas. The traditional courtyard house was specifically designed to manage heat through passive cooling, shading, and natural ventilation. Its replacement with modern construction has worsened the thermal environment of the historic areas while destroying the architectural heritage that embodied centuries of adaptive climate knowledge.

Institutional Weakness — the gap between the heritage protection that Iraqi law nominally provides and the actual management of the historic areas is one of the most consistently documented findings of research on Baghdad's heritage. Conservation legislation exists but is not enforced. Planning regulations exist but are not applied consistently. International support cannot substitute for functioning local institutions, and building those institutions in the context of a city still recovering from decades of conflict is a slow and fragile process.

The scholarly literature on Baghdad's heritage has grown considerably in urgency and sophistication over the past two decades. Early systematic work — including Fethi's 1978 inventory which documented 160 buildings of outstanding cultural significance already demolished since 1917 — established the baseline against which subsequent loss has been measured and provided the first quantified evidence of what modernisation was costing the historic city. That inventory, produced at a moment when considerably more remained than exists today, is now a historical document in its own right: a record of things that no longer exist.

More recent research by Al-Saffar and colleagues has produced comprehensive condition assessments of the Old Rusafa historic centre, mapping building conditions, identifying the most vulnerable structures, and documenting the social and economic dynamics driving displacement and abandonment. The finding that over 50 percent of buildings in surveyed areas are in poor or very poor structural condition gives a quantified dimension to what visual observation already suggests.

Research into the climate dimensions of Baghdad's heritage situation has identified the urban heat island effect as both an accelerating threat to built fabric and an argument for heritage conservation as a climate adaptation strategy. The traditional courtyard house — with its orientation, massing, internal garden, and wind-catching devices — is a refined response to the specific thermal conditions of the Mesopotamian climate, developed over centuries of incremental adaptation. Demolishing that building typology is not merely a heritage loss. It is a climate adaptation loss, removing from the city a body of embedded thermal knowledge that no amount of mechanical air conditioning can fully replace.

Archaeological investigation has confirmed the depth of occupation beneath the historic areas and the potential for significant finds that could illuminate the Abbasid city at its height, but the conditions for systematic archaeological research in the historic core have not existed for decades and may not exist again in the near future.

The trajectory Baghdad is on does not lead to sudden collapse. It leads to something slower and in some ways harder to reverse — the gradual attrition of a historic fabric that has already lost the majority of what it once contained, until what remains crosses some threshold of fragmentation beyond which it no longer constitutes a coherent historic urban environment but simply a collection of isolated monuments in a modern city that has otherwise forgotten what it once was.

That threshold is closer than most people realise. The figure that research has produced — fewer than 400 heritage houses remaining in reasonable condition by 2009, from more than 5,000 in the early 1970s — describes a loss of over 90 percent in less than four decades. The pace of that loss has not reversed. Without intervention, the remaining fabric will continue to deteriorate, the listed monuments will remain isolated and increasingly difficult to interpret without the urban context that gave them meaning, and the possibility of recovering anything recognisable as the historic city of Baghdad will diminish with each passing decade.

The climate dimension adds urgency to a situation that was already urgent. A city projected to experience maximum temperatures above 40°C by 2050, with increasing flood risk and a deteriorating urban environment, will find that its most vulnerable historic structures — already weakened by neglect and conflict damage — are also the least equipped to survive an increasingly hostile thermal and meteorological environment.

Baghdad has survived the Mongol sack, Ottoman conquest, British occupation, revolution, war, and sanctions. Its heritage has not survived all of those events intact, but enough has survived to make the city still legible as one of the great urban sites of Islamic civilisation. That legibility is what is now at stake, and it will not be preserved by goodwill or by the nominal protection of laws that are not enforced.

The House of Wisdom is gone. What remains deserves better than the same indifference that allowed it to disappear.