The political and economic decadence of the region was the main cause of the progressive penetration, starting from the 3rd century, of nomadic Arab populations that were getting closer and closer to the course of the Euphrates, through the ill-determined and unsafe border of the desert. Thus, when at the beginning of the 7th century the Islamized Arabs took possession of it, for a long time the population, consisting essentially of the descendants of the ancient Aramaized Babylonians, was mixed with numerous Persian and Arab elements. Since then the name al-Iraq (Arabization of the Middle Persian erak “Persian”) began to indicate the territory crossed by the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Arab conquest was faced with a composite civilization: in the process of assimilation, which was slow, the Arabs imposed their religion and their language, but in turn absorbed many elements of local cultures, which, following the part predominant that Iraq had in the formation of Islamic civilization, they extended to this whole civilization. The cities of Kufa and Basra, at first simple Bedouin encampments, were centers of expansion and further conquests towards the Iranian plateau and Central Asia, and at the same time the scene of the political-religious rivalries that manifested themselves in bosom of Islam. L’ Iraq began to play an important role in Muslim political life when the fourth caliph Ali, son-in-law of Muhammad, settled there to fight against Umayyad-dominated Syria. The victory of the latter in the struggle for the caliphate made the region a hotbed of opposition. The two parties of the Shiites and the Khargites developed there, whose uprisings disturbed the peace of the country for almost a century. When the Abbasids, descendants of al-Abbas, Muhammad’s uncle, succeeded, with the help of Persian elements, in supplanting the rival Umayyad caliphs, Iraq became the center of Islam. With the intention of affirming and strengthening the advent of the new dynasty, the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur, founded in 762, on the west bank of the Tigris, the new capital, located at the center of the Islamic territory, near the two great river arteries through which communications to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean took place, in a dominant position on the road that led from the Mesopotamian plain to the Iranian plateau and from there to Central Asia. The city was given the official name of Madinat as-Salam (“city of peace”), or Dar as-Salam (“house of peace”), but the Iranian toponym of the pre-existing village on which it was built prevailed, Baghdad (“given by God”). The 9th and 10th centuries saw an extraordinary development of Iraq’s wealth and civilization. The high degree of power of the Abbasid Caliphate made Baghdad the most splendid urban center of the Middle Ages: populated to a greater extent than any other city in the world, full of sumptuous buildings, mosques, schools, baths, hospitals, markets, commercial traffic and cultural exchanges throughout the world, it was celebrated in the Muslim East as the metropolis par excellence, and the fame of its grandeur and splendor spread throughout the Christian West, colored by fabulous details. Not even the progressive decline of the caliphate, and with it the shattering of the empire into a multitude of separate states, did not take away from Baghdad the character of a great and flourishing city. For Iraq religion, please check thereligionfaqs.com.
Beginning in the 11th century, Iraq began to lose its position of pre-eminence in the Islamic world and its economic decline began. The northern part suffered in particular, where the Kurdish invasions spread, the southern one, where the neglect in the maintenance of the canals allowed the reform of a swampy area, and the border towards the desert, where the incursions of the nomads did not find more solid. resistance: all areas that became the seat of rebellion movements especially of a Shiite character. These conditions were maintained until the invasion of the Tartars, which took place in the mid-13th century. From this moment on Iraq was dominated by dynasties descending from the lineage of Genghis Khan, which, completely Islamized, continued the cultural traditions of the caliphate, but in an impoverished and decayed environment. The Persian element regained vigor, without however depriving the region of the Arab character, by now definitively assured.
The Persian Safavids replaced the dynasties of Mongol origin in the 16th century, bringing Shiism back to Iraq, which had originated there but had been defeated by Sunni orthodoxy. However, the domination of the Persians was opposed, from the beginning, by the expansion of the Ottoman Turks. Already under the sultan Selim part of northern Mesopotamia was annexed to the Turkish empire; then, with the capture of Baghdad in 1534 by Suleiman the Magnificent, Iraq came under Ottoman rule, a condition in which it remained until 1917, not without continuous conflicts with the Persian Safavids, who came to reoccupy Baghdad between 1623 and 1628. This succession of wars, which intertwined the periodic invasions and rebellions of the nomads based on the borders of the desert, vilayet of Baghdad, Mossul and Basra, lived for about three centuries as a periphery of the Turkish empire. Only in the second half of the 19th century was there any mention of a revival, determined not only by the reforms introduced, albeit without energy and without continuity, by the Ottoman government, by the interest of the European powers, for which Iraq it was not only a possible field of economic exploitation, but also an element in the game of rivalry in international politics.
