Baghdad Looks Back For Its Future
By Rajiv Chandraekaran
"Have you anything new?" a teacher eager for some recent fiction asked with a hopeful lilt.
The salesman glumly shook his head. Most of the volumes were dated and dog-eared, remnants of private libraries sold off, like so much else here, because their owners needed money to survive the trade embargo imposed by the United Nations after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. There were tomes of Dickens, yellowed copies of Reader's Digest and computer textbooks from a generation ago, but nothing printed since the start of the sanctions.
Undeterred, the teacher kept browsing, eventually settling on a collection of poetry written more than 1,000 years ago, in the days when Baghdad was a cosmopolitan and sophisticated city, a center of science and literature, of art and amusement, of algebra and a Thousand and One Nights.
"When the present is difficult, we must remind ourselves of the past," he said. "It gives us strength to go on."
Traumatized by authoritarian rule, two devastating wars, sanctions and the imminent threat of a U.S. invasion, Baghdad survives on nostalgia. It is a place where, when a visitor asks what residents like most about their city, they often speak of life decades -- or centuries -- ago.
"We have a deep relationship with civilization that dates back to the days of Ali Baba, and before that the Babylonians, who gave the world the first code of laws, and the Sumerians, who invented writing," said Fadhil Thamir, a literary critic who frequents the book market. "We are a place of culture, which makes us very proud."
Middle-aged Baghdadis reminisce about the go-go 1970s, the decade before the catastrophic war with neighboring Iran, when oil revenue subsidized a comfortable middle-class existence for most Iraqis. They could afford new cars and spacious homes. The government provided free medical care and scholarships to study abroad. The city teemed with bars, nightclubs and cinemas showing the latest from Hollywood.
An older generation recalls the days before President Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and the revolutionary governments that preceded it, back when a British-installed monarch ruled and people enjoyed greater civil liberties.
Still others dream about the Baghdad of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and other stories from the "Thousand and One Nights," when the city was the capital of an empire that stretched from North Africa to the edges of China. And some conjure the ancient Sumerian and Babylonian civilizations, whose descendants established a small village called Baghdad at a U-shaped bend in the Tigris River about 2,800 years ago.
Most relics of that world were consumed by floods, sandstorms and Mongol invaders. The rest were bulldozed decades ago to make way for wider roads and newer buildings in a Baathist campaign to modernize Iraq. Only vestiges of the prosperous 1970s remain: theaters that show 15-year-old movies, Swiss watch shops that sell only used timepieces, travel agents who cannot book international tickets and bars forced to turn into cafes after the government banned public consumption of alcohol.
The remnants of Hussein's oil-slicked welfare state also have crumbled -- the U.S.-style expressways are filled with jalopies, and once-modern hospitals lack medicine.
On the surface, Baghdad is dominated by expressions of Hussein's aspirations of grandeur. There are extravagant palaces and imposing government ministries, monuments to militarism and ubiquitous portraits of the president. There are banners everywhere proclaiming loyalty to the leader and organized rallies where people profess willingness to sacrifice themselves for the government.
But many people here privately dismiss all that. To them, the enduring spirit of this city of 6 million people is found in places like the book market, where the intellectual vibrancy that defined their community for centuries still can be experienced, fueling memories that have enabled them to weather political repression, wars and the embargo. Baghdadis have the same feelings of pride as Parisians or New Yorkers -- they believe they live in one of the world's great cities.
If U.S. troops succeed in capturing Baghdad as the Mongols, Ottoman Turks and British did before them, they will find a city of people too proud to welcome an invading force but restless for a shake-up they hope will restore their lost glory.
"We are torn," one Baghdad writer said. "We don't like the idea of the Americans coming here, but we're not like the North Koreans. We're not ready to say we're always with the regime. Most people would like something better."
If U.S. forces want to be accepted here, one Iraqi intellectual said, "they have to do more than just bring democracy and punish Saddam's henchmen."
"They have to focus on rebuilding Baghdad," he said. "People here are yearning for their city to be reborn."
Center of Culture
Baghdad reached the apex of its glory while Europe still was mired in the Dark Ages.
