The Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 656/1258 has often been described as a medieval holocaust, an extremely violent act, which led not only to the collapse of the ‘Abbāsid caliphate (750–1258) and the city of Baghdad, but to the decline of Islamic civilisation as a whole. Clichés such as: ‘If the Mongols had not burnt the libraries of Baghdad in the 13th century, we Arabs would have had so much science, that we would long since have invented the atomic bomb’ can still be heard in the Arab world. Moreover, this anachronistic view has been revived in the last decade when the Mongol conquest of Baghdad became a favourable metaphor for the American occupation of 2003. Descriptions of the fall of Baghdad as an act of infidels’ vandalism directed against Islamic or Iraqi civilisation or as a burst of violence that took centuries to overcome prevail in contemporary Arabic literature and in Muslim Internet sites, as well as in some of the Western general surveys that seek to explain Iraq from Chinggis Khan to Saddam Hussein and after.

This chapter aims to look afresh at the question of violence in the conquest of Baghdad. While not denying that the conquest was a violent occupation, it highlights the non-violent means that were involved in it, and the ways in which such violence was understood and legitimised by the contemporaneous Muslim writers. On the basis of biographical literature from both the Īl-Khānate and the Mamlūk sultanate, it argues that the violence was not addressed towards the Islamic civilisation as a whole, and that the non-violent means and Baghdad's swift and overall successful restoration contributed significantly to the legitimation and marginalisation of the violence involved in the conquest in the collective memory of the Eastern Islamic world until the rise of nationalism. As a starting point I would like to refer to a unique and highly personal eye-witness account of the conquest, which is quite different from its conventional descriptions.

The evidence in question is that of ‘Abd al-Mu’min b. Yūsuf b. Fākhir Ṣafī al-Dīn Urmawī, one of the more illustrious musical artists and theoreticians in the Muslim world.