Iraq is an amazing country. It is the cradle of civilisation. First, it was the Sumerians, who almost 6000 years ago, settled in the south of country and gave us writing, created the first cities and laid the foundations of science, religion, astronomy, culture and much more. Then after, successive civilisations prospered in that country: Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Persians and Arabs. All building upon the achievements of the proceeding one culminating in the most cultured city in the world at its time: Baghdad of the 1001 nights, the capital of the great Abbasid Empire. However in 1256 that great city fell to the Mongols who proceeded to destroy its great monuments, burning and pillaging and killing hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants. From then on, Iraq suffered nothing but a series of invasions led by blood-thirsty tyrants. No other country in the world has suffered such a catastrophic decline. By the 19th century, it was just a forgotten, sparsely populated barren land.
I tried very hard to find what life was like in 19th century Iraq. The sources are extremely limited. I was looking for an ‘indigenous’ source as opposed as to one written by the ruling elite or European travellers. My quest finally led me to a book entitled ‘Memoirs of a Babylonian Princess’ published in 1845 in London and written by Maria Theresa Asmar. She was an Iraqi christian who lived in Mosul and Baghdad and recorded her life (and the people of the time) in Iraq and then her travels before finally settling down in Europe.
I found the book riveting reading and culturally valuable as it threw light on 19th century Iraq. While it was full of fine personal details, I only wanted to draw a general picture of what the country was like then:
- The rulers (the pashas) were ruthless people who had no interest in advancing the country and their only methods of raising money was by enslaving the masses and fleecing the few rich people, even to the extent of torturing and killing them.
- The country was literally in total darkness, while Europe was lighting up to gas and electricity, Iraq was devoid not only of universities, but there were hardly any schools. The vast majority of the nation was illiterate.
- There was no concept of citizenship and no sense of belonging to the country, each community, each tribe, lived by itself, totally independent of other communities, only making contacts with others as and when needs arose.
- Religion was totally dominant and people were very superstitious.
- Hardly any economy existed, people were very poor, basically subsisting on whatever the land provided them with.
- The tribes were a law onto themselves and their favourite money-making exercise was raiding other tribes and holding travelling caravans to ransom.
- Simply put: it was a miserable place to live in.
But if one was to reflect, one can see that so much of Iraq’s present day troubles has its roots in that dark period and so much of what was wrong then is still unfortunately prevalent today.
Maria Theresa ended up losing her family and abandoning Iraq to live in Europe. Sadly a familiar story.