تفاصيل الرسالة العلمية

Iraq and its historical geography have not received opulent treatment in historical writing as it did at the hands of the narratives of the ancient historians. But to the forefront of its narrating historians came the Iraqi university professor and academic Salih Ahmad al Ali whose work is presented in this study entitled "Iraq in the Writings of the Historian Salih Ahmad al ? Ali".He created the valued parameters through classification of the historical lands for the locations, stations, centers, and landmarks of construction, etc., adding the important and pedigree sources, to find entry into the mothers of the books about the historical geography, the historical lands, the travels and the landmarks of lifestyle and the building plans of the cities. Al- Ali was interested in the special manner of the description of the layout of the old Islamic cities; because they marked in the most excellent way the stamp of civilization and culture in those centuries, he could rely on his method of historical science and the foundations of building for the analysis and deduction. He connected the creation of some of them with others, giving credit also to what the orient lists wrote, discussing it in his writings, but relying on the Arab Islamic, economic, and social history and so forth. As is mentioned in the main contents, he knew the historians and the geographers and others intimately who benefited the Arab Islamic culture. As al- Ali concentrated on the cultural accomplishments and the importance of the building tradition, as his studies of the plans of Baghdad in the first centuries of the Abbasid's showed, which landmarks indicated the social, administrative, economic, and political spheres, and what they meant as well for the descendants, the markets, bridges, stores, residences, palaces, and other landmarks. He dealt with those for different historical lands and Iraqi cities in the plans for instance of: Kufa, Basra, Samara, Hira, Najaf, and other Iraqi cities and districts as well as of what lies north of it, from the precise and peerless description of the earth, the road network, mosques, assembling places, different landmarks including castles, markets, centers, and stations. He got his information from plans and architecture, the most trustworthy geographical and historical sources for the description of those cities and their streets. This extended as well to the social groups and the tribes, which inhabited them before and after the process of the Islamic conquest and their standing throughout history, especially Arab history, and their role that the changes in the events demanded of them. The same is true for those cities and lands and the religious, political, and economical standing of their inhabitants. Al- Ali succeeded in conveying the objectives he wanted to convey during his writings about Iraq and in creating a connection between the cities and their landmarks and thus the profound understanding, which relies upon the historical geography, which embraces the links of space and time. What the labor of man created historically is both preserved in Iraq: the Arab and the Persian, well considered a center of civilization and cultural irradiance in the past, the present, and the future