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Medieval Baghdad: Where to from now?

State of the Field and Future Research.
Bagdad médiévale : état des lieux et horizons de recherche. Réflexions suite au colloque IAS/INALCO (Paris, 2022).
Nassima Neggaz et Vanessa Van Renterghem

Résumés

S’appuyant sur les réflexions collectives issues d’un colloque international qui s’est tenu à Paris en juin 2022, cet article propose une évaluation critique des recherches historiques sur la Bagdad médiévale et propose des pistes pour leur renouvellement. Le colloque a réuni des spécialistes de champs variés – histoire urbaine, politique, sociale, économique, littéraire et intellectuelle – et insisté sur l’innovation méthodologique face aux défis engendrés par la fragmentation de la documentation conservée. L’article synthétise les avancées récentes dans des domaines clés, dont l’histoire environnementale, tout en soulignant les lacunes persistantes dans notre connaissance de la topographie, de l’administration, de l’économie et du tissu social de la Bagdad médiévale. Il appelle à une réévaluation des périodisations conventionnelles, à un décentrement par rapport aux cadres dynastiques et à l’adoption d’approches multi-scalaires, allant de la microhistoire à l’histoire globale et connectée. En insistant sur la complémentarité des méthodes interdisciplinaires et numériques avec les approches textuelles traditionnelles, les auteurs et autrices mettent en lumière le potentiel d’outils nouveaux ou peu exploités – nouvelles approches de la photographie aérienne, de la numismatique et de l’étude des manuscrits, analyse de réseaux, textométrie et autres outils issus des humanités numériques – pour redynamiser les études bagdadiennes. En critiquant les modèles historiographiques eurocentrés et en plaidant pour une intégration plus étroite des différentes échelles d’analyse, l’article défend une approche renouvelée, collaborative et méthodologiquement pluraliste de l’étude de la Bagdad médiévale, capable de dépasser les clivages linguistiques, régionaux et disciplinaires des historiographies existantes. Il repositionne ainsi Bagdad, non seulement comme le centre politique du califat abbasside, mais également comme une matrice permettant de repenser l’histoire urbaine et intellectuelle du monde islamique prémoderne.

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Notes de l’auteur

Reflections following the 2022 Paris IAS/INALCO Methodological Workshop. To consult Workshop Program see file in annex.

With Maaike van Berkel, Michal Biran, Rémy Gareil, Stefan Heidemann, Mathias Hoorelbeke, Jan Jelinowski, Hugh Kennedy, Françoise Micheau †, Alastair Northedge, Letizia Osti, Eugénie Rébillard, Mathieu Tillier and Peter Verkinderen.

Texte intégral

We would like to thank the Institute for Advanced Study in Paris and the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (Inalco, Paris) for their support in organising this workshop. The workshop benefited from the support of the FIAS fellowship program and that of the Labex RFIEA+, as well as from Inalco and Cermom funding. The FIAS fellowship program is co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 945408. This event was also supported by the Labex RFIEA+, funded by the “Investissements d’avenir” program (ANR-11-LABX-0027-01). We also would like to extend our deepest gratitude to our colleague and friend, Professor Sylvie Denoix, for her feedback on an earlier draft of this paper.

Introduction

  • 1 The term “medieval” is used in this article to designate the period of Islamic history that roughly (...)
  • 2 The notion of an “archive” and the scholarly debates about the existence and loss of archives in th (...)

1The purpose of this article is twofold: to evaluate the current state of historical scholarship on medieval Baghdad and to propose new directions for future research. These insights stem from an international workshop held in Paris in June 2022, co-organised by Nassima Neggaz (Paris Institute for Advanced Study) and Vanessa Van Renterghem (Inalco, Cermom). The workshop, titled “Interdisciplinary Sources & Methods for the Study of Pre-Archival Societies: The Case of Baghdad” (hereafter referred to as the “Paris workshop”), brought together fifteen junior and senior researchers from seven countries, who work on the city of Baghdad in the medieval period,1 from various perspectives: urban history, social history, political history, economic history, literary history and archaeology. The aim was to evaluate what historians currently know about medieval Baghdad and identify areas that remain unexplored. A specific goal was to leverage this collective reflection to address broader methodological challenges in writing the history of societies with a long tradition of archiving, albeit with a limited quantity of preserved archives—defined here as “documentary records preserved in their original archival context,” (Hirschler, 2021: 3) within larger collections. The issue of these archival documentary materials—understood as collections of administrative or private documents2—will be examined in more detail in the section on sources. In this respect, the symposium was groundbreaking as it placed the research methodology at the forefront of inquiry. It provided participants with the opportunity not only to present their research but also to engage in discussions on new questions, approaches, and the potential of recent research methodologies, such as computational tools and Digital Humanities. A conference report has been published in al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā (Neggaz and Van Renterghem, 2024); the present article offers a thematic review of the key issues and questions raised during the symposium, alongside a reflection on the current state of the field and future research directions concerning the history of medieval Baghdad.

2The History of Medieval Baghdad and the Paris workshop

  • 3 All dates are given in the AH/CE format (Islamic calendar/Common era).
  • 4 “Baghdad: Eye’s Delight,” exhibition of the Museum of Islam Art of Qatar, Doha, 26 October 2022–25 (...)
  • 5 International symposium ‟İslam Medeniyetinde Bağdat (medînetü’s-selâm) Baghdad (Madinat al-Salam) (...)
  • 6 Entitled “Baghdad: Cradle of Culture and Civilization, 1013–2013,” this conference was organised by (...)
  • 7 “Baghdad, Space of Knowledge,” organised by Jens Scheiner and Isabel Toral, Freie Universität Berli (...)
  • 8 Organised by the research projects “NoMansLand, FWF-START Project Y-1232-G30” (Austrian Academy of (...)

3In October 2023, the firm Ubisoft released a new episode of their flagship video game, “Assassin’s Creed Mirage,” taking place in Baghdad in the year 287 AH/861 CE.3 The enthusiastic reception of this episode highlights the broad public interest in the capital of the Abbasid caliphate. Catering to a different audience, the Qatar Museum of Islamic Art organised a major exhibition titled “Baghdad: Eye’s Delight” in 2022-23, which explored the city’s history from its foundation to modern times.4 Indeed, medieval Baghdad seems to enjoy a general sympathy in the public’s eyes. In the scholarly field, while numerous studies—both ancient and modern—have been devoted to the city, historians face significant methodological challenges, ranging from the scarcity of documentary sources to the difficulties of conducting fieldwork in recent decades. As a result, many aspects of medieval Baghdad remain underexplored, despite its role as the Abbasid Caliphate’s capital for nearly five centuries. A few international symposiums have focused on Baghdad; some have addressed the city’s history up to the present day (such as the Istanbul symposium in 2008,5 the Washington conference in 2013,6 or the upcoming Baghdad symposium organised by the Iraqi Bayt al-Ḥikma to celebrate the city’s 1300th anniversary according to the Hijri calendar), while others have concentrated on the medieval period (like the Berlin symposium in 2013).7 Thematic workshops are rarer, such as the international hybrid conference held in Vienna in 2022,8 which examined Baghdad as a centre of knowledge after the Mongol conquest. Despite these efforts, there is still a notable lack of collective works or research programs dedicated specifically to the study of medieval Baghdad.

  • 9 The present article encloses a general bibliography in the field of medieval Baghdadi studies. It d (...)
  • 10 See also Northedge, forthcoming, and Van Renterghem, forthcoming/c.

4A useful handbook for medieval Baghdad—the first academic handbook devoted to the history of the Abbasid capital—has been recently edited by Jens Scheiner and Isabel Toral (Scheiner and Toral, 2022; substantial review by Micheau, 2024), in the wake of the Berlin symposium. While many books, articles, and excellent syntheses have been written on medieval Baghdad (in particular the studies of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dūrī, Jacob Lassner, and Hugh Kennedy, for the publications in Western languages; ʿImād ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Raʾūf (1966, 1993, 2002), Mustafa Jawād and Aḥmad Sūsa (1958) for publications in Arabic),9 we still rely on Guy Le Strange’s study based exclusively on Arabic and Persian medieval texts and published in 1900 for the topography of the city (Le Strange, 1900). Before Scheiner and Toral’s publication, the main references on Baghdad remained A. A. Duri’s article on Baghdad in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition (1960), and more recently J. Lassner’s in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd edition (2019).10

  • 11 Notably Turkish. See the articles in Turkish published in the proceedings of Istanbul symposium (Üs (...)

5Regrettably, publications in English and other Western languages, while grounded in the study of medieval Arabic sources, have often neglected to engage with contemporary Arabic scholarship. This trend has led to a situation where, much like in other areas of Islamic medieval studies, an Iraqi and Arab school of historical research on Baghdad remains largely isolated from its Western counterpart. The challenges of fostering academic exchanges between Iraq and non-Arab countries during Saddam Hussein’s regime, as well as in the years following the American intervention in 2003, have only exacerbated this divide. The participants in the Paris workshop were predominantly affiliated with European institutions, which inherently limited the scope of the discussions. Consequently, the workshop primarily reflected the progress of research on Baghdad carried out in recent decades in English, and to a lesser degree in French, while largely overlooking contributions in Arabic and other non-Western languages.11 Building scholarly connections between these distinct historiographical traditions is undoubtedly a vital undertaking for researchers within both Western and Arab academic communities.

6Until recently, with the notable exception of George Makdisi’s work, scholarship on medieval Baghdad has predominantly concentrated on the first century of Abbasid rule. Scheiner and Toral’s handbook marks a significant departure from this trend, offering a comprehensive overview of seven centuries of Baghdadi history, from the city’s founding in 145 AH/762 CE to the conclusion of Ilkhanid rule in the 8th century AH/14th century CE. This work, which includes the Buyid, Seljuq, late Abbasid, and Ilkhanid periods, sets a new standard for future studies. The Paris workshop sought to address the entirety of the medieval period, from the foundation of Baghdad to the Ilkhanid era. Some participants adopted a long-term perspective, covering the full medieval span. These approaches were often grounded in specific corpuses, such as numismatics, or adhered to particular methodologies.

  • 12 By “traditional,” we refer to the critical reading of sources aimed at gathering data and factual i (...)

7Given the near absence of material relics or extensive archaeological studies, texts—primarily narrative in nature and non-documentary—serve as the principal sources of information on medieval Baghdad. Historians draw upon a diverse array of narrative texts, including historiographical works such as chronicles and dynastic histories, biographical collections and rijāl books, geographical treatises and riḥla, but also literary adab works, in prose or poetry, administrative treatises and handbooks, and mirrors for princes. Research on medieval Baghdad relies on texts written in Arabic, Persian, Syriac, Hebrew, or other languages, such as Armenian, Georgian, Turkish, or Latin. These textual corpuses are analysed through a range of methodologies, from a “traditional”12 qualitative reading to various quantitative approaches, including prosopography, lexicometry, and statistical analysis.

8Material corpuses are scarce, but they do exist and encompass numismatic collections, aerial photographs, satellite imagery, maps, topographic data, and broader archaeological surveys and reports. It is important to note that, with the exception of some coins, these material sources typically do not originate from Baghdad itself but rather from its surrounding regions. Examples include archaeological excavations in Samarra and Raqqa, surveys of the Diyāla area and the Euphrates, topographical studies of Khuzistan, and coin collections from Iraq and the Jazīra. These materials are employed with caution, primarily for comparative purposes.

I. Past and present scholarly fields for the history of medieval Baghdad

  • 13 In his topological description of Baghdad, al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī discussed the number of public bat (...)
  • 14 Kennedy, 2011: 177–199. Despite ongoing debates about the exact population of medieval Baghdad, sch (...)
  • 15 See the dedicated articles in Scheiner and Toral, 2022, for Christian (Morony, 2022), Jewish (Zvi S (...)

9Despite Baghdad’s pivotal role in Islamic history, many aspects of its urban history remain unresolved. Speculations about its population during the early Abbasid period have persisted since the 5th/11th century (Micheau, 2008), with al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī (d. 463/1071) already engaging in this debate.13 Contemporary scholars generally estimate the population to have been in the hundreds of thousands—potentially reaching half a million, as suggested by Hugh Kennedy.14 While the ethnic and religious composition of this population,15 shaped by successive waves of immigration, is broadly understood, it remains underexplored, particularly regarding the dynamics between sedentary and nomadic groups and the social fabric of the city. Economic questions, such as Baghdad’s role in trade, its sustenance as a massive metropolis, its contributions to industrial and craft production, and its influence on local, regional, and global economies, have been raised but still require thorough investigation. Additionally, the topography and urban structure of Baghdad remain to be fully examined, a task complicated by the limitations of available sources and the scarcity of archaeological data.

I.1. Urban topography: an unknowable city?

  • 16 A list of the few remaining structures can be found in Khalīl and Strika, 1987; an assessment of ar (...)
  • 17 For example the Jones map of 1854 (“Ground Plan of the Enceinte of Baghdad, Survey made by Commande (...)
  • 18 A comparison of tentative maps and sketches of medieval Baghdad reveals that historians disagree on (...)
  • 19 See for example the work done by Makdisi, 1959, focusing only on textual sources.
  • 20 The challenges involved in mapping medieval Baghdad are so significant that many scholars have chos (...)

10Unlike other metropolises and smaller towns of the Middle East, medieval Baghdad has nearly vanished from the modern landscape, presenting a significant challenge for historians. The city’s history is difficult to reconstruct, as almost no material vestiges from the Abbasid period have survived.16 Baghdad was repeatedly ravaged by floods, fires, wars, sieges, depopulation, and subsequent reoccupations, particularly in the western part of the city. The predominantly brick-built structures, with few exceptions, did not endure into modern times. Today, the remnants of Abbasid Baghdad are scarce, limited to a few Seljuq-era tombs, two madrasas from the 7th/13th century, and some Ilkhanid architectural masterpieces, such as the Khan Mirjān. Another notable landmark is the design of the late-Abbasid wall of East Baghdad, constructed by Caliph al-Mustaẓhir bi-llāh in 488/1095 and maintained until the 1920s. Although this wall was documented in early 20th-century photographs and 19th-century maps,17 it was destroyed at the end of the Ottoman period, with only one gate—heavily restored during Saddam Hussein’s time—still standing today. During the Ottoman period, as evident from 19th-century maps, West Baghdad became largely depopulated, with much of it converted into agricultural fields, leading to the loss of medieval toponyms (Massignon, 1910–1912: 2:77). The rapid re-urbanisation that occurred in the 20th century further diminished the likelihood of conducting archaeological excavations or studies in the old core of the city. Unlike Damascus or Cairo, where the outlines of main streets or communication axes have been preserved, Baghdad has lost these vital elements, along with the precise locations of key landmarks, including palaces, walls, canals, mosques, madrasas, ribats, and the Round City itself (the palace city).18 The medieval course of the Tigris River, known to have significantly altered its meanders over time, remains unexamined. Consequently, reconstructing the topography of medieval Baghdad, a task currently reliant primarily on textual sources,19 is far from straightforward. These challenges explain why the tentative maps of medieval Baghdad are more schematic and less detailed than those of medieval Cairo or Damascus, where significant monuments and city walls still stand, and where archaeological studies have been or are being conducted.20

  • 21 CORONA was the United States’ first spy satellite program. It produced images from space originally (...)

11Taking on the study of Baghdad’s topography necessitates the adoption of innovative methods, such as landscape analysis. Insights into the potential of these approaches were provided by two papers presented at the Paris workshop. Northedge, who has extensively studied the archaeology of Samarra, explored how archaeology could augment the topographical study of medieval Baghdad. He advocated for a comparative approach, suggesting that palatial and domestic architecture from Raqqa or Samarra—constructed using similar materials and techniques as the lost buildings of Abbasid Baghdad—could offer valuable parallels. Northedge also highlighted the potential of underutilised non-textual sources, particularly aerial photographs from the first half of the 20th century and CORONA satellite imagery21 from the 1960s. A meticulous analysis of these images, when cross-referenced with the rich textual data available, could assist researchers in identifying key structural elements of medieval Baghdad, such as walls or canals. Even though much of West Baghdad has been levelled for agricultural use during the modern period, traces of ancient structures—such as the largely overlooked wall built by Caliph al-Mustaʿīn in 251/865, which Micheau suggested may have quickly disappeared due to its absence in later sources—or major watercourses like Khandaq Ṭāhir (Ṭāhir’s Trench) north of the Round City, might still be discernible in aerial images or urban morphology. Given that the levelling techniques of that time were rudimentary and labour-intensive, remnants of these features could have persisted. However, Northedge noted that a 1919 aerial photograph indicates that West Baghdad was completely flattened, leaving none of the mounds typical of ruined cities, most probably due to flooding.

12In his study of hydraulic installations on a larger scale, Verkinderen presented the methods and findings from his PhD research, which he later published as a book (Verkinderen, 2015). The work focuses on the evolution of watercourses in Lower Iraq and Khuzistan, particularly during the early Islamic period. Similar to Northedge, Verkinderen’s approach integrated data from various sources, including satellite imagery, aerial photography, detailed maps, archaeological and geological surveys, and texts accessed through the digital Shamila library. While Verkinderen was unable to directly study the area of Baghdad, his case study on the city of Ahvaz in Khuzistan offered a compelling example of how to merge material and textual data to partially reconstruct the region’s watercourses and irrigation systems. This methodology could potentially be applied to better understand the hydraulic infrastructure of Baghdad and its surroundings during the medieval period.

  • 22 Informal conversation of V. Van Renterghem with archaeologist S. McPhillips, March 2024.

13Crucial for medieval Baghdad’s topography were the canals, which linked the Euphrates, in the west, to the Tigris, in the east. These waterways not only supplied water to neighbourhoods not directly situated along the Tigris but also facilitated the circulation of goods, although their utility was sometimes limited by the presence of stone bridges, or qanṭara. The canals also significantly influenced the urban layout, particularly on the west bank, by creating physical separations between different districts. Despite their importance, these canals have completely vanished from modern Baghdad, with their routes depicted on Le Strange’s maps only on a hypothetical basis. The construction, management, and maintenance of these medieval canals, primarily based on textual sources, are currently being studied as part of the “Source of Life” project led by Maaike van Berkel at Radboud University in Nijmegen. This project aims to produce a comparative study of water management in large cities of the medieval Islamicate world. Topographical factors, such as ground relief that allowed water to flow down to the Tigris, must be considered in these studies, although fieldwork would likely enhance the accuracy of this data. Another potential avenue for archaeological surveys could involve examining the palm groves that cover significant areas of modern Baghdad.22 Precisely locating the old canals within the modern urban fabric or retracing the medieval meanders of the Tigris would enable researchers to approximate the location of the Round City and other key elements of early Abbasid Baghdad, thereby advancing our understanding of the city’s structure during its formative period.

  • 23 See the ten thematic maps for the Seljuq period by Van Renterghem, 2015, and the eight thematic art (...)
  • 24 Recent cartography for specific districts or periods includes Ahola and Osti, 2013: 241, and Neggaz (...)

14Numerous questions about the topography of medieval Baghdad remain unresolved, including the precise location and extent of gardens (with Northedge and Kennedy noting the lack of evidence for a garden at the centre of the Round City), markets, cemeteries, administrative buildings, hospitals, boat-bridges, and wharves. While some studies have focused on specific institutions such as prisons (Tillier, 2008: 408; Rébillard and Tillier, 2022: 151), madrasas, ribats, and mosques,23 further research is needed. The development of general, historical, local, or thematic maps—whether tentative or hypothetical—remains essential.24

  • 25 We would like to thank Stephen McPhillips for his suggestions on this subject.

