MUSLIMS NEED REPARATIONS OR REVENGE OR BOTH FROM RACIST GENOCIDAL MONGOLS

5. Baghdad, 1258. Ian Frazier’s excellent piece in the New Yorker, featured here last week, gives a far better account than I could hope to do, so I’ll just outsource Baghdad’s fall to him, but I will note that the Mongol sacking of Baghdad marked the end of the Islamic Golden Age. The Mongols took all of 12 days to destroy several centuries worth of cultural, political, and scientific achievements.

4. Aleppo, 1260. The Mongol siege of Aleppo wasn’t all that noteworthy, and the city itself wasn’t all that important to any of the players involved in the Mongol conquest of the caliphate, but Aleppo is today a famous city (notwithstanding former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson’s famous gaffe) for all the wrong reasons. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Aleppo fell to the Mongols in six days, and like most of the Muslim cities that were conquered by the Mongol hordes, Aleppo’s citizens were callously slaughtered. The Great Mosque of Aleppo, one of the few bright spots in the city’s long, mostly sad history, was also razed. (The Mongol general who led the siege, Hulagu Khan, executed some his local ally’s leaders, who were Christian, for this travesty.)

3. Bukhara, 1220. Located along the Silk Road, Bukhara was at the time of the Mongol invasion of Persia a flourishing center of intellectual and commercial activity, and not just throughout Persia but the whole Muslim world. Scholars, merchants, and mercenaries from Bukhara were famed as far away as China and Germany. It is estimated that 30,000 people died after the Mongols conquered Bukhara, a result of  most of the city surrendering but not the garrison. Thirty thousand was a “moderate” number of people to be killed for Bukhara’s equally moderate resistance to the Mongol hordes. The Mongol invasion of Persia, which was ruled by the Khwarazmian dynasty at the time, happened just as the empire was emerging from expansionary conquests of its own. This meant that the Khwarazmians, while technically governing Persia, had little actual power in the region, and the resistance to the marauding Mongols highlights Persian weakness well.