Among the names given to Bagdad, as has been said in a preceding page, was that of Dar-as-Salam, or Medina-as-Salam—City of Peace. In view of the numerous vicissitudes through which the erstwhile capital of the Caliphs has passed, the protracted sieges it has sustained, the frightful destruction it has time and again undergone, the appalling massacres of its inhabitants at the hands of bloodthirsty invaders, it would be difficult to conceive a more preposterous misnomer.

We have seen what was the fate of the city when it was given over to the savage and rapacious hordes of Hulagu Khan. But this reign of terror was but a prelude to the horrors that befell the ill-fated city when, less than a century and a half later, the brutal Mongols again captured and sacked the city; when its streets streamed with the blood of its defenders and reëchoed with the frenzied shrieks of women and children, and when, as a climax of all this unutterable carnage,[448] the Mongol leader, Timur, celebrated his bloody victory by erecting on the ruins of Bagdad a gruesome pyramid of ninety thousand heads of its slaughtered inhabitants.[449]

No wonder that the people of the East were wont to declare that “conquest by Turks or Saracens was a blessing compared with falling into the jaws of the implacable Mongols.” When word reached the Court of Byzantium that the Mongols, under Timur, were approaching the city, so great was the terror which they inspired that “popular rumor painted the invaders as having dogs’ heads and eating human flesh.”[450]

When, in addition to all these atrocities, one recalls the deeds of violence and savagery which afterwards followed the successive storming and occupation of the unfortunate city by Turkomans, Persians, and Turks, one must conclude that the proper epithet for Bagdad would have been not Dar-as-Salam—City of Peace—but Dar-al-Harb—City of War.

“But what,” the reader inquires, “of modern Bagdad, of the Bagdad of to-day”? Since the Muses left the fair capital of the Caliphs, long centuries ago, little more of interest remains in it than may be found in any other city of the Moslem East.

My first hurried view of Bagdad was in the parting splendor of sunset,

My eyes were then open only to what was beautiful, romantic, picturesque.

My second view was on the following morning, from the terrace of the Carmelite monastery. It was at the hour when the sun, in the words of Omar Khayyám, was scattering

A filmy veil of pearl-gray mist hung over the slumbering city and the witchery of the scene was even more enthralling than that which so captivated me the preceding evening. Presently

Yes, I was in Bagdad, the fairy city of boyhood’s dreams, the glittering home of pomp and pleasure, where the fair Zobeide dwelt in a palace with spangled floors and marble stairs with golden balustrades; where there was a riot of broidered sofas, damask curtains, silk tapestry, purple robes from the most famous looms of the East; where a joyous group of bejeweled dancing girls were wont, to the sound of harp and lute and dulcimer, to carol away, with voices as melodious as that of Israfel, the cares and ennui of their pleasure-sated mistress.

Willingly I yielded myself to the hypnotic influence of the spiritus loci. In fancy I saw Aladdin with his wonderful lamp; the one-eyed calenders as they told their fascinating tales; the fishermen as they deluded the heavy-witted jinn; Harun-al-Rashid and Jaffer as they wandered under their double-collared cloak through the somber streets of the capital; the radiant homes of wealth and luxury, which gleamed with the subdued light of a myriad of golden lamps and reëchoed with the heart-easing strains of sweet music and the gladsome voices of midnight revelry.

But the illusion was of short duration. The mauve-shot veil of tenuous mist lifted under the ardent rays of the morning sun and the magic city of Harun and his favorite Zobeide vanished to give place to the squalid houses, narrow, crooked streets, and crumbling walls of a time-stricken, war-battered city which is now but a shadow of what it was in the days of its pristine glory.

