[Reader-list] Literary culture in Baghdad from Salon.com

[Rana Dasgupta]

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.

Amir hatched a million schemes for post-Saddam Iraq. He wrote long 
advisory letters to President Bush, and he wanted to start an English 
instruction school for adults, which was reasonable and nearly 
succeeded. Amir explained to any captive listener that he was working on 
a manuscript that tracked Baghdad's exploding inventory of graffiti. 
"Saddam is coming back," he had copied down from a dust-colored wall in 
the old city right after Baghdad fell. Beneath it was the response, 
"Yes, but he's coming back through your ass." By June of last year, he 
had more than 3,000 quotations from the street and he was carefully 
adding new quotes to his archive. The same walls were rewritten, edited 
by anonymous authors, the graffiti turning against the U.S. When I left 
in September 2004, he was kind enough to give me a copy. Amir, 
compulsive chatterer, couldn't stop talking because he had years of 
unborn commentary stored for the exact moment when the regime collapsed. 
When the time had finally come, it was almost more than he could bear. 
It was Amir, Socratic in his ugliness, ex-radar technician, dissident 
spokesman, who believed Iraq could survive the occupation to scatter the 
ashes of the dictatorship.

"This is the real parliament of Iraq," a Shabandar dweller exhorted 
after the invasion. "This is where the real discussions take place." If 
the Shabandar was Iraq's parliament, then al-Sayegh was its prime 
minister. If you were a writer in Baghdad, it did not matter where you 
came from, you ended up at the Shabandar, because the cafe and the book 
district received everyone. Amir would find you there. If you were a 
thief, then your stoop was in Bab Al Sharji. For literary types, it was 
Al Mutanabbi Street. There happens to be a great symmetry in Arabic that 
binds the words for "writer" and "book" in a single sound. Book is 
"kitab," writer, "katib," and the difference is little more than a shift 
in stress when the words are spoken.

Today, the street where books and writers coexist has become a street of 
ghosts. After I returned to Iraq in late May this year, I learned that 
Amir Sayegh had fled to Canada.

Iraqis still shop in the book district, but most of the intellectuals 
who felt free to say what they thought in public are either in hiding or 
have fallen silent out of fear that spies for various armed groups will 
target them for assassination. Iraqi writers are starting to head 
underground, retreating to protected offices. Because literary culture 
is so bound to a particular neighborhood of Baghdad, an attack on Al 
Mutanabbi Street is an attack on Iraqi culture itself. This is a culture 
once so vibrant that a famous slogan in the Arab world ran, "Cairo 
writes, Beirut publishes, Baghdad reads."

A mere two and a half years after I met Amir, not a trace of his 
optimism remains, and in the district where they were once welcomed, 
many Iraqis shun foreigners. It is extremely dangerous to openly 
associate with Westerners, particularly Americans, since doing so can 
lead one to be denounced as a traitor by an insurgent group. No one 
wants to be the ice seller. Other Iraqis, who have had family members 
killed in the uprisings that spread across the country, have moved 
toward the insurgents or joined them. Those left in the middle, those 
who have no bad feelings about foreigners, are in a vanishing minority. 
Trust, always hard to find in Iraq, is extremely rare. This is a sea 
change, a shift evident in the hard looks and hesitant hand-shakes when 
we meet people in passing. Foreigners in Iraq experience this social 
breakdown in a direct way, but Iraqis suffer on a far more intense 
level. They face exactly the same threats, the evaporation of trust, the 
ever-present danger of kidnapping and assassination, but they do not 
have the option of going home to another country. The old ties that 
bound Iraqis to each other are coming apart.

In the intervening time since the fall of Baghdad, a vast thieves' 
market of looted machinery, drugs and other illegal business has 
swallowed Al Rasheed Street, the long once-elegant old boulevard that 
runs along the Tigris, sending tentacles down into the busy book 
district. Al Rasheed Street has a long colonnaded stretch that is now 
closed to traffic while lookouts for armed groups keep a close eye on 
strangers in the market. Everyone is suspicious and everyone is monitored.

