Baghdad rises from the ashes
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I COULD SELL Baghdad. The city is spread generously on either side of the Tigris River, a ghostly relic of the “Paris of the Middle Eastâ€Â.
Before Saddam’s time, tourists arrived from the Gulf states and Syria, to eat “masguf†fish at riverside restaurants and shop in the galleries of Abu Nuwas. They would visit the medieval Mustansiriya School, with its exquisite Arabic arch and cloisters. They would perambulate the neighbouring souk and the old Christian quarter. They could visit the graceful Ottoman barracks. Everything has changed. Two decades of war, sanctions and looting have left Baghdad a desperate place, lawless and derelict. I wandered into the main station, an Art Deco monument on the scale of New York’s Grand Central. When I asked after the trains, a shamefaced official said “the train is out at presentâ€Â. I opposed the invasion but I would oppose even more the current pressure in Washington to “cut and runâ€Â. The world helped to wreck Iraq. It has an overwhelming duty to salvage it. The best place to savour Baghdad is from the river in front of the old British Embassy. It looks out from a shady garden across the water to the Al Ahrar Bridge and the Rashid district. Here in Mutanabi Street booksellers still set out their wares on the pavement, yielding me a first edition of Wilfrid Thesiger’s The Marsh Arabs. On Friday Baghdad’s small chattering class gathers in the “intellectuals’ caféâ€Â, to drink tea and smoke hookahs beneath sepia photographs of old Baghdad. The ancient city was laid out round two “Strands†on either side of the Tigris, Sa’adun Street to the north and Haifa Street to the south. Though Saddam destroyed much of the Ottoman fabric, precious fragments survive. Off Sa’adun Street are old houses with over sailed upper floors and oriels lattice windows, behind which women might gasp cool air in summer. In Shak Bashar is a warren of metal and carpentry workshops seemingly unaltered since the Middle Ages. You can turn a corner and still find a superb Arabic mansion, teetering on the edge of collapse. Twentieth-century Baghdad is remarkably spacious. Avenues intersect at roundabouts, overseen by mosques and minarets. There are a zoo, parks along the riverside and, at Mansur, a modern suburb worthy of Los Angeles. Here lived Saddam’s sanctions-busters. The American favourite, Ahmed Chalabi, unwisely took up residence in the mansion of Saddam’s son, Uday. The new architecture is inventive, sometimes even Babylonian, but rarely kitsch. Baghdad’s greatest scenic asset must be Saddam’s Republican Palace, now headquarters of the Coalition boss, Paul Bremer. Its sprawling site some three miles round lies in the heart of town, like Beijing’s Forbidden City or the Bourbons’ Louvre. Villas sit amid lawns, canals and eucalyptus groves. In the palace itself the great ballroom is now offices and the astonishing throne room with its “Scud murals†has become a chapel. The whole enclave should have been donated to the people of Baghdad when Saddam fell. Instead the Americans are laying down concrete car parks, chopping down trees and building a perimeter “Baghdad Wallâ€Â. It is sad. But one day the Americans will go. Then there is a true civic opportunity to be seized. With money and a Herculean imagination, there is no reason why the Paris of the Middle East should not rise again from the dust and ashes.
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Baghdad rises from the ashes
Simon Jenkins Times 17 November 2003
I COULD SELL Baghdad. The city is spread generously on either side of the Tigris River, a ghostly relic of the “Paris of the Middle Eastâ€Â.
(30/12/2003)
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Baghdad Office / Agents
Mr. Walid Abdul-Amir Alwan
Bab Al-Mudham
P.O. Box 489, Baghdad - Iraq
Mobile: +964 790 183 1726,
E-mail: itmbaghdad@tcph.org
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