As a compliment to our hosts we did not even express a wish to explore the city, which we had come so far to see, until we had visited their schools and those conducted by their heroic coworkers, the Sisters of the Visitation of Tours. After having spent several most delightful hours with teachers and pupils we sent for a trio of those white donkeys for which Bagdad is so celebrated. Gentle as they are strong and hardy, they willingly keep up an easy, ambling gait for hours at a time without exhibiting the slightest evidence of fatigue. I learned to value them a third of a century ago when traveling in Egypt and I was glad to have an opportunity of again availing myself of their service in the old capital on the Tigris. Here they take the place of cabs which would not be at all available in the majority of the very narrow streets of the city.

As the Carmelite monastery is in the heart of the city, we soon found ourselves in the midst of a colorful scene that could not be surpassed by anything similar either in Damascus or Stamboul. Such a seething cauldron of races, such an utter confusion of tongues, such a motley carnival of costumes from plain white and black to the gay fabrics of Madras and the tawdry prints of Manchester! Here we meet men of countless types and creeds and nationalities—Turks, Afghans, Persians, Arabs, Indians, and Europeans; Jews, Hindus, Christians, Parsees, Shiites, Sunnites, and Mohammedans of all the seventy-three sects into which the Prophet of Mecca predicted Islam would eventually be divided. The languages and dialects number more than a score, for which reason the traveler in Bagdad would imagine that he hears fully as many different tongues as were spoken by the builders of the Tower of Babel. Indeed, not the least of the many difficulties which the British forces encountered in their recent operations against the Turkish army was, we are told, “the same which confronted the contractors for the old tower so many thousands of years ago.”

The appearance of Bagdad, as we wandered through the maze of narrow, filthy, noisome streets, was quite different from what it seemed when we first saw it from our lazily moving kelek on the palm-fringed Tigris, or when we gazed upon it enveloped in the delicate mist of early morning. Then little was visible except domes and minarets covered with bright-colored tiles and scintillating mosaics which appeared to float in the opalescent atmosphere.

As in the case of all other eastern cities, Bagdad is more enchanting at a distance than when viewed from her somber unsanitary and intricate thoroughfares. And as we threaded our way through these dingy streets and byways, flanked on either side by low, dun-colored, windowless mud houses, we found it difficult to see in them, even in fancy, the sumptuous homes that adorned the city in the time of Caliphs and more difficult still to repeople them with the glamouring figures of Thousand and One Nights.

But when one passes from these narrow and gloomy streets, that will scarcely admit a camel, into the spacious courtyards with which even the most unpretentious dwellings are provided, one is often surprised at the magic transformation of the scene. Here one finds a profusion of beautiful trees and shrubs and plants loaded with flowers of every size and hue. Among the most conspicuous are the palm, the orange, and the pomegranate whose bright green foliage is in striking contrast with the flaming blooms of the hibiscus in which the Bagdadi takes as much pleasure as do her dusky Hawaiian sisters in far-off Honolulu, with whom these brilliant flowers are universal favorites.

A peculiarity of the habitations of the well-to-do of Bagdad is the serdab, an underground chamber which is usually eight or nine feet in height. It is here that the family lives during the terrifically hot weather that prevails during summer and a part of the spring and autumn. But, although the temperature is here ten degrees lower than in the upper part of the house, the intense heat of mid-summer, which often reaches 120° Fahrenheit in the shade, is almost unbearable. As so great a part of the people spend much of their time in the serdab, the city seems to be almost lifeless during a greater part of the day. Towards sunset, however, it begins to revive. The women then repair to the terraces of their dwellings where they pass the night in talking, smoking, drinking sherbets, and trying, when the mosquitoes permit, to get a little sleep. As to the men, especially the Moslem portion of the population, they endeavor to find some surcease of misery in the Lethean fumes of their chibouks and hubble-bubbles. Most of them congregate in the countless coffeehouses which, during the everlasting dog days of Bagdad, are thronged day and night with all sorts and conditions of sweltering and par-baked humanity.