NewsWhen I first heard about Hajji Qais' death, I was searching for a 
friend I made in the early days of the occupation, an Iraqi writer named 
Hamid Mokhtar, who spends a great deal of time on Al Mutanabbi Street. 
Ahmed Dulaimi went looking for him on Friday the 5th of August but there 
was no sign of Mokhtar and he found only nervous booksellers and the 
Shabandar cafe shuttered. The Shabandar is always open, even during 
Ramadan, and this was another bad sign. What started as a search for a 
writer became a search for a neighborhood.

A few days later, when I finally met Mokhtar at the Iraqi Writer's Union 
and told him about the bombing on the bookseller's row, he was not 
surprised. He had already heard the news and said without any 
hesitation, "We are all targets for assassination now." Mokhtar, who is 
well known in Iraq for spending eight years in Abu Ghraib during 
Saddam's regime, knows the feeling well. While other writers cooperated 
with the previous government, Mokhtar was one of a small number of 
intellectuals who continued to work without producing the obligatory 
paeans for the dictator. Eventually, security men came to his house and 
arrested his typewriter, and finding that unsatisfactory, eventually 
returned for the man himself. These days, rail-thin but looking much 
healthier than he did after his release from prison, the soft-spoken 
Mokhtar argues for religious tolerance and national unity. In Iraq, now 
a crucible for at two distinct fundamentalist movements, the act of 
publicly advocating these principles in Baghdad is flat-out heroic.

"When I appear on television and in magazines, that brings me to the 
attention of these [armed] groups. Many of my friends have been killed, 
even my colleagues from prison have been targeted. Before, we were 
suffering under Saddam, but now there are many Saddams." In the 
aftermath of the occupation, those loyal to any one of the numerous 
armed politico-religious gangs are indistinguishable from anyone else in 
Iraq. The threat is invisible.

Mokhtar is finding himself, along with the other writers who experienced 
a sudden shock of freedom, under some of the same unpleasant pressures 
he felt under the regime. Writers and intellectuals are being driven 
back underground or, at the very least, stymied by the uncertainty and 
fear of reprisals for advocating forbidden ideas, and an idea acceptable 
to one faction is heresy to another. Sayegh and Mokhtar's longtime enemy 
has returned not as a single tyrant, but instead as a creature the 
occupation has atomized into thousands of gunmen amped on pure hatred 
and fundamentalist Islam.

"In Saddam's time I only had one enemy, the dictator; now it is not very 
clear. He's disappeared. Saddam has become a ghost, he could be 
anywhere, " Mokhtar explained with a shrug.

"Mutanabbi Street is the place where we express our ideas. We don't have 
any other place to go and many of the famous Iraqi writers have fled the 
country. The only way to communicate with them is through the Internet. 
The others are afraid and they are hiding. I've been advised not to go 
out in public." Mokhtar said that his old car was easily spotted on the 
road, so he got a new one that doesn't stand out quite as much.

On the following Wednesday, five days after I met Mokhtar at his office, 
I took Ahmed down to Al Mutanabbi Street. We found the Shabandar open. 
There were a few younger men sitting on the benches keeping an eye on 
the clientele and they had beards, a new development for the Shabandar. 
These are newcomers, who come to keep watch on the smokers and tea 
drinkers. Out in front of the great windows, sitting behind Hajji 
Mohammed, the owner of the place, is a scribe for those who need to 
write official letters but do not know how to write. The old man is 
curled over an ancient Arabic typewriter with a piece of yellowed paper 
wound through the platen. It looks like he's been there for a hundred years.

In the Shabandar, Ahmed was sitting next to me trying to figure out what 
he was supposed to do.

"You want me to go ask the owner, Hajji Mohammed, about the bombing?"

"No."

"OK. What do you want to do?"

"I don't want to do anything."

Ahmed waited for more information. He was wearing a black T-shirt that 
said, "Hate the Game, not the Player."

"I just want to sit here and let these guys get used to us for a minute."

