The Clock and the Hunchback
The remnants of the al-Nuri Mosque, destroyed in the final days of the battle of Mosul (photo: William Daniels).
“Mosul is a city that dreams of the past,” says Saqr Zakaria, a 30-year-old activist from the devastated city in northern Iraq. “We hear about Mosul in the 20s, of its Golden Age, of the important families, and the writers and poets who once lived here. But my experience of the city has been one of occupation, radicalisation and weapons.” Zakaria is among many young Maslawis who are working to rebuild their city, which was occupied by IS in 2014, and reduced to rubble in the subsequent US coalition war to liberate it three years later.
A year ago, Zakaria took over a heritage home in the medieval part of the old city, which he turned into a period-themed arts space and café called Bytna (Our Home). Inside, several rooms decorated with antiques, local crafts and old photographs provide venues for community workshops. A traditional teahouse serves over a hundred locals daily. “We want people to come and connect with Mosul’s past and its real identity,” he says. “Many Maslawis have no knowledge of what the city was once like.”
As one of the world’s oldest cities, Mosul has many pasts to turn to. The medieval city, where Zakaria’s arts space is, was built on the western flank of the Tigris river. A short walk away are the remains of the 12th-century al-Nuri Mosque and its leaning minaret, built by the city’s Seljuk ruler, and destroyed during Mosul’s occupation by the armed jihadist group Islamic State (IS). Beyond al-Nuri is a Dominican monastery established in the 19th century, which brought the region’s first printing press and modern manuscripts library. Further on is a complex of churches, including the remains of a 7th-century chapel of the ancient Syriac order. And on the other side of the river are the ruins of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, dating back to 6,000 BCE. These buildings point not only to Mosul’s deep history, but also its diversity. The city was once a major Levantine hub on the trade route to India, where communities of different faiths and languages co-existed for centuries. Yet decades of sectarianism and conflict, compounded by IS’s occupation, eroded this social fabric. Mosul became known as a homogeneous, religiously conservative city, and a hotbed of terrorism.
This historic coexistence is now the subject of Unesco’s $110m cultural heritage recovery project, which aims to “revive the spirit” of the devastated city. “Mosul is Iraq’s second city, and it has always been an important centre for culture and trade,” says Paolo Fontani, who leads Unesco’s mission in Iraq. “We want to revive its spirit as a city of exchanges and a city of culture.” With $50m funding sourced from the UAE, three major landmarks of the old city that were destroyed during the Battle for Mosul will be rebuilt: the al-Nuri Mosque and its leaning minaret, the 19th-century Dominican monastery, and the 19th-century Syriac-Catholic Cathedral of al-Tahera. “These icons stood for centuries as the living symbols of Mosul’s cultural ethos and its rich and diverse civilisational identity,” says the UAE’s Minister of Culture Noura Al Kaabi. The UAE opposes political Islam and projects an image of diversity and tolerance, which it has also applied to its presence in Mosul. “We are committed to playing a decisive role in bringing peace and prosperity to all parts of our region, including Mosul and Iraq,” she adds. Alongside this is an EU-funded project to restore heritage homes, revive the city’s crafts, and build new schools.
But can a city that has lost its social fabric be restored through its buildings alone, and which past do Unesco and its partners hope to restore it to? The questions are pertinent not just to Mosul, but to several Middle Eastern cities that have been destroyed in the last 10 years and require reconstruction. In Syria, the architectural heritage of cities like Homs and Aleppo are being rebuilt, while millions of their original inhabitants were made refugees. This intractable relationship between the built environment and its social fabric highlights both the role and the limitations of architecture and cultural heritage preservation in a post-conflict setting.
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The name Mosul is believed to come from “wasala”, an Arabic word for link. For millennia, this city served as a crossroads linking North to South, and East to West. Muslin, a cotton-based fabric, is said to have derived its name from its Mosul traders, the musuliyin, who imported it from South Asia to Europe. Culturally, the city was closer to the regions in modern-day Syria and Turkey than it was to Iraq’s capital, Baghdad. “As the historical land of the Assyrians, Upper Mesopotamia, where Nineveh (now Mosul) lies, belongs as much to Syria to the West, as it does to Iraq to the South,” says Percy Kemp, a Paris-based author and historian of Mosul. “Etymologically, the name Syria derives from the name Assyrian, so that one might say that Syria belongs to Mosul as much as Mosul belongs to Syria.” The medieval city grew on the Western banks of the Tigris, but has since expanded onto the Eastern Bank. These two sides are now referred to colloquially as the “Left” and “Right” coasts of the city.
