Resurrecting the book market of Baghdad

When a car bomb obliterated Iraq's millennium-old literary heart, a bookseller 7,000 miles away resolved that the voices of Al-Mutanabbi Street would not be forgotten

Book market
(Image credit: (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed))

Before the bomb, Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad appeared to be made of books: they littered the sidewalks, waved from tables and carts, sat on shelves inside bookstores, and peeped at passersby through the windows. The booksellers, like hawkers at the market, advertised the freshness and nourishment of their wares, tempting bookworms with what was in season, from a first edition to an eighteenth-century manuscript to the latest book in a foreign language. Dusty children dodged ivory-colored Ottoman pillars and piles of books as tall as themselves to pry wallets and phones from the pockets of eager book buyers, who realized their loss only after they had sought refuge in al-Shahbandar Coffee House for a drink and a smoke. Before the bomb, the nooks and crannies of Al-Mutanabbi Street were the classrooms and libraries where enlightenment sparked, master's theses began, doctoral research continued, and publications celebrated. Dictionaries and diaries, notebooks and novels, pencils and portraits canoodled late into the night, and no journalist, writer, student, or professor ever felt ill-equipped on Al-Mutanabbi Street. Signs for each bookstore and stationery shop were crammed one below the other, a clutter of titles tempting those below. Before the bomb, politics were challenged, poetry recalled and recited, dominoes won, hookah enjoyed, and radio alternated between the news and Oum Kalthoum's songs, which students, professors, clerics, and tourists alike stopped to absorb.

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