In a piece in The Observer recently the rebel MP George Galloway said “the best place I’ve been to is Baghdad. I first visited it in 1993, and fell in love with it, head over heels”.
George, your political beliefs are mistaken, your opinions frequently absurd and your choice of friends sometimes disastrous. But you recognise something about Iraq which few others have seen. I too fell in love with it at first sight in 1957, and have remained in love with its memory ever since.
In 1958 the Iraqi army murdered King Faisal and most of his court and family and took over the government of the country. Since then the Iraqi people have endured a succession of appalling dictators of unrivalled barbarity. It took an allegedly civilised American 
president and his British side-kick to launch an attack on Iraq far more destructive than any since the fourteenth century Mongol leader Tamerlane constructed 120 towers of the skulls of Arabs he had killed. Even Saddam could not beat that, though Bush may.
The people of Iraq are a mixture of civilisations, races, nationalities, religions, sects, tribes such as you would not find anywhere else in the region or, indeed, the world : Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrians, Baluchi, Iranian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Yazidi, Sabaean, Kurdish, Turkmen, Turkish, Shia, Sunni and many, many others. This produces an amalgam of clashing characteristics not always easy to like or admire, but certainly original and unforgettable.
Baghdad is not a city for tourists. As you approach it by air you can hardly see the earth through the thick screen of dust which enshrouds everything. When they finally open the door of the aircraft you suddenly encounter the heat which hits you like a burning wall, so intense that you would not have thought humans could exist in it.
They always used to say of Baghdad, even before the coalition forces made their contribution, that half of it was always being rebuilt, while the other half was being knocked down. It is true that apart from a few Abbasid remains there is very little in Baghdad before the 19th century, and in its present state nobody could call it attractive. ”Imagine a vast sprawling city on a flat and featureless plain. . . A huge brown river idles sluggishly between low banks. . . The sky is huge, the land never ending. At the centre of the city is a vast vaulted market, leprous with beggars, flies and muck, the stench overpowering, the noise cacophonous. It is a city made for violence, the broad streets fed by stinking side alleys, the drains running down the middle of the street. Dust in summer, mud in winter. The tired palms that fill the empty spaces seem no more than a trite sarcasm aimed at the desperate shabbiness and poverty of the city”. That is a description from March 1962. It is probably still true of those parts that are still standing.
But heat and dust and dirt are the concomitants of living in Iraq and you get used to them, even make a virtue of them; you learn to ignore them and to love the city and country especially for those times when you are not afflicted by them. I used to ride back through the desert past the black tents of the Bedouin as evening was falling, with gentle breezes taking the edge off the day’s frightful heat, the colours of the desert scrub – purple, green and gold transforming the harsh reality of daytime into unutterable beauty so that you hardly dared to gaze for fear it would fade away. My friend Henry used to say that the beauty of the desert could only be truly appreciated from the back of a horse. “If I were a painter” he said “I would have my easel up here”. In a country of extreme heat the night takes on an enchanted quality. Most Baghdadis used to sleep on the roof in summer, under a sky full of stars (except when the khamsin brought the dust in from the desert). But many of the younger ones, like their one-time caliph Haroun al Rashid whose habit it was to roam the city by night in disguise, looked on the night as the time for pleasure. They used to go down to the mighty Tigris to find or make their own entertainment in the bars, chaikhanas and cabarets of Abu Nawas Street. In the heat of summer the Tigris dwindles to a muddy stream, and the great area where the river normally flows is given up to straw huts and market stalls, foremost among which are the sellers of samak masguf, big flat fish sliced lengthwise in two then hung on a lattice-work of fragrant twigs around a fire which slowly cooks the fish while you sip your cloudy arak in impatient expectation and watch the people stroll lazily past… You listen to the music of the belly-dancers in the clubs or the blind singers in the open-fronted cabarets, or sit in the chaikhanah playing tric-trac talking poetry or politics while “smelling the breezes”.
The night is never long enough down on the bed of the Tigris. With the sweet smell of masguf smoke, the plangent tones of the oudh and the words of Abu Nawas robbing you of your senses it is easy to imagine that you too are a poet back in Abbasid Baghdad nine centuries ago:
I saw silver in the fountain,
Still the picture lingers,
When the pale girl’s little mountain,
Slipped between the fingers,
Sleek and prominent and hairless.
If I had my wish,
I’d be water, I‘d be careless
I would be a fish. . . . .
You begin to understand why the city was then renowned for its beauty and culture, and known as the city of peace , Dar-as-Salaam. And you pray that one day it will again be so.
Christopher Herdon
April 2006
