Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood: an illustrated history of the city: Caabu Members' book launch with Justin Marozzi

Please join Caabu for a Members' book launch on the history of Baghdad with Justin Marozzi, author of Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood. 

When: Wednesday, 25 June, 18:30 pm

Where: Boardroom, Arab British Centre, 1 Gough Square, EC4A 3DE 

Click here for directions  

Please note that this is a Caabu Members' event. If you're not already a member and would like to become one in order to come to the event, you can do so here. As places are limited, RSVP is essential. Please confirm your attendance with Joseph Willits (willitsj@caabu.org). 

About the book:

For much of its extraordinary life Baghdad, the 'City of Peace' as it has been called almost since its foundation, has been one of the most violent cities on earth. As U.S. troops entered in 2003, they became the latest participants in a turbulent history stretching back to the year 762, when Caliph Mansur's masons laid the first sun-baked bricks of his imperial capital. For 500 years Baghdad was the seat of the Abbasid Empire, a marvel of glittering palaces, magnificent mosques, Islamic colleges and teeming markets watered by the Tigris. This was the city of the mathematician Al Khwarizmi, who invented algebra; of Harun al Rashid, the caliph immortalised in many tales of Baghdad from A Thousand and One Nights; of the great poet Abu Nuwas, whose playful verses scandalised society, and of dozens of other astronomers, doctors, musicians and explorers. A thriving trading emporium and metropolis that attracted merchants from Central Asia to the Atlantic, its economy was the envy of West and East alike.

Baghdad has been a city, too, of terrible hardships. It has been regularly beset by epidemics, famines and floods, by the terror of foreign invasions, military occupations and the brutal rule of strongmen, from capricious caliphs to Saddam Hussein. This, therefore, is also the history of those who have ruled Baghdad, and of those who have conquered it: Ottoman sultans, Persian shahs, the Mongol Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, and of Tamerlane, Marlowe's 'Scourge of God', who in 1400 sacked the city and ordered the construction of 120 towers from 90,000 of his adversaries' severed heads. Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood equally tells the compelling stories of the long-suffering masses, the ordinary men and women from slaves to soldiers who have lived and died in this turbulent city.

In this vivid new history of Baghdad - the first published in English in nearly a century - Justin Marozzi brings to life its whole tumultuous history, charting a captivating course through thirteen centuries of splendour and destruction.

You can read reviews in the Independent, the Evening Standard, and the Spectator. You can also read an extract in the National. 

About Justin:

Justin is a travel writer, historian, journalist and political risk and security consultant. He has travelled extensively in the Middle East and Muslim world and in recent years has worked in conflict and post-conflict environments such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur. His most recent position was as communications advisor to the President of Somalia, based in Mogadishu 2013-2014.

He graduated from Cambridge with a Starred Double First in History in 1993, before studying Broadcast Journalism at Cardiff University and winning a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania to read a Masters in International Relations. After working in the BBC World Service on 'News Hour' and BBC Westminster on 'Today in Parliament', he joined the Financial Times as a foreign correspondent in Manila, where he also wrote for The Economist. 

His first book, South from Barbary, was an account of a 1,200-mile expedition by camel along the slave routes of the Libyan Sahara, described by the desert explorer and SAS veteran Michael Asher as "the first significant journey across the Libyan interior for a generation". His second, Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World, launched in Baghdad in 2004, was the best-selling biography of the world's greatest Islamic conqueror and a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year.

In 2006, he wrote Faces of Exploration, a collection of profiles of the world's leading explorers. He has contributed to Meetings with Remarkable Muslims (an interview with the Afghan mujahid hero Ahmed Shah Massoud), The Seventy Greatest Journeys, and most recently The Art of War (essays on Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan and Tamerlane).

Justin also wrote The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus, published in October 2008, which was based on extensive research in Turkey, Iraq, Egypt and Greece. 

Justin is a regular contributor to a wide range of national and international publications, including the Financial Times, Spectator, Times, Sunday Telegraph, Guardian, Evening Standard, Standpoint and Prospect, where he writes on international affairs, the Muslim world and defence and security issues, and has broadcast for the BBC World Service and Radio Four.

Justin is a member of Chatham House, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, where he has also lectured, and an Honorary Travel Member of the Travellers Club. In 2011 he was elected as a Councillor of the RGS and appointed a Senior Research Fellow in Journalism and the Popular Understanding of History at Buckingham University's Humanities Research institute.

He Tweets at @justinmarozzi.

If you would like to attend this Caabu Members' book launch, please RSVP to Joseph Willits (willitsj@caabu.org). You can become a member of Caabu here.