“In modern history, two conditions had to be met for Mosul to prosper and flourish,” explains Kemp. “The city had to have unhindered access to the Mediterranean Sea, so as to be able to fulfil its role as a trade link between East and West. And concurrently, a strong and autonomous local power needed to be in place, failing which the advantages of trade would be siphoned off by the central government or else by some powerful neighbour.” The city declined under Mongol rule, which began in the 13th century, but was redeveloped in the 16th century by the Ottomans, before prospering under the rule of a local dynasty, the Jalili family, who were appointed the walis or governors of Mosul in the 18th and 19th centuries. As such, the modern erosion of Mosul’s cosmopolitan identity began with the drawing of borders by British and French colonial powers in the early 20th century. In 1926, Mosul became a part of Iraq, whose capital was Baghdad, and its natural geographical connections to Syria and Turkey were disrupted. “Successive governments after that turned Mosul into a local Iraqi city, rather than maintaining its international links,” says Omar Mohammed, a Paris-based historian from Mosul, who lived through the IS occupation and blogged about daily life there under the pseudonym Mosul Eye.
Today, the city’s population has a Sunni Muslim majority. Yet traces of Mosul’s more diverse social fabric are still found in the old city’s urban layout and buildings. “Mosul’s powerful families gathered Christians and Jews to live in their quarters,” says Najeeb Michaeel, Archbishop of Mosul’s Chaldean Church, who was born in Bab al-Bayd, one of the city’s historic gates. “Every quarter felt like its own city.” Across the rest of the Ottoman Empire, non-Muslim minorities lived in closed quarters, and their gates were shut to strangers after the evening curfew. Mosul was the only major city where these Christian and Jewish quarters remained open, a sign of the co-existence it enjoyed under local rule.
The market life that developed along the city’s Ottoman ramparts helped foster this diversity. Mohammed Hadid, the Iraqi politician and father of the late architect Zaha Hadid, describes the habits and lifestyle of Mosul’s merchant class in the early 20th century in his 2007 book Memoirs. His family lived in a series of interconnected homes around the Bab al-Saray, or Palace Gate, which still houses markets: “The home was divided into separate quarters for men and women,” he wrote. “The entrance to the house had four doors, leading to these quarters. The walls along the main roads had no windows.” These Ottoman walls had simply been incorporated into homes as Mosul expanded over time.
Iraq’s political upheavals, however, often led to backlashes against the city’s minorities. Michaeel recalls the aftermath of a Communist revolt in Mosul when he was a child in the early 1960s. At the time, many of the city’s Christians were members of the Iraqi Communist Party. “The reprisals targeted Christians in the city and in the surrounding villages,” he says. “People were tied to cars and dragged by their feet across the city, or they were hanged outside the Mosul hospital.” Yet despite violence such as this, Mosul’s cosmopolitan spirit survived through most of the 20th century. During the city’s annual Spring Festival, for instance, the statue of the Virgin Mary outside the Dominican monastery would be strewn with offerings and images from the city’s different communities: Christians, Muslim Arabs, Kurds, Turcomen and Yazidis. It was an indication of the city’s heterogeneous nature: many languages, many faiths, largely coexisting despite the tensions and differences between them.