15Looking ahead, research on the topography of medieval Baghdad clearly necessitates a collaborative approach that integrates both textual and material data.25 One promising avenue is the creation of a diachronic relational database of toponyms and urban structures. Such a database could be compiled by historians utilising text-mining digital tools to extract and organise all references to specific toponyms or buildings within a broad corpus of medieval and modern texts. This would facilitate the analysis of the relative positions of different areas, the chronological presence of urban elements, and variations in their names over time. Given the current restrictions on access to Baghdad, future fieldwork would significantly enhance our understanding of the medieval city. Additionally, exploring remote sensing technologies, such as LiDAR, in conjunction with a geographic information system (GIS) could offer valuable insights into Baghdad’s topography and urban layout.

I.2. Political history: the Caliphs’ capital

16In contrast to its topography, the political history of Baghdad is well-documented and extensively studied. As the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate from 145/762 onward, following Kufa, Baghdad’s political narrative has been thoroughly explored, benefiting from the city’s close association with the Abbasid dynasty. This focus on political history has long been a central theme in Baghdadi studies. Pioneering scholars such as Jacob Lassner, Gaston Wiet, and Reuben Levy established the foundational framework for subsequent research (Lassner, 1980; Wiet, 1971; Levy, 1929). In the 20th and 21st centuries, numerous studies have been produced by leading scholars who have examined Baghdadi political history from various perspectives. Noteworthy contributions include those by Hugh Kennedy (notably Kennedy 1981, 2004, 2006, 2016), whose extensive work on the subject is too vast to enumerate fully, and Tayeb El-Hibri (2021). Scholars like Maaike van Berkel, Nadia Maria El Cheikh, Hugh Kennedy, and Letizia Osti have concentrated on the reign of Caliph al-Muqtadir (van Berkel et al., 2013). Makdisi, 1990 focused on 5th/11th century Baghdad, while Donohue, 2003 studied the Buyid period. Van Renterghem, 2015 and 2022, investigated Baghdadi elites during the Seljuq era, Hanne, 2007 examined the 5th/11th and 6th/12th centuries, and Hartmann, 1975 researched the reign of Caliph al-Nāṣir (r. 575-622/1180-1225), among other scholars.

17Several contributions in the Paris workshop have added nuance and detail to this political history, often by mobilising interdisciplinary approaches. Stefan Heidemann, for instance, suggested that numismatics can illuminate urban dynamics, and more specifically the expression of urban power. He explained that coins, through their inscriptions, provide evidence of the legal and administrative structures of cities in the Abbasid empire. Mint names often refer refer to provinces, carry honorifics, and are typically associated with a signle city within a wider agglomeration. The absence of a mint with the name “Baghdād” between the city’s foundation in 145/762 and the Mongol conquest of 656/1258 indicates that Baghdad was not conceived of as a city in the Weberian sens, but rather as an agglomeration of amṣār (sg. miṣr), in the legal rather than historical sense. Baghdad, Heidemann argued, consisted of the Madīnat al-Salām (the palace city, called today the Round City), the palace city of al-Ruṣāfa in West Baghdad, the Karkh settlement in East Baghdad, as well as numerous other separate urban entities. As already pointed out by Lassner, studies on the political history of Baghdad will have to make a distinction between Madīnat al-Salām and the other areas of what we consider “Baghdad.” Historians will be called to be more attentive to what coins can tell us about the legal and administrative structures that issue them, questioning the notion of “city” or agglomeration in medieval Islamic fiqh as confronted to administrative practice.

18Baghdad as the centre of an empire was also examined from other angles, in particular cultural and symbolic. Through a thorough investigation of Kitāb al-Aghānī, Hoorelbeke explored the centrality of Baghdad in the realm of poetry, calling it the “qibla of poets.” He examined the circulation of poets and singers active between the years 132/750 and 193/809, with the aim of locating their movement through the detailed biographical records left to us by Abū al-Faraj al-Isfahānī (d. 356/967). Baghdad begins to take the ascendancy over other cities of Iraq and the broader empire a few decades after its foundation. While Iraq, in matters of poetry, benefited from the presence of authorities of consecration in Basra and Kufa, Baghdad was the main place of training and symbolic recognition of poets. The centrality of Baghdad within Iraq, Hoorelbeke argued, is linked to the court acting as a place of financial consecration for poets. The remarkable importance of Baghdad is the outcome of the progressive concentration of these two powers of consecration, symbolic and financial.

19In the same vein, Gareil’s contribution shed light on the symbolic aspects that made Baghdad not only the centre of the empire, but also the centre of the world. The universality trope is indeed widespread in a great variety of historical, geographical and literary sources, particularly so during the 4th/10th century. By studying the occurrences of this theme in written accounts of the 3rd-4th/9th-10th centuries, and in particular in the lesser-known version of Ibn al-Faqīh al-Hamadhānī’s (fl. 290/903) Kitāb al-Buldān, Gareil demonstrated how the universality trope is intrinsically connected with not only the cultural, but also the political history of Baghdad, since it served as an instrument of legitimisation of Buyid rule. Writers of the time used this trope to convey the reputation of the city and to address the divisions of the empire through literary symbols of unity and universality. Gareil pushed us to think about these tropes and their meaning seriously, and to pay attention to their evolution. These symbolic tropes about Baghdad have meaning not only for the period analysed by Gareil, but beyond, and should be examined within the larger context of the Abbasid empire.

I.3. Urban administration: Abbasid and Ilkhanid Baghdad

20Beyond political history, the Paris workshop featured several important contributions to the study of both Abbasid and Ilkhanid administration. The field had already benefited from the works of Letizia Osti, Maaike van Berkel, Nadia Maria El-Cheikh, and Hugh Kennedy, most notably their volume Crisis and Continuity in the Abbasid Court (van Berkel et al., 2013). The book successfully covered various aspects of Abbasid administration during the reign of al-Muqtadir, in particular, the vizier, the bureaucracy, the military, the chamberlains, and the harem. The judiciary under the Abbasids has been researched in depth by scholars like Mathieu Tillier (2023). During the workshop, van Berkel undertook a reconstruction of the functioning of the archives kept in the central administration of Baghdad during the caliphate of al-Muqtadir (r. 295/908-320/932) (van Berkel, 2014). She showed how it was possible, through the study of literary sources, to reconstruct the complex and articulated functioning of Abbasid administration, despite the non-conservation of physical archives. Rébillard gave similar insights by looking at a different sector of activity: urban control. In her presentation, she argued for the previous presence of police archives, which she was able to trace through a body of varied literary texts as well as a normative source, a 3rd or 4th/9th or 10th century anonymous manuscript entitled Risālat Siyāsat al-mulūk. 3rd/9th-century Baghdad saw the bureaucratisation of police administration and procedures, with the rise of daily documents such as police reports (ruqʿa), registers (daftar), or petitions (qiṣṣa), that were duly archived. While these archives have not survived, they can be partly known through these literary and normative sources mentioned (Rébillard, forthcoming). This material sheds important light on the Abbasid apparatus for urban control.

21Matters of urban administration were the focus of several contributions. How were neighbourhoods and quarters administered on a daily basis? How was food distribution organised at the local level for over half a million Baghdadis? Who was in charge of urban administration during the Samarra period? Kennedy stated that there was no dīwān for food supplies in Baghdad, and no centralised system. Food supplies worked as long as the state indirectly paid for them; the caliph created the demand in the Baghdadi economy through the payment of salaries. This important feature of the system explains why, contrary to ancient Rome where enormous amounts of sources exist, we do not hear anything about food supplies until things start to go wrong during the 4th/10th century and famine hits, as reported by Miskawayh (Tajārib, 6/127). Micheau proposed a reconstruction of local Baghdadi life and activities during the period when Baghdad was no longer the Abbasid capital. During the Samarra “interlude,” Baghdad was administered by the ṣāḥib al-shurta, the police chief, whose functions expanded drastically. A member of the Ṭāhiride family until 278/891, his responsibilities started to match those of a governor, and he was in charge of collecting taxes and maintaining order in the entire Sawād, the fertile rural area around the city; Baghdad was effectively under the control of Samarra.

22The Ilkhanid period was the focus of the work of Biran and Jelinowski, who both contributed to our understanding of Ilkhanid Baghdad’s administration, a question that has already received detailed treatment by Biran (2022). Although the city lost its status as the nominal centre of the Islamic world, Biran showed how Baghdad remained the Iraqi capital, with the occasional presence of the Mongol ordo (mobile Ilkhanid court). Baghdad’s administration mirrored the central Ilkhanid government and operated on a dual administrative system (Aigle, 2006). Authority was shared between a Mongol governor (the shiḥna) and a Muslim civil administrator (vizier or ṣāḥib al-dīwān). While the first was in charge of the Mongol and nomadic populations, the second was responsible for the sedentary population. On the same period, Jelinowski, studying Juwaynī’s (d. 682/1283) Tārīkh-i Jahāngushā, demonstrated that Baghdad’s institutional position under Hulegu was directly impacted by this new hierarchical, embedded, Mongol and Islamicate system of power.

I.4. Economic and environmental history

23Just as Baghdad’s political history has often been framed within the broader history of the Abbasid state, so too has its economic life traditionally been examined through the lens of Abbasid economic history. As the commercial centre of the caliphate, Baghdad naturally became central to discussions of Abbasid trade and production. Scholars such as Robert McCormick Adams, Michael Morony, Hugh Kennedy, Richard Bulliet, and Bas van Bavel, among others, have explored both the capital’s activities and the wider commercial networks of its periphery (Adams, 1965; Morony, 1984; Bessard and Kennedy, 2024; Bulliet, 2022; van Bavel, 2016).

24At the Paris workshop, the economic history of Baghdad was revisited by Kennedy and van Berkel. Supplying food to a metropolis of Baghdad’s scale was an immense challenge, in times of prosperity as well as in moments of crisis, yet the issue of provisioning the Abbasid capital has only recently come to the fore. Drawing on archaeological evidence, Kennedy emphasized the heavy reliance of Baghdad on cereal production from the Sawād (southern Iraq), with its flourishing agricultural economy, as well as from the Jazīra in north-west Iraq. Grain was transported by river along the Euphrates and the Tigris, especially from the eastern Jazīra. For Kennedy, Abbasid Baghdad must therefore be understood within a vast economic framework that encompassed not only Iraq but also more distant regions with which the city traded and from which it imported grain. Agricultural production was sustained by both the high demands of urban centres and a consumerist Baghdadi society, as well as by the sophisticated canal system that enabled transport and distribution. Yet, as mentioned above, the Abbasid state does not appear to have played an active role in organizing supply. By the 4th/10th century, the system collapsed, and Baghdad had become what Kennedy evocatively describes as a “zombie capital.”

25Van Berkel, in the final presentation, added a reflection on water supply in Baghdad, stemming from her Dutch research program “Source of Life. Water Management in the Premodern Middle East (7th-15th c.).”26 The program investigates water management in Baghdad and other cities in Iraq and beyond (Basra, Samarra, Mecca, Cairo, Damascus). For Baghdad, it aims to reconstruct the management of water installations, building on recent (Ahola and Osti, 2013: 223–226; Verkinderen, 2015) and less recent (Le Strange, 1900; Lassner, 1970a) scholarship. Van Berkel addressed the question of the water canals, which supplied a large part of West Baghdad, running from the Euphrates in the West towards the Tigris in the East, while East Baghdad was fed by the Nahrawān Canal coming from the North-East and the tail ends of the Ishaqi system west of the Tigris fed the north of West Baghdad. Water, van Berkel argued, is a powerful lens for understanding urban organisation, but also the pattern of rulers-and-ruled relationship. As for food supply, the involvement of the Abbasid state in supplying clean water to the inhabitants of Baghdad was weak after the main canals had been constructed or restored. The distribution of water was organised in a partly collective and partly private commercial way, with water carriers selling water to inhabitants.

I.5. Issues in social history

26Two important fields covered by the Paris workshop were social and intellectual history. The social history of Baghdad is a developing area, and it has often been tackled through the lens of Abbasid social history. Several works have thus contributed to Abbasid history broadly speaking while providing more detailed examinations of Baghdadi social history within that context. This is the case of Nadia Maria El-Cheikh (2015), Amira Bennison (2010), Muhammad Ahsan (1979), and James Lindsay (2005). Some scholars have focused on the city and built its social history through a variety of sources, mostly literary, for instance Vanessa Van Renterghem (2015), Francoise Micheau (2008), Simha Sabbari (1981) on the topic of popular movements, or Reuven Snir (2013) on verses about Baghdad, to name a few (see also Canard, 1962). Some recent works have attempted to bring aspects of the social history of Baghdad to a broader audience (Selove, 2019 and 2021). Topics of social history have covered social and religious groups within the city, elites versus common people, women (and the harem), marriage and divorce, but also etiquette, cookbooks (Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens, 2007; Medieval Arab Cookery, 2001), or party crashing (Selove, 2012; see also Weber, 2014).

27Social history was a prominent focus at the Paris workshop, with several papers offering historical perspectives on various social groups: the poets (Hoorelbeke), the Shīʿī population of the Karkh area (Neggaz), criminals and delinquents (Rébillard), and the local population of small districts (Van Renterghem). These diverse approaches contribute to a richer understanding of the social fabric of medieval Baghdad.

  • 27 On the history of the Imāmī-Shīʿī movement in Karkh Baghdad, see Neggaz, 2019; on the Barāthā mosqu (...)

28Hoorelbeke’s paper at the Paris workshop integrated social and intellectual history, focusing on the role of Baghdad in the evolution of Arabic poetry and emphasizing the significance of Abbasid patronage. He highlighted how sponsorship and social affiliations influenced the development of poetry in the city. Neggaz’s research on the Shīʿī population of the Karkh area revealed how patronage and social connections attracted Imāmīs to this part of Baghdad. By analysing Shīʿī rijāl works, she traced the migration of Imāmī scholars to Karkh and demonstrated how they deliberately chose this area as their home. Neggaz noted that while Sunni biographical works, such as al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s Taʾrīkh Baghdād, offer limited information on Shīʿī figures, Shī{ī sources are crucial for understanding their presence and influence. Neggaz’s study showed that al-Karkh, rather than Baghdad as a whole, became the centre of the Imāmī wikāla (network of deputies) by the late 3rd/9th century and later the heart of the Imāmī ḥawza (seminary) and rationalist theology under the Buyids (333–447/945–1055). She used chronicles and poetry to explore how al-Karkh evolved into a hub of Imāmī-Shīʿī activity, influencing both the social and political life of the Abbasid capital from the Buyid period until the Mongol invasion of 656/1258. Her approach, utilising a range of sources including medieval geography manuals, historical chronicles, local histories, biographical dictionaries, poetry, and travellers’ accounts, exemplifies the potential of microhistory to uncover the dynamics of the Imāmī-Shīʿī movement in this suburban area of Baghdad.27

  • 28 Similar patterns can be observed in the chronicles describing revolts in Mamluk Cairo and Damascus (...)

29Rébillard’s research into crime in Abbasid Baghdad provided valuable insights into the social perceptions and categorisation of criminality. Her analysis of both literary and normative sources highlighted a tendency to over-represent collective crimes, such as gang-related activities, at the expense of more routine individual crimes, especially when the latter did not involve members of the political or military elite.28 This focus on collective criminal groups, like the ʿayyārūn or zuʿʿār, underscores how these groups were often scapegoated for various criminal actions throughout the Abbasid period. Rébillard also identified patterns in the types of offences recorded, noting a prevalence of certain crimes over others. For instance, while theft was a common crime, specific forms like kabsāt (violent house attacks) were more frequently documented by chroniclers. Her study of al-Ṣūlī’s Kitāb al-Awrāq revealed a surge in criminal activity during the early 4th/10th century, coinciding with the arrival of the Buyids in Baghdad. This increase in crime, she argues, was linked to the tumultuous political climate, rising prices, and mutinies among soldiers, which exacerbated living conditions.

  • 29 Van Renterghem explains that the discontinuity of the urban landscape has been noted and commented (...)

30Van Renterghem’s paper offered new perspectives on Baghdad’s social history by examining neighbourhood identities during the Seljuq period. While it is well-established that Baghdad was divided into distinct neighbourhoods in the 5th/11th and 6th/12th centuries,29 Van Renterghem explored how Baghdadis’ attachment to their local areas influenced their social identity. Her analysis of literary sources reconstructed residents’ sense of belonging and the impact of neighbourhood divisions on urban life. Van Renterghem’s study draws parallels with research on local identities in other cities and eras, such as Toru Miura’s examination of the Ṣāliḥiyya neighbourhood of Damascus (Miura, 2015). Despite the greater coverage of Ottoman periods, Abbasid Baghdad remains a crucial case for understanding complex urban histories and the formation of local identities. The paper underscores how collective identities are shaped and expressed during significant urban events like festivals, social gatherings, and riots.

I.6. A center of knowledge: intellectual history and social history of the scholars

  • 30 Within the existing abundant bibliography, see Gutas, 1998; recently: Scheiner and Janos, 2014a; fo (...)
  • 31 For the early period, see Karamustafa, 2007; for the 5th–7th/11th–13th centuries, Muhammad, 2024. O (...)

31Baghdad’s role as a centre of knowledge during the Abbasid period is a well-researched topic, with significant scholarship dedicated to its intellectual and scientific history.30 The impact of the political context is very often invoked as a frame of periodisation for intellectual and scientific history, with different dynastic periods receiving varied levels of attention. The early Abbasid period is by far the most largely investigated, with scholarship covering the intellectual life under the first caliphs, the translation movement, the development of literature, philosophy, medicine, mathematics, and other rational and traditional sciences (with an emphasis on Islamic law) in Baghdad. The role of the city as a scientific hub and a centre of elaboration and diffusion of Arabic-written knowledge has also been studied. Attention has been paid to the social history of scholars, to their local and global networks, and to their links with the political spheres, mostly through the angle of patronage. For the middle period (Buyid and Seljuq times), patronage has been investigated with an emphasis on the development of institutions of learning (madrasas) and their impact on the urban landscape and society (Makdisi, 1961; Ephrat, 2000; Van Renterghem, 2015). Later times (late Abbasid and Ilkhanid periods) have been researched under the angle of scholars’ patronage, libraries, and manuscript production and circulation (Löhr, 2023). The role of Baghdad in the development of the Sunni schools of law, and especially the local Ḥanbalī school (Laoust, 1959; Makdisi, 1963; Melchert, 1997; Ephrat, 2000; Hurvitz, 2003; Van Renterghem, 2015), and in Sufism,31 has been studied. Baghdad has been mainly investigated as a place of knowledge production and as a centre for the diffusion of sciences.

  • 32 This presentation has been published: Tillier, 2024.
  • 33 The miḥna was a period of religious inquisition initiated by the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mūn (r. 198-2 (...)

