MOSUL

city in northern iraq (mesopotamia).

Mosul (also spelled Mawsil) is located on the west bank of the Tigris river opposite the ancient city of Nineveh. It was a significant center during the early Islamic period with a sizable Christian population. Destroyed by the Mongols, Mosul regained importance under the Ottoman Turks. Some of the older mosques and churches survived.

Located on the trade routes that led to eastern Anatolia and thence to the Black Sea, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran to the south, goods from Mosul were shipped by raft down the Tigris to Baghdad or overland to Aleppo and Damascus or points north. The city was a center for regional and international trade: Grain export, the manufacture of cotton thread and fabric (whence the term muslin ), and trafficking in sheep hides and wool were important activities.

The government at Istanbul regained administrative control of the city from local rulers in 1834; in 1879 it became a separate Ottoman province that included Kirkuk, Arbil, and Sulaymaniya, but real power remained in the hands of local families—Mustafa Çelebi Sabunci was virtual dictator from 1895 to 1911. The population of the mud-brick-walled city in the later nineteenth century was estimated at forty thousand, including seven thousand Christians and fifteen hundred Jews. By World War I the population of Mosul had risen to seventy thousand, and the city became the economic and administrative capital of the Ottoman province of Mosul, one of three (Baghdad, Basra, Mosul) that would make up modern Iraq.

With the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the consequent protracted negotiations between Britain and Turkey for sovereignty over the city, Mosul became part of Iraq rather than Turkey. Though its stature as a center of trade waned as Baghdad became Iraq's capital, the city continued to expand. During the 1940s and 1950s many of the traditional families came to own much of the land and were instrumental, together with local Arab nationalists, in fomenting a rebellion against Abd al-Karim Qasim in 1959. With the discovery of oil nearby and the construction of a refinery, Mosul has retained its importance. It has rail links to Baghdad, Syria, and Turkey, a university, an airport, and a religiously diverse population. The population (estimated at 1,846,500 in 2004) is mainly Kurdish with a significant Christian minority and a Yazidi population that lives in the Sinjar mountains to the west of Mosul.

see also qasim, abd al-karim.

Bibliography

Batatu, Hanna. The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Baʿthists, and Free Officers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.

reeva s. simon