🇮🇶 Iraq
Baghdad
Baghdad (بَغْدَاد — the name of Parthian or Aramaic origin, most likely meaning "Gift of God" (Bagha-Dāta: the Old Iranian "Bag" (God/deity) + "Dāda" (gift): "the gift given by God/the deity"), population 8.1 million — the capital of Iraq and one of the most important cities in the history of human civilization) was the most important city in the world from its founding by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur in 762 CE to the Mongol invasion under Hulagu Khan in 1258 CE: during the Islamic Golden Age (the Abbasid Caliphate, 750–1258 CE), Baghdad was the largest city in the world (the 10th-century Baghdad: the population was between 500,000 and 1.2 million — the most populous city on Earth, more than twice the size of contemporary Constantinople and more than five times the size of Rome or Paris), the center of the translation movement (the Bait al-Hikma — the "House of Wisdom": the translation and research institution founded by Caliph Harun al-Rashid and expanded by his son al-Ma'mun: the institution where the Greek philosophical and scientific corpus (Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Euclid, Ptolemy, Archimedes) was translated into Arabic and then developed and extended by Muslim scholars: the mathematical work of al-Khwarizmi (the "Father of Algebra": the "al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa-l-muqābala" — the book from whose name the word "algebra" derives), the astronomical work of al-Battani, the medical encyclopedias of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), the optical theory of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) and the philosophical work of al-Kindi (the first systematic Islamic philosopher): the most important intellectual achievement in medieval history took place in Baghdad): the city was razed by the Mongol invasion of Hulagu Khan on February 10, 1258 (the "Sack of Baghdad" — described by the Persian historian Juvayni as the destruction of the world's greatest city: the Mongols are said to have thrown so many books from the Bait al-Hikma into the Tigris that the water turned black from the ink: the libraries, the hospitals, the irrigation systems and the dynasty of 37 Abbasid caliphs that had ruled the Islamic world for 508 years were all destroyed in this single invasion). Modern Baghdad is rebuilding itself after the 2003 Iraq War (the US invasion) and the 2014–2017 occupation of parts of Iraq by ISIL (Daesh) and is now safe to visit in the central tourist areas.