Free The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) by Joel Kotkin

foster a sophisticated urban culture but did not worship the city for its own sake; religious concerns, the integration of the daily lives of men with a transcendent God, overshadowed those of municipal affairs.
    The primacy of faith was evident in the layout of Islamic cities. Instead of the classical emphasis on public buildings and spaces, mosques now arose at the center of urban life. 13
    This religious orientation, and the attendant laws governing day to day, differentiated the Muslim conquest from those of the other nomadic invaders who also preyed on the decaying classical civilization. When the Germans, Huns, and others seized the great cities of Rome, Persia, and Byzantium, they generally left little more than ruins and ashes. The Muslims, in contrast, sought to incorporate newly acquired cities— Damascus, Jerusalem, and Carthage—into what they believed to be a spiritually superior, urban civilization.

     

DAMASCUS: PARADISE ON EARTH
     
    In 661, the caliphate abandoned Medina as their political capital and moved to Damascus, a city more suited to handling the administration, communication, and commercial needs of the expanding empire. In contrast with Mecca or Medina, Damascus lay in a fertile region, nourished by the Baradá River, which flows from the mountains of Lebanon. As the Arab poet ibn Jubayr wrote:
    If Paradise be on earth, Damascus must be it; if it is in heaven, Damascus can parallel and match it. 14
    Damascus broadened the exposure of the Arabs to other cultures. Damascus was a great cosmopolitan city, home to various Christian sects and Jews. Under Islam, these “peoples of the book” were allowed to practice their faiths, often far more freely than under the former Byzantine rulers. The Koran suggested that the dhimmis (protected persons) be made “tributaries” to the new regime and thus “humbled,” but otherwise their rights were assured. This relative toleration led the Jews and even some Christians to welcome, and even assist, in the Muslim takeover of their cities. 15
    The cosmopolitan character of Islamic urban life also spurred the growth of trade, the elevation of the arts and sciences. 16 In the newly conquered cities, the Arab souk often improved on the Greco-Roman agora. Rulers developed elaborate commercial districts, with large buildings shaded from the hot desert sun, with storerooms and hostels for visiting merchants. The new rulers built large libraries, universities, and hospitals at a pace not seen since Roman times. 17
    The new urban spirit extended well beyond the walls of Damascus. Basra in Iraq, Fez and Marrakesh in North Africa, Shiraz in Iran, and Córdoba in Spain all testified to the civic imagination of the new order. 18 Córdoba, wrote one German nun, was “the jewel of the world, young and exquisite, proud in its might.” So great was the cultural pull that in Córdoba, complained one ninth-century Christian scholar, few of his brethren could write Latin adequately but many could “express themselves in Arabic with elegance and write better poems in this language than the Arabs themselves.” 19

     

BAGHDAD: “CROSSROADS OF THE WORLD”
     
    Baghdad, the new capital founded by the Abbasid caliphate in the late eighth century, emerged as the greatest of these early Muslim cities. Located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, close to the site of both ancient Babylon and Ctesiphon, the former capital of the Sassanid Persian Empire, the city was described by one contemporary observer, Abu Yousuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq, as the “crossroads of the world.”
    Designed to be a great capital, Baghdad was constructed with a circular plan: wall, moat, and inner wall surrounding the palace. 20 Its population, at least a quarter million inhabitants, dwarfed those of contemporary Venice, Paris, and Milan, then the leading cities of Europe, and equaled the last great redoubt of Greco-Roman civilization, Constantinople. By 900, it was likely the largest city in the world.