32During the Paris workshop, many papers were dedicated to the intellectual life and milieu of Baghdad. Some addressed intellectual history issues within social or political history approaches (Hoorelbeke on poets, Micheau on scholars and ulamas, Neggaz on Imāmī religious authorities). Tillier examined a particular figure of East Baghdad, the scholar and judge Wakīʿ (d. 306/918) and his book on judges (Akhbār al-quḍāt), where the space devoted to Baghdad appears particularly reduced.32 Tillier showed that Baghdad is used by Wakīʿ as a counter-model in matters of judicial administration. Wakīʿ was a member of the scholarly elite, as was al-Ṭabarī, his contemporary. In his work, Wakīʿ presents himself as a Traditionist, vehemently opposed to the heterodoxy of the dogma of the creation of the Qurʾān and to the crime that the miḥna33 represented in his eyes. For him, Baghdad was the epitome of the detrimental alliance between “sold-out” scholars and jurists and a government whose religious authority he, like his peers, no longer recognised. His work, therefore, offers a reinterpretation of the history of the qadis through the lens of that pivotal moment represented by the miḥna, in which a Baghdad qadi played a fundamental role. From a more personal standpoint, Wakīʿ appears to be reciprocating the disdain some of his contemporaries exhibited towards him, particularly in the accusation that he neglected his father. Tillier’s paper thus emphasised the role of both the local and individual context in history writing. He highlighted the importance of the miḥna as a fundamental, polarising event which had a strong impact on historiography.

33Intellectual history, as said before, is easily related to the political context: changes of dynasties or of “official” ideologies had consequences on intellectual production. The status of Baghdad as a capital brought together scholars from very distant areas; strong or rich patrons could decide to massively invest in translations, or in the founding of specific learning institutions. It is then interesting to assess what happened in the domain of intellectual life when Baghdad lost its status as capital, to the benefit of Samarra. Micheau carefully distinguished the scholars who moved to Samarra from the ones who stayed in Baghdad, and showed how this gave birth to two distinct scholarly identities. Many scientists of the 3rd/9th century like the Banū Mūsā, Thābit ibn Qurra, and even the great physician and translator Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, lived a large part of their careers in Samarra, which experienced a rich and intense intellectual life due to caliphal patronage (Micheau, 2023). As shown by Judith Ahola (Ahola, 2004), religious scholars, conversely, stayed in Baghdad where the intellectual identity of the city turned in favour of traditional knowledge. Micheau emphasised the fact that this milieu of traditional scholars no longer had ties with the Abbasid power: this mutual estrangement can be attributed both to the miḥna, again, and to the departure of the Abbasid court to Samarra.

34The following period, when Baghdad had recovered its status as a capital, underwent a new evolution under Buyid rule. The patronage activity of the Buyid entourage has long been studied under the angle of humanism and rational knowledge (Kraemer, 1986). Gareil, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the relationship between knowledge and power in 4th/10th-century Baghdad (Gareil, 2019), investigated the consequences of the return of the caliphal court to Baghdad. As pointed out by Micheau, it re-established contact between different groups of scholars that had lived separately for decades. But these groups elaborated rival identities, articulated around the distinction between rational and traditional sciences, as Gareil demonstrates. At the same time, an ideology of centrality and universality of Baghdad was elaborated and diffused, along with a sense of continuity between the period of al-Maʾmūn and the 4th/10th century, progressively concealing the Samarra period. The scientific patronage of the Buyid rulers can be read as the framework or the instrument which enabled the development of such an ideology of the universality of Baghdad, knowledge playing an important role in this trope of universality, very specific to Baghdad at this time. Gareil quoted many fragments of literary sources pertaining to 4th/10th-century Baghdad, emphasising its uniqueness and prosperity.

35A recent trend in intellectual history investigates the material aspects of the development and diffusion of ideas and discourses. Some papers addressed this topic, in a marginal or frontal manner. Building on her recently published book on al-Ṣūlī (d. 335/947) (Osti, 2022), Osti explored the interplay between literary and political networks in 4th/10th century Baghdad through the example of this scholar, poet, courtier, historian of the caliphate, and disciple of Wakīʿ. She demonstrated how a detailed analysis of his work provides insights into the material means of text dissemination in medieval Baghdad and beyond. Osti examined passages where al-Ṣūlī discusses his use of personal notebooks (daftar, pl. dafātir) to record auditions, poetry, and drafts of future works. She contextualised these references within the broader debates on oral and written transmission that preoccupied his contemporaries.

  • 34 Ben Azzouna’s research is based on a corpus of 125 illustrated or calligraphed manuscripts produced (...)

36Osti’s presentation contributes to the broader field of book studies and reading and writing practices, offering fresh insights into intellectual life in the medieval Islamic world (Hirschler, 2012; Seidensticker, 2015; Toorawa, 2005 on Baghdad). Baghdad’s significance as a centre of book production and sales is well-established, yet several aspects warrant further investigation: the city’s role in paper production, the various book-related professions (including paper makers, book binders, copyists, and booksellers), and the institutions involved in book dissemination such as bookstores, libraries (Eche, 1967; Aube, Kouamé and Vallet, 2013), and madrasas (Ephrat, 2000; Melchert, 2011; Van Renterghem, 2015). While much has been studied about book production and circulation in Ilkhanid Baghdad (De Nicola, 2023; Löhr, 2023), including Biran’s research on libraries, manuscripts, and their professionals (Biran, 2019), there remains room for further exploration. Biran’s work, which includes examining the list of calligraphed manuscripts from the Ilkhanid and Jalayirid periods as detailed by Nourane Ben Azzouna in Aux origines du classicisme, suggests promising avenues for future research in this area (Ben Azzouna, 2018).34

  • 35 We will come back to the KITAB project in later sections of the article.

37Tillier, Hoorelbeke, Micheau and Osti likewise examined scholarly mobility. Biographical collections provide a basisfor applying digital tools such as network analysis to trace not only the movement of scholars but also the creation of long-distance networks,as seen in Neggaz’s study of the Imāmī-Shīʿa. Osti’s examination of al-Ṣūlī’s networks sheds light on the intricate connections between scholars and their intellectual and social circles in Baghdad. By focusing on al-Ṣūlī’s interactions with his masters and disciples, Osti contributes to a nuanced understanding of how personal and scholarly networks functioned. Neggaz’s work on the migration of Shīʿī intellectual elites to al-Karkh illustrates how such movements impacted the social and political landscape of Baghdad. The use of rijāl books and poetry to trace these movements highlights the significance of geographic mobility in shaping intellectual and social dynamics. Analysing the KITAB project data,35 Aslisho Qurboniev (who could not participate in the conference due to administrative reasons) produced graphs comparing the weight of Baghdad in scholarly networks with the importance of other contemporary cities. Qurboniev applied Digital Humanities methods to the analysis of geographical data and text reuse in exceptionally long texts, including Muḥammad Bāqir Majlisī’s (d. 1110/1699) Biḥār al-Anwār. This approach introduces a new dimension to previous quantitative studies on Baghdad’s regional and global significance in scholarly networks (Ephrat, 2000; Ahola, 2004; Van Renterghem, 2015).

II. Sources, methods and approaches: old corpuses, new tools?

38The Paris workshop systematically addressed both sources and methodologies. The renewal of Baghdadi studies may emerge along several lines: the incorporation of new sources, the development of innovative methods of analysis, and the adoption of fresh research themes and approaches. A crucial element of this renewal lies in rethinking the traditional periodisation, which too often confines the city’s history within political-dynastic frameworks. By challenging this conventional lens, scholars can uncover a richer and more nuanced narrative of Baghdad. Moreover, shifting the scale of inquiry—from microhistory to broader global and connected histories—opens the way to a more comprehensive and multidimensional understanding of the city’s past.

II.1. Sources: texts and beyond?

39In the absence of archaeological studies, the history of medieval Baghdad, from political and social history to topography and urban evolution, has to be investigated quasi-exclusively through texts. Thankfully, the available texts are numerous and varied, though it must be added that most of them are non-documentary literary productions, since no archival material is available until the Ottoman period.

II.1.a. Manuscripts and edited texts

  • 36 Ibn al-Dubaythī, Dhayl. Though this biographical dictionary is not mentioned by Scheiner in his inv (...)
  • 37 Two full editions of this text, that was only partly published before, were issued by different pub (...)

40In the last decades, many manuscript works about medieval Baghdad have been edited, and previous partial editions have been completed, as is for example the case with the continuation (Dhayl) of al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s (d. 463/1071) Taʾrīkh Baghdād by the Baghdadi Ibn al-Dubaythī (d. 637/1239), edited in Beirut in five volumes (2006) when the previous edition counted only two.36 It is to be noted that Iraqi sources, which used to be mainly published in Baghdad, are now edited in Damascus and Beirut (and sometimes Cairo), reflecting the leading role that the editors in these cities have taken in publishing Arabic medieval texts. Other texts that were written from outside Baghdad have also become available, such as the Mirʾāt al-zamān of Sibṭ ibn al-Jawzī (d. 654/1256),37 who left Baghdad at a young age but makes use of Iraqi sources in his chronicle.

  • 38 This source had already been mentioned by Sadan, 1979 and 1990. Rébillard proposed an edition of th (...)
  • 39 Institutional sites around the world that offer digitised manuscripts for Islamic and Arabic studie (...)

41Identification of previously unknown or unused manuscripts is uncommon, but provides the unique occasion of bringing fresh material to Baghdadi studies. A recent example is Adam Talib’s “discovery” of the poetry dīwān of Ibn al-Mūṣalāyā (d. 497/1104), an important dignitary of the Abbasid administration hailing from a Nestorian family. Talib is currently working on editing and analysing this newly identified manuscript (Talib, forthcoming). Similarly, already identified but under-exploited manuscripts can significantly enrich our understanding of medieval Baghdad. For instance, the anonymous Risālat Siyāsat al-Mulūk, utilized by Rébillard in her PhD research on the Abbasid shurṭa, offers a detailed section on the chief of the Abbasid police (ṣāḥib al-shurṭa) and his agents. This manuscript is housed in the Sülaymaniye Library in Istanbul.38 The hope of identifying new texts is getting thinner with the globalisation of access to manuscript libraries around the world, but the digitisation of manuscripts makes them much more accessible to researchers than it used to be before the end of the 20th century. Institutional or informal sites propose databases of manuscripts that can be downloaded in digital format or read online,39 in versions that are sometimes more readable than the old microfilm copies. This fact also offers historians the capacity to work on material aspects of the manuscripts, studying marginal notes, colophons and reading marks (audition certificates, possession marks, public readings, notes of the copyist) as has been done for other urban contexts, mainly in Syria (ex. Görke and Hirschler, 2011). It is to be noted that, except for the Ilkhanid period (Ben Azzouna, 2018; Löhr, 2023), the art of the book in Baghdad remains mainly underexplored.

II.1.b. Documentary sources and administrative practice

42The title of the workshop presented Baghdad as a “prearchival” context. This terminology was discussed and nuanced by the workshop participants, in particular van Berkel who reminded us that the lack of large preserved archival collections does not imply that medieval societies and administrations did not care about generating and preserving administrative documents. To the contrary, many sources prove that the Abbasid (as well as Buyid, Seljuq and Ilkhanid) rulers and administrators produced and methodically kept archives, be they fiscal, judicial, as previously studied by Tillier, military, or police archives, as shown by Rébillard (Tillier, 2009; Rébillard, forthcoming; see also van Berkel, 2014).

43This reflects the extensive scholarly debate surrounding the existence and nature of archives in the pre-modern Middle East. Scholars have long questioned whether the medieval Islamic world had a robust culture of archives and a state-run administration grounded in written records. If such a system existed, they asked, why have significant archives, similar to those of medieval Europe, not survived? As highlighted by Tamer El-Leithy, the dearth of archives became a commonplace about the pre-modern Islamicate world, often used to emphasise an essential difference between the Western world and Islam; as such, it can reflect an Eurocentric way of considering Islamicate societies (El-Leithy, 2011). Over time, however, scholarly opinions evolved significantly. Samuel Stern initially argued that only a few archives were preserved (Stern, 1964), while Michael Chamberlain attributed this perceived scarcity to cultural factors (Chamberlain, 1994). In contrast, Petra Sijpesteijn proposed that there was an “archival mentality” in the region (Sijpesteijn, 2007). In the same perspective, Tamer el-Leithy provided evidence of an administration in pre-modern Islamic lands that relied on written documentation (El-Leithy, 2011). He advocated for an anthropological approach to archiving practices and “documentary culture” of the medieval Islamicate societies, and reminded us that the life-cycle of archives must be taken into consideration. Archives of a dynasty could be deliberately wiped out as a symbol of the political change, and private archives could be dispersed or even erased for reasons pertaining to familial or individual strategies.

  • 40 Fozia Bora argues further that Mamluk chronicles should be considered archives (Bora, 2019).

44The work of scholars researching later periods has also been critical in this discussion. Konrad Hirschler further advanced the debate by suggesting a rethinking of what constitutes an “archive” (Hirschler, 2016).40 Using the Mamluk period as a case study, Hirschler argued for a shift away from the idea of fixed archival spaces or a central state archive, towards a focus on archival practices.

45Marina Rustow built on this perspective by demonstrating the existence of sophisticated archival practices under the Fatimid state, drawing on her study of the Cairo Genizah and its documents (Rustow, 2020). The diversity of documents produced by the Fatimid administration led her to argue that the Fatimid bureaucracy exhibited features consistent with Weberian concepts of state function and structure. Rustow also proposed that the Chancellery encouraged private individuals to create their own archives. She noted that authentication marks were not personal signatures but rather standardised religious formulas, designed to erase the identity of individual civil servants and create the impression of a bureaucracy grounded in reproducible, rational, and standardised procedures—what she terms “a machinery.”

  • 41 This is despite the fact that eight Abbasid documents have been found in Samarra by Herzfeld, and s (...)

46Archives could be lost due to various reasons, from climate factors, floods and fire, to dynastic changes and military sieges—or were often simply thrown away, because no longer of use—; paper could also be reused by later administrations, as was shown by Marina Rustow in the case of the Cairo Genizah documents. Participants in the Paris workshop insisted that Medieval Baghdad cannot be considered a “pre-archival” society because it did produce archives. This is why this term has not been kept in the title of the present article; it was rather a context “with (a lot of) archives which did not survive.” That being said, the lack of preserved archives is, nevertheless, a reality and not a mere cliché, and constitutes one of the many challenges that modern historians have to face. Beyond administrative archives, it is also true of other kinds of documentary evidence: unlike Egyptian papyri or Mamluk waqfiyyāt, for the Baghdadi context, texts of a documentary nature (as opposed to literary) did not survive from medieval times. To our knowledge, no collection (or even samples) of judicial documents, fatwas, petitions, foundation deeds, testaments, original diplomatic letters, private correspondence, letters of traders, conversion certificates, wedding contracts, or other kinds of documentary evidence—except for coins—have been preserved from Abbasid or late medieval Baghdad.41 That being said, we know from the narrative sources that such written documents were regularly produced and used in Baghdad, just as they were elsewhere in the Islamicate world. Some administrative letters or fiscal documents have been preserved in law or chancery manuals such as the Kitāb al-kharāj of Abū Yūsuf (d. 182/798) or, many centuries later, al-Qalqashandī’s (d. 821/1418) Ṣubḥ al-aʿshāʾ, but no participant in the Paris workshop actually made use of such documentary sources.

II.1.c Archaeology, numismatics and material culture

  • 42 Despite ongoing debate over its central thesis (recent reviews of Adams’ work include Whitcomb, 200 (...)

47As discussed above, no archaeological surveys or excavations have been made in Baghdad, since the modern city largely covers medieval sites. Northedge and Verkinderen proposed new leads for exploring Baghdad’s topography by combining aerial photographs, old maps and textual data. An archaeological survey within today’s Baghdad may be conceivable, especially in non-built areas such as palm groves, but the difficult access to the field makes it unlikely, except if it were undertaken by an Iraqi project and team. The importance of such an approach is demonstrated by the fact that the great archaeological survey led by Robert McCormick Adams in the 1960s in the Diyāla plains, north-east of Baghdad, still stands as a reference today (Adams, 1965).42 Through the analysis of ceramic material found during the mission, Adams drew conclusions about the variation of population in the Diyāla area, on a long-term approach leading from prehistoric to modern times. Of course, such a study has its methodological limits: the ceramic typology does not always distinguish between the Sasanian or early Islamic period, for example; and obviously, in an urban context, surface prospection cannot rely on shard spotting. But for example, the current archeological work undertaken by Peter Brown in the Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab (south of Iraq, near old Basra), as part of the “Source of life” Project, could offer new information about the agrarian production in this area, mainly determined by Baghdadi needs and buying possibilities (Brown, 2022). Archaeology in the surrounding regions is thus absolutely necessary to understand the economic history of Baghdad, as Kennedy demonstrated by using the results of Sophie Berthier’s study on the archaeology of the Middle Euphrates in Syria. Berthier demonstrated the high level of hydraulic activity in the Euphrates valley in early Islamic times—a fact related, according to Kennedy, with the necessity of feeding Baghdad—followed by a decline of many settlements along the 4th/10th century (Berthier, 2001).

48Numismatics constitutes an exception in matters of material evidence. Numerous coins from the Abbasid era have been preserved, coming from different mints, among which the Round City, Madīnat al-Salām. Abbasid coinage was made of gold (dinars), silver (dirhams) and copper (fulūs). It is globally present during the whole period of Abbasid rule; Ilkhanid coins minted in Baghdad are also well known. Heidemann adds donative coins to his analysis: these gold coins were minted—by the caliph or sometimes one of his wives—and donated on special occasions, such as the wedding of the caliph, the circumcision of his sons or the Nawrūz festival. Though they were not meant for general commercial circulation, they bear dates, caliphs’ names, and most importantly, often names of palace complexes.

49Numismatic evidence is currently used in political history in order to confirm or clarify dynastic history, as proof of control of a determined territory. Coins also serve as primary evidence for economic history, as factual and primary textual documents with up to 150 words. They are of particular importance when documents (and archives) are largely missing. Heidemann’s paper suggested a new approach, in the field of urban and administrative history, based on the analysis of mint names. Considering coins as “serially printed texts,” Heidemann invited us to view them as a potential source—a “non-conventional source”—for the study of urban history. This could open new perspectives, in particular for the period that is under-studied in Baghdad’s history, namely the 8th/14th and 9th/15th centuries, for which numismatic corpuses are known.

50Other material evidence from medieval Baghdad could be used in Baghdadi studies: the various artefacts produced in the city, from luxury articles to common products. Such surviving artefacts are not numerous, notably because no archaeological excavation has been undertaken in the city itself, but some do exist. We already mentioned the case of manuscripts considered in their materiality, but the study of objects, in their diversity, would also be of great help. To our knowledge, though studies exist on specific and exceptional items (luxury objects, ṭirāz textiles, and so on), no global investigation has been devoted to Baghdadi material culture for the medieval period and this field of study could open interesting research avenues.

II.1.d. Narrative and literary sources

  • 43 Medieval Arabic sources on Baghdad are too numerous to be presented here. For a (non-exhaustive) pr (...)

51Literary texts have been the core of Baghdadi studies since their beginnings. These texts are abundant and of various nature: geographical treaties, topographical descriptions, travelogues, historiographical sources in their variety, from chronicles and dynastical histories to biographical collections and Shīʿī rijāl books; “diaries” or auto-documentary texts; adab production such as ethical treaties, mirrors of princes, literary texts in prose and poetry, anthologies; and other sorts of texts, from lists of teachers (masyakhas) to cooking books, and from catalogues to sermon collections.43 Almost all the papers presented in the Paris workshop relied at least partially on such textual sources. Some rich texts have been exploited in various perspectives, for example the Awrāq of al-Ṣūlī, used by Osti to study the material media of knowledge production and circulation, as well as by Rébillard in her study of crime and criminals. It’s worth noting that geographical texts were not a central focus in the papers presented at the workshop, with the exception of Gareil’s, who used the work of Ibn al-Faqīh al-Hamadhānī. This may be attributed to the fact that these sources were among the first to be extensively exploited in the study of medieval Baghdad, notably by scholars such as Le Strange and Lassner. Consequently, while these texts remain valuable, they have perhaps been overshadowed by the pursuit of new sources and methodologies in more recent research.

