Baghdad
Baghdad (/ˈbæɡdæd/ ⓘ BAG-dad or /bəɡˈdæd/ bəg-DAD; Arabic: بَغْدَاد, romanized: Baghdād, [baɣˈdaːd] ⓘ) is the capital of Iraq and the second-largest city in the Arab world after Cairo. It is located on the Tigris river. In 762 AD, Baghdad was chosen as the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, and became its most notable major development project. Within a short time, the city evolved into a significant cultural, commercial, and intellectual center of the Muslim world. This, in addition to housing several key academic institutions, including the House of Wisdom, as well as a multiethnic and multi-religious environment, garnered it a worldwide reputation as the "Center of Learning".
For other uses, see Baghdad (disambiguation).
Baghdad
بَغْدَاد
30 July 762 AD
Baghdad City Advisory Council
Ammar Moussa Kadhum
673 km2 (260 sq mi)
34 m (112 ft)
8,126,755[2]
Baghdadi
UTC+3 (Arabian Standard Time)
UTC+3 (No DST)
amanatbaghdad.gov.iq (in Arabic)
For much of the Abbasid era, during the Islamic Golden Age, Baghdad was the largest city in the world. Its population peaked at more than one million people.[3] The city was largely destroyed at the hands of the Mongol Empire in 1258, resulting in a decline that would linger through many centuries due to frequent plagues and multiple successive empires. With the recognition of Iraq as an independent state (formerly the British Mandate of Mesopotamia) in 1932, Baghdad gradually regained some of its former prominence as a significant center of Arab culture, with a population variously estimated at 6 or over 7 million.[note 1] Compared to its large population, it has a small area at just 673 square kilometers (260 sq mi).
The city has faced severe infrastructural damage due to the Iraq War, which began with the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and lasted until 2011, and the subsequent insurgency and renewed war that lasted until 2017, resulting in a substantial loss of cultural heritage and historical artifacts. During this period, Baghdad had one of the highest rates of terrorist attacks in the world. However, terrorist attacks have gradually been on the decline since the territorial defeat of the Islamic State militant group in Iraq in 2017.[8]
Name[edit]
The name Baghdad is pre-Islamic, and its origin is disputed.[9] The site where the city of Baghdad developed has been populated for millennia. Archaeological evidence shows that the site of Baghdad was occupied by various peoples long before the Arab conquest of Mesopotamia in 637 CE, and several ancient empires had capitals located in the surrounding area.[10]
Arab authors, realizing the pre-Islamic origins of Baghdad's name, generally looked for its roots in Middle Persian.[9] They suggested various meanings, the most common of which was "bestowed by God".[9][11] Modern scholars generally tend to favor this etymology,[9] which views the word as a Persian compound of bagh (
) "god" and dād (
) "given".[12][13] In Old Persian the first element can be traced to boghu and is related to Indo-Iranian bhag and Slavic bog "god."[9][14] A similar term in Middle Persian is the name Mithradāt (Mehrdad in New Persian), known in English by its borrowed Hellenistic form Mithridates, meaning "Given by Mithra" (dāt is the more archaic form of dād, related to Sanskrit dāt, Latin dat and English donor),[9] ultimately borrowed from Persian Mehrdad. There are a number of other locations whose names are compounds of the Middle Persian word bagh, including Baghlan and Bagram in Afghanistan, Baghshan in Iran itself,[15] and Baghdati in Georgia, which likely share the same etymological Iranic origins.[16][17][18]
Other authors have suggested older origins for the name, in particular the name Bagdadu or Hudadu that existed in Old Babylonian (spelled with a sign that can represent both bag and hu), and the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic name of a place called Baghdatha (בגדתא).[9][19][20] Some scholars suggested Aramaic derivations.[9] In Hindu Puranas, It is mentioned that the city was named after King Bhagadatta.
Another view, suggested by Christophe Wall-Romana, is that name of "Baghdad" is derived from "Akkad", as the cuneiform logogram for Akkad (𒀀𒂵𒉈𒆠) is pronounced "a-ga-dèKI" ("Agade") and its resemblance to "Baghdad" is compelling.[21][22]
When the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded a completely new city for his capital, he chose the name "City of Peace" (Arabic: مدینة السلام, romanized: Madīnat as-Salām), which now refers to the Round City of Baghdad proper. This was the official name on coins, weights, and other official usage, although the common people continued to use the old name.[23][24] By the 11th century, Baghdad became almost the exclusive name for the world-renowned metropolis.