There were warning signs. No one spoke in the cafe, and most of the 
customers were smoking in silence; if they did speak, they kept their 
voices low so they wouldn't be overheard. Men sitting on benches across 
the cafe looked away when we glanced in their direction. People were 
monitoring us, a few were waiting to see what would happen, keeping an 
iron in the fire with respect to possible future events. When we'd come 
in, I had seen a man in his 30s wearing a particular kind of beard that 
the jihadis favor. He was reading a paper and made a show of not looking 
up. Fighters in the Mahdi Army wear this beard. It also didn't have to 
mean anything, although those beards were not common two years ago. We 
sat down next to him.

"Ahmed, look at this guy next to us."

"Sure, man, I see him, no problem." Ahmed speaks in perfect American 
movie English.

"Ask him about the bombing on Tuesday that killed Hajji Qais."

So Ahmed turned to the man and asked him.

"I know you guys are from the press," the man with the beard whispered. 
"You are asking very sensitive questions. If you ask Hajji Mohammed 
about it he might suspect you of something." The man with the beard 
didn't feel like talking about the bombing. We went to the front of the 
cafe and found Hajji Mohammed, who is slightly grizzled and irritable, 
stuck behind his small desk where he rings up the customers. When we 
asked him about the bombing he said that he couldn't remember a time 
when people were killed for absolutely no reason. Hajji Mohammed went on 
to speak wistfully about the old monarchy, saying Iraq had its best days 
under the king. We asked him why he'd closed the cafe last Friday on its 
busiest day of the week.

"Fridays I lose so much money because people buy a tea and sit all day 
and when it comes time to pay, they come to me and lie about how many 
teas they had. So I closed the cafe. We also had generator problems," 
Hajji Mohammed said. It was a massive lie, which he did not expect us to 
believe. Fridays are the busiest day for the Shabandar, the day that 
writers from all over the city come to discuss, translate and work on 
manuscripts; business booms. Mokhtar also makes a point of being at the 
Shabandar on Friday where he holds court. The real reason Hajji Mohammed 
closed the cafe, which everyone on the street knows, is that he has been 
receiving threats from insurgent groups who don't like his clients and 
their politics. Mokhtar is likely one of the reasons, and there are 
other dissident groups as well. We would find one such semi-clandestine 
organization two days later and they would confirm that the Shabandar 
was receiving threats, but they couldn't say who was behind them. The 
men never show themselves.

We left the Shabandar and found a man around the corner who said that 
Hajji Qais' son was not killed in the bombing, and only found out about 
his father's death on television. He said that Ahmed Qais was working 
around the corner in another small stationery store, called the Nadeem. 
The bookseller said we could talk to him if we were interested.

Hajji Qais' son, Ahmed Qais, is in his early 30s, a well-educated Sunni 
engineer. He's clean-shaven and polite, not an extremist. Ahmed Qais is 
a little heavy-set from consuming sugary tea and bread. He's well-spoken 
in Arabic, and he understood a great deal of spoken English, often 
responding before the translation came in. For a man whose father had 
been killed a few days before, Ahmed Qais was pretty calm and focused. 
It took a little while to convince him to talk to a reporter but he 
relented after a few minutes. We found a room in the back of the 
stationery store where we could talk.

"Who do you think killed your father?" I asked him. He leaned forward 
and lowered his voice.

"Everything is suspected. He worked all day and all night, so there's no 
way he could be involved in something. The police came and conducted a 
short investigation and then left, but in a destroyed country like this, 
they can't investigate anything. There are also some strange people here 
who think that my father was selling valuables or Easter gifts and some 
people think that might be the wrong thing to do."

Ahmed Qais talked for an hour about how it was important for his family 
to move on with their lives, which seemed like an odd comment to make so 
soon after the killing. Ahmed Qais didn't back any particular theory of 
the crime. In fact, he stayed away from saying anything specific and 
wouldn't name anyone he thought was involved. He was obviously extremely 
frightened and thought that talking about the assassination of his 
father would only bring him problems. Ahmed Qais asked if I heard what 
happened to the ice seller in Dora and we said yes, that story was going 
around and we knew it. I asked him about threats his father might have 
received and he said that there weren't any, that his father didn't have 
enemies on the street.