The city became the capital of the Islamic world in 762, after Arab fighters evicted the Persians and established what would turn into one of the greatest dynasties of the Middle East. Blessed with forward-thinking rulers known as caliphs, the circular, walled city turned into a modern and cultured place. Realizing the importance of controlling the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the caliphs constructed canals, dikes and reservoirs, freeing the city from malaria and ensuring sufficient agricultural production to feed its already booming population of almost 1 million.
In the 9th century, caliph Harun Rashid lavished gifts on writers and poets, who held forth at literary salons and cultivated the tales of a Thousand and One Nights. His son, Mamun, founded a library called the House of Wisdom, where scholars translated the writings of Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Ptolemy, Euclid and Pythagoras into Arabic. Mathematicians discovered theories of algebra and calculus, while astronomers and physicians made new advances.
But in 1258, the Mongol warlord Hulagu, Genghis Khan's grandson, marched on the city with 200,000 soldiers. The invaders spent 40 days slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people and destroying centuries of scholarship. Books from the House of Wisdom were set alight or dumped in the Tigris.
Stripped of its glory, the battered city was ruled off and on for the next centuries by a procession of foreigners, including Persians and Ottoman Turks. Baghdad's last occupiers were the British, who marched up the Tigris from the Persian Gulf during World War I to seize the city from the Turks. The military campaign contributed to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire but cost tens of thousands of British lives.
After the war, British colonial officers lumped the disparate territory they regarded as Mesopotamia -- ethnic Kurds in the north, Sunni Muslims in the center and Shiite Muslims in the south -- into an invented nation called Iraq. But the British, interested in the region's oil fields, reneged on their repeated promises to give Iraq independence, sparking an insurrection that forced them to install a loyal king in Baghdad and beat an exit by 1932.
As indefensible as Baghdad has been over the centuries, it has chafed at invaders. "We have never accepted foreign occupation," said Hussein Ali Mahfoud, a professor at Baghdad University who is regarded as the city's leading historian. "It is intolerable to Baghdadis."
A Drive to Modernize
Save for a few parts of downtown, there is little in Baghdad that appears more than 50 years old. New neighborhoods of boxy two-story brick houses, with flat roofs and walled gardens, radiate for miles. The suburban sprawl and network of expressways give it the feel of a city in the American Southwest.
Renovation began in 1968, when the Baath Party overthrew a military government that had toppled the monarchy a decade earlier. The Baathists installed a political and social welfare system that has come to define modern Iraq.
The government had little interest in democracy or free expression but set out to refashion ancient Baghdad into a modern city. Buildings with Roman columns and wrought-iron balconies were torn down to make way for government ministries and wide boulevards. Even places deemed historical sites were rebuilt with new bricks, depriving them of charm.
The modernization campaign led to the construction of hospitals, universities and shopping centers. Baghdad's health care and education systems were regarded as the best in the Arab world. Stores were filled with luxury goods -- Japanese electronics, Italian fashions, French perfume -- that were sold at subsidized prices.
By the 1970s, with revenue from the world's second-largest oil reserves filling the country, Baghdad appeared on the verge of a renaissance.
Sadoun Street, a wide avenue on the eastern side of the Tigris, became Baghdad's Champs-Elysees. The Sinbad Cinema and the Stars Theater showed first-run Western movies. Bars, posh restaurants and cafes with sidewalk seating sprang up. Elegant shops sold Rolex watches and Cartier cuff links. International airlines and multinational firms had offices on the street.
Merchants remember the days when young couples and families would stroll here, sometimes wandering a few blocks down an alleyway to reach the banks of the Tigris, where there were yet more bars and restaurants serving grilled river fish.
"It was like any European city," said Qasim Alsabti, the owner of an art gallery. "You could buy anything you wanted. You could have the best food. You could spend the whole night having fun."
Art and literature also flourished. Galleries sprouted along the riverfront. Bookshops opened along Sadoun Street. The city's love affair with books became so well known that people across the Arab world used to say: "Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads."