  • 44 For a synthesis on Baghdadi Christians: Morony, 2022.
  • 45 On the Jewish sources about Baghdad, see Zvi Stampfer, 2022: 733–734.
  • 46 Publication of the thesis for the obtention of the French Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches, In (...)

52The textual sources about medieval Baghdad are not always written in Arabic, or by Muslim authors. Christian local chronicles exist in Arabic (starting with Mārī ibn Sulaymān and ʿAmr ibn al-Mattā, 12th and 14th centuries CE) and are very rich about socio-political life in Baghdad.44 These sources are well known to specialists of Eastern Christian Churches, but are less used by historians of the Islamic world, contrary to the famous Syriac chronicle of Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286 CE), which is translated into English and French and commonly used in political and social history. Jewish sources exist about Baghdad, in Hebrew, Arabic or Judeo-Arabic: they encompass textual productions of Jewish Baghdadi scholars, like Ibn Kammūna (d. 683/1284) (Pourjavady and Schmidtke, 2006), fragments from the Cairo Genizah, juridical and theological responsa, and descriptions of Baghdad in travel accounts written in Hebrew (notably by Nathan the Babylonian, mid-4th/10th century; Benjamin of Tudela and Petachia of Regensburg in the 560-70’s/1170’s, and Judah al-Ḥarīzī, d. 622/1225).45 Importantly, texts in other languages than Arabic, Persian, Syriac and Hebrew can also be used to write the history of Baghdad, though most of them were written from outside the city. For her study of the Ilkhanid period, Biran used sources in Georgian, Armenian, Latin, and Chinese. Travellers from Europe also wrote about Baghdad, in particular Riccoldo Da Montecroce, who stayed in Baghdad in 690/1291. Arabic texts written from outside Baghdad are sometimes helpful to study the city: Van Renterghem’s forthcoming research on the Fatimid conquest of Baghdad, during the year 451/1059 (Van Renterghem, forthcoming/a),46 makes an extensive use of Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk sources, written in Egypt and Syria.

53Turning back to Arabic sources, new research now makes a more intensive use of historiographical texts, which are full of references to urban and social history, as well as adab and variegated texts. Researchers are now investigating books that do not take Baghdad as their main subject, like the Kitāb al-Aghānī (Book of Songs) studied by Hoorelbeke. Poetry itself can be used for urban studies, as Neggaz demonstrated about al-Karkh.

  • 47 For such an approach, see El-Hibri, 1999 and 2010; Noth and Conrad, 1994.

54A “traditional”—critical and philological—approach of historiographical texts still forms the core of most of the historians work on medieval Baghdad: chronicles and literary texts have to be read in their entirety to draw the main features of the city’s history and place it in a larger geographic, political, economic, and intellectual context. Much work remains to be done on these corpuses, but literary sources also present specific challenges for historical research; their historical use can be renewed by literary approaches to narrative texts. One of the questions that was debated during the Paris workshop is the use of the many tropes and recurrent narratives (akhbār) that abound in such texts. Rébillard reminded us to keep in mind the exemplary nature of such narratives: she argues that historical analyses must not focus on the question of the historicity of each narrative, but rather examine why such material was selected by the authors of the texts, in her case in order to exemplify the power of the state and its agents in punishing criminals. At a different level of analysis, Gareil made tropes his main object of investigation, and showed how the tropes of universality, associated with knowledge (ʿilm and ḥikma), and the trope of centrality, are more and more associated with Baghdad during the 4th/10th century, according to a temporality deeply linked with the political context in which the texts were produced. The study of tropes and their evolution in medieval narratives, with a keen focus on intertextuality, represents a highly promising avenue of research.47 Finally, all participants in the workshop confirmed the vital importance of studying the terminology and the shades of difference between quasi-homonyms, be it in matters of criminality (Rébillard), designation of neighbourhoods (Van Renterghem) or even boats on the Tigris and the Euphrates (Kennedy). Van Renterghem showed, for example, that the vocabulary referring to neighbourhoods and city districts is very specific and applies to local spaces in a non-homogeneous manner. The term “maḥāll” (pl. of maḥall, “area, district”), for instance, is only used for the West side of the city, denoting a link between local space and urban terminology.

II.2. New perspectives on the textual sources

II.2.a. Quantitative approaches of literary texts: Baghdad in prosopography

55For many decades, quantitative approaches have been applied, with the help of computers, on some types of medieval corpuses. One popular approach is prosopography, based on the statistical analysis of biographical collections; it was used by many speakers at the workshop (Micheau, Gareil, Osti) and scholars (Ahola, 2004; Ephrat, 2000; Van Renterghem, 2015). The prosopographical approach encompasses a great range of methods, from “manual” counting to the use of relational databases. It allows scholars to highlight collective entities such as families, schools of thought, religious factions, entities built on a geographic, ethnic or professional basis. Family or knowledge transmission links can also be studied by way of network analysis, as suggested by Osti for 4th/10th-century Baghdad. Statistical studies based on collections of biographies as well allow scholars to investigate the geographic mobility of a determined category of people, over a specific time period, thus assessing the weight of Baghdad in a field of knowledge for example (Hoorelbeke on poets).

56It is also to be noted that a microhistory approach was adopted in some papers (Neggaz, Osti, Van Renterghem), enabled by the abundance of (literary) texts available in some contexts. The microhistorical approach implies the use of a large number of heterogeneous sources on the same period and topic; conversely, prosopography and quantitative processes require to establish an homogeneous corpus of sources containing series of stereotyped data, that can be handled with consistency. Despite (or because of) their differences, such approaches must be considered as cumulative and not exclusive from one another. Each one has its methodological limits, and some participants explicitly discussed them in the Paris workshop, as did Verkinderen about the cumulative use of dissimilar data, forming heterogeneous corpuses (of a different nature, composition, timeline, and so on), for reconstructing the watercourses of Lower Iraq.

II.2.b. Digital humanities: new tools, new perspectives, new limits?

57Textual corpuses are well known, and extensively used, by the historians of Baghdad. Though some manuscripts are occasionally identified and new texts are regularly edited, adding to our global knowledge of the medieval city, research renewal mainly relies on unexplored research issues, or on new research tools that enable us to investigate the known texts in new ways. The Paris workshop explored both in a collective manner. Particularly, two papers explored the promising avenues opened by new digital methods for working on large corpuses of texts.

58In his study of the work of ʿAṭā Malik Juwaynī, administrator of the Ilkhans in Baghdad, Jelinowski made use of new tools, like lexicometry. This allows him to study the Tārīkh-i Jahāngushā as an archive—a patchwork of poetry, quotation of administrative or political documents, biographies, and histories,—as much as a discourse on history. Analysing the vocabulary of different parts of the text with the help of quantitative tools, such as the Stylo package in R language,48 he was able to pinpoint stylistic variations, highlighting the fact, for example, that the history of the Ismailis was distinct from the other parts of the book. In line with an earlier hypothesis formulated with Simon Berger (Berger and Jelinowski, forthcoming), lexicometry could be used to study the distribution of Mongol vocabulary in the work, enabling Jelinowski to consider the Tārīkh-i Jahāngushā as a Mongol discourse making use of Persian textual sources, more than the opposite.

59During the last decade, new digital methods and tools have been developed that enable computational approaches of large-scale corpuses. Researchers in Islamic history know the existence of digital libraries gathering medieval texts, such as al-Maktaba al-Shamila or al-Maktaba al-Shīʿīyya.49 Very basic lexicometric enquiries may be done by searching a particular text (or the whole corpus) on the Shamila website, but the counting is manual and the search cannot be configured. Specific projects have been built to allow scientific approaches of large-scale textual corpuses. One of the most famous projects in the field of Islamic history is the KITAB Project, managed by Sarah Bowen Savant at Aga Khan University in London, which benefited from large funding endeavours such as a European Research Council grant. The project seeks to develop methods, tools and techniques to explore not only text reuse and authorship, but also intellectual networks in the premodern Arabic textual tradition. Several results have been published, including a new version of KITAB’s text reuse data that can be downloaded at Zenodo, an Open Science platform that supports Open Access.50

  • 51 Led by Sarah Savant, Maxim Romanov (University of HamburgVienna) and Matthew Miller (University of (...)
  • 52 David Smith (Northeastern University) developed the Passim software upon which the text reuse proje (...)
  • 53 The results of this research are accessible in the following blog by Verkinderen: https://kitab-pro (...)

60A member of the core team of this project, Verkinderen presented in Paris a second paper illustrating some possibilities open by these methods, tools, and text corpuses, through the example of the text reuse detection method used by the KITAB project and the corpus developed by the OpenITI (Islamicate Texts Initiative) Corpus project.51 The later, based on preexisting digital textual corpuses, gathers about 11.000 texts (more than two billion words) in Arabic, Syriac or Persian, written between 3rd-9th/9th-16th centuries, making it the largest computer-actionable pre-modern Islamicate texts corpus to date. The KITAB project uses this huge corpus with the help of the algorithm PASSIM.52 It could establish impressive graphics of textual reuse that show, in a very direct way, how medieval authors reused (very often without quoting) former texts in their own works. In his presentation, Verkinderen compared the works included in this corpus with the list of books known to Baghdād’s most famous bookseller, Ibn al-Nadīm (d. 385/995).53 He concluded that both the Fihrist and the works that form the OpenITI corpus appear as very fractional representations of the Islamic written tradition for the first four Islamic centuries. He also demonstrated that 80% of all books in the OpenITI corpus written by authors who passed away before 400/1000 are not mentioned in the Fihrist, when more than 95% of the book entries of the Fihrist do not figure in the OpenITI corpus.

  • 54 Verkinderen notes that “with the recent improvements of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for Ara (...)

61Several factors might explain these discrepancies, such as the well-known difficulty of identifying titles in the Fihrist, or the possibility that Ibn al-Nadīm preferred to include in his work deceased authors rather than his contemporaries. Verkinderen hypothesised that both the OpenITI corpus and the Fihrist have their own preferences when it comes to subject matters selected, as illustrated by hadith. In the Open ITI corpus, 40% of the pre-400/1000 books are devoted to hadith, an over-representation due to the fact that a large number of hadith works were digitised. In the Fihrist, conversely, a relatively small number of hadith works are mentioned. Multiple factors could explain this fact: some of these works did not exist in Ibn al-Nadīm’s time, or it could come from a conscious decision by the author to leave these out. Another conclusion highlighted by Verkinderen is the over-representation of works by Iraqi authors in the Fihrist, the Islamic West being largely absent—the OpenITI corpus shares this bias for Iraq. This kind of research is all the more important since it can help researchers in the digital humanities identify blind spots in the OpenITI corpus and take it into account in their works. These blind spots can be specific genres, time periods, or regions that are under-represented in the corpus.54

  • 55 Romanov underlines that while Baghdad was the dominant urban center for Iraq and the entire Islamic (...)

62The possibilities opened by these new tools are vertiginous, but the methodology itself is not without shortcomings. Verkinderen listed some of them: the lexicometrical and quantitative approaches, for example, present a risk of decontextualisation of the use of the terms, and could generate a superficial kind of reading. The way the research corpus is constituted also adds a bias: texts included in the available databases are at risk of being over-represented, at the expense of texts that have not been digitised yet. Like with any other kind of research, historians have to clearly be aware of these limits and scrupulously expose how their corpus was constructed, what biases it may introduce, and begin with a meticulous reading of their texts (in the original language, it goes without saying) before starting quantitative analyses. That being said, lexicometrical and quantitative approaches could be useful for geographical analysis, especially microhistorical studies of Baghdad when we consider neighbourhood vocabulary and highly specific lexicon defining districts and areas of the city. In 2014, Maxim Romanov published a blog post entitled “Islamic Urban Centers (661-1300 CE),” based on his Ph.D. dissertation work (Romanov, 2014). Using literary sources—in this case al-Dhahabī’s Taʾrīkh al-Islām—the blog presented a dynamic cartogram showing how the prominence of major urban centres changed over time. Romanov’s method consisted of using nisba (descriptive name) in the sources to showcase the number of individuals who referred to a specific urban centre. The changing size of the urban centre on the dynamic cartogram then reflects its importance for each period. With a dataset of over 29,000 individuals for the period 41/661-699/1300, Romanov explains that a “prominent centre” is a place with which at least ten individuals from Taʾrīkh al-islām are associated. We notice that Baghdad, as the new capital city of the Abbasids, quickly dwarfs the other Iraqi cities such as Basra and Kufa in prominence;55 Romanov argues that these Iraqi cities practically disappeared from this social map around 300/913. Baghdad then clearly remains the dominant urban centre of both Iraq and the entire Islamic world until the early 7th/13th century.

63Aslisho Qurboniev built on Romanov’s work and contributed a blog as well as an application to examine the subcorpus of the OpenITI, which includes all the texts in that corpus composed within the first five centuries of Islam, ending in 505/1111, the year of the death of al-Ghazālī. Qurboniev analysed the native origins and linguistic/cultural backgrounds of the authors of the earliest Arabic books composed in this period, drawing conclusions about the geographical distribution of the medieval texts written in Arabic. Because nisbas are not always indicative of a person’s place of origin, Qurboniev manually checked reliable reference works and created birthplace metadata for most authors in the OpenITI corpus (Qurboniev, 2021). This metadata fed to the corpus would eventually allow it to have accurate geographical information for the places of birth, death, residence, study, and travel for all authors in the corpus. This, in turn, would allow historians using the corpus to generate more informative networks and map out demographic as well as cultural shifts over time. The outcome of this research is accessible through an application: the “First Five Centuries Power BI App.”56 The app, which is still being improved, allows the user to explore the geographical distribution of authors in the corpus through visualisation tools.

64As can be seen here, tools from the digital humanities present methodological limitations. While these new methods have merit and should be considered for what they might bring to the historian, there are important caveats to be aware of, and the high possibility of misinterpretations. Only a detailed philological and critical examination of the literary sources can allow us to produce adequate historical readings.

II.3. Rethinking the analytical frame

65The Paris workshop, along with our collective expertise in the history of Baghdad, urges us to rethink the prevailing analytical frameworks in our field, particularly regarding periodisation and scale of analysis.

II.3.a. Periodising Baghdad history: escaping the dynastic division?

  • 57 Michael Cooperson traced the origin and posterity of the representation of the early Abbasid times (...)
  • 58 As an example among many: the tenth chapter of Ira Lapidus’ handbook of Islamic history is entitled (...)
  • 59 At least in terms of independence of the caliphs towards the Buyid and Seljuq rulers, in the religi (...)

66Abbasid history is, until now, classically divided into two periods. The first one, from the beginning of the dynasty to the devolution of political and military power to a Great Amir (Amīr al-umarāʾ), a title quickly monopolised by the Buyid rulers (334–447/945–1055), is considered as a “golden age”57 of the Abbasid caliphate, when caliphs were exerting full (or at least some) political and military authority. Consequently, the second period (334–656/945–1258) is widely considered a time of decadence of the caliphate, when the Abbasids were under the foreign tutelage of the Buyid then Seljuq dynasties.58 Consequently, Abbasid studies considered the first period much more than the second: it is a telling fact, for example, that the School of Abbasid Studies, until recently, restrained its field to the period until 447/1055. It has been shown in the last decades that a political renaissance of the Abbasid caliphate took place during the 12th century (Hanne, 2007; Van Renterghem, 2015; Tor, 2017: 301–14), or even before.59 Syntheses or studies on the Abbasids now consider the whole span of Abbasid rule, giving a less unequivocal vision of the evolution of the caliphate (El-Hibri, 2021). Nevertheless, the history of Baghdad has, for a long time, been subjected to the classical political periodisation, and longue durée studies are still in their beginning. Consequently, the first two Abbasid centuries are more studied than the middle and late Abbasid period (mid-4th/10th to mid-7th/13th centuries; on the late Abbasid period, the only syntheses are Kennedy, 2010 and Gilli-Elewy, 2022).

67The supremacy of the dynastic and political frames as reference frames for urban history must be discussed; the history of Baghdad does not have to be systematically considered as following the evolution of the Abbasid dynasty (Van Renterghem, 2011b). Indeed, in matters of social and economic history, the continuity of many activities invites us to consider the city’s history in a longue durée perspective. Undoubtedly, political events and trends have a tremendous impact on the economy, demography, and social and intellectual life; but they cannot be considered the unique decisive factor commanding all urban evolutions. The city has sometimes thrived when the Abbasids were weak, and the end of the dynasty did not imply the death of its former capital. The recent studies about Baghdad under Buyid (Neggaz, 2019; Alshaar, 2022) or Seljuq rule (Ephrat, 2000; Van Renterghem, 2015) show that the city was still active and populated in the times of political tutelage over the Abbasid caliphate, and Biran as well as Jelinowski demonstrated that the Ilkhanids made a point of restoring and governing Baghdad after the siege of 656/1258, and that the city was still rich and active under Mongol rule.

68Globally, the weight of political and dynastic events as the only chronological references has to be nuanced. At least three speakers of the Paris workshop addressed this question. As an example of the supposed prevalence of politics over urban history, the departure of the caliphs to their new capital, Samarra, in 221/836, is often considered as a given milestone in the history of Baghdad. The paper presented by Micheau illustrated how, if Baghdad was then deprived of political power and was not the object of construction programs, as it had been in the previous period, the city remained nevertheless an active commercial hub, as well as an important centre of intellectual life, except in the field of rational sciences. At that time, Baghdad was governed by the ṣāḥib al-shurṭa, and the city underwent topographical transformations, outside of any building program decided from Samarra; these facts led Micheau to question the very concept of “interlude,” as it does not properly reflect the important changes that took place during this period, particularly in the field of urban administration. Neggaz similarly argued that examining Baghdadi urban history in the longue durée can provide valuable insights into the chronological timelines for the development of Shīʿism, both within the city and across the broader region.

69In the realm of historiography, Tillier explored an alternative periodisation based on political events, highlighting how the works of Wakīʿ and other Baghdadi historians from the 3rd/9th and 4th/10th centuries reveal key moments that shaped historical narratives. He argued that, alongside the caliphs’ return from Samarra to Baghdad at the end of the 3rd/9th century, the miḥna initiated by al-Maʾmūn and continued by some of his successors during the first half of the century was equally, if not more, pivotal in creating a historiographical breach. Crucial events that constitute a turning point in some fields of history do not always correspond to dynastic change or caliphal succession.

  • 60 For a synthesis on this period, essentially based on Persian sources, see Zaryāb, 2002 and Wheeler, (...)

70The history of Baghdad is so intricately tied to the Abbasids, its founders, that scholarly focus on the city often wanes after the dynasty’s decline. While recent work, notably by Biran, has expanded our understanding of Baghdad during the Ilkhanid period, the city’s later medieval history remains underexplored. Despite the organisers’ efforts to include discussions on the post-Abbasid era—covering the Mongol Jalayrids, the Turkmen confederations of Qarā Qoyunlu and Āq Qoyunlu, and the Safavid and Ottoman periods60—no specialist was available to participate in the workshop. Although local, detailed sources for this period exist and have been edited, such as the Taʾrīkh al-Ghiyāthī, comprehensive studies are scarce. Apart from ʿAbbās al-ʿAzzāwī’s monumental work, which focuses on Iraq from the Mongol conquest in 656/1258 until the end of Ottoman rule in 1917 C.E. (ʿAzzāwī, 2004), the history of Baghdad between the fall of the Abbasids and the Ottoman conquest has not been fully explored. This period remains a promising field for future doctoral research projects.

