take me back to the casbah

The great wall of Baghdad:

The US military is building a three-mile concrete wall in the centre of Baghdad along the most murderous faultline between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

The wall, which recognises the reality of the hardening sectarian divide in Baghdad, is a central part of George Bush's final push to pacify the capital. Work began on April 10 under cover of darkness and is due for completion by the end of the month.

Patrick Lang offers some background:

Mahalle" signifies a "quarter" of a pre-modern Islamicate city, functioning as a sub-jurisdiction underneath a city government. (It is one of several Arabic words for that.) They were often walled and had an inner social and business life as well. Such subdivisions of European cities were also common before the renaissance. Within a "mahalle" lived the self-segregated members of ethnic, guild, sectarian and tribal groups. People grouped themselves in that way because they did not trust others outside their own groups. Typically the streets on the outer edges of the "mahalle" were open at first and then were gradually encroached on by building until it was easy to put up a gate and install watchmen.

…This kind of organization of Islamicate cities gradually disappeared in most places in the late 19th and 20th Centuries C.E. It disappeared as the colonial powers sought to impose the kind of town planning that they were familiar with and as early independent governments sought to foster a civic life centered on inter-communal loyalty and "national" identity.

Baghdad was a lot like that before 2003. There were still places in the city that were inhabited by all one thing or another but the trend was towards integration in housing and in marriage.

We are successfuly re-medievalizing Baghdad, so it would be a good idea to become familiar with the old terms. They are lurking in the back of the collective mind of the city and will be back.

I was reading John Man's biography of Kublai Khan last night, in which he notes that US forces are sometimes refered to as the new Mongols in the Muslim world, in reference to the sack of Baghdad and the overthrow of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1225. He notes as well that it's not an exact metaphor. It looks more like a restoration of the forms of social organisation of the time.

Anyway, here's something prepared earlier on that theme.