Passing so much time in a state of semi-torpor, it is not surprising that even the strongest constitutions soon succumb to the enervating climate. Because of the intolerable heat, Europeans endeavor every few years to find relief in a change of climate. But when this is not possible, the majority of the foreign sufferers are short-lived. Thus I was informed that the average life of the Carmelite missionaries in southern Mesopotamia is only about nine years. But their premature deaths do not deter them from continuing the work of charity to which they are so devoted. As soon as one drops out of the ranks his place is immediately taken by a zealous confrère who is only too willing to serve in the cause of the Master where the trials are most severe and where the dangers are greatest and most imminent.

What with the grilling climate, defective drainage, ignorance and neglect of the first principles of hygiene, one is not surprised to learn that the population of Bagdad is periodically decimated by the plague. Cholera is frequent. It was this dread visitant that carried off General Maude, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces during the recent campaign in Mesopotamia against the Turks.

We visited all the places of interest in the city but those in which we found most local color were the bazaars. As we neared the principal one of them we found the street crowded with Kurdish hamals bearing incredible burdens, and quick-stepping white donkeys disputing the way with awkwardly racking camels which snappishly sputtered or proudly held aloft their supercilious noses while disdainfully sniffing the air above the heads of shouting drivers. And round about us was a vociferating throng that were roughly jostling one another in their mad rush to force themselves into the alluring bazaars, which were already filled with all kinds of curious idlers or prospective purchasers.

Although the bazaars of Bagdad are much smaller than those of Damascus and Constantinople they are more interesting. This is not because of the attractive wares, but rather on account of the strange and motley crowd. And what a variety of garbs and what a medley of colors! There are every type and shade of oriental face; every style of headdress; every variety of costume one can conceive. Fezes, tarbooshes, keffiehs, turbans, the brimless hat of the Baktiari, the long felt hats of the Lurs and the Kurds; the black astrakan caps of the Russians and the Persians. As to costumes, there is everything imaginable from the primitive dhotee of the Hindu to the graceful full-flowing aba of the Arabian mollah and the elaborately embroidered apparel of an Indian rajah or the closely fitting frock coat of some prodigal nabob from Europe in quest of strange curios or rare old rugs and tapestries from Khorassan and Candahar.

The vesture of the women is even more variegated and costly and resplendent than that of the men. Some are garbed in rich silks of all the tints of the autumn leaf. Some are veiled, others unveiled, according as they come from the Moslem, Jewish, or Christian quarter of the city—but all are gathered around all the booths in which there is a special display of feminine finery. There is no law in Islam to prevent women from visiting the bazaars and whenever they desire to escape the monotony of the harem they start out on a shopping tour in which they take as much delight as do their sisters in the West. Frequently they have no more intention of making purchases than have the habituées of the great department stores of Fifth Avenue or the splendid jewelry shops of La Rue de la Paix.

My attention was directed to the large number of Jews who had shops in the city and stalls in the bazaars. Many of them were specially conspicuous on account of their cheap misfit garments from English and German manufactories, which contrasted sharply with the costly and elegant robes of some of their customers. For headdress most of them wore black skull caps or flaming red fezes made in Vienna. But they all had the same dark, prominent eyes, the same hot and shining looks, like fanned flames, which so characterize the people of their races in other parts of Mesopotamia and the Near East.

When I expressed surprise at the number of the descendants of Abraham that we saw not only in the bazaars but in all parts of the city, one of my companions informed me that they constituted fully one-fourth of the population. The exact number of the inhabitants of Bagdad is not definitely known, but it is variously estimated to be from one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand. There are, indeed, few, if any, other large cities in the Near East in which the children of Abraham have so great a representation in proportion to that of the adherents of other religious beliefs.

The majority of the Jews in Bagdad are descendants of those who were deported from Judæa to Babylonia by Nebuchadnezzar six centuries before the Christian era. Others, doubtless, are descended from Hebrew captives that were a century and a quarter earlier carried to Assyria by Sargon and Tiglath-pileser III. Still others trace their descent from those who voluntarily sought refuge in Mesopotamia after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans and after the Holy City, many centuries later, fell under the sway of Islam.