II.3.b. The necessity of multi-scale approaches

71Traditional approaches have tended to consider Baghdadi history either at the level of the city, or at the level of the Empire. What new approaches show, however, is the importance of varying the scales of analysis that the historian can work with. Besides the level of the city, and the imperial level, three scales of analysis hold potential for future studies: microhistory (neighbourhood, family, person), regional history (Baghdad and the Sawād for instance; Baghdad and Iraq on the political and military level; but also Baghdad and its neighbouring cities like Kufa for the study of Shīʿī networks) and global and connected history.

  • 61 A similar approach has been adopted by Eychenne, Meier, and Vigouroux (2018) in their study of late (...)

72Understanding Baghdad and Iraq in their regional environment can shed new light on the city and its dynamic working within this larger framework.61 Indeed, the city was never isolated, but rather operated in a system of complex regional interactions. For example, it was in close relation with Samarra for a substantive period (Micheau): what families moved from Baghdad to Samarra? Did they return after the Samarra “interlude,” or did they remain? How did these migrations of elites affect Baghdad both in the short and longer term? Baghdad also operated within a network of Shīʿa who moved between Kufa and Karkh Baghdad over several centuries (Neggaz, 2019), and attracted families from Iranian background during Seljuq times (Van Renterghem, 2015, chap. 12). Can we establish other networks with neighbouring cities, especially Basra as suggested by Hoorelbeke for poetry? How can these help us understand how the capital city changed over time?

73Studying Baghdad at a regional level raises an array of issues that have not been fully addressed until now, or still deserve attention: demography, economy (and in particular agricultural production and taxation), circulation of people and goods around Baghdad, impact of the presence of disruptive Bedouin tribes in the area, wars and conquests, and security, some of which will specifically be considered below. All of these questions demonstrate that it is not possible to deal with Baghdadi history without placing it in its hinterland, on a regional, and sometimes even imperial, scale.

74The economy is one of the key areas where the regional scale is amply needed, as underlined by Kennedy. Historians need to further investigate the role of water transportation between Baghdad and other regional territories. Adopting the Euphrates valley as a scale of analysis (as did Berthier, 2001) can yield compelling results for Baghdad, most notably to understand rural population settlements. The previous work of Adams (1965) could be built upon to further the study of settlements at the regional level. Aside from the economy, issues of climate and environmental changes are also important to examine at this scale of analysis, as well as migration movements and population change.

75Last but not least, Baghdad’s central place in global and connected history has not been dealt with appropriately. Despite the rise in global history studies, Baghdad usually only receives a partial treatment limited to a specific time period, often linked to its intellectual role during the 3rd/9th-4th/10th centuries. This stands in sharp contrast to the ways in which other major cities have been examined for their role in world history, including Constantinople or Rome. For instance, the role of Baghdad in the medieval world trade networks is still to be fully assessed. Comparing Baghdad with major cities from other regions of the world, starting with Beijing, could also be a fruitful exercise of urban and imperial history.

III. New Research Avenues for the History of Medieval Baghdad

76Considering now the future of research in medieval Baghdad history, it is obvious that some themes have been largely under-studied and need further investigation. New approaches are emerging, following the main currents of Islamic medieval studies. Eventually, the contribution of Baghdadi historians to the global history of the Islamicate world during the medieval period must be assessed.

III.1. Some under-explored topics in medieval Baghdad history

77Interestingly, some important topics are still under-studied for medieval Baghdad, starting with the social and religious history of Shīʿism, a very important component of local history. Studies on Sufism and on women should be developed, and the question of the relation of Baghdad with its surrounding rural territories is still at its beginnings. Other questions should also be newly addressed, but are not developed here; among them: communications, terrestrial and fluvial roads, barīd and circulation of men and goods around Baghdad; trade and traders; the role of Baghdad in non-Muslim faiths; families and children; domestic architecture; the disabled in the city.

III.1.a. Baghdad and Shīʿism

78Throughout the Abbasid period, Imāmī Shīʿism developed in various centres in Iran, Iraq and Khurāsān; Qum, Kūfa, Rayy, and Baghdad are the most noteworthy cities where Imāmī theology was elaborated (Newman, 2000; Van Ess, 2016). In Baghdad, as shown by Neggaz, 2019, it was in a specific quarter of the city named al-Karkh that the Shīʿī movement—both its intellectual stream and the popular activism of the masses—developed most strongly.

79Despite the predominant role played by the city in the development of Imāmī theology, studies focusing on Baghdadi Shīʿism are relatively scarce considering the demographic importance of Shīʿa in Baghdad as well as the role the city played in the elaboration of Shīʿī doctrine. Kufa has received more thorough examination, notably through the works of Hossein Modarressi on Kufa as the centre of the pro-ʿAlīd movement, and Najam Haider who used ḥadīth transmitters as a point of analysis to shed light on the birth of an insular Imāmī community in Kufa (Modarressi, 2003; Haider, 2011). Haider concludes that the Imāmīs constituted a distinctive community at the start of the 2nd/8th century. Much work could still be done to explore the links between Imāmīs in Kufa/Najaf, Baghdad, Karbala, or Qom. Shīʿī sources—in particular rijāl works and hadith collections—are a rich mine that remains little used for Baghdad. They can help us determine when and why specific Imāmī figures moved from one city to another, what social conditions encouraged their movement, and where specifically they chose to reside within an urban context. Microhistory analyses are fruitful for studying these movements. Many of the rijāl works are indeed quite specific about the location these figures decided on to establish their residence. Aside from homes, mosques are key local institutions that deserve more investigation. As religious, but also social and political sites that saw the organising of various movements and rebellions, their role in the consecration of community and belonging is crucial. The Barāthā mosque in West Baghdad is an example of an important site throughout the Abbasid period; this mosque and its evolution in that period is currently examined by Neggaz, forthcoming.

  • 62 Money-changers associated with the Shīʿī movement became predominant in the time of Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (...)
  • 63 This includes research on the deputies of the imams, see for instance Klemm, 2016.
  • 64 The cursing of the Companions, for the most part the first three Caliphs, and sometimes ʿĀʾisha, th (...)

80Another way to use Shīʿī rijāl works is to pay attention to the social functions of the people listed. For example, we notice mentions of a significant number of ṣarrāfiyyūn (money changers) established in al-Karkh. A whole street called ʿAwn was filled with bankers and money changers.62 What do these social roles tell us about group identity and community? Another area of research that can be developed is the non-elites. Currently, much scholarship has dealt with elite figures of the Shīʿī movement,63 for example al-Mufīd (d. 413/1022) (Bayhom-Daou, 2005; McDermott, 1978). A fruitful approach would be to consider the overall Shīʿī population of an area, or the relations between known Shīʿī leaders and the local populations. Ritual practices and their evolution (“sabb al-ṣaḥāba64 for example) can be an interesting lens to consider these interactions, particularly since Shīʿī local figures often intervened and acted as intermediaries in the activities of the larger population.

81Aside from Imāmī Shīʿism, all other forms of Shīʿism in Baghdad could benefit from further investigations, building off of the work left to us by al-Nawbakhtī (d. between 300/912 and 310/922), Firaq al-Shīʿa. This is the case of Zaydīs and Ismā’īlis in particular. The movements that the heresiographers qualify as the more extreme—the ghulāt (including the Qarāmiṭa)—have received some attention in social studies that have examined violent encounters in the city (for example Massignon, 1938 and 1935–1945; Friedman, 2001). More can be done in order to situate Baghdad and its neighbourhoods in these broader movements. An example is the Kharijites, who have fought several battles in al-Karkh specifically during the early Abbasid period (Neggaz, 2019: 280); this fact alone could be further investigated.

III.1.b. Baghdad Sufis and Sufism

  • 65 For a general presentation of the main Sufi figures of Baghdad from the 2d/8th to the 4th/10th cent (...)

82Not only were Sufis an integral part of Baghdadi society, but Sufism itself, as Karamustafa has demonstrated, was at least partly born in Baghdad during the early Abbasid period (Karamustafa, 2007). Baghdad therefore occupies an important space in general studies on Sufism, but the local impact of the development of the ascetic and then Sufi movements was, until recently, less specifically studied. For example, the presentation of the Baghdadi context, in the study of Hamza Malik on the local Sufi master ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (d. 561/1166) (Malik, 2019), is focused on political history more than on urban and social features. The late Abbasid period has recently been addressed, from a local point of view, by Atta Muhammad who investigates in particular the development of the ribāṭ as “an institution of the public sphere,” and describes the political and social role of Sufis in Baghdad, particularly during the Seljuq period (Muhammad, 2024). For the same period, the urban impact of the numerous ribāṭ foundations from the 5th/11th century onwards, as well as the flourishing in Baghdad of Sufi lineages from an oriental background, have been studied by Van Renterghem, 2015, chap. 3 and 12. If no paper during the Paris workshop was focused on Baghdadi Sufis or the impact of Sufism in Baghdad, we consider that these questions need to be addressed for the entirety of the medieval period.65

III.1.c. Looking for the women (and finding some)

  • 66 Such as juridical treatises, but they are not specifically concerned with Baghdad. For a treatise o (...)

83The study of medieval women has benefited from innovative approaches, as well as the use of sources not traditionally thought to include relevant material on the topic. For instance, van Berkel presented the case of some water infrastructures built by women, such as ponds, and one of the donative dinars studied by Heidemann was dedicated to Zubayda, wife of Hārūn al-Rashīd. While we have very few specific studies on women in medieval Baghdad, the field would benefit from examining hagiographical material, as done by Nelly Amri in the case of North Africa (Amri, 2000 and 2010). The medieval sources, exclusively written by male authors for a mainly male audience, are usually blamed for giving no space, or a significantly reduced space, to women. Actually, since historians began to feel concerned by women’s history, in the late 20th century, more information on them has been found in medieval sources than was hoped. The pioneer work of Nadia Maria El Cheikh is a testimony that information can also be found about Baghdad. Though rare, medieval works dedicated specifically to women do exist, some being of a normative kind,66 others historiographical and biographical (such as Ibn al-Sāʿī (d. 674/1274), Nisaʾ al-Khulafāʾ). Women living in Baghdad have been studied mainly in a specific context, particularly the Abbasid harem and court (El Cheikh 2003, 2005 and 2010), and some scholarly or ascetic women are also known (El Cheikh, 2021), as well as women founders of urban institutions (Van Renterghem, 2015: chap. 15). That being said, Baghdad is generally a mere context for such studies, and no general enquiry exists on women in Baghdad, unlike what has been done for Mamluk Cairo by Mounira Chapoutot-Remadi for instance (Chapoutot-Remadi, 1995). Slave concubines of a high status have been investigated the most, often through a gender approach (Myrne, 2010 on the musician ʿArīb (d. 277/890); Myrne, 2017 on women consorts in the early Abbasid period). However, free women and lesser-status slave women remain understudied. The broader role of women in Baghdad, their impact on urban society and topography, as well as wider gender dynamics, still have to be addressed in the scholarship on Baghdad.

III.1.d. The city in its rural hinterland: issues in demography, nomadism, security, taxation, and land control

  • 67 Notably the work of Michele Campopiano, and the doctoral research of Noémie Lucas, based on the stu (...)
  • 68 An iqṭāʿ was originally a fiscal grant remunerating a civil or military service.

84Although the rural area around Baghdad, the fertile Sawād, has long been an object of examination, some questions must be addressed in more depth. Previous scholarship (in particular the work of Claude Cahen in the 1960s), as well as more recent works,67 deal essentially with the early Abbasid period (2nd/8th to 3rd/9th or 4th/10th centuries). Published scholarship covers the relations between Baghdad and its countryside essentially under the angle of rural investments by the urban elites, and exploitation of rural resources by the rulers or their entourage (by the way of direct taxation, or later, starting with the Buyid period, by the devolution of iqṭāʿ grants68). More studies are needed on the impact of urban waqfs on the territory around Baghdad, as was done in the case of Egypt or Syria for example; it is true that no documents such as waqfiyyas are available for Iraq, contrary to the abundant Mamluk documentation for Egypt and Syria.

85The control of rural areas has not been dealt with until recently. In her PhD, now published as a book (Rébillard, 2024), Rébillard examined the way in which the Abbasids organised the control of the Sawād and further regions, by creating police districts in the 3rd/9th century. These districts increased in number until the first half of the 4th/10th century, but then the control of the lands around Baghdad became the prerogative of military Buyid power, which used iqṭāʿ grants as a remuneration for their officials. Iqṭāʿ gradually led to the formation of territorially based local powers and contributed to the division of Iraqi territory into small entities. This division was also made possible by the loss of power and authority of the main rulers: during the first half of the 5th/11th century, for example, Buyid authority declined both in Baghdad and in Iraq, and the period was marked by chronic instability.

  • 69 Though fundamental, the study of Jürgen Paul on ḥimāya is focused on Iran and addresses Iraq only i (...)
  • 70 Following the methodology of Stefan Heidemann’s study on Upper Mesopotamia, who makes an intensive (...)

86Iraqi Bedouin tribes proved to be inescapable actors of regional history, and posed important threats to regional stability, particularly when the central power was weak. Bedouins sometimes attacked and plundered Baghdad, and at times limited their depredation to raiding the travellers, and particularly the pilgrimage caravan, or to requiring a protection tax (khafāra, ḥimāya) to let people and goods go through their territories.69 They also succeeded in creating local dynasties during some periods, such as the Mazyadids who founded al-Ḥilla in the 5th/11th century. Their presence around Baghdad is one of the factors influencing urban life, but the links between the city and its Bedouin neighbours are still to be studied. Finally, the question of the “bedouinisation” of Iraq starting from the 5th/11th century, a phenomenon stated by some historians but debated by others, is still to be discussed in light of textual and material evidence, notably numismatics and archaeology.70 A phenomenon of bedouinisation—urban dwellers or villagers adopting a nomadic or semi-nomadic life, due to the incapacity of sedentary life and economy to sustain the whole population of the area—could have had consequences on the Baghdadi population, attracting a part of it to join the new Iraqi nomads.

87This question raises two kinds of issues at the level of regional history: demography and security. Leaving aside the impact of local revolts like the one led by the Zanj of southern Iraq or the Qarmatians from Bahrain, wars and military events, from the Abbasid movement to the Buyid, Fatimid, Seljuq, Mongol and Turkmen conquests, had a tremendous impact on the Iraqi population and economic activity. Some of these conquests were limited to movements of troops, others were accompanied by wider migration of population. Baghdad was undoubtedly profoundly impacted by these periods of war that could last for entire decades, inducing depredations by the foreign troops, fiscal exactions, death and capture of war prisoners (including women), destruction of villages and towns, and agricultural decline. The impact of wars on Baghdad and its demography is difficult to assess, and has not been addressed in a systematic way yet. Similarly, the security of the area around Baghdad (and inside the city) was often impossible to guarantee, jeopardising the circulation of people and goods to and from Baghdad. The impact of this situation on the Abbasid and post-Abbasid capital’s attractiveness should be fully investigated.

III.2. New themes and approaches

88New themes and approaches have recently been developed and are slowly changing our understanding of Baghdad. This is the case with environmental and sanitary history; the history of senses in the capital city; the history of crime; microhistory; religious and profane celebrations; as well as the symbols attached to the city over the longue durée.

III.2.a. Health and environmental history

  • 71 A detailed study in Arabic already exists: Al-Sūsa, 1963–1965.
  • 72 A qanāt is an ancient underground aqueduct system, common in arid regions, that uses gravity to tra (...)

89An important developing field for medieval Baghdad is environmental and sanitary history. This includes sanitary practices and institutions, the spread of diseases in the city, as well as general climate trends and changes. Environmental questions are largely understudied for medieval Baghdad, with very few works published on the topic. Baghdad suffers for example from a lack of earthquake studies, despite their episodic occurrences as attested in the primary sources: although the alluvial plain of Iraq in which Baghdad is located is not a high-risk seismic zone, small earthquakes occasionally struck the city, causing urban damage and social and political disruption. Floods of the Tigris were more frequent and destructive, and would deserve detailed examinations, not only to understand the environmental issues that plagued the city, but also to possibly link these ecological occurrences to the social and political consequences they had on the population and the territory as a whole.71 What were the consequences of floods on reconstructions? Heidemann emphasised the fact that floods destroyed entire neighbourhoods of the agglomeration. Was it possible to rebuild these entire areas? Or did they have to be rebuilt with temporary structures? Van Berkel also brought forth the question of water safety. The sources do mention occasional diseases and epizooties due to animal and human corpses falling in wells, rivers, canals and qanāt72 shafts.

90Historical sources could be paired with scientific analyses in order to conduct large-scale examinations spanning centuries. Such studies in fact exist for Iran and the Persian world in the medieval period, for instance the work of Charles Melville and N. Ambraseys on earthquakes (2005). This field of study is also well developed in the case of Byzantium, with the works of Izdebski and Preiser-Kapeller (2024), whose book brings together historical, archaeological, and natural scientific evidence by experts seeking to understand the intersection of human and natural history. An equivalent does not exist for the Islamic world. “Historical Seismology” (as chapter six by Lee Mordechai is entitled) is an important field of inquiry for the Eastern Mediterranean given the seismically active character of the region throughout recorded history.

  • 73 Bulliet further argues that: “Indeed, if historians of medieval Baghdad had been the first to arriv (...)

91Perhaps key to medieval Iran is the fairly recent book by Richard Bulliet, Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran. A Moment in World History (2009). The book argues that parts of the Middle East, including Iraq, Iran, and eastern Anatolia, experienced an unprecedented number of extremely cold winters first in the 308/920s and then more consistently from 397/1007 onward for a century. The early 5th/11th century indeed marks the end of the early warm period. This “Big Chill” was a central cause for famines and epidemics, but also potentially a factor for migrations. The colder weather affected not just Iran, but Central Asia, Mesopotamia as far south as Baghdad,73 Anatolia, and Russia. In the case of Baghdad, the end of the warm period seems to have increased the height of the spring floods. Looking at both Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201) and Ibn al-Fuwaṭī (d. 723/1323), Bulliet also compared the occurrences of floods mentioned in the works, and cases where the rivers froze because of the cold weather. He argues that the successive migrations of Turkic populations from Central Asia into Iran were linked to climate changes, and a significant weather cooling. This is explained by the Turks’ temperature-sensitive industry of cross-breeding one-humped and two-humped camels. While the book has led to many debates, and though other factors can also be mobilised to explain Turkic migrations (Northedge, for example, mentions the abandonment of the ribāṭ frontier in central Asia in the 349s/960s), the question of climate change must be taken into account when studying large-scale phenomena such as these migrations, and more studies are required in this field. Bulliet focuses on Iran, and despite elements of inquiry being displayed, we still need a study fully devoted to Baghdad and the precise fashion in which the city was affected by climate changes. In 2012, Ronnie Ellenblum contributed a chapter on the subject (Ellenblum, 2012), arguing that the city suffered from a series of climate and ecological catastrophes that are an important factor in its decline (see also Bulliet, 2022: 30–34). This single study needs to be backed by further research that addresses both the factors and the consequences of these changes in climate.

