Fascinating (and depressing) story in Salon.com -
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/08/26/culture/index.html
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A
The death of Al Mutanabbi Street
Iraqi culture was reborn when Saddam fell, only to die again. A report from
Baghdad's fear-haunted literary cafes.
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By Phillip Robertson
Aug. 26, 2005 | BAGHDAD, Iraq --
The sea has swallowed the honey
And love turned to ashes in the roads.
-- Hamid Mokhtar, "The Rabble"
Near the old Jewish quarter of Baghdad, at Al Rasheed Street, there is a
meandering alley named after the Iraqi poet Al Mutanabbi. The poet's street
branches away from Al Rasheed and heads down through a tissue of dilapidated
buildings with thin columns that hold up warped balconies. Bookstores of
every description occupy the street-level spaces, selling technical manuals,
ornate copies of the Quran and a nice selection of pirated software. Al
Mutanabbi then runs downhill toward the mud-brown bend of the Tigris until
veering west at a covered market and the high walls of an old mosque school.
Right at the bend in the road is Baghdad's legendary literary cafe, the
Shabandar, where for decades writers and intellectuals have come to drink
tea and smoke tobacco from water pipes. The place is smoke-scarred and
dirty. When there is electricity, which is almost never, the fans do not
cool the air at all. Literary men in their shirt-sleeves sit and smoke.
On Tuesday, Aug. 2, walking carefully under the white-hot sun, a man carried
a bag down Al Mutanabbi Street and walked into Hajji Qais Anni's stationery
store, stayed for a short time, then left without his package. When the
package exploded a short time later, the blast killed Hajji Qais, who was
sitting near the door where he kept watch over his shop. The bomb set fire
to his place, and it is now a blackened shell on bookseller's row.
Hajji Qais had been on Al Mutanabbi street for 10 years and the vendors all
knew him. He sold greeting cards for births and anniversaries along with
Christmas and Easter gifts, cologne and pens. He wore a beard and was also
known as a devout Sunni who had no problem hiring Shia workers or spending
time with Christian colleagues. Aside from stocking a few items related to
Christian holidays, there was nothing unusual in his shop. He wasn't a known
member of any political party, and he was, according to his neighbors on Al
Mutanabbi Street, a generous man who often gave money to the poor.
No one in the district will speak openly about who killed him, including his
own son.
Ahmed Dulaimi, a young guitarist for Iraq's only heavy metal band, told a
story that has been going around Baghdad these last few weeks. There was an
ice seller selling ice from a small shop on the sidewalk in the Dora
neighborhood. One hot day, a man came up to him with a gun and said, "You
shouldn't be selling ice because the Prophet Mohammed didn't have ice in his
time." Then the gunman shot the ice seller dead. This story terrifies Iraqis
but they often laugh when they recount it, because it is absurd that anyone
would get killed for selling ice or shaving a beard. It is also true that
the ice-seller anecdote follows a pattern of killings around the capital
where Islamic militants have regularly assassinated Iraqis for violating
strict, and utterly random, codes of behavior. The point of the ice-seller
story is that now, anyone in Iraq can be killed for any reason at all. After
Hajji Qais was killed, more than one person mentioned these spontaneous
assassinations, and they spoke about them the way they'd describe a
sandstorm, an all-encompassing thing that no one can stop.
Baghdad's literary neighborhood has a long history of dissent and a
well-practiced tolerance of other ideas. Under Saddam, Al Mutanabbi Street
was a center for small anti-regime cells who published illegal copies of
their tracts, under fake names. Because the place was known for intellectual
resistance to the regime and as a center for liberal ideas, the government
hated it. In the manic days after the fall of Baghdad, a flood of Western
journalists came to Al Mutanabbi Street to meet dissident Iraqi writers, and
in the cafes and shops there was always the excited roar of conversation.
Men clinked their tea glasses on small cups, they gestured, hatched their
schemes. English translation was a hot commodity in those early days. I was
at the Shabandar cafe in May 2003 when Amir Sayegh, an Iraqi Christian, came
over and told me how he worshiped Sidney Sheldon over Joyce and Faulkner as
the greatest writer to ever write in English; he had no use for the literary
canon, but he took writers in and made them part of the neighborhood.
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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