The favorable conditions under which the Jews of the Captivity lived during the reign of the Babylonian monarchs, and even during the time of the Abbasside Caliphs, induced many of their brethren to join them in the fertile plains of the Tigris and the Euphrates. So satisfactory, indeed, were the relations of the Jews with their Babylonian rulers, that when, after they had been seventy years in captivity, Cyrus the Great gave them permission to return to their native land, but few of them, comparatively, availed themselves of the proffered opportunity. The unsettled conditions of Palestine and the sad experiences of those of their fellow countrymen who had returned to Jerusalem decided the majority of the Jews to remain in Babylonia where, although nominally captives, they enjoyed more peace, prosperity, and even more freedom than it was possible to find in the ravaged and desolate land of their fathers.

Once fairly settled in Babylonia, where they seem from the first to have enjoyed a great measure of freedom, the mode of life and fortunes of the Jews underwent a complete change. In their fatherland their chief pursuits were pastoral and agricultural. In Mesopotamia also they followed for a time the avocations of their forefathers. Thanks, however, to the greater productivity of the soil in the fertile Babylonian plain, which far surpassed that of the richest fields of Judæa and to their native thrift and industry and keen eye to business opportunities, which permitted no chance to escape them, it was not long before the children of the exiles were living in ease and comfort, while many of them soon found themselves in a position which, as compared with that which they occupied in Palestine afforded them, in Johnsonese phrase, “the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

From that time most of the Jews of Mesopotamia began to devote themselves to commercial pursuits, which, more than anything else, influenced the subsequent fortunes of their countrymen throughout the world.

But not only did the descendants of the Jews of the Captivity achieve distinction in the commercial world; they also became celebrated for their attainments in science and letters. Under the Caliph Ali, in the middle of the seventh century of our era the Jews of Irak—Southern Babylonia—were able to organize what was almost an independent state. Here flourished the great Talmudic schools of Sara and Pumbeditha and here, in the country of their father Abraham, the Jews loved to fancy the survival of a prince of the Captivity who had recovered the scepter of David.[451] This was a period of notable prosperity for Irak, a period when Bagdad was at the height of its glory; when it was not only preëminent in science, art, and literature but was the religious capital of Jewry as well as Islam.[452]

In conclusion, I may here answer a question which I have been often asked, namely, “What of the future of Bagdad?” “Is there any hope of its return to its former greatness and splendor?”

This is a difficult question to answer. When one remembers that two other great capitals—Seleucia and Ctesiphon—once flourished only a few leagues to the south of the city of the Caliphs and that now but a vestige of them remains; when one remembers that Babylon, a short distance to the southwest, was, for nearly two thousand years, the most magnificent city of the ancient world, but that, under the demolishing action of man and nature, it so completely disappeared that its very site was long a matter of controversy, one will hesitate to make any predictions about anything in a land in which the vicissitudes of fortune have been so extraordinary and in which the conflicts of international interests have been so relentless and so destructive. And yet, when one travels over the matchless alluvial plains on which stood the famous capitals that once controlled the destinies of Western Asia, one cannot but feel that there is a brilliant future in this celebrated region of the two rivers, but only when a stable and enterprising government shall have been established—a government whose purpose will be not to exploit the land and the populace for its own selfish purposes, but a government that shall be willing to guarantee to the people the blessings of peace and at the same time honestly strive to secure for them their position in the family of nations, to which their long and wonderful history gives them so just a title.[453] Then and then only shall we again see the broad desert of Mesopotamia blossoming as of old, and witness once more in the Land of the Two Rivers a metropolis that shall recall the greatness and the splendor of Babylon and Seleucia and Ctesiphon and of Bagdad too,—Medinah-al-Salam—as it was in the golden prime of Al Mamun and Harun-al-Rashid the Great.