There are cities we visit, and cities that visit us back. Baghdad was one of those. I went to Baghdad in 2007 as a banker. I arrived thinking about banks, technology, systems and the work that lay ahead. I knew Baghdad mostly from the news—a city of war, uncertainty and extraordinary security precautions.

My first experience of Baghdad was hardly reassuring. On the final approach, the aircraft tilted sharply and descended in a strange spiral. I gripped the armrests, wondering what was happening. Only later did I learn that this corkscrew landing was a defensive manoeuvre, intended to make the aircraft a more difficult target from the ground.

That was my introduction to Baghdad. But not the Baghdad I eventually carried home.

The Baghdad Behind the Blast Walls

I lived in Mansour with other Indian expatriates. We travelled to work in armoured vehicles, lived behind layers of security and learned quickly that the rhythm of everyday life could change without warning.

Yet within all that, there was another Baghdad. There were colleagues, conversations over tea, evening gatherings, laughter and the ordinary routines of working life. And slowly, beneath the Baghdad of blast walls and security convoys, I began to sense another city—the Baghdad of history.

A city that had been old long before it became dangerous. A city that had once been one of the great intellectual centres of the world.

A Scholar’s Whisper Across Centuries

Recently, I stumbled upon the name of Abu ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAlāʾ, born around 689 CE, one of the great scholars of the early Islamic world. A renowned Qur’anic reciter, grammarian and linguist, he was revered for the extraordinary care he brought to his words. He was not one to speak lightly; precision, restraint and scholarship defined his reputation.

One of his sayings stopped me cold:

I have not spoken for thirty years except when I was certain.

Thirty years. In an age where opinions are fired off like bullets, where silence feels like a weakness, his discipline feels almost supernatural.

He believed words deserved patience. And then came another sentence attributed to him—one that reached across centuries and touched something in me:

Those who lived and died in Baghdad were moved from heaven to heaven.

I paused at that line. Perhaps because I had lived in Baghdad.

Not the Baghdad he knew, of course. His world belonged to a very different age. But the words suddenly made me think about the city I had known.

What kind of city makes a scholar describe life there as ascending from one heaven to another?

The Baghdad Beneath Baghdad

The Baghdad of the Abbasid era became a centre of scholarship, translation and intellectual exchange. Knowledge travelled there from different civilisations, from India, Persia, Egypt to Greece and Europe. Mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, language and literature flourished.

Books travelled. Scholars travelled. Civilisations travelled. Baghdad became a meeting point of human thought. And that is the Baghdad we forget when we think of Baghdad today.

We tend to see the Baghdad of modern history—the wars, the checkpoints, the blast walls, the armoured vehicles. I saw some of that Baghdad myself.

But there was always another Baghdad beneath it. The Baghdad of scholars. The Baghdad of manuscripts. The Baghdad of the Tigris. The Baghdad of centuries of accumulated memory.

When I drove through its streets, I often wondered: Who walked here before roads existed? Who stood by the Tigris and watched the water carry ideas downstream? Who argued over a manuscript that would later reshape a distant civilisation? Who taught a student whose words would outlive empires?

History was not somewhere else. It was under our feet.

The Discipline of Silence

Perhaps that is why Abu ʿAmr’s other sentence lingers: “I have not spoken for thirty years except when I was certain.”

There is something powerful about that. We live in a time when silence makes us uncomfortable. We feel compelled to answer. To comment. To react. To have an opinion. Abu ʿAmr seems to have understood that sometimes silence is not emptiness. It is thought. It is restraint. It is respect for the truth.

And perhaps that explains why his words survived. He may have spoken rarely, but people remembered what he said.

What Remains After the Fire

There is another detail about Abu ʿAmr—one that feels almost mythic. Traditional accounts tell us that towards the end of his life, he burned his books and notebooks as he turned increasingly towards religious devotion.

Imagine that. A lifetime of learning reduced to ash. And yet, strangely, the books disappeared while the words remained. That is one of the mysteries of history.

We think monuments and libraries are what preserve civilisation. Sometimes they do. But sometimes all that survives is a sentence. A name. A memory. A few words carried across centuries.

And one of those sentences brought me back to Baghdad.

Heaven Upon Heaven

When I look back now, I don’t remember only the difficult things. I remember colleagues. Friends. Tea in the evenings. The strange courage of ordinary life in an extraordinary environment. I remember the feeling of living inside a city whose present was turbulent, but whose past was immense.

And perhaps that is what Baghdad does to those who spend time there. It makes you look backwards. It makes you feel the weight of time. It reminds you that every city is a palimpsest—one story written over another.

I went there to work in a bank. I left with something I had not expected—a sense of having briefly stepped into history. Years later, I can still see it: The Tigris. The dusty streets. The blast walls. The armoured vehicles. The people. The conversations. And somewhere beyond all of that, the Baghdad of another age.

So, I return to Abu ʿAmr: “Those who lived and died in Baghdad were moved from heaven to heaven.”

Was Baghdad heaven? No. I saw too much suffering to romanticise it. But I understand, perhaps a little better now, what he may have meant. Because Baghdad is not simply one city. It is layer upon layer of civilisation. One Baghdad beneath another. And perhaps that is its greatest mystery.

You may leave Baghdad. But Baghdad does not quite leave you.