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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
In the intervening time since the fall of Baghdad, a vast thieves' market of looted machinery, drugs and other illegal business has swallowed Al Rasheed Street, the long once-elegant old boulevard that runs along the Tigris, sending tentacles down into the busy book district. Al Rasheed Street has a long colonnaded stretch that is now closed to traffic while lookouts for armed groups keep a close eye on strangers in the market. Everyone is suspicious and everyone is monitored.
When I first heard about Hajji Qais' death, I was searching for a friend I made in the early days of the occupation, an Iraqi writer named Hamid Mokhtar, who spends a great deal of time on Al Mutanabbi Street. Ahmed Dulaimi went looking for him on Friday the 5th of August but there was no sign of Mokhtar and he found only nervous booksellers and the Shabandar cafe shuttered. The Shabandar is always open, even during Ramadan, and this was another bad sign. What started as a search for a writer became a search for a neighborhood.
A few days later, when I finally met Mokhtar at the Iraqi Writer's Union and told him about the bombing on the bookseller's row, he was not surprised. He had already heard the news and said without any hesitation, "We are all targets for assassination now." Mokhtar, who is well known in Iraq for spending eight years in Abu Ghraib during Saddam's regime, knows the feeling well. While other writers cooperated with the previous government, Mokhtar was one of a small number of intellectuals who continued to work without producing the obligatory paeans for the dictator. Eventually, security men came to his house and arrested his typewriter, and finding that unsatisfactory, eventually returned for the man himself. These days, rail-thin but looking much healthier than he did after his release from prison, the soft-spoken Mokhtar argues for religious tolerance and national unity. In Iraq, now a crucible for at two distinct fundamentalist movements, the act of publicly advocating these principles in Baghdad is flat-out heroic.
"When I appear on television and in magazines, that brings me to the attention of these [armed] groups. Many of my friends have been killed, even my colleagues from prison have been targeted. Before, we were suffering under Saddam, but now there are many Saddams." In the aftermath of the occupation, those loyal to any one of the numerous armed politico-religious gangs are indistinguishable from anyone else in Iraq. The threat is invisible.
Mokhtar is finding himself, along with the other writers who experienced a sudden shock of freedom, under some of the same unpleasant pressures he felt under the regime. Writers and intellectuals are being driven back underground or, at the very least, stymied by the uncertainty and fear of reprisals for advocating forbidden ideas, and an idea acceptable to one faction is heresy to another. Sayegh and Mokhtar's longtime enemy has returned not as a single tyrant, but instead as a creature the occupation has atomized into thousands of gunmen amped on pure hatred and fundamentalist Islam.
"In Saddam's time I only had one enemy, the dictator; now it is not very clear. He's disappeared. Saddam has become a ghost, he could be anywhere, " Mokhtar explained with a shrug.
"Mutanabbi Street is the place where we express our ideas. We don't have any other place to go and many of the famous Iraqi writers have fled the country. The only way to communicate with them is through the Internet. The others are afraid and they are hiding. I've been advised not to go out in public." Mokhtar said that his old car was easily spotted on the road, so he got a new one that doesn't stand out quite as much.
On the following Wednesday, five days after I met Mokhtar at his office, I took Ahmed down to Al Mutanabbi Street. We found the Shabandar open. There were a few younger men sitting on the benches keeping an eye on the clientele and they had beards, a new development for the Shabandar. These are newcomers, who come to keep watch on the smokers and tea drinkers. Out in front of the great windows, sitting behind Hajji Mohammed, the owner of the place, is a scribe for those who need to write official letters but do not know how to write. The old man is curled over an ancient Arabic typewriter with a piece of yellowed paper wound through the platen. It looks like he's been there for a hundred years.
In the Shabandar, Ahmed was sitting next to me trying to figure out what he was supposed to do.
"You want me to go ask the owner, Hajji Mohammed, about the bombing?"
"No."
"OK. What do you want to do?"
"I don't want to do anything."
Ahmed waited for more information. He was wearing a black T-shirt that said, "Hate the Game, not the Player."
"I just want to sit here and let these guys get used to us for a minute."
There were warning signs. No one spoke in the cafe, and most of the customers were smoking in silence; if they did speak, they kept their voices low so they wouldn't be overheard. Men sitting on benches across the cafe looked away when we glanced in their direction. People were monitoring us, a few were waiting to see what would happen, keeping an iron in the fire with respect to possible future events. When we'd come in, I had seen a man in his 30s wearing a particular kind of beard that the jihadis favor. He was reading a paper and made a show of not looking up. Fighters in the Mahdi Army wear this beard. It also didn't have to mean anything, although those beards were not common two years ago. We sat down next to him.
"Ahmed, look at this guy next to us."
"Sure, man, I see him, no problem." Ahmed speaks in perfect American movie English.
"Ask him about the bombing on Tuesday that killed Hajji Qais."
So Ahmed turned to the man and asked him.