Just as I was leaving, I handed him a piece of paper with my contact 
information on it. He said, "Even if I had some information, I would 
keep it to myself." Ahmed Qais told me that he had two families to 
support and that it was a big responsibility.

"We should just forget it," he said.

I was stunned. "Forget the killing?"

"Yes."

Hajji Qais Anni had only been dead for six days. His blackened store is 
a monument to the assassination and also a warning to other Al Mutanabbi 
Street vendors. On Sunday, three days before I met his son, another man 
selling cassette tapes of the Quran was assassinated by gunmen. He 
worked in a store a block away from Hajji Qais' place.

Two days later, on Friday, in the faint hope of finding the Shabandar 
open, we went back to Al Mutanabbi Street to meet Hamid Mokhtar, but the 
cafe was shuttered. The street was filled with booksellers and book 
buyers. At 10 in the morning, it was 115 degrees, while street vendors 
yelled out, "Drinks! Cold! Drinks! Pepsi! Miranda!" It was hard to move 
in the crowd. There were hundreds of men in the street shopping for 
books spread out on carpets, buying religious tracts, technical manuals. 
Copies of pirated software were placed respectfully by ornately bound 
Qurans.

We found Mokhtar waiting in front of the Shabandar. He said, "We can't 
stay here." So we walked to a bookstore called Adnan's Library where we 
drank tea, while Mokhtar scouted for a safe place. He led us through 
winding streets below Al Rasheed Street, small alleys that branched off 
Al Mutanabbi, narrow canyons whose walls were white in the sun. Mokhtar 
was worried that we would be attacked; he'd taken this route many times 
before, trying to ditch the Mukhabarat (secret police) men in the old 
regime days. On Rasheed Street, there is a dark pit of a place called 
Hassan the Foreigner. Men who couldn't get into the Shabandar were there 
drinking tea and smoking. Students worked at a nearby table taking 
careful notes. It was impossible to see what they were working on. The 
place was ancient, unimprovable and collapsing down into itself in slow 
motion. A faint rectangle of light came through the windows and died 
long before the back wall where we found a free bench.

"I discovered that a girl I knew from college was writing reports on me 
[for the secret police]. I was surprised but this gave me an idea for a 
new book." I asked him if he was able to write these days. Mokhtar got 
upset with the question. "No, I can't write under these conditions, I 
have to calm down. I need some time to think. It's too soon." Like all 
other Iraqis, Mokhtar has been pushed into the rapidly splintering 
future without time to cope with the past.

As he was talking, other middle-aged men gathered around us very quietly 
and sat down after long ritual greetings. They were all poets and former 
political prisoners; they were all Mokhtar's friends. All the prison men 
are the same. They talk about prison, how they survived, and they carry 
pictures of those days like wedding photos. In the photos, taken on the 
special occasions when their families were allowed to visit, they are 
hunched in groups and hollow-eyed. Prisoners form tight-knit groups and 
the photographs showed the circle of men whom Mokhtar trusted. It is a 
special honor to see these pictures. Mokhtar carries them with him. We 
were being allowed inside Mokhtar's cell.

One of Mokhtar's friends, a poet, leaned over and said to me, "I have 
some information. The Shabandar is closed because it got a threat."

"From who?"

"Nobody knows."

The man was going slowly blind from cataracts. He wanted to know where 
he could go for treatment. "I am a writer. Without my eyes, what can I 
do?" he asked.

We talked and drank tea until a loud man sidled up from nowhere. I never 
even saw him coming. He was a loud Arab-American from Indiana in a 
business-casual shirt who said he worked with the International 
Republican Institute. (IRI states that no one fitting that description 
has ever worked with its organization.) We got into a conversation about 
what he was doing, none of which made a great deal of sense, and then he 
explained I couldn't write any of his information because he doesn't 
want to be targeted by the resistance. The Indiana man also said all 
these things at the top of his lungs in English in the depths of a cafe 
that the insurgents control or at least monitor. It was a terrible 
mistake in Hassan the Foreigner and there was nothing you could tell 
him. Mokhtar looked over at me with suffering eyes and left for another 
appointment.

