Book Burning in Baghdad

I was in Spartanburg, South Carolina, a very long way from Baghdad, when I read the news that a street where I once spent a lot of time on my visits to Iraq, one where I learned a great deal about its people and their history, had been the target of a massive suicide car bomb.

Al-Mutanabi was the booksellers' street. I'd gone there a few times when Saddam Hussein was still in power and it seemed a sad, secretive, paranoid place. But I went there as often as I could in 2003 and 2004, after the American-led invasion that toppled the tyrant, because I thought I could find the spirit of freedom and liberty that our troops were supposed to have brought with them.

What I discovered were a growing number of stalls selling religious tomes and posters, especially iconic portraits of Ali and Hussein, the sainted imams of Shi'a Islam. But, for English speakers, there was also a thriving trade in histories. Under the dictator, quietly and quite illegally, merchants had been photocopying whatever books they could get their hands on that told of Iraq's past. Now they were anxious to sell them to the ancient capital's new arrivals.
So I bought a copy of Gertrude Bell's letters written from Baghdad when she was a leading architect of British occupation in the 1920s. I acquired a British officer's account of the grim battles in the swamps of southern Mesopotamia during World War I. (In those days, the Germans—"The Huns"—supposedly were inciting radical Shiite militias to attack the benevolent English.) I bought a rare copy of the national museum's catalogue, with wonderful old pictures of dozens of artifacts before they were looted under the unwatchful eyes of American soldiers.

Walking down the booksellers' street toward the Shah Bander café, where the city's literati once smoked water pipes, drank coffee and debated the meaning of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," was a little like a stroll through the stacks of a great library, except that the city, the history, the culture and the passion for it, was right there, all around you.

The Reuters dispatch about the bombing yesterday was spare and evocative: "As firefighters doused the flames which reached up to the third storey of some buildings, papers and book pages fluttered on the ground, some blackened, others bloody. Charred bodies lay almost unrecognizable, half buried in the rubble of shop fronts." More than 20 people were killed.

In Spartanburg, I thought the story of Al-Mutanabi street might be worth sharing. A good friend, poet and naturalist John Lane, had invited me to little Wofford College in this, one of the reddest corners of a very red state, to speak to students and townspeople about press coverage of the Middle East. And I accepted the invitation, not least because I often feel that Southerners are the only Americans who can understand in their guts the core problem we face in Iraq. They are the only ones ever to have felt the corrosive humiliation of occupation, in their case by northern forces after the Civil War. And the memory of that experience, even 142 years after Appomattox, still informs—some would say inflames—their view of the world.