Hey Delegates!
I found this article about salons popping up in Baghdad, and how this is a sign of freedom of expression returning to the city. Give a look over, and I’d love it if you’d leave some comments about it.
Here is the url: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/world/middleeast/02baghdad.html?em
I will also past the article.
Thanks and good luck!
Josh Reyman
Baghdad Journal
Speaking Freely Where Fear Rules
BAGHDAD — At the end of a week that included two spectacular bomb attacks, Ali al-Nijar left his home to talk about poetry. Mr. Nijar, a retired professor of agriculture, was squeezed in among 60 others at a weekly literary salon on Baghdad’s Mutanabi Street, one of about a dozen salons that have sprung up around the city in the last two years as violence has dropped.
“This is a product of freedom,” Mr. Nijar said, waiting for the featured speakers to arrive. The topic for the week was a poet named Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, one of the founders of modern Iraqi poetry. “Of course, there is fear in the city right now,” Mr. Nijar said. “But people don’t care about the bombings. I know the risk I’m taking, but I don’t care.”
For centuries salons were a vital part of Iraqi intellectual life, places where people of different classes or sects met to discuss culture, literature or ideas. At one time Baghdad had more than 200 salons, about a quarter of them run by Jews, said Tariq Harb, a lawyer who is a regular at several salons and hosts his own.
But during Saddam Hussein’s presidency, the salons dwindled away or went underground, as people objected to government control or feared the presence of government spies. In the sectarian violence that followed the 2003 American-led invasion, people were often afraid to meet in public.
Safia al-Souhail started her salon last April, after a level of peace had come to the city. It meets one afternoon a month at her home and ends after dark, which would have been unthinkable during the height of sectarian violence.
On the Thursday after the recent bombings, about 80 people gathered in a long reed structure known as a mudhif, modeled after the architecture of the marshes of southern Iraq. Ms. Souhail, a member of Parliament who is running for re-election with one of the Shiite alliances, worked the room, shaking hands and welcoming guests, including several political figures. Blue banners in the front and back of the hall, not unlike a candidate’s campaign banners, announced Safia al-Souhail’s Literary Salon.
“Here you have the top of Iraqi society,” said Majeed H. al-Azawi, a friend of Ms. Souhail’s and a member of the salon’s board, pointing out people in the crowd: a few members of Parliament, historians, academics, lawyers and writers. “This area is very safe, but many of the salons are outside this area.”
The topic for the day was the Imam Hussein and his daughter, Zainab