Fast-forward to June 2014, and Mosul, now a city of more than one million people, was seized by IS overnight. The city became a part of its self-proclaimed “caliphate”, which consisted of vast swathes of mostly deserted territory in Iraq and Syria. IS placed Mosul’s culture at the heart of its propaganda. The city’s Muslim heritage that did not conform to more puritanical understandings of Islam was its first target. After destroying all of the historic Muslim shrines, including 12 conical domes, it blew up the tomb of the Prophet Jonas, a pilgrimage site for all of the city’s religions. Then it turned its destruction to the ancients, who were not only preIslamic, but potent symbols of Iraqi nationalism: the Assyrian city of Nimrud, the ruins of the Kingdom of Hatra in the Nineveh Plains, and artefacts at the Mosul museum. Finally, it drove out minorities from both the city and the Nineveh Plains. This assault resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, who fled to cities in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
The US-led coalition’s battle to liberate Mosul saw further cultural destruction – and all but obliterated the city. Mosul’s ancient churches, believed to be hiding spots for IS fighters, were reduced to rubble in air strikes. Then, as IS came close to defeat, the al-Nuri mosque with its leaning minaret imploded, with both sides accusing the other of destroying it. According to the UN, 800,000 residents fled the city and more than 40,000 civilians were reportedly killed. Throughout the research for this piece, the complete destruction of the city to get rid of IS was often described to me privately as being vengeful or unnecessary.
IS made a deliberate spectacle of its iconoclasm, and Western media embraced its propaganda videos as a symbol of a clash of civilisations. The joint Unesco and UAE project adopts a similar narrative, of using culture to combat radicalisation. “The youth of Mosul who [are working] side by side with their Muslim and Christian peers on the mosque and church sites[...] will be able to attest to the power of fraternity and tolerance,” says Al Kaabi. But in adopting this tack, the project ignores the less-documented and often overlooked decline of Mosul, which began several decades before IS’s take over. Decades of autocratic one-party rule had already eroded political life in the city. The Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing UN-embargo on Iraq in the 90s, isolated the country. Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein’s “Arabisation” policies brought Arab Sunni tribes to the Nineveh Plains, and the giant dam that he built north of the city in the early 1980s destabilised buildings in the old city.
In the 1990s, Saddam, who fashioned himself as a secular Arab nationalist, launched the Faith Campaign, aimed at reviving Islam in public life to consolidate his rule as the country was crippled by sanctions. “In Mosul, this gave a pathway to the Muslim Brotherhood,” explains Rasha Al Aqeedi, a senior analyst and the head of the nonstate actors programme in the human security unit at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy. “Mosul was always religiously conservative, but its approach to Islam was closer to [the] Sufi approaches of the Levant. When the Brotherhood took platform, these Sufi traditions were frowned upon. Discrimination and intolerance towards other religions grew.”
Sectarian troubles after the US-led invasion in 2003 caused further devastation to Mosul. “After the regime fell, we hoped for progress and an opening to the world. Unfortunately, we went backwards and not forwards,” says Abu Bakr Kanaan, director of Mosul’s Sunni Endowment Office, a religious authority that owns the al-Nuri Mosque and minaret, among other landmarks in the city. The newly-formed Iraqi government marginalised Mosul because of its majority Sunni population, which was viewed as sympathetic to Saddam and Sunni Islamist groups. Al-Qaeda took hold of the city in 2006, and staged frequent attacks. “We experienced a brain drain. The city’s doctors, lawyers and engineers started leaving,” says Kanaan.
During this period, Mosul’s non-muslim minorities were targeted. “Many Yazidis who worked in the public sector once lived in Mosul – Saddam had given them land and a home in the city – but they all left after the fall of the regime in 2003,” explains Nasr Hajj, a Yazidi activist from Bashiqa, a neighbouring district in the Nineveh Plains that is home to an important Yazidi community. Mosul’s Christians, meanwhile, dwindled to a few thousand. To compound this, Iran-backed Shi’a militias, who were sent by the Iraqi government on the pretext of controlling al-Qaeda, subjected the city’s civilians to frequent acts of torture and humiliation. This included the forced displacement of Sunni Shabaks, a Kurdish-speaking minority, from the Nineveh Plains. “It was a fertile recruitment ground for al-Qaeda,” says Al Aqeedi.
Today, the continued marginalisation of Mosul by Iraqi authorities hampers attempts to develop a new civic life. In October 2019, when youth protests took hold across Iraq, Mosul and other Sunni-majority cities remained silent, fearing retribution from the government if they participated. A Maslawi theatre troupe did, however, release a music video on YouTube in solidarity with the protestors elsewhere. The song’s title, ‘Bliya Djara’, means “no solution” in a slang that has remnants of Turkish. The song itself is a pastiche of the Italian anti-fascist folk song ‘Bella Ciao’.