92While Ellenblum drew on a wealth of textual and archeological evidence, new scientific methods have been used in recent years, in particular genetic information on epidemics applied to the study of medieval cities, such as Monica Green’s article “Plague and the Fall of Baghdad in 656/1258” (Fancy and Green, 2021). During the Paris workshop, Biran challenged the thesis of Green, whose methodology was based on a combination of genetic information about the origin of the Yersinia Pestis, the microorganism that causes the Plague on the one hand, and various literary sources read in translation on the other (Biran, Brack and Amitai, 2024). Green’s conclusion was that the outbreak of the Plague was the key factor behind the collapse of the Muslim resistance to the Mongol conquerors in 656/1258. Through the philological study of Ilkhanid sources in Arabic (Ibn al-Fuwaṭī, d. 723/1323), Persian (Shīrāzī, d. 711/1311), Syriac (Bar Hebraeus = Ibn al-ʿIbrī, d. 1286 C.E.), Armenian, and Georgian, Biran deconstructed this argument, proposing rather that the so-called Plague was in fact regular epidemics caused by the siege. Pestilence was present in Baghdad before the arrival of the Mongols, Biran demonstrated, due to malnutrition and people converging from the Sawād. She also turns her attention to the increasing cooperation between textual historians and natural scientists and scientifically informed historians, to underline the limits of these methodological tools. Indeed, scientific proxies that give dates with the qualification of “±~200 years” are often less accurate than the textual information embedded in historical sources. Biran showed that while there are benefits to the new methodologies using digital humanities and natural sciences, these do not make philological analysis less important, to the contrary. Historians need to work closely with the sources in their original languages in order to decipher their meanings and nuances. Digital and science-based tools may provide further data, but their use has to be coupled with the analysis of historical sources.

93To summarise, the field of environmental studies for medieval Baghdad will benefit from large-scale studies that examine climate developments at the macro-level, all the while seeking to understand the micro consequences on this large city and its population: how were ethnic and religious groups in the city affected by the climate changes in and around Baghdad? What changed in the composition of the population? What were the consequences of climate catastrophes on urban organisation and security? We know that the Tigris floods led to urban chaos and a lack of functioning infrastructure, which in turn affected urban policing and population control. More crimes, in particular thefts, took place in those periods, often led by the ʿayyārūn. Since Baghdad was heavily populated and functioned as an attractive cosmopolitan city for professionals of all walks of life, the impacts on the city’s population and everyday life promise to be extremely fruitful to study.

III.2.b. History of senses and urban timeframes

94Emerging fields of study open new perspectives in studying medieval Baghdad. It is the case with the history of senses, which develops an attention to sounds, odours and other components of the sensible experience. The soundscape of medieval Baghdad—a topic that highly interested the Ubisoft team in producing the Assassin’s Creed Mirage episode in 2023—is currently investigated by Rébillard and Van Renterghem, as part of a thematic issue of the Bulletin d’Études Orientales dedicated to the sound history of medieval Islamic societies (Rébillard and Van Renterghem, forthcoming). The difficulty of such a study lies in the heterogeneity of the available information about sound, scattered in various kinds of sources. The history of smells in medieval Baghdad has not been examined yet, to our knowledge. Smells and sounds are parts of the experience of senses that could enrich our knowledge of the medieval city, especially on a micro-scale: what was the lived experience of residents of the various districts of Baghdad? Was there inequality in the exposure to loud sounds or bad smells? How did sound take part in the political and religious life, by the way of collective, projected sounds, like the khuṭba, the call to prayer or the proclamations of the herald (munādī) of the rulers? Were sounds and smells regulated, at least theoretically, by law or by ḥisba treatises? What role did they perform in everyday life, at the level of a neighbourhood? Were there conflicts around sound or smell? These are some of the questions raised.

95Timeframes of Baghdadi life must also be explored, on the model of Mathieu Eychenne’s study of the “Mamluk night” (Eychenne, 2014). Rébillard gives some information on the nocturnal work of the police, and on the way night was considered and lived by the Baghdadi society itself; night also appears as the perfect moment for crime. Scattered information in the sources could be used to give a panorama of the “Baghdadi night” and the peculiar activities that took place nightly. More generally, the question of temporality can be used to add some nuance to the study of social practices in medieval Baghdad: like today’s hammams, the same spaces could be, for example, frequented by men at one time of the day, and by women at other times. The sense of time experienced by the Baghdadi is another potential avenue.

III.2.c. Urban festivals

  • 74 Arabic sources of the inquiry are detailed in Borroni and Cristoforetti, 2016.
  • 75 The political use of Mihrajān (Arabisation of the Persian Mehragān) is also considered in Borroni, (...)

96Life in the city was structured along a calendar of annual religious and secular celebrations, which offer insight into a different temporality. As times of exception, these celebrations were key moments for the social and political life of the cosmopolitan city and its many residents. Indeed, as the seat of the Abbasid caliphate, Baghdad was particularly prone to festivities of all kinds, be they political and dynastic ceremonies, or religious celebrations involving Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian communities around ʿĪd al-Fiṭr, ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā, Mawlid al-Nabī, ʿĪd al-Ghadīr, ʿĀshūrāʾ, Yawm al-Ghār, Christmas, Purim, Nowrūz, Mehregān, Sadeh. Very few of these festivities have been specifically studied, except for Nayrūz (Arabisation of the Persian Nowrūz). Massimiliano Borroni has shown how the adoption of this Persian celebration by the Abbasid caliphs was linked with taxation and administrative practices of Sasanian background, and how celebrating Nowrūz was successively adopted by the common people (Borroni, 2015 and 2017);74 but similar studies are lacking for the other annual festivals,75 starting with ʿĀshūrāʾ.

  • 76 As pointed out by Boaz Shoshan, it is the complexity of the source material rather than its scarcit (...)
  • 77 The term “festivals” is understood in its broad meaning as a “special day or period, usually in mem (...)
  • 78 The current scholarship has focused on popular movements and the Ḥanbalīs in medieval Baghdad, part (...)

97While there are several studies analysing religious festivals in medieval European cities, such analyses remain scarce for the Islamic world, mainly due to the challenges posed by the source material for the study of popular culture.76 To fill this gap, a current project by Neggaz entitled “Social History through Religious Festivals: Baghdad in the Medieval Period (945-1258 CE)” seeks to conduct a microhistory of Baghdad’s religious festivals77 between 333/945 and 656/1258, shedding light on the ways in which distinct religious communities defined their boundaries and relations with one another through participation in or violent rejection of one another’s religious festivals.78 A locus of encounters between various social groups and religious communities, the Baghdadi religious festivals were as much places of celebration as they were spaces for self-assertion and violence. An examination of Arabic and Persian records of the period under scrutiny shows an unmatched level of violence compared to previous periods: hundreds of fitan (civil conflicts) took place in Baghdad, a considerable number of which started off during religious festivals. This study will investigate these festivals by focusing on the following set of questions: What social roles did festivals fulfil in medieval Baghdad? How did communal inclusion and exclusion operate within the framework of festivals, some being a gathering place for various religious communities, while others functioned as exclusive spaces? What does the detailed description of festive activities such as processions, clothing, ritual objects, but also gender roles, and participants, tell us about group identities in medieval Baghdad? How did the popular masses create and maintain some festivals forbidden by political authorities, such as ʿĀshūrāʾ under the Seljuqs? On a topographical level, how did the sites of memory change during this period, considering the growth of new sites of pilgrimages, venerated tombs, and other such developments? In addition to religious festivals, civil festivities, such as the ones that were held to celebrate the building of new walls in East Baghdad under caliph al-Mustaẓhir bi-llāh in 488/1095, were bringing together inhabitants of various urban districts and were occasions to collective parades, entertainment, popular jubilation, and infringement to Islamic law. They are, as such, unique occasions for the historian to observe collective identities, gender relations, and social transgressive practices.

98Secondary scholarship has produced some important studies in the field of political celebrations, such as Andrew Marsham’s examination of the oath of allegiance to the caliph from early Islam to the late 3rd/9th and 4th/10th centuries (Marsham, 2009). Abbasid court ceremonials have received some attention in the works on the Abbasids like the study of Hanne (2007) or comparative works that slightly touch on Baghdad (see for instance Beihammer, Constantinou and Parani, 2016). Early works from the 1950s and 1960s, like those of Canard (1961) and Sourdel (1960), had emphasised the little information the modern historian has access to about the Abbasid court ceremonial in Baghdad. In 2014, El Cheikh published an article challenging these statements and highlighting the information that can be gleaned from the literary sources (El Cheikh, 2014). There remains a lot to be done, however, in particular for the later part of the Abbasid period. In comparison with the Byzantine Empire, Fatimid Cairo (Sanders, 1994), or medieval Jerusalem (Elad, 1995), Abbasid Baghdad has not received the treatment it deserves as both an important political capital and the most cosmopolitan city in that time period. The Umayyad caliphates have, in comparison, received greater attention with the works of Andrew Marsham for Damascus and Janina Safran or Elsa Cardoso for Cordoba (Marsham, 2009; Safran, 2001; Cardoso, 2023). Recent comparative works on pre-modern ceremonials in the Middle East make the important observation that courtly life in medieval Europe has received much greater coverage than the Middle East for the period before 1500 CE (recently, Pomerantz and Birge Vitz, 2017). This statement could not be truer for Baghdad.

III.2.d. Crime, riots and urban control

99Urban history includes the question of urban control, closely linked to urban administration and governance, and urban autonomy. The distinctive features of Baghdad in these matters are: first, the plurality of authorities involved in urban control; second, the role of Ḥanbali activists in civil unrest; third, the presence of local gangs of armed men playing a role in criminal activities, but also in political and religious matters, the ʿayyārūn. These issues were examined in the 1960s by Claude Cahen and in the 1980s by Simha Sabari, according to a Marxist approach for the latter (Cahen, 1959; Sabari, 1981). It has been explored since by Deborah Tor, Vanessa Van Renterghem and Eugénie Rébillard, among others.

100Eugénie Rébillard has examined the official urban control of Baghdad—whether through the police (shurṭa) or military forces—by tracing the development of the Abbasid shurṭa, which originated within the army. Her study highlights the role this institution played in maintaining Abbasid governance over both the population of Baghdad and the broader territories up to the 4th/10th century (Rébillard, 2024). In Baghdad, the shurṭa was a numerous and specialised corps; the extension of its jurisdiction to the rural areas around Baghdad is directly linked to the multiplication of rebellions opposing the Abbasid power during its first two centuries. The Abbasid shurṭa, also called maʿūna, had to share its jurisdiction with the local rulers who put the Abbasid caliphs under tutelage: Buyid amirs and Seljuq sultans. Urban control over Baghdad in Seljuq times has been studied by Tor, 2007 and Van Renterghem, 2015 (chap. 14); this task was shared between the civil governor appointed by the Seljuqs, the shiḥna, and officials working for the Abbasids, the ḥujjāb; in the 5th/11th century and later, it also included the participation of the local Hashemis under the guidance of their naqīb.

  • 79 For example the urban riots of the Mamluk period, investigated by Garcin, 2003; Elbendary, 2015; Pe (...)
  • 80 See also Van Renterghem, 2015: 450–458.

101Urban revolts and popular riots were a feature of medieval Baghdadi life. Unlike in other contexts,79 they were rarely caused by economic factors, but were often of a confessional nature (see for example Van Renterghem, 2022b). From the 4th/10th century at least, local Ḥanbalis played a critical role in riots, under the leadership of activists enjoying a strong popular support, eager to “command the right and forbid the wrong” (al-amr bi-l-maʿrūf wa-l-nahī ʿan al-munkar). They have been studied by Laoust (1973), Cook (2001), and Van Renterghem (2011a), but further research would be welcome. Another unruly actor of medieval Baghdadi life was the ʿayyārūn, investigated mainly by Tor (2007).80 The social composition of the ʿayyārūn (were they all of modest extraction, or did they include elite members?), their exact connections with the rulers, the police and the militaries, their link with the futuwwa—in particular under the reign of caliph al-Nāṣir (r. 575–622/1180–1225; see Hartmann, 1975) —, are still debated by historians. It would be interesting to reconsider urban revolts and riots, which chronology and actors are now identified, in a regional context taking in consideration war and conquest, dynastic change, frailty of the political power, and even climatic and sanitary events and change. Studying urban riots also raises the issue of security in Baghdad and around it. Times of war, with their episodes of siege and battles, must also be considered as times of exception (Van Renterghem, 2019)—an exception that allows us to implicitly understand the organisation of the city in times of normalcy.

III.2.e. MicroHistory and Neighbourhoods

102As we just saw, Baghdadi moments of urban violence and revolts were taking place in particular neighbourhoods of the city, and are a testament to the local nature of Baghdadi residents’ mobilisations. Microhistory, because of its focus on activities within particular districts and neighbourhoods, is a compelling level of analysis that has brought very fruitful investigations and findings. A city as large as Baghdad functioned as a complex urban agglomeration and deserves to be examined at a micro level in order to bring out the differences between its various urban segments. Local identities, such as the Shīʿī identity of Karkh (Neggaz), or feelings of belonging to particular neighbourhoods and districts of the city (Van Renterghem), can be examined and brought to light through an examination of the corpus that focuses on these various segments of the city, rather than on Baghdad globally.

103More work needs to be done in order to understand the development of local identities within the city, in particular through the neighbourhood lexicon put forth by Van Renterghem. Rather than being Baghdadi, many residents considered themselves Karkhis for instance; the Imāmī-Shīʿī movement deemed al-Karkh safe for its activities and encouraged newcomers to reside in this specific area rather than anywhere else within Baghdad. What the sources demonstrate is that Karkh was more than a quarter and acted as a city within Baghdad. There is copious poetry written for Karkh, in the fashion of poetry devoted to cities; Karkh was also repeatedly destroyed and burnt down, its history shedding light on the broader urban life in the Abbasid capital, and on the development of Imāmī-Shīʿism during its formative period. While it is unclear whether we have enough data to reconstruct the history of other districts in detail, more work can be done to understand the evolution of neighbourhood limits, and what each area considered as its boundaries. Was it the doors, the walls, the canals or bridges, or the wasteland? How do these limits change, and are they negotiated by the people? The source material clearly shows strong solidarity movements within neighbourhoods, where residents are collectively either targeted or seeking retribution against another area. Often, the local mosques acted as gathering places for these movements (Neggaz, forthcoming on Barāthā), but the homes of preachers and scholars were also important meeting grounds for these activities.

III.2.f. Baghdad’s Symbolic Nature

104Another peculiarity of Baghdad is its highly symbolic nature and the ways in which these symbols evolved over time. Baghdad has been associated with metaphorical meanings from its earlier days, and like other important cities, the foundation of Baghdad is also the object of legends (Toral, 2022). When Caliph al-Manṣūr built his capital in 145/762, he called it Madīnat al-Salām (the City of Salvation or the City of Peace), with the hope that the meticulous and inspired construction planning would lead to the emergence of a most distinguished city. Perhaps retrospectively, the Arab geographer and historian Yaʿqūbī (d. 284/897) described Baghdad as the “crossroads of the universe.” (al-Buldān, 7: 233–234, 237). By his time, the capital city had indeed become a world centre. It was home to a highly diverse and cosmopolitan population that included pioneering scientists, mathematicians, astronomers, legal scholars, historians, philosophers, and poets. Whether it inspired awe or revulsion, Baghdad was almost always associated with symbolic significance by writers of the time.

105In his article on “Baghdad in Rhetoric and Narrative,” Cooperson reminds us in the first lines of a quote by André Miquel calling Baghdad “la plus exemplaire, la plus symbolique de toutes les villes que [l’Islam] fonda.” (Cooperson, 1996: 99, citing Miquel, 1967–1980: 4: 225). As such, Baghdad was not only a real city but also a mythical one, which Cooperson examines through centuries of evolving topoi in the literary works of medieval writers. Recurring literary tropes include Baghdad being the center of the world, an object of desire, a source of disappointment, and a metropolis of vanished glory (on the role that Baghdad has played in Arabic poetry since its foundation in 145/762 and throughout the history of Arabic literature, see Snir, 2021). Descriptions of a fascinating city filled with the utmost beauty contrast with those depicting it as the most corrupt of places, where misery and injustice thrive. These representations are interesting insofar as they reflect the interplay between a set of factors: historical circumstances, evolving perceptions of the city across time periods, disjunction between image and reality, broader shifts in societal values, as well as literary topoi. Zayde Antrim’s article “Connectivity and Creativity” built upon Cooperson’s work with a focus on the representations of Baghdad’s centrality in various sources and genres, from the 3rd/9th to the 5th/11th centuries (Antrim, 2011). She demonstrated how these centrality topoi served multiple purposes, from justifying political authority to fostering a sense of intellectual and spiritual connectedness among Muslims across different periods. The evolution of these symbols associated with Baghdad, and in particular the tropes of political centrality and the one of universality, is also at the core of Gareil’s work on the Buyid period (2019).

106Seen from the outside, Baghdad was associated with various emotions and symbols, ranging from envy to repulsion and hatred. Many Armenian and Georgian sources on pre-656/1258 Baghdad are filled with negative sentiments associated with the city, its rulers, and its population. Even Western accounts, like that of Marco Polo, condemn the city for its violence and crimes toward Christians—though often mentioning facts that are not verified. These texts are highly polemical as they tend to view Baghdad as the seat of Muslim power, from a perspective of political competition. In that context, the city is seen as a corrupt place, and becomes synonymous with the Caliphate. The tendency to equate Baghdad with the Caliphate is discernible in a wide range of Abbasid-era sources, both Arab and non-Arab. In his Taʾrīkh Mukhtaṣar al-Duwal, Bar Hebraeus (Ibn al-ʿIbrī) explains that the Abbasid Caliph al-Mustaʿṣim bi-llāh (d. 656/1258) used to tell people warning him about the Mongol advances the following: “Baghdad is enough for me, and they will not demand it from me if I give up the rest of the lands to them, and they will not invade it either while I am living here and it is my home and the home of my ancestors.” (Bar Hebraeus, Mukhtaṣar, 445–446, trans. by Neggaz).

107It would be interesting to investigate further whether Shīʿī authors display similar topoi and symbols about the city. Indeed, several Shīʿī sources from the period of the Mongol sack of Baghdad do speak of the city and the Caliphate in dark terms, as places of injustice and corruption deserving of divine wrath. The fall of the “illegitimate” Abbasid caliphate in 656/1258 is celebrated in several of these accounts. Conversely, the positive account on the situation of the Jewish population of Baghdad under the Abbasid caliphate in the travelogue of Benjamin of Tudela (second half of the 6th/12th c.) can be read as a critic addressed to the Christian rulers of Europe and their policies towards local Jews (Jacobs, 2011).

108The symbolism of Baghdad is a topic that needs further investigation, in particular the varying expressions and contextual inflections of recurring topoi. Medieval writers used topoi as literary tools to offer commentary on the events, places, and time periods they were describing. These topoi were largely shared across literary traditions, since they tend to have common roots in ancient Greece and the Sasanian world. Hence, working across regional boundaries and involving for instance medieval Europe or Byzantine historians might be fruitful to shed light on existing parallels across geographical areas and time periods. Another rewarding idea is to work more closely with classicists to further the study of topoi and their meanings (see Neggaz, 2020).

III.3. Baghdad and beyond: How does Baghdad’s history contribute to the global history of medieval Islam?

