I went to the Baghdad Book Fair looking for one book and ended up finding something I hadn’t been looking for.

Conversations.

‘Blood Meridian’ was nowhere to be found, so the original mission failed. In its place, I spent hours talking to journalists, writers and booksellers. The Iranian booksellers were particularly memorable, remarkably knowledgeable and many of them speaking fluent, polished Arabic.

Naturally, I asked them about Sadegh Hedayat.

Hedayat is not an easy writer to place neatly on a shelf…
Brilliant, influential, deeply pessimistic and controversial even in his own lifetime, he was fiercely critical of religion, particularly Islam and wrote about the decline of Persian culture through a chauvinistic, sometimes explicitly anti-Semitic lens, with particular hostility toward Arabs.

What surprised me was not that they knew him.
It was how warmly they spoke of him.

I was standing among shelves crowded with religious books, speaking with Shia Muslim Iranians and listening to them speak of Hedayat with something close to affection.

They spoke of his genius, his despair, his imagination. They looked past the mockery and provocation in his writing and tried to find the mind beneath it.

And there was something striking about hearing this from people for whom religion is not simply an idea, but part of the world they inhabit. Hedayat had placed Persian identity, at times, against Islam and against the Arabs he blamed for the erosion of an older Persian world. Yet here were people who did not seem threatened by that hostility. They could disagree with him profoundly and still recognize his brilliance.

And that is what makes literature different from belief…

We do not have to agree with a writer to recognize ourselves. We can reject his prejudices, despise his conclusions and still find something alive in his words.

So, Hedayat does not have to become a saint to remain a great writer, and the people who admire him, do not have to become Hedayat.

I have always associated this collapsing building with what it feels like to live beneath the skies of Iraq.

There is something strangely beautiful about it.
You can still see the old design in its ruined lines, the workmanship in its arches and windows, the care that once went into making it last.


Now its bricks are crumbling, its walls are bowed and decades of neglect have become part of its architecture…

It reminds me of the country around it.

Wars, sanctions, invasions, upheavals, years of neglect… so much has been built, broken, patched and left unfinished.
Yet somehow, life continues inside what remains.

The building still shelters people.
It gives them somewhere to belong for a little longer.

Yes, it is ugly.
It is rotting from the inside out and no one seems to be stopping it.

There are warnings everywhere:
‘This building may collapse at any moment. Please do not pass nearby.’

And yet we do.

We walk beneath it, past it, around it. We hear its sickly creaking overhead and eventually learn to hear it as another sound of the city.

And the building holds.

Because there are still people beneath it.

Perhaps that is what feels so familiar about it.

It should have fallen long ago.

It hasn’t.


I’m aware that this is by far my bleakest post, but this city’s ugliness deserves as much attention as its beauty.


#iraq #baghdad #streetphotography

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#streetphotography #portraitphotography #baghdad a #iraq

Lentil soup and a cigarette to wake the men up!


#baghdad #iraq #streetphotography #portraitphotography

I bought a DVD player from this gentleman a few years ago. It was used, blue- the exact blue of the gate to his shop. It still works perfectly. A few days ago, I sat down and watched Twilight on it again, which feels like an unnecessarily long story for a second-hand DVD player, but somehow it has become part of mine.

A few shops before him is another gentleman who sells DVDs, illegally produced, though I have never been particularly troubled by the technicalities.

I buy them even when I have no particular desire to watch them, because by now he expects at least one DVD from me whenever I pass his shop.


And I always buy one.

Gladly.


Over the years, I have accumulated an entire shelf of them. Most remain unwatched, quietly waiting for a future version of me who will apparently have far more free time than I do now. But I like seeing them there. They remind me of the street, of these small shops, and of the people who have slowly become part of its landscape without ever intending to.

The gentleman with the DVDs has no idea how much I value that little ritual.

He smiles whenever he sees me approaching, already knowing that I will stop.

And perhaps he does not know that, sometimes, a person’s smile can become worth more than everything they have to sell.

His is.



#baghdad #iraq #streetphotography

There is a little corner of Al-Rasheed Street where two old friends have been keeping watch over the world for more than thirty years.

One repairs watches, the other repairs glasses- their real business has always been keeping the rest of us oriented.


Every time I walk down that street and step through their doors, I am greeted with the same enormous smiles and invitations for tea.

It hardly matters what kind of day I am having. The moment I see them, something in me softens and perhaps that is one of the reasons I keep returning.

You come looking for a book, an old watch, a pair of glasses, some forgotten object from another decade- and instead you find people.

People who have been here long enough to become part of the landscape. People whose faces you begin to associate with the place itself.

For me, these two gentlemen are part of the memory of this street. And whenever I see them, with their familiar smiles and their inevitable invitation for tea, Al-Rasheed feels a little more like home.


I apologize for the man behind minding his business with his sandwich. I couldn’t miss that shot.


#streetphotography #baghdad #iraq

This stylish gentleman asked me to take a picture of him with a peace sign.
How can I say no?

He also wanted to know what I thought of his fit, immediate 10/10!


My camera did something funny with the colors but I don’t mind the results.




#streetphotography #portraitphotography
#baghdad #iraq

Baghdadi men and cats.

These gentlemen men spend their days at Al-Mutanabi and Al-Rasheed Streets. These are the kind of men who can turn a simple conversation into an argument about politics, literature, history or whatever else Baghdad has given them to disagree about.

Here to honor their lives, their hobbies, their jobs, their intellect and their smiles.

#baghdad #iraq #streetphotography

The gentleman who runs this shop is a retired biology professor from the University of Baghdad, one of Iraq’s leading public universities. He says he has always been drawn to fixing broken things. Two years after retiring, he turned that lifelong interest into a small business, opening the shop to restore old radios, gramophones and other forgotten objects.

Over seven years of visiting and speaking with book and antique-shop owners, I have noticed a curious pattern: many, if not most, hold PhDs or advanced degrees in various fields. It is an interesting observation, but also a somewhat concerning one. There is something telling about so many highly educated people finding their second lives among old books, antiques and broken machines and what that might say about the place our intellectuals are given in society.

#baghdad #antiques #oldtech