Christophe Wall-Romana has suggested that al-Mansur's choice to found his "new city" at Baghdad because of its strategic location was the same criteria which influenced Sargon's choice to found the original city of Akkad in the exact same location.[25][26]
Administratively, Baghdad Governorate is divided into districts which are further divided into sub-districts. Municipally, the governorate is divided into 9 municipalities, which have responsibility for local issues. Regional services, however, are coordinated and carried out by a mayor who oversees the municipalities. The governorate council is responsible for the governorate-wide policy. These official subdivisions of the city served as administrative centers for the delivery of municipal services but until 2003 had no political function. Beginning in April 2003, the U.S. controlled Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) began the process of creating new functions for these. The process initially focused on the election of neighborhood councils in the official neighborhoods, elected by neighborhood caucuses. The CPA convened a series of meetings in each neighborhood to explain local government, to describe the caucus election process and to encourage participants to spread the word and bring friends, relatives and neighbors to subsequent meetings. Each neighborhood process ultimately ended with a final meeting where candidates for the new neighborhood councils identified themselves and asked their neighbors to vote for them. Once all 88 (later increased to 89) neighborhood councils were in place, each neighborhood council elected representatives from among their members to serve on one of the city's nine district councils. The number of neighborhood representatives on a district council is based upon the neighborhood's population. The next step was to have each of the nine district councils elect representatives from their membership to serve on the 37 member Baghdad City Council. This three tier system of local government connected the people of Baghdad to the central government through their representatives from the neighborhood, through the district, and up to the city council. The same process was used to provide representative councils for the other communities in Baghdad Province outside of the city itself. There, local councils were elected from 20 neighborhoods (Nahia) and these councils elected representatives from their members to serve on six district councils (Qada). As within the city, the district councils then elected representatives from among their members to serve on the 35 member Baghdad Regional Council. The first step in the establishment of the system of local government for Baghdad Province was the election of the Baghdad Provincial Council. As before, the representatives to the Provincial Council were elected by their peers from the lower councils in numbers proportional to the population of the districts they represent. The 41 member Provincial Council took office in February 2004 and served until national elections held in January 2005, when a new Provincial Council was elected. This system of 127 separate councils may seem overly cumbersome; however, Baghdad Province is home to approximately seven million people. At the lowest level, the neighborhood councils, each council represents an average of 75,000 people. The nine District Advisory Councils (DAC) are as follows:[108]
The nine districts are subdivided into 89 smaller neighborhoods which may make up sectors of any of the districts above. The following is a selection (rather than a complete list) of these neighborhoods:
Demographics[edit]
Religion[edit]
Baghdad's population was estimated at 7.22 million in 2015. The city historically has a predominantly Sunni population, but by the early 21st century around 52% of the city's population were Iraqi Shi'ites. At the beginning of the 21st century, some 1.5 million people migrated to Baghdad. Sunni Muslims make up 29–34% of Iraq's population and they are still a majority in west and north Iraq. As early as 2003, about 20 percent of the population of the city was the result of mixed marriages between Shi'ites and Sunnis.[120] Following the civil war between the Sunni and Shia militia groups during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the population of Sunnis significantly decreased as they were pushed out of many neighborhoods. The War in Iraq following the Islamic State's invasion in 2014 caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqi internally displaced people to flee to the city.[118]
Baghdad is home to diverse ethnic and religious groups with an Arab majority, as well as Kurds, Turkmens, Assyrians, Yazidis, Shabakis, Armenians and Mandaeans. The majority of the citizens are Muslims with minorities of Christians, Yezidis and Mandeans also present. There are many religious centers distributed around the city including mosques, churches and Mashkhannas cultic huts.
Masjid Al-Kadhimain is a shrine that is located in the Kādhimayn suburb of Baghdad. It contains the tombs of the seventh and ninth Twelver Shi'ite Imams, Musa al-Kadhim and Muhammad at-Taqi respectively, upon whom the title of Kādhimayn ("Two who swallow their anger") was bestowed.[121][122][123] Many Shi'ites travel to the mosque from far away places to commemorate those imams.
In the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad, was the house of Baháʼu'lláh, (Prophet Founder of the Baha'i Faith) also known as the "Most Great House" (Bayt-i-Aʻzam) and the "House of God," where Baháʼu'lláh mostly resided from 1853 to 1863. It is considered a holy place and a place of pilgrimage by Baha'i's according to their "Most Holy Book".[124] On 23 June 2013, the house was destroyed under unclear circumstances.[125]