Minka Nijhuis, a brilliant Dutch journalist, was sitting next to me and 
said we should go look for some people who she thought might know more 
about the bombing and the threats to the cafe. It was also safer to keep 
moving.

We walked out into the crucible sun and found the bookseller street 
deserted, the vendors packing up. A dwarf passed by us pushing a 
handcart full of empty boxes.

Minka's contacts were members of a secular pro-democracy group called 
the Cultural Gathering. We walked to the end of Al Mutanabbi. Next to a 
covered market stood a large building with a courtyard. Inside the 
courtyard were men selling books and pamphlets on tables. The second 
floor had piles of dead copiers, a graveyard for dead office equipment. 
We walked to the gates, where Minka spoke to a man who asked us to wait 
for a moment. That was when we realized that the group was using 
observers, who made sure that no one who didn't belong there could get 
through the gates. If there was a problem, one of the men would run to 
the group and tell them to scatter. The office is deep off the 
courtyard, so controlling the gates is not difficult.

Men on the street selling cigarettes, soft drink salesmen, and other 
people who stay in one place for long periods of time often work as 
lookouts for underground groups in Iraq. You see it everywhere. The 
Cultural Gathering was worried about being attacked by insurgents and 
they had their eyes open.

The leader of the Iraqi Cultural Gathering emerged from the courtyard to 
greet us, blinking in the harsh light. His name was Mohammed Shakir 
Mahmoud, and he was happy to see journalists because he wanted to talk 
about his work and there weren't any foreigners coming around to listen.

In a small, dusty office with a computer and a few chairs, Mahmoud said, 
"We have the idea that every aspect of Iraqi culture was damaged by the 
dictatorship, that's why we should rebuild the culture and bring 
attention back to Iraqi civilization. In the past there was a great deal 
of damage. We were isolated and alienated from each other. That's why we 
created this organization."

The organization puts out a journal of essays on democracy and Iraqi 
civilization, where they promote the values of a secular unified 
country. Mahmoud was not enthusiastic about religion as the basis of 
government; he thought the federalism expressed in the draft of the 
constitution was a simple power grab by armed factions. Four other men 
quietly came into the room to join the discussion, sat down on the 
chairs and listened while Mahmoud, who works as a newspaper editor, 
explained what they were trying to do.

"We organized meetings in the Shabandar of writers who had been forced 
to leave Iraq during Saddam's time. Our basic idea is that Iraqis should 
understand themselves." Mahmoud's haven in the Shabandar lasted for two 
meetings and that was it. After that, Hajji Mohammed told them they 
weren't welcome, that they were causing trouble because he'd been 
getting threats from insurgent groups. Mahmoud, whose group has about 
120 unofficial members, discussed the Iraqi national identity over tea 
with his friends. Islam and its effect on civilization was the topic of 
the second, a subject that may have pushed Hajji Mohammed at the 
Shabandar over the edge. Thinkers who advocate a secular Iraq are being 
driven slowly underground because their ideas are a threat to the 
religious fundamentalists in each armed group.

Jarrar Hassan, a forthright middle-aged man who was sitting next to 
Mahmoud, said, "Hajji Mohammed thinks the threats have something to do 
with our meetings. I spoke to him and he told me what happened because 
we have a good relationship. He said, 'If you guys came on Fridays then 
someone will drop off a bomb and kill all of you. So I closed the cafe.'"

Minka said, "So you are the troublemakers."

"We are honored to be so," Mahmoud laughed. "We are still a small 
organization. We can't do much. We have no public membership lists and 
we have not been threatened individually, but as a group we have been 
accused of being spies for the U.S. and accused of apostasy. In the 
newspaper, people printed direct threats against us."

As we were leaving, Mahmoud gave us a copy of the Iraqi Cultural 
Gathering Journal to take with us. It was difficult to leave the men 
there. They looked stranded and uncertain about the future. We started 
to make our way out. In the hall, we passed the carefully stationed 
lookouts, and as we walked by, each serious young man joined the group 
and walked with us down to the street. Not one of them carried a gun.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

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About the writer
Phillip Robertson is reporting from Iraq for Salon.