Most Baghdadis were willing to tolerate the lack of civil liberties under Hussein's government so long as material benefits continued. But those days ended in 1980, a year after Hussein formally assumed the presidency, when Iraq went to war with Iran. The conflict claimed more than 250,000 Iraqi lives and forced the government to divert billions of dollars it had been spending on social programs to buy arms. In 1990, two years after that war ended, just as Iraqis were hoping to pick up where they had left off, Hussein sent tanks into Kuwait. The consequences -- the Persian Gulf War and economic sanctions -- asphyxiated the city.
"The last 20 years have been like another Mongol invasion," said Hussein Ali, a bookseller. "It has robbed us of our glory."
'Paradise' Lost
The blight is everywhere nowadays.
On Sadoun Street, shoeshine boys and beggars ply the sidewalks. The decrepit Sinbad Cinema is showing a two-decade-old film called "Illicit Dreams," whose sex scenes have been cut out by censors. The theater's owner, Mohammed Fakri Jamil, said he desperately wants to screen a new release -- "Everyone would love Jean-Claude Van Damme or Jackie Chan!" -- but no distributors will ship films to Iraq. "Illicit Dreams," he said, is one of the few Western films circulating in the country.
A few doors down, buildings that once held bars and nightclubs now are filled with money-changers and medical equipment salesmen. Baghdad's bars were closed in the mid-1990s as part of a campaign to promote Islamic values. Exchange houses multiplied because a free fall of the Iraqi currency led people to shift their savings to dollars. Medical supply shops propagated because hospitals began requiring patients to bring their own syringes, bedpans and medicines.
Nearby is a shop called the House of Wisdom. It used to sell books but now offers only stationery.
A block away, travel agents who once booked European vacations while away their days by smoking, drinking tea and arranging the occasional religious pilgrimage inside Iraq. Years ago, their customers included the watch salesmen across the street, who would travel to Switzerland twice a year for seminars and shopping trips.
"It is difficult to imagine now, but it used to be like paradise here," said Salah Mullah, the owner of a travel agency that still displays a large "Book Here" sign from British Airways in the front window. "We lived in the best city in the world."
Sadoun Street remains among the more prosperous parts of the city. In other neighborhoods, members of the now destitute middle class hawk their possessions -- household bric-a-brac, car parts, old records -- for cash to buy food.
The conditions are even grimmer in Saddam City, a slum of more than 2 million Shiites, where open sewers and piles of garbage line the streets and security officers patrol with an intensity not seen in other parts of Baghdad. In 1999, riots erupted in Saddam City after the assassination of a prominent Shiite cleric and two of his sons, which some in the neighborhood blamed on the government. Troops crushed the disturbances, killing dozens of people, according to human rights groups.
Saddam City is a striking contrast to the Arrasat and Mansour districts, home to a privileged minority who have grown rich through government connections and oil smuggling. It is not uncommon to see late-model Mercedes-Benz sedans and BMW roadsters zipping their occupants to stores offering imported items many Iraqis have never heard of, from flat-screen Korean television sets to Italian lingerie and Cuban cigars.
But Baghdad's unquestioned king of opulence is Hussein, who has built about a dozen lavish palaces around the city, all concealed by high walls. One in the Mansour area features two massive bronze busts on opposite corners of the building: one of the famous Arab warrior Saladin and the other of Hussein.
Many Baghdadis regard Hussein's palaces and monuments as pompous sideshows that do not reflect the city's character. To them, what matters are the small steps they have taken to rebuild their lives.
Baghdad's street life may not be as flashy as it was a quarter-century ago, but sidewalks are dotted with shops offering rotisserie chicken, fresh-squeezed juices and sweet tea. Stores are stocked with new clothing, electronics and watches, and much of the merchandise is locally produced.
The Baghdad Symphony continues to perform, even though musicians have been forced to take second and third jobs to pay their bills.
On one end of Mutanabi Street, home to the book market, old men gather as they have for decades -- at a modest cafe crammed with wooden benches, where they read newspapers and chat about events of the day. A common topic of conversation, predictably, is the good old days.
"A great city has been ruined," said one patron. His friend snorted in disagreement, slapping the rickety table between them. "Baghdad is not dead," he shouted. "It is only sleeping. And I think it will awaken very soon."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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