Basra

Basra was founded in 636 as a garrison town for the Arab armies, on a site inland from the present centre near what is now Al-Zubayr. Within a century it had become a great port and a centre of learning, where the grammarian Sibawayh codified Arabic, the writer al-Jahiz produced his essays, the ascetic al-Hasan al-Basri taught, and the Mu'tazila school of theology took shape. Ships traded to India, East Africa and China, and the voyages behind the Sinbad stories are associated with its quays.

Wealth had a brutal foundation. Enslaved African labourers drained the salt marshes around the city, and their revolt, the Zanj rebellion of 869 to 883, devastated southern Iraq and briefly took Basra itself. Later the port declined and shifted downstream towards the Shatt al-Arab, and the Portuguese, Safavids and Ottomans all contended for it; under Ottoman rule it was a provincial capital where British, Persian and Indian merchants traded, and the East India Company kept an agency.

British forces landed in 1914 and made Basra the base of the Mesopotamian campaign. Oil, the port and the date trade made it prosperous into the 1970s, with a reputation as Iraq's most cosmopolitan city. The Iran–Iraq War of 1980 to 1988 put it on the front line, and the Faw peninsula changed hands twice; the 1991 uprising against the government was crushed here; and after the 2003 invasion British forces were based in the city. Since then oil revenues have grown while public services have not, and protests over water, power and jobs have repeatedly filled its streets.

Basra's character comes from the sea. Centuries of trade with the Gulf, India and East Africa left a port city more mixed and more outward-looking than inland Iraq, and it shows in the music, the food and the old merchant houses whose carved wooden shanasheel balconies lean over the canals. The city was a byword for cosmopolitan life in the mid-twentieth century, with cinemas, clubs and a large foreign community, a memory older residents keep alive.

It is a city of poets. Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, born in nearby Jaykur and one of the founders of modern Arabic free verse, wrote the rain and the palm groves of the south into Arabic poetry, and his statue stands on the corniche. Basra's older literary and religious scholarship, from Arabic grammar to Sufi teaching, is still a source of local pride.

The population is overwhelmingly Shia Arab, with tribal affiliations that carry real weight in the countryside and in politics, and small Christian and Mandaean communities, the latter famous as silversmiths, though most have emigrated. Muharram is the great public season, with processions in every district. Hospitality is emphatic: guests are fed first and questioned later, and refusing food or tea takes practice. Football is followed passionately, and the city's stadium has become a symbol of its recovery.

More than a million people live in Basra, Iraq's third largest city, in a province that produces the great majority of Iraq's oil exports. The city's economy is the port, the oilfields that ring it, shipping and customs, government employment and trade; the international companies working the southern fields bring in expatriate staff who mostly live in compounds outside town. For all that wealth, unemployment among young people is high and the gap between the oil economy and everyday life is the city's central grievance.

Water is the other. Salt water pushes up the Shatt al-Arab as the rivers' flow falls, the palm groves that once lined the banks have thinned, and in 2018 contaminated water left tens of thousands of people needing treatment and set off months of protest. Electricity fails in the summer, and households pay neighbourhood generators to fill the gaps.

The daily rhythm is built around the heat. Work and markets start very early, the middle of the day is spent indoors, and life returns in the evening to the corniche, the markets and the cafés, which stay busy until late. Families take the river air on the promenade, and the cooler months bring picnics in the date groves and trips out to the marshes. Jobs, water, power and the management of oil money dominate public argument.

Basra eats from the river, the Gulf and its palms. Zubaidi, the silver pomfret, is the prize fish, fried or grilled and served with rice; sbour, a shad, is eaten in season; and shrimp from the Gulf and river fish appear in spiced stews and in rice dishes that show generations of trade with India — turmeric, cardamom and chilli are used more freely here than in northern Iraq. Masgouf, carp split and cooked upright beside an open fire, is grilled on the riverbank as in Baghdad.

Noomi Basra, the dried black lime named after the city, gives stews and rice their sour edge, dropped in whole or ground to a powder. Rice is the staple, above all the fragrant anbar grown up the Euphrates, served with okra, white bean or aubergine stews, with dolma, and with quzi, lamb cooked slowly over rice with nuts and raisins. Bread comes from the tannour oven, and geymar, the thick clotted cream made from marsh buffalo milk, is eaten at breakfast with honey and kahi pastry.

Dates are the city's signature crop, grown in dozens of varieties along the Shatt al-Arab in what was once the world's largest date palm forest. They are eaten with coffee, boiled into dibis syrup, blended into drinks and baked into klecha for Eid. Sweet shops sell baklava, halva and milk puddings, and tea in istikan glasses and cardamom coffee close every visit.