by BIRGIT SVENSSON
On Fridays, you can get a taste of just how special Mutanabbi Street used to be. For a couple of hours once a week, this neighborhood in the Iraqi capital returns to its former glory when everybody who is anybody in the Baghdad’s art and culture scene is out on the famous “book mile.”
The street has been renowned for centuries: a place where the printed word was bought and sold, where poets offered readings, where philosophical discussions went late in the night. Musicians publicized their forthcoming concerts, publishers negotiated with writers, actors looked for producers and directors, and vice versa.
Nowadays, those who want some space on the “book street” — which is nearly a kilometer long — better get there early to try and cram themselves in among everybody from professional book dealers with first editions on offer to modest sellers of second-hand titles.
Even greater than the swarms of sellers are the crowds of buyers, and at noon men and women in equal numbers leave the street with stacks of books under their arms. Everything winds down when it’s time for Friday prayers. The books are packed up again until next week, and by 1 p.m. at the latest the street has been swept clean.
It used to be, Mutanabbi Street dealers say, that you saw people reading all over Baghdad, but today hardly anybody reads in public anymore. They put this down to the reign of terror that has and to some extent still does hold the city in its sway.
A deficit of intellectuals
As an Arabic saying goes, Middle Eastern books are “written in Cairo, printed in Beirut, and read in Baghdad.” At no time was this truer than in the days of the Abbasids, who reached their political and cultural highpoint in the 8th and 9th centuries while Europe was in the dark Middle Ages.
Traces of all this aren’t so easy to find anymore. The war and terror destroyed most of what remained. But now one of the old centers is being revived: the Bayt al-Hikma, or House of Wisdom, founded by Al Ma’mun (786-833), the son of Harun al-Rashid from One Thousand and One Nights. His intention was to create a gathering place for the intellectual elite — and the goal is the same today.
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