Books are back for Bohemians of new Baghdad

Daily Telegraph ^ | 4 Aug 2004 | Adrian Blomfield

[propertius]

Baghdad By Adrian Blomfield in Baghdad (Filed: 04/08/2004)

Saddam Hussein would be grumbling in his prison cell if he knew.

Al-Mutanabi Street, the book-lined alley whose spirit he tried for decades to crush, is again filled with customers, from communists to clerics, who would once have faced jail for reading some of the material on offer.

One man browsing the stalls was Sami al-Mutairy, a one-eyed poet and playwright who wrote The Tribes of Fear, a thinly-veiled attack on Saddam's attempts to sow ethnic disunity. He was imprisoned and tortured by the Ba'ath party's secret police.

"They used a ring to grind out my eye," he said. "They said I was a communist. Well, that was true enough - I am a Trotskyite. But I don't think the punishment fitted the crime."

Many of those around him, vendors and customers alike, were also jailed.

Abdul Rasool Ali, a member of the once-persecuted Shia religious majority, was arrested three times, accused of selling texts espousing his creed. After a confession obtained under torture, he was jailed for eight years.

But he considers that he escaped lightly in comparison with his brothers. One was executed, the other disappeared.

"Before we had to be very careful what we sold," Mr Ali said. "But now, look, I have everything in open view."

The atmosphere of repression may have vanished but al-Mutanabi is in dire need of new material if it hopes to return to its mid-20th century heyday. Most of the books on sale were published no later than the 1960s, donated to the vendors by rich Iraqis who emptied their libraries before fleeing the country.

Perhaps the most unsuccessful book on display is Konec Dobrodruzstvi, a Czech translation of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair.

"I've been trying to get rid of that for 14 years," said the vendor, George Sabah. "No one seems to want it."

Iraq's intellectuals are starting to write again. But they now face a new threat from extremists fighting American troops and Iraq's interim government. These insurgents are also targeting academics and, according to the Iraqi Union of University Lecturers, have killed more than 250 since Saddam's fall.

In the Shahbander Cafe, frequented by Iraq's intellectual classes since 1917, the collapse of society dominated the conversation.

"If only more Americans had read more Hobbes maybe we would not be in the mess we are today," said Muhammad Mubarak, a philosopher who has written biographies of Francis Bacon and David Hume. "His predictions of the collapse of society are very apt."

"If only more Americans could read at all," Mr al-Mutairy said, "although, as a communist, I could never agree with Hobbes."

Haji Mohammad al-Kheishaly, Shahbander's proprietor for 30 years, said: "Things have gone back to the way they used to be. Whether that is because Saddam has gone or because I have banned dominoes to improve the standard of conversation, I don't know."

[propertius]

"If only more Americans could read at all," Mr al-Mutairy said, "although, as a communist, I could never agree with Hobbes."

Tosser, as we English say. Though sorry he lost an eye, of course.

[cyborg]

He needs to get Sky TV and watch Oprah the woman 'who got America reading again'.

[Valin]

Bump