109The research on medieval Baghdad both benefits from new thematics and approaches in medieval Islamic history, and contributes to the renewal of questions and methods. Baghdad might be compared to other important cities of the medieval Islamic world, such as Cairo or Damascus. Provided we keep in mind its distinctive characteristics in matters of size and political role as the capital of an empire, Baghdad can also be used as a case study in many fields of research, starting with a reflection on the notion of city in the medieval Islamic contexts. Finally, the global significance and impact of Baghdadi studies in medieval Islamic history must also be assessed.

III.3.a. Comparative studies on cities

  • 81 The historiography of the “Islamic city” concept has demonstrated that this essentialist model was (...)

110We would understand Baghdad better by comparing it to other cities both in the Middle East and beyond. Comparative studies could help us determine more accurately the extent to which Baghdad resembled or differed from other contemporaneous metropolises, be it on the level of topography, urban organisation, social life and popular movements, but also representations and discourses on the city. Such comparative works, present and future, could also help us shed light on an enduring question about Baghdad: was it an exceptional city, and if so, in what ways? Such comparisons are helpful as long as the historian adopts a non-Eurocentric and non-essentialist view of what a medieval city had to look like.81

  • 82 Two of the papers delivered in Cairo were dedicated to Baghdad: van den Bent, forthcoming, and Van (...)

111Topographical studies would greatly benefit from comparative perspectives between Baghdad and other cities in the area. Northedge highlighted the potential of using the preserved architecture of Raqqa, Gur, and Samarra to understand the planning of Baghdad. This could be fruitful since similar techniques were used to build these three cities. Matters of territorial organisation such as water management are also a growing field of study for pre-Ottoman Baghdad. Van Berkel’s project “Source of Life: Water Management in the Pre-Modern Middle East” has adopted a comparative perspective to understand water management in premodern Middle Eastern cities, with a focus on Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Samarra, Mecca and Basra. The February 2024 workshop in Cairo led to detailed examinations and discussions around the physical infrastructure related to water management in those cities, but also the multitude of social institutions which mediated the distribution of water, showcasing wider mechanisms and evolutions of premodern urban governance. Josephine van den Bent’s presentation focused on early Abbasid and Buyid Baghdad (ca. 750-1000 CE). It demonstrated the ways in which Baghdad relied on different systems of water management, including large canals and aqueducts constructed by the authorities, charitable initiatives, the use of water carriers, or the reliance on both public and private cisterns and wells. Van den Bent highlighted the hybrid nature of the water management system in Baghdad, putting forth the role of forces from “above” and “below” to build and maintain these systems. It seems that this was not a Baghdadi peculiarity and that most Middle Eastern cities showed this duality.82

  • 83 As underlined by Neglia, in a colonial context, this insistence on fundamental differences between (...)

112Perhaps one of the most engaging areas of comparison between Baghdad and other cities in the region and beyond is social life and popular movements. Such comparisons are however rather scarce. European medieval cities were long seen as unitary entities with strong institutions of urban government. Middle Eastern medieval cities, by contrast, have been perceived as very unlike their European counterparts, due to the absence of comparable urban institutions.83 Patrick Lantschner is one of the very few scholars who dared comparisons between medieval European and Middle Eastern cities, mostly Italian cities with Damascus and Cairo in the Mamluk and early Ottoman period (Lantschner, 2015, 2017 and 2022). Challenging the common understanding of cities as unitary entities, Lantschner proposes to see them rather as polycentric arenas, where multiple units of organisation such as the neighbourhoods structured public life. With this new understanding of the city as a fragmented whole, the comparison of popular revolts and their control in Bologna and Damascus becomes very fruitful.

113Comparison is above all rewarding at the scale of the medieval Islamicate world. The collective work Grandes Villes Méditerranéennes du Monde Musulman Médiéval, directed by Jean-Claude Garcin (2000), applied a shared analytical framework to pre-modern Middle Eastern cities that included Damascus, Baghdad, Cordoba, Fustat/Cairo, Aleppo, Fes, Tunis, and Kairouan. This framework included key aspects of urbanisation processes and features, such as the morphology of these cities; their infrastructures and services; their management; their various networks; the formation of their populations; but also their image and identity. The large maps that accompanied the volume are a very helpful addition, as the reader is able to compare and contrast these cities, represented at the same scale. Similar studies are needed, particularly comparative works across regions and time periods, for instance between Abbasid and Mamluk/Ottoman cities. On the social and political level, the case of Baghdad, a political capital later under the domination of foreign rulers (Buyids and Seljuqs), can be studied to discuss the model elaborated by Ira Lapidus, in which the ulamas play the role of intermediaries between the local population and the foreign (and military) rulers (Lapidus, 1967: in particular the chapter untitled “The ulama and the formation of an urban society,” 107–113). This model, elaborated for Cairo or Damascus during the Mamluk period, should be assessed and discussed for other urban contexts and previous periods. The growing knowledge we have of the social history of medieval Baghdad allows for such a debate.

114A theme covered by Garcin’s endeavour cited above is the image or identities of cities through time. In Arabic literary sources of the Abbasid period, Baghdad’s centrality and universality are often explained through a comparative lens (Gareil, 2019). Baghdad is compared and contrasted with other cities that do not share the same identity or image. Replacing Baghdad within this larger framework of cities with identities and reputations attributed to them would be beneficial for the historian. Building on the previous studies by Michael Cooperson (1996) and Mona Hassan (2017), Antrim’s work on Baghdad’s reputation among Muslims over the centuries is a good starting point, as she showcased how “repeating images of Baghdad’s centrality and connectivity worked talisman-like to produce and reproduce creativity and authority in the present” (Antrim, 2011: 73; see also Antrim, 2012).

III.3.b. What does Baghdad teach us about the concept of the city in the medieval Islamic context?

  • 84 For the origins of this model—rooted in French, English, and German Orientalist traditions—as well (...)

115In their diversity, studies on medieval Baghdad demonstrate very clearly that the Western idea of the “Islamic city,” as it has been developed in the 20th century (mainly on the model of modern towns in colonial or mandatory contexts, in North Africa then Syria and Egypt,), is inoperant as much as scientifically questionable.84 Baghdad does not fit in this—essentialist and unhistoric—model of a city centred on one unique Friday-mosque, surrounded by markets, and characterised by a sectorisation of activities. Like it was also the case in Cairo, Baghdad had multiple Friday-mosques (up to a dozen according to the period), various centres of power—from the Abbasid palaces and administrations to Buyid, Seljuq and Ilkhanid residences,—and a large diversity of markets and places for economic activities.

116Such examples of polycentric, huge metropolises encourage historians to add nuance to the nature of the notion of “city” in Islamicate contexts. Further investigation is required, especially on the vocabulary used in different types of sources to refer to urban entities at various scales, from the neighbourhood to the abstract notion of “city,” and in various textual contexts, from law treatises seeking to give a general definition of the city, madīna, as an agglomeration of population equipped with a Friday-mosque, to literary sources where the sense of belonging to smaller, practical entities can be developed by the author or his characters. Heidemann encouraged us to pursue this analysis by using a wide array of sources, including literary texts, juridical treatises, coins, and administrative documents. Such an issue also underlines the necessity to work on the Arabic lexicon, as well as the difficulty of translating the Arabic terms without erasing the shades of difference that they carry. As stated before, such studies can also help historians to assess the specificities of Baghdad by comparing it to other important agglomerations of the medieval period.

III.3.c. The significance of Baghdadi studies for medieval Islamic history

117It is impossible to assess here the global impact of Baghdadi studies on the field of medieval Islamic history, but some perspectives can be presented. Baghdad stands without any doubt as a special example a of very big metropolis of the medieval Middle East; its characteristics in terms of population have been widely pointed (cosmopolitanism, coexistence of many confessions and ethnic groups, social and economic diversity, huge number of inhabitants), as well as its specificity as the capital of the Abbasid empire. Investigating Baghdad means studying the heart of the Abbasid empire, in terms of political and administrative management, commercial activities, attractiveness of elites, and as a knowledge hub. Its character of political and dynastic capital makes Baghdad a unique example, and on one hand weakens the relevance of comparative history with other contemporary cities—at least as long as there was one unique political capital of the Islamic empire. But then, the fading of Abbasid authority—which can also be traced locally, especially in terms of urban control—and the tutelage of new dynasties gave birth to a different situation, where Baghdad was the capital of a significantly reduced territory, or was only the siege of the caliph, holder of a symbolic authority, and not the political capital of the Buyid Great amirs or the Seljuq sultans. Baghdad became a provincial capital in Ilkhanid and successive times—and maybe even before, and was to remain such until the 20th century.

118As the capital of the early Abbasid empire, Baghdad was certainly a laboratory of cultural, economic, political, religious and intellectual phenomenons, and a center from which many models were spread, as has been shown by Audrey Caire in terms of food culture (Caire, 2022), but it was certainly not the only place where culture or politics were experimented, changed, and circulated. The role of Baghdad as a centre of innovations must be reconsidered in relation to the notion of polycentrism of the Islamic empire, since studies demonstrate that the dynamics of innovation was not based on an unequivocal centralised model (Nef and Tillier, 2011). In this perspective, the links of Baghdad with distant areas of the Islamicate territories, like Khurasan for example, must be investigated from various perspectives—in this case, from the role in Baghdad of the Khurasani abnāʾ al-dawla, the first military supporters to the Abbasid dynasty, to the impact of oriental Sufism on Iraqi mystics. Finally, the dynamism and global weight of Baghdad in the Abbasid empire, and wider Islamic territories, has to be put in perspective with the dynamism and weight of other areas, be they geographically far from the center or rebel to the central political authority, areas that are sometimes hastily considered as margins, hence as marginals, when they should be regarded as parts of a global geographical, social, economic, and political balance.

Conclusions

119“When one person declared that he had never been to Baghdad, the answer was crystal clear: ‘In that case, you have seen nothing on the earth’” (Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, Taʾrīkh Baghdād, 45).

120This quote captures the powerful impression Abbasid Baghdad left on its visitors. Unfortunately, this marvel of the past has not left us with many relics or objects from the rare archaeological excavations that took place. Today, medieval Baghdad can only be known through the largely literary sources that have survived, a rich corpus of varied texts of multiple genres including historical chronicles, biographical dictionaries, poetry, adab works, legal manuals, geography texts, travellers’ accounts, etc. With such an eclectic corpus, how can the modern historian help us further improve our knowledge of the city? What are the ways in which today’s scholars of Baghdad can shed new light on the city, particularly when archives and documentary sources have not been preserved, and our corpus is mostly fixed?

121The Paris workshop highlighted both the scrupulous scholarship done on the city in the past decades, as well as the challenges that remain ahead. These start with the difficulties of studying the urban history of Baghdad, including population estimates, ethnic and religious components, economic activities, and urban structure. The lack of archaeological remains poses a significant obstacle in reconstructing the city’s topography, with only limited physical remnants from the Abbasid period. Scholars explored methods like landscape analysis and combining archaeological evidence with textual data to enhance our understanding of medieval Baghdad’s urban layout. The scarcity of documentary sources related to Baghdad and the challenges of conducting fieldwork in the region were discussed. Despite these obstacles, researchers emphasised the significance of ongoing efforts to uncover and analyse manuscripts that provide fresh insights into Baghdadi studies. More collective works and research programs are still needed in this field. A key aspect in this regard is the necessity of establishing scholarly connections between Western and Arabic academic scholarship.

122Sources and methods were a key component of the workshop and its discussions. Here lay both challenges and exciting new opportunities. One of the central themes of the workshop was the exploration of textual corpuses and the various methods used to analyse them. From qualitative readings to quantitative approaches like prosopography and statistical analysis, researchers discussed the challenges and opportunities of studying historical texts related to Baghdad. The workshop highlighted the importance of combining traditional philological and critical examinations with new digital humanities tools, to enhance our understanding of the city’s past.

123In terms of approaches, the workshop prompted a reevaluation of the conventional analytical frameworks used in studying Baghdad’s history, advocating for a reconsideration of periodisation and analytical scales. By adopting a trans-regional approach and incorporating microhistory perspectives, researchers sought to address longstanding questions about the population, economy, and urban structure of Baghdad during the Abbasid era.

124New areas of research on Baghdad have been developing in recent years, including environmental and health history, history of the senses, Shīʿism, Sufism, women and gender, and the history of criminality to cite a few. These fields are still calling for more work to be done, and would benefit from more collective endeavours, including comparative perspectives that can help us view Baghdad in light of other contexts.

125Whether in the field of topography, urban administration, or social history, several pathways are possible, and in fact very encouraging. In topography and urban history for instance, the combination of material and textual data, as well as the creation of a trans-period relational database of toponyms and urban structures, searchable through text-mining digital tools, would be fruitful approaches. In the field of urban administration, several scholars have been reconstructing lost archives through the use of literary sources that mention these administrative documents and their content. Social history has benefited from studies focused on specific groups—often with the use of biographical sources—their identities and networks, as well as their impact on the larger urban environment.

126This article took the Paris workshop as a starting point to address the state of the field of Baghdadi studies, discuss methodological challenges, and propose new avenues for research. It has proposed several ways of advancing this field of study, from topography to sanitary history, and has emphasised the importance of collaborative efforts.

127To write the history of Baghdad today is to confront the limits of our categories—of archive, city, and historical narrative itself. The city’s dispersed sources and enduring symbolic power invite a mode of inquiry that is both comparative and self-reflexive, bridging Arabic and Western scholarly traditions and engaging with material evidence and digital methods. Baghdad thus becomes more than a historical site: it is a methodological vantage point from which to question how historians reconstruct societies whose evidence is fragmented yet whose memory endures. The challenge for the coming years is not only to recover new data, but to continue reimagining the frameworks through which Baghdad—and the Islamicate city more broadly—can be understood.

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Bibliographie

BAGHDAD BIBLIOGRAPHY

This bibliography gathers key references on the history of medieval Baghdad. It does not claim to be exhaustive and does not include primary sources, except for those cited within the article (for Arabic sources on Baghdad, see Scheiner, 2022).

SOURCES

[ANONYMOUS], Maxime Rodinson et al. (trans.), Medieval Arab Cookery, Devon, Prospect Books, 1998.

[ANONYMOUS], Ṭāriq Nāfiʿ al-Ḥamdānī (ed.), Taʾrīkh al-Ghiyāthī, Baghdad, Maṭbaʿat Asʿad, 1975.

BAR HEBRAEUS (IBN AL-ʿIBRĪ), A. Ṣāliḥānī, S. J. (ed.), Taʾrīkh Mukhtaṣar al-Duwal, Beirut, al-Maṭbaʿa al-Kāthūlīkiyya li-l-Ābāʾ al-Yasūʿiyyīn, 1890.

IBN AL-DUBAYTHĪ, Bashshār ʿAwwād Maʿrūf (ed.), Dhayl taʾrīkh Madīnat al-salām Baghdād, 2 vols., Baghdad, Maṭbaʿat Dār al-salām, 1974, Manshūrāt wizārat al-iʿlām, Silsilat kutub al-turāth 36.

IBN AL-JAWZĪ, [ed. unknown], Aḥkām al-nisāʾ, Cairo, Dār al-hudā al-muḥammadī, 1985.

IBN AL-SĀʿĪ, Mustafa Jawad (ed.), Nisaʾ al-Khulafāʾ, Cairo, Dar al-Maʿārif, 1968.

IBN AL-SĀʿĪ, Shawkat Toorawa (ed. and trans.), Nisaʾ al-Khulafāʾ, Consorts of the Caliphs: Women and the Court of Baghdad, New York, New York University Press, 2015.

IBN AL-DUBAYTHĪ, Bashshār ʿAwwād Maʿrūf (ed.), Dhayl taʾrīkh Madīnat al-salām Baghdād, 5 vols., Beirut, Dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1427/2006.

[IBN SAYYĀR], Nawal Nasrallah (trans.), Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens: Ibn Sayyār Al-Warrāq’s Tenth-Century Baghdadi Cookbook, Leiden-Boston, Islamic History and Civilization 70, Brill, 2007.

AL-KHAṬĪB AL-BAGHDĀDĪ, Muḥammad Amīn al-Hanjī (ed.), Taʾrīkh Baghdād, 14 vols., Baghdād, Maṭbaʿat al-Saʿāda, 1931.

MISKAWAYH, Abū al-Qāsim Imāmī (ed.), Tajārib al-umam wa-taʿāqub al-himam, 8 vols., Tehran, Dār Sorūsh li-l-ṭibāʿa wa-l-nashr, 2000-2002.

SIBṬ IBN AL-JAWZĪ, Kāmil Salmān al-Jubūrī (ed.), Mirʾāt al-zamān fī taʾrīkh al-aʿyān, 15 vols., Beirut, Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2013.

SIBṬ IBN AL-JAWZĪ, Ibrāhīm al-Zaybaq (ed.), Mirʾāt al-zamān fī taʾrīkh al-aʿyān, 23 vols., Damascus, Dār al-Risāla al-ʿālamiyya, 2013.

AL-YAʿQŪBĪ, M. J. de Goeje (ed.), Kitāb al-Buldān, 8 vols., Leiden, Brill, 1870-94, Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum.

WORKING TOOLS

EI2: Encyclopædia of Islam, ed. H. A. R. Gibb et al., 2nd edition, 11 vols., Leiden, Brill, 1960‑2004.

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PETRY, Carl F., 2016, The Criminal Underworld in a Medieval Islamic Society: Narratives from Cairo and Damascus under the Mamluks, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

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SEIDENSTICKER, Tilman, 2015, “Audience Certificates in Arabic Manuscripts: The Genre and a Case Study”, Manuscript Cultures, 8, 75–91.

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SILVERS, Laury, 2020, The Jealous: The Sufi Mysteries Quartet, Book Two, Toronto, Self-Published.

SILVERS, Laury, 2021, The Unseen: The Sufi Mysteries Quartet, Book Three, Toronto, Self-Published.

SILVERS, Laury, 2023, The Peace: The Sufi Mysteries Quartet, Book Four, Toronto, Self-Published.

SIJPESTEIJN, Petra M., 2006, “The Archival Mind in Early Islamic Egypt: Two Arabic Papyri”, in SIJPESTEIJN, Petra M. (ed.), From al-Andalus to Khurasan. Documents from the Medieval Muslim World,, Leiden, Brill, 163–186.

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THOLIB, U., 2002, The Reign of the ʿAbbāsid Caliph al-Qādir billāh (381/991–422/1031). Studies on the Political, Economic and Religious Aspects of His Caliphate during the Buwayhid Rule of Baghdād, PhD dissertation, McGill University; VDM Verlag.

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WELLS, Rebecca Deborah, 2015, Settlement in the Diyala and Southern Mesopotamia: A Reassessment of Robert McCormick Adams’ Sasanian and Early Islamic Ceramic “Type Fossils”, PhD dissertation, Durham University. Available at: <http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/11411/>.

WHITCOMB, Donald, 2007, “Islamic Archaeology and the ‘Land behind Baghdad’”, in STONE, E. C. (ed.), Settlement and Society: Essays Dedicated to Robert McCormick Adams, Los Angeles, Cotson Institute.

Principal websites for medieval Arabic sources or digital tools

Al-Maktaba al-Shamela (database of digitized texts, Sunni orientation): <https://shamela.ws/>.

al-Maktaba al-Shīʿīyya (database of Shīʿī digitized texts): <http://www.shiaonlinelibrary.com>.

