Umar's 636 garrison became Iraq's only seaport
Basra began in 636 as a Rashidun military camp and grew into an Islamic Golden Age knowledge and trade hub with the first mosque outside Arabia. Today it is Iraq's third city and sole coastal outlet, repeatedly shelled in modern wars yet anchored by oil and the Shatt al-Arab.
The first camp was pitched by the commander Utba ibn Ghazwan on the ruins of a Persian military settlement, and the spot is still marked by the Imam Ali Mosque some 15 kilometres southwest of today's city. In 639 Umar made the camp a city of five districts under Abu Musa al-Ash'ari, laid out in a circle on the Partho-Sasanian pattern. The name may mean overwatcher, fitting a base facing the Sassanids, or derive from an Aramaic word for a place of huts. Summer heat routinely tops 50 °C.
Why anyone chose the site is unclear: it had no fresh water, no sea access and little farmland. One settler told Umar his people had only a reedy salt marsh, with food reaching them as though through an ostrich's throat. Yet salaried soldiers created a lucrative market, and investors built irrigation over some 57,000 hectares; enslaved Zanj labourers scraped salty topsoil into ridges that still stand, though most workers were paid free men. Too shallow to flush salt, the canals were largely abandoned after the Zanj sacked the city in 871 and the Qarmatians in 923.
Under the Abbasids Basra became an intellectual capital, home to a school of grammar rivalling Kufa's and to the polymath Ibn al-Haytham, the writer al-Jahiz and the mystic Rabia Basri. A Buyid governor built a library of 15,000 books, and Sinbad's fictional voyages set out from its harbour.
The Mongols sacked it in 1258, the Portuguese took it in 1526, and British troops captured it in 1914. In 2003 it was the first city seized in the invasion of Iraq, and half its people had fled during the Iran–Iraq War.
Source: Basra
