Beautiful Baghdad Quotes

To retreat in my aloneness, my beautifully peaceful garden, to find shade under my heart, in the solitude of abundance, without you in sight.

Thy impudence has a monstrous beauty, like the hindquarters of an elephant.

He took a fine fresh fig from his pocket and washed it meticulously in a glass of water; then he peeled it open before our eyes. Inside, the beautiful fig was crawling with maggots. The imam concluded his lesson by saying, ‘It’s not a question of washing your bodies, but your souls, young men. If you’re rotten inside, neither rivers nor oceans will suffice to make you clean.

So much of our world has been brutally wrested from us; we now have to say enough. No more. Perhaps if enough individuals find out what is actually going on for themselves and start doing something about it, then maybe we can stave off the fast-advancing crisis and create a beautiful. healthy, livable planet where all life flourishes and man is free to rise to greater heights.

Throne of my lonely niche, my wealth, my love, my moonlight. My most sincere friend, my confidant, my very existence, my Sultan, my one and only love. The most beautiful among the beautiful… My springtime, my merry faced love, my daytime, my sweetheart, laughing leaf… My plants, my sweet, my rose, the one only who does not distress me in this world… My Constantinople, my Caraman, the earth of my Anatolia My Badakhshan, my Baghdad and Khorasan My woman of the beautiful hair, my love of the slanted brow, my love of eyes full of mischief… I’ll sing your praises always I, lover of the tormented heart, Muhibbi of the eyes full of tears, I am happy.

Throne of my lonely niche, my wealth, my love, my moonlight. My most sincere friend, my confidant, my very existence, my Sultan, my one and only love. The most beautiful among the beautiful… My springtime, my merry faced love, my daytime, my sweetheart, laughing leaf… My plants, my sweet, my rose, the one only who does not distress me in this world… My Constantinople, my Caraman, the earth of my Anatolia My Badakhshan, my Baghdad and Khorasan My woman of the beautiful hair, my love of the slanted brow, my love of eyes full of mischief… I’ll sing your praises always I, lover of the tormented heart, Muhibbi of the eyes full of tears, I am happy.

From the pleasure podium of Ali Qapu, beyond the enhanced enclosure, the city spread itself towards the horizon. Ugly buildings are prohibited in Esfahan. They go to Tehran or stay in Mashhad. Planters vie with planners to outnumber buildings with trees. Attracting nightingales, blackbirds and orioles is considered as important as attracting people. Maples line the canals, reaching towards each other with branches linked. Beneath them, people meander, stroll and promenade. The Safavids' high standards generated a kind of architectural pole-vaulting competition in which beauty is the bar, and ever since the Persians have been imbuing the most mundane objects with design. Turquoise tiles ennoble even power stations. In the meadow in the middle of Naghshe Jahan, as lovers strolled or rode in horse-drawn traps, I lay on my back picking four-leafed clovers and looking at the sky. There was an intimacy about its grandeur, like having someone famous in your family. The life of centuries past was more alive here than anywhere else, its physical dimensions unchanged. Even the brutal mountains, folded in light and shadows beyond the square, stood back in awe of it. At three o'clock, the tiled domes soaked up the sunshine, transforming its invisible colours to their own hue, and the gushing fountains ventilated the breeze and passed it on to grateful Esfahanis. But above all was the soaring sky, captured by this snare of arches.(p378)

Show me." He looks at her, his eyes darker than the air. "If you draw me a map I think I'll understand better." "Do you have paper?" She looks over the empty sweep of the car's interior. "I don't have anything to write with." He holds up his hands, side to side as if they were hinged. "That's okay. You can just use my hands." She smiles, a little confused. He leans forward and the streetlight gives him yellow-brown cat eyes. A car rolling down the street toward them fills the interior with light, then an aftermath of prickling black waves. "All right." She takes his hands, runs her finger along one edge. "Is this what you mean? Like, if the ocean was here on the side and these knuckles are mountains and here on the back it's Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, West L.A., West Hollywood, and X marks the spot." She traces her fingertips over the backs of his hands, her other hand pressing into the soft pads of his palm. "This is where we are- X." "Right now? In this car?" He leans back; his eyes are black marble, dark lamps. She holds his gaze a moment, hears a rush of pulse in her ears like ocean surf. Her breath goes high and tight and shallow; she hopes he can't see her clearly in the car- her translucent skin so vulnerable to the slightest emotion. He turns her hands over, palms up, and says, "Now you." He draws one finger down one side of her palm and says, "This is the Tigris River Valley. In this section there's the desert, and in this point it's plains. The Euphrates runs along there. This is Baghdad here. And here is Tahrir Square." He touches the center of her palm. "At the foot of the Jumhurriya Bridge. The center of everything. All the main streets run out from this spot. In this direction and that direction, there are wide busy sidewalks and apartments piled up on top of shops, men in business suits, women with strollers, street vendors selling kabobs, eggs, fruit drinks. There's the man with his cart who sold me rolls sprinkled with thyme and sesame every morning and then saluted me like a soldier. And there's this one street...." He holds her palm cradled in one hand and traces his finger up along the inside of her arm to the inner crease of her elbow, then up to her shoulder. Everywhere he touches her it feels like it must be glowing, as if he were drawing warm butter all over her skin. "It just goes and goes, all the way from Baghdad to Paris." He circles her shoulder. "And here"- he touches the inner crease of her elbow-"is the home of the Nile crocodile with the beautiful speaking voice. And here"- his fingers return to her shoulder, dip along their clavicle-"is the dangerous singing forest." "The dangerous singing forest?" she whispers. He frowns and looks thoughtful. "Or is that in Madagascar?" His hand slips behind her neck and he inches toward her on the seat. "There's a savanna. Chameleons like emeralds and limes and saffron and rubies. Red cinnamon trees filled with lemurs." "I've always wanted to see Madagascar," she murmurs: his breath is on her face. Their foreheads touch. His hand rises to her face and she can feel that he's trembling and she realizes that she's trembling too. "I'll take you," he whispers.

When I got to the museum, I was stunned to discover what a great civilization Mesopotamia was, what a fascinating place I’d grown up in. There were sculptures from the Sumerian, Babylonian, and the Assyrian era, and some were amazingly intact. They were beautiful and absolutely mesmerizing, and I carefully examined every one and read all of the information about them. An hour earlier, I’d been enjoying the beauty of iconic structures in London, but the sculptures in that museum were thousands of years older and told me so much about my heritage and culture. The Lamassu, a winged bull with a human head, especially filled me with pride. It was such a magnificent structure, so delicately carved with great imagination and knowledge beyond our understanding.

In 771, a traveller arrived in the city [Baghdad] with a copy of a work of Hindu astronomy called the Siddhanta (The Opening of the Universe), by the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta (598-668). Unlike Euclid, Brahmagupta did not set out his mathematical propositions clearly with proofs, but obscured them (as was traditional in Indian mathematics) under a veil of poetry -- beautiful, but extremely difficult to unravel. Al-Mansur gave his court astrologer, al-Fazari, the Herculean task of translating the Siddhanta, which introduced Baghdad to the concept of 'positional notation' -- the way we write numbers to this day, using the digits 1 to 9, in columns of units, tens, hundreds and so on. The possibilities that this system opened up were limitless; when it was eventually adopted, it transformed the entire discipline of mathematics by allowing calculations that would have been impossible with the old Roman-numeral system. Positional notation was already known in Syria and had been admired by Severus Sebokht, who wrote about the 'nine sings' of Indian mathematicians in 662.