Baghdad Book Fair
Here’s an article from a December issue of The Boston Sunday Globe. (Originally printed in the NYT.) Despite all the headlines that catch our eye (and that, well, appear in newspapers like the one I read this in), “There is a big gap between the people in the street and political elite…People in the street are not that interested in what happens in politics,” according to Maysoon al-Demluji, a former deputy minister of culture. That might be a bit of an overstatement, but she’s speaking at the Baghdad International Book Fair; her point is that this is the kind of place where “real life” in Iraq happens.
This book fair, which is actually the second largest in Iraq, is held at the site of the Baghdad International Fair and caters to a population that touts this: “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.”
This is a part of the world that fascinates me, mostly thanks to an incredibly rich middle- and high-school curriculum but also because of schoolmates who moved to my area in the late 80s/early 90s. This particular article was written by Jane Arraf (for the NYT), who first started reporting on Baghdad in the 1990s and she provides a nice overview of the Iraq she first encountered — Saddam Hussein’s — and what it looks like post liberation from the Islamic State. (Not surprisingly, ISIS banned almost all books.) When she first started, she could sometimes get “rare glimpses behind the closed doors of people’s homes, [where] there were often books — in some houses, beautiful, built-in wooden shelves of them, all of them read and almost every book treated by its owner as an old friend.”
She reminds us of cuneiform, the earliest form of writing that originated in Iraq. She writes about how, in the 9th century, translators at Bayt al Hikma (“House of Knowledge”) translated “all important works in existence” into Arabic.
Basically, this piece revealed to me how often Americans take for granted the unfettered access we have to books and information. And that when people don’t have this advantage, they might be more apt to say things like “Reading is my therapy. Just visiting this place [the Baghdad International Book Fair] is satisfying even if I don’t buy any books.”
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