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Mosul’s people built their city’s shrines, palaces, mosques, markets synagogues and churches, but today Unesco and the UAE, alongside other organisations, are attempting the reverse process: by rebuilding the city’s heritage, they hope to revive its social fabric. “Mosul is coming back,” says Unesco’s Fontani. “I speak to Maslawis and there is a lot of willingness to revive the city. I’m confident they will make Mosul even better than it was before.” Unesco and the UAE’s joint project focuses on the reconstruction of the city’s religious buildings, rather than its market activity. “These buildings represent the essence of the social fabric of the city. Therefore, restoring these buildings, is an important step in restoring the social fabric of Mosul,” says Al Kaabi. The challenge of rebuilding Mosul has no precedent, adds Fontani. “We hope it will serve as an example in how to rebuild other cities that have been destroyed by conflict.”
This idea that reconstruction can restore coexistence was echoed during Pope Francis’ visit to Iraq in March 2021, which aimed to highlight Iraq’s dwindling Christian community and encourage the hundreds of thousands who had left the country to return. In Mosul, where just dozens of Christians now live in the city, the Pope spoke amid the rubble and ruins of al-Tahera, which is part of a complex of four churches that also includes an Armenian church, a Syriac-Orthodox cathedral, and a 7th-century chapel, known as the “old” al-Tahera. Together, they outline the age and diversity of this community. “Such a rich cultural and religious fabric […] is weakened by the loss of any of its members,” said the Pope, who also highlighted the relationship between the Dominican Monastery’s clock tower, which once rang in the city every 15 minutes, and al-Nuri’s leaning minaret, whose prominence in the old city’s skyline helped orient visitors. “The two buildings call on each other and serve as points of orientation,” explains Fontani. “One tells the time, the other indicates your position in the city.”
The biggest physical challenge in Unesco’s reconstruction efforts will be restoring this 12th-century leaning minaret, al-Hadba, which means “hunchback”. After its destruction, only the base of the 45m-high minaret was still standing. Omar Al Taqa, a Unesco engineer leading the reconstruction of the complex, says it took months to clear the site. “We cleared 5,000 tonnes of rubble and found remnants of exploded IEDs,” he explains. “In the al-Nuri Mosque, we found 20 unexploded IEDs hidden within the walls of the mosque and active bombs in the prayer hall.” Today, 44,000 pieces of the structure’s original material have been collected and indexed. “We don’t know exactly who destroyed the mosque and the minaret, but people who were living in the area at the time say IS exploded the complex, because it was the seat of their caliphate, and they didn’t want to return it to a liberated city.”
The reconstruction will preserve the minaret’s famous lean, which was noted as early as the 14th century by the traveller Ibn Battuta. Al Taqa believes that the lean is connected to the changing temperature of the bricks. “The bricks grow and shrink throughout the day according to the temperature,” he explains. A monitoring system has been installed at the base of the site, to measure its width, temperature and inclination. “Until now the minaret [has been] stable and we’re not seeing any movement.”
In addition, an architectural competition in April selected designs by a team led by Egyptian architect Salah El Din Samir Hareedy for al-Nuri’s renovation, as well as an adjoining park and school. “It will serve as a place for worship, reflection, learning and exchange. Its gardens and memorial site will allow residents and visitors to engage with the history of Mosul,” says Al Kaabi. But many original features will be preserved following the results of a survey that was conducted among the city’s residents. Al Taqa’s team is working with craftsmen from Mosul to rebuild the wooden foundations, and the alabaster marble columns of the prayer hall. The mosque and minaret may take on a new significance in the city after its reconstruction. “Al-Hadba is a landmark in the city,” says Al Taqa, who is 30 and a resident of Mosul. “But before it was destroyed, young people like me didn’t visit it much. When we were in our 20s and IS took the city, we couldn’t go there at all. But we have stories about it from our fathers and grandfathers, who even went up to the top of the minaret.”
Just a few minutes walk away, the Dominican monastery is remembered as an important centre of learning in the city. In addition to its prominent clock tower, the stone two-domed building includes a refectory, individual monastic cells, and a library. “Three elements make up a monastery: the church for prayer, the refectory reflects communal life, and the library is a space for contemplation and the study of God,” explains Olivier Poquillon, a French brother of the Dominican order who is overseeing the reconstruction.