KITAB Project: <https://kitab-project.org/fihrist/OpenITI-vs-Fihrist-part-3/> <https://kitab-project.org/New-Release-of-the-KITAB-s-Open-Access-T/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0tXQc8vOvtHTpx-9zZgTZ2kfGimOc2og8SG2UWBeBFoQwpfVuN37NU89c_aem_hijld0sUWtYQRVHp9SIBFQ>.

Blog al-Raqmiyyat (Maxim Romanov, Digital Islamic history): <https://maximromanov.github.io/>.

University of Michigan Library’s list of digitised Islamic manuscripts: <https://guides.lib.umich.edu/islamicmsstudies/onlinecollections>.

Center for the Study of Islamic Manuscripts of the Al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation: <https://digitallibrary.al-furqan.com/world_library>.

Informal site for digitized Arabic manuscripts: <https://www.alukah.net>.

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Document annexe

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Notes

1 The term “medieval” is used in this article to designate the period of Islamic history that roughly corresponds to the “Middle Ages” in Western history, i.e. from the 1st/7th c. to the end of the Mamluk state at the beginning of the 10th/16th c. While we are conscious of the Eurocentric character of this formulation, we chose to use it because of the wide understanding of what “medieval” means. It must be understood as having no negative connotation, since in the case of the Middle East and the Islamic world more broadly, the “medieval” period is associated with many positive cultural and societal developments.

2 The notion of an “archive” and the scholarly debates about the existence and loss of archives in the medieval Islamic world will be further discussed in section II. 2. Of particular importance in this debate are the works of El-Leithy, 2011; Sijpesteijn, 2007; Hirschler, 2021; Rustow, 2020.

3 All dates are given in the AH/CE format (Islamic calendar/Common era).

4 “Baghdad: Eye’s Delight,” exhibition of the Museum of Islam Art of Qatar, Doha, 26 October 2022–25 February 2023; https://mia.org.qa/en/calendar/baghdad-eyes-delight/about-the-galleries/. A catalogue was published in English and Arabic on the occasion, with many thematic and historical contributions in addition to the presentation of the exhibited artefacts (Baghdad: Eye’s Delight, 2023).

5 International symposium ‟İslam Medeniyetinde Bağdat (medînetü’s-selâm) Baghdad (Madinat al-Salam) in the Islamic Civilization,” organised by the Umraniye Municipality, Istanbul; the Research Centre for Islamic History, Istanbul Art and Culture (IRCICA); and the University of Marmara, Faculty of Theology, Department of Islamic History and Arts, held in November 2008. Proceedings of the symposium were published (Üstün, 2011).

6 Entitled “Baghdad: Cradle of Culture and Civilization, 1013–2013,” this conference was organised by the Iraqi Cultural Center (ICC) and The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARII) and was held in November 2013 (program available at https://tabsir.net/?p=2279).

7 “Baghdad, Space of Knowledge,” organised by Jens Scheiner and Isabel Toral, Freie Universität Berlin, August 2013.

8 Organised by the research projects “NoMansLand, FWF-START Project Y-1232-G30” (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and “Bibliotheca Arabica” (Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities). See Löhr, 2023.

9 The present article encloses a general bibliography in the field of medieval Baghdadi studies. It does not claim exhaustivity but lists the main references which form a basis for the history of Baghdad. For fuller and thematic bibliographies, see Scheiner and Toral, 2022 (specific bibliographies at the end of each chapter). The final “Baghdad bibliography” does not include references to books and articles which do not specifically deal with Baghdad, but are rather comparative in perspective. Other studies quoted in the article are listed as additional references.

10 See also Northedge, forthcoming, and Van Renterghem, forthcoming/c.

11 Notably Turkish. See the articles in Turkish published in the proceedings of Istanbul symposium (Üstün, 2011).

12 By “traditional,” we refer to the critical reading of sources aimed at gathering data and factual information from texts through contextualisation and cross-comparison, as well as to the philological method, in contrast to literary approaches that focus on style and tropes, or to statistical and textometric analyses based on computationally processed corpuses.

13 In his topological description of Baghdad, al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī discussed the number of public baths in the city and the number of people these baths could serve (Engl. transl. in Lassner, 1970a: 107 sq.). For a discussion on population evaluations in medieval Islamic cities, see Northedge, 2022.

14 Kennedy, 2011: 177–199. Despite ongoing debates about the exact population of medieval Baghdad, scholars agree upon the fact that Baghdad was an enormous city in size and population. See Bulliet, 2022, quoting Lassner who spoke of “the greatest city of the medieval world” (Lassner, 1970a: 17, quoted by Bulliet, 2022: 316).

15 See the dedicated articles in Scheiner and Toral, 2022, for Christian (Morony, 2022), Jewish (Zvi Stampfer, 2022) and Zoroastrian populations (Durkin-Meisterernst, 2022); Van Renterghem, 2009 for Baghdadis of Kurdish origin; etc.

16 A list of the few remaining structures can be found in Khalīl and Strika, 1987; an assessment of archaeological work in Rousset, 1992.

17 For example the Jones map of 1854 (“Ground Plan of the Enceinte of Baghdad, Survey made by Commander F. Jones and Mr W. Collingwood of the Indian Navy, 1853-54”), published in Jones, 1857.

18 A comparison of tentative maps and sketches of medieval Baghdad reveals that historians disagree on the precise location of the Round City in western Baghdad: some situate it close to the present course of the Tigris, while others place it further south.

19 See for example the work done by Makdisi, 1959, focusing only on textual sources.

20 The challenges involved in mapping medieval Baghdad are so significant that many scholars have chosen to forgo the attempt altogether. Illustrating this point, the sole map of Baghdad included in Scheiner and Toral (2022) is Van Renterghem’s reconstruction of Seljuq-era Baghdad (p. 246).

21 CORONA was the United States’ first spy satellite program. It produced images from space originally used for reconnaissance and to produce maps. In 1995, President Clinton declassified 800,000 photographs from CORONA in order to make them available for environmental and historical research.

22 Informal conversation of V. Van Renterghem with archaeologist S. McPhillips, March 2024.

23 See the ten thematic maps for the Seljuq period by Van Renterghem, 2015, and the eight thematic articles and maps by Neggaz, Rébillard, Tillier and Van Renterghem in Denoix and Renel, 2022.

24 Recent cartography for specific districts or periods includes Ahola and Osti, 2013: 241, and Neggaz, 2019: 307.

25 We would like to thank Stephen McPhillips for his suggestions on this subject.

26 NWO VICI grant, 2019-2025. https://www.ru.nl/en/research/research-projects/source-of-life-water-management-in-the-premodern-middle-east.

27 On the history of the Imāmī-Shīʿī movement in Karkh Baghdad, see Neggaz, 2019; on the Barāthā mosque of Baghdad in the early Abbasid and Buyid periods, see Neggaz, forthcoming.

28 Similar patterns can be observed in the chronicles describing revolts in Mamluk Cairo and Damascus (Neggaz, 2023).

29 Van Renterghem explains that the discontinuity of the urban landscape has been noted and commented on by medieval as well as modern historians, citing Lassner, 2019 who called Baghdad “a city of cities,” or more precisely “a series of municipal entities clustered within a greater metropolitan area.” Lassner argued that such entities had an institutional basis, since Baghdad was divided into a plurality of judicial circumscriptions and had up to six jāmiʿ-mosques.

30 Within the existing abundant bibliography, see Gutas, 1998; recently: Scheiner and Janos, 2014a; for recent synthesis, with bibliographies: Günther, 2022; Janos, 2022; Scheiner and Janos, 2014b.

31 For the early period, see Karamustafa, 2007; for the 5th–7th/11th–13th centuries, Muhammad, 2024. On Sufism in Baghdad, see below, III.1.b.

32 This presentation has been published: Tillier, 2024.

33 The miḥna was a period of religious inquisition initiated by the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mūn (r. 198-218/813–833) and continued by his successors, aimed at enforcing the Muʿtazilite doctrine that the Qur’an was a created—rather than eternal—text. It marked a significant instance of state intervention in theological debate and religious authority.

34 Ben Azzouna’s research is based on a corpus of 125 illustrated or calligraphed manuscripts produced in Iraq and Iran during the Ilkhanid and Jalayirid period. This work is not restricted to Baghdad and is explicitly not exhaustive, since it is based on the manuscripts that the author was able to examine herself in various institutions in Europe, Turkey, and Iran.

35 We will come back to the KITAB project in later sections of the article.

36 Ibn al-Dubaythī, Dhayl. Though this biographical dictionary is not mentioned by Scheiner in his inventory of the texts available to study Baghdad (Scheiner, 2022), it is an important source about the social and intellectual life in the city between the second half of the 5th/11th and the first half of the 7th/13th century.

37 Two full editions of this text, that was only partly published before, were issued by different publishing companies in 2013 (Beirut, 15 vols. and Damascus, 23 vols.). Both editions are unfortunately inaccurate, especially when it comes to proper nouns (in particular Turkish ones) and place names.

38 This source had already been mentioned by Sadan, 1979 and 1990. Rébillard proposed an edition of the passages on the Baghdadi shurṭa and a translation in French: Rébillard, 2021: 608–617.

39 Institutional sites around the world that offer digitised manuscripts for Islamic and Arabic studies have been usefully listed by the University of Michigan Library: https://guides.lib.umich.edu/islamicmsstudies/onlinecollections; see also the website of the Centre for the Study of Islamic Manuscripts of the Al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation: https://digitallibrary.al-furqan.com/world_library. For informal sites, see for example https://www.alukah.net/.

40 Fozia Bora argues further that Mamluk chronicles should be considered archives (Bora, 2019).

41 This is despite the fact that eight Abbasid documents have been found in Samarra by Herzfeld, and studied by Reinfandt, 2012.

42 Despite ongoing debate over its central thesis (recent reviews of Adams’ work include Whitcomb, 2007: 255-59, and the thesis by Rebecca Deborah Wells, 2015), this book remains a foundational work in Iraqi studies. Adams combined textual analysis, aerial photography, and data from a surface survey of the Diyāla region—located northeast of Baghdad—covering periods from prehistory to modernity. His research highlighted the extensive irrigation infrastructure and agricultural vitality of the Diyāla area during the Sasanian era, which supported the prosperity of numerous settlements. He argued for a gradual decline in subsequent periods. Nonetheless, the great Nahrawān canal remained in use for seven centuries—an exceptional lifespan for a man-made irrigation system.

43 Medieval Arabic sources on Baghdad are too numerous to be presented here. For a (non-exhaustive) presentation of the main available Arabic textual source, see Scheiner, 2022, which presents the most important edited historiographical, geographical and adab works, as well as travel accounts, on which the historians of medieval Baghdad rely (with a list of references). Each study in Scheiner and Toral’s Handbook (2022) offers its own list of sources and secondary works on a specific topic or time period.

44 For a synthesis on Baghdadi Christians: Morony, 2022.

45 On the Jewish sources about Baghdad, see Zvi Stampfer, 2022: 733–734.

46 Publication of the thesis for the obtention of the French Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches, Inalco, 2023.

47 For such an approach, see El-Hibri, 1999 and 2010; Noth and Conrad, 1994.

48 https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/stylo/index.html.

49 Al-Maktaba al-Shamela can be accessed at: https://shamela.ws/ ; al-Maktaba al-Shīʿīyya is accessible at: http://www.shiaonlinelibrary.com.

50 The link is accessible here: https://zenodo.org/records/11501559; explanations about the platform and its use can be found at: https://kitab-project.org/New-Release-of-the-KITAB-s-Open-Access-T/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0tXQc8vOvtHTpx-9zZgTZ2kfGimOc2og8SG2UWBeBFoQwpfVuN37NU89c_aem_hijld0sUWtYQRVHp9SIBFQ.

51 Led by Sarah Savant, Maxim Romanov (University of HamburgVienna) and Matthew Miller (University of Maryland).

52 David Smith (Northeastern University) developed the Passim software upon which the text reuse project is based.

53 The results of this research are accessible in the following blog by Verkinderen: https://kitab-project.org/fihrist/OpenITI-vs-Fihrist-part-3/.

54 Verkinderen notes that “with the recent improvements of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for Arabic script by the OpenITI Arabic-Script OCR Catalyst Project (AOCP), we hope we will be able to add more and more printed books from genres, time periods, and regions that are disregarded by third parties.” See previous link.

55 Romanov underlines that while Baghdad was the dominant urban center for Iraq and the entire Islamic world until the beginning of the 8th/13th century, other major urban centers existed in Iraq, including Wāsiṭ and al-Anbār.

56 For access to the app, please see the following link: https://kitab-project.org/b/.

57 Michael Cooperson traced the origin and posterity of the representation of the early Abbasid times as a “golden age,” which “gave the period an outsized place even in the pre-modern Arabic tradition” (Cooperson, 2017: 41). The notion of “golden age” is of course questionable in itself, since it implies an ineluctable decline after this time of political, and/or cultural, apogee.

58 As an example among many: the tenth chapter of Ira Lapidus’ handbook of Islamic history is entitled “Decline and fall of the ʿAbbasid Empire” (Lapidus, 1988: 85–91).

59 At least in terms of independence of the caliphs towards the Buyid and Seljuq rulers, in the religious field (Makidsi, 1963; Tholib, 2002).

60 For a synthesis on this period, essentially based on Persian sources, see Zaryāb, 2002 and Wheeler, 2011.

61 A similar approach has been adopted by Eychenne, Meier, and Vigouroux (2018) in their study of late Mamluk and early Ottoman sources concerning the waqf of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Their work demonstrates how integrating the city’s hinterland and retracing its interactions with the urban core can offer a fresh perspective on the economic and social history of Damascus. Unfortunately, no comparable documentation is available for medieval Baghdad.

62 Money-changers associated with the Shīʿī movement became predominant in the time of Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq in Kufa (Asatryan, 2014; Newman, 2000: 6). Kufa has received more attention than Baghdad on that question. On ʿAwn street, see Neggaz, 2019: 276; it was attacked by the Ḥanbalīs in 329/940.

63 This includes research on the deputies of the imams, see for instance Klemm, 2016.

64 The cursing of the Companions, for the most part the first three Caliphs, and sometimes ʿĀʾisha, the Prophet’s wife, and Muʿāwiya. See Neggaz, 2019: 2823.

65 For a general presentation of the main Sufi figures of Baghdad from the 2d/8th to the 4th/10th century, see Basharin, 2022. Historical mysteries taking place in Abbasid Baghdad and centred around Sufism include Laury Silvers’ The Sufi Mysteries Quartet, four novels that are often used in university classrooms (Silvers, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023).

66 Such as juridical treatises, but they are not specifically concerned with Baghdad. For a treatise of this kind written in 12th-century Baghdad, see Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201), Aḥkām al-nisāʾ.

67 Notably the work of Michele Campopiano, and the doctoral research of Noémie Lucas, based on the study of kharāj-treatises (Lucas, 2020).

68 An iqṭāʿ was originally a fiscal grant remunerating a civil or military service.

69 Though fundamental, the study of Jürgen Paul on ḥimāya is focused on Iran and addresses Iraq only in a marginal way (Paul, 2020).

70 Following the methodology of Stefan Heidemann’s study on Upper Mesopotamia, who makes an intensive use of numismatics as well as of textual sources (Heidemann, 2002). See also Adams, 1965 and Berthier, 2001.

71 A detailed study in Arabic already exists: Al-Sūsa, 1963–1965.

72 A qanāt is an ancient underground aqueduct system, common in arid regions, that uses gravity to transport water from an aquifer to the surface. In contrast, a canal is an open, man-made waterway—typically above ground—used for irrigation or navigation and often fed by rivers, lakes, or artificial sources; both need maintenance, but unlike qanāts, canals may require pumping or mechanical flow control.

73 Bulliet further argues that: “Indeed, if historians of medieval Baghdad had been the first to arrive on the field of climatic battle, they might well have postulated a Medieval Cold Period” (Bulliet, 2009: 76).

74 Arabic sources of the inquiry are detailed in Borroni and Cristoforetti, 2016.

75 The political use of Mihrajān (Arabisation of the Persian Mehragān) is also considered in Borroni, 2015.

76 As pointed out by Boaz Shoshan, it is the complexity of the source material rather than its scarcity that constitutes the major issue (Shoshan, 1993).

77 The term “festivals” is understood in its broad meaning as a “special day or period, usually in memory of a religious event, with its own social activities, food, and memories” (Cambridge English dictionary). As such, festivals encompass both joyful events and sad ones, such as the martyrdom of Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, grandson of Prophet Muḥammad, at Karbalāʾ, commemorated during the festival of ʿĀshūrāʾ.

78 The current scholarship has focused on popular movements and the Ḥanbalīs in medieval Baghdad, particularly the works of Cahen, 1959, Laoust, 1973 and Sabari, 1981. In this perspective, the religious transformations that took place in Baghdad during the transitional period that saw the rise of a Persian Shīʿī dynasty to power (the Buyids in 333/945), followed by a Turkish power who promoted Sunnism (the Seljuqs in 447/1055), and the final phase of the Abbasid caliphate before the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 656/1258, have merely been studied at the macro level, through the prism of political and dynastic changes. This macro perspective has many limitations, which this study seeks to answer.

79 For example the urban riots of the Mamluk period, investigated by Garcin, 2003; Elbendary, 2015; Petry, 2016; and Neggaz, 2023.

80 See also Van Renterghem, 2015: 450–458.

81 The historiography of the “Islamic city” concept has demonstrated that this essentialist model was largely constructed through a contrast with contemporary European cities. As Neglia (2008: 3) puts it, it defined “an urban system connoted by a “different” structure from the “western” one.”

82 Two of the papers delivered in Cairo were dedicated to Baghdad: van den Bent, forthcoming, and Van Renterghem, forthcoming/b. Proceedings of the conference will be published in 2025: van den Bent, van Berkel and Hayes, forthcoming. See also Brown and van der Bent, 2025.

83 As underlined by Neglia, in a colonial context, this insistence on fundamental differences between “Western” and “Islamic” cities emphasised “a dichotomy between a progressive European and a stagnant Muslim world” (Neglia, 2008: 5). Urban autonomy of medieval cities from the Islamic area has been studied by Amabe, 2016. Interestingly, Amabe considers devotes only a very short chapter to Baghdad, which he considers as “An Early Abortive Example” that did not give birth to an independent urban government.

84 For the origins of this model—rooted in French, English, and German Orientalist traditions—as well as for some of the early critiques it provoked, see Abu-Lughod (1987) and Haneda (1994). The historiography surrounding the “Islamic city” paradigm, including both its historical development and subsequent revisions, has been surveyed by Neglia (2008). Notably, despite its breadth, this article devotes less than a single page (p. 40) to medieval and modern Baghdad. This marginal treatment reflects the broader historiographical pattern: aside from the early contributions of Claude Cahen, Baghdad has remained largely absent from scholarly debates on the concept of the “Islamic city.”

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Nassima Neggaz et Vanessa Van Renterghem, « Medieval Baghdad: Where to from now? »Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée [En ligne], 158 (2/2025) | 2025, mis en ligne le 21 octobre 2025, consulté le 09 novembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/remmm/23663 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/14zmr

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Nassima Neggaz

New College of Florida, Sarasota, Floride, États-Unis. nassimaneggaz[at]gmail.com ; ORCID: 0000-0002-3623-7304

Vanessa Van Renterghem

Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (Inalco) & Centre d’Études et de Recherches Moyen-Orient, Méditerranée (CERMOM). vanessa.vanrenterghem[at]inalco.fr , Idref :084557907

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