The current premises were built in the 1870s by the French emperor Napoleon III. Princess Eugenie, Napoleon’s wife, gifted a clock to the church, through which the building’s church gets its name “Our Lady of The Hour”. In Arabic, it is colloquially known as al-Saa, meaning “the clock”. “It was the first clock in Mesopotamia,” says Poquillon. “It may appear like a mundane object today, but at the time it represented high technology.” Until the 1930s, the area around the al-Saa hosted the diplomatic outpost for the French Consul and the Vatican.
The Dominicans opened the region’s first modern schools for boys and girls in the building in the 1840s, which attracted both Muslim and Christians pupils, as well as the first printing press and manuscripts library. Thinkers, poets, and musicians of all faiths and communities visited the monastery to access these resources. “The first Arabic Bible, and the first book of Kurdish grammar were printed here,” says Poquillon. “Manuscripts were once the reserve of Mosul’s prominent families,” explains Mohammed, the historian, “but the library made these records more widely accessible to anyone in the region. It helped democratise learning.”
Both historic and contemporary attempts to diminish this influence are visible around the building, however, such as a mosque facing the church that Saddam built in the 1980s. During IS’s occupation, the complex served as a military court and execution ground, its clock tower was damaged, and parts of the clock itself were looted. Tiles from the ceiling have fallen and when the walls were stripped a Unesco clearance team uncovered hidden weapons. The library’s 800 manuscripts were transferred to safety in Erbil in 2014, the capital of the Kurdistan region, where they remain. Today, the former girls’ school, which closed down in the 1960s, is used for parking cars.
An earlier renovation of the monastery in the 1990s focused on the building’s interiors. A symbolic colour scheme and restoration style was developed to show the city’s suffering and resilience after the Iran-Iraq war. The vaulted ceilings are patterned with a mosaic of interlocked white, grey, blue and earth red tiles, with calligraphic inscriptions in Arabic on the rims of the rounded arches. But today, the recovery efforts go beyond physical challenges towards intangible ones: reviving the monastery’s social and educational role. “It’s not about re-decorating,” says Poquillon. “I don’t want the building to become a museum. It’s about allowing the social, religious and innovative elements that make up the space to continue.” But can this be achieved when much of the community the monastery used to serve has now left the city?
In this spirit, Mohammed, who is also active in several efforts to revive the city’s heritage, is working on the development of a “green path:” a tree-planting project between the al-Nuri Mosque and al-Saa. “We can use public space to create stronger connections between the two buildings,” he explains. The plan, he adds, has a precedent. In the 1930s, the French consul commissioned drawings for a public garden connecting the mosque to the church. The housing between both buildings prevents such a garden today, so instead he is planting trees in the streets.
But while the spirit of coexistence is present in the urban outline of the old city, it is no longer part of its living social fabric. Sabah Adeeb works as a security guard at al-Saa and grew up in the old city of Mosul. But today he lives alone in Tel Kaif, an Assyrian Christian town outside of the city. “My family’s home is close to the al-Saa church,” he explains, “but we sold it in 2012. Many Christians had started leaving.” His wife and son live in the Netherlands, and his daughter is in the USA. “I’m waiting for us to be reunited with them again,” he says, “but I also urge the Christians to come back to Mosul.”
This issue is more acutely felt in the desolate remains of the al-Tahera Cathedral, the third building to be restored by Unesco and the UAE. The church was used as a military court by IS and subsequently destroyed by a coalition airstrike. All that is left today are four bare walls. Anas Al Zayad, the Unesco engineer overseeing the reconstruction, says that simply rebuilding the cathedral is not enough. “The complex is entirely destroyed,” he explains. “If Christians visit al-Tahera once it is complete, they will see all the destruction around it. They won’t want to come back and live here.”
Even if this was addressed, it is unlikely that those who fled Iraq and now live abroad will come back to the battered city and country. Across the river in the Left Coast area of the city, the Bishara church holds the only regular Sunday service in the city, attracting about 50 to 70 people. Outside, some locals have said, young Muslims gather to watch the service, curious to know about the city’s Christian heritage which, unlike their forebears, they have no connection to.
Beyond Unesco’s remit, other recovery and reconstruction projects are also seeking new ways of defining the city. Beneath the Tomb of the Prophet Jonas, German archaeologists working with Mosul’s Sunni Endowment Office and the Iraqi Ministry of Culture uncovered the remains of an ancient Assyrian palace. “The tomb is a landmark of Mosul’s heritage and civilisation,” says Kanaan, the endowment office’s director. “We set the first stone to rebuild it as soon as East Mosul was liberated, while the West was still under occupation.”
The Tomb’s reconstruction also evokes questions of Mosul’s religious identity. Sufism, a more syncretic form of Islam, was dominant in the city until the early 20th century. “It was common for us to visit the tombs of dead saints,” says Al Aqeedi, recalling Sufi traditions that persisted in Mosul during her childhood. “The Faith Campaign put an end to that.” IS’s puritanical ideology, and more orthodox forms of Islam, forbid the worship of saints. But today, Mosul’s wealthier families are contributing to the reconstruction of the mosque attached to the Tomb. “Local families have asked to restore the mosque themselves, without the government’s support,” adds Kanaan.
Such are the layers of Mosul’s collective memory, that other communities also claim the shrines as theirs. Hajj, the Yazidi activist from neighbouring Bashiqa, says that the shrines of the Old City, including the Tomb of Jonas, could have Yazidi origins. In their tradition, he explains, Yazidis also built shrines dedicated to dead saints. “Some of the shrines in the Old City have features of Yazidi shrines,” he says. “We believe that over time, they were transformed into mosques or husseiniyas [a site of mourning for Shi’a Muslims].” The origins of the syncretic and ageless Yazidi religion are disputed and, today, the majority view themselves as a distinct ethnic group. “We will not be participating in the reconstruction of the shrine, because we feel there are still tensions between us and the Muslim community,” says Hajj. “Nonetheless, a Muslim woman from the city donated towards rebuilding the shrines that were destroyed by IS in Bashiqa.”
But some memories of Mosul, and the buildings attached to them, were deemed not worth preserving by local authorities. Among these is the modernist National Insurance building in West Mosul, which was designed in the 1960s by the pioneering Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji. The building had a slim row of arched windows that was typical of Chadirji’s experiments in blending international modernism with a local Iraqi vernacular. “It was one of the most important buildings in Mosul,” says Chadirji’s London-based widow Balkis Sharara. “Rifat was very proud of it. It was the first building he’d worked on with stone, whereas buildings in Iraq were normally made of brick.” But Maslawis remember how IS executed prisoners by throwing them from the heights of the seven-storey building. It was demolished soon after liberation. “The IS occupation is part of the memory of the building and of the city,” adds Sharara, who opposed the demolition.
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The reconstruction of Mosul’s cultural heritage may seem odd given the city’s overwhelming humanitarian requirements. “Even the basic services like electricity and water, schools and hospitals, aren’t available,” says Unesco’s Al Zayad. Hundreds of thousands of residents have yet to return. Amid all this, however, Maslawis are adamant that cultural heritage can help restore the city’s identity. “We’re seeing Mosul’s young people coming together to rebuild the city and reject religious fundamentalism. They give me a lot of hope,” says Michaeel, the city’s archbishop. It is a sentiment with which Kanaan agrees. “I want Mosul to be a city of peace, a city of love. I want my Christian and Yazidi brothers to return to the city,” he says. “We are working on healing our wounds and bringing the people back to the city hand in hand. News reports say that Mosul is a place of terrorism, from which terrorism sprung. This is not true, Mosul is the city of peace, coexistence and love.”
But other, intangible, factors may be needed for the city’s “spirit” to revive. “You can’t recover Mosul’s identity without restoring its international connections,” says Mohammed. “Mosul has never been a local city, and it should never be. Post-IS is our chance to put the city on the global map.” To achieve this, however, more must be done than restoring the city’s architecture. “The essential characteristic of a crossroad – and Mosul is a crossroad – is that it cannot exist by and for it itself,” says Kemp, “It can only exist by facilitating the flow of life, or the flow of trade if you prefer, between other places that lie North, South, East and West of it.”
Words Lemma Shehadi
Photographs William Daniels, Ivor Prickett, Tommy Trenchard, Teun Voten and Iva Zimova
This article was originally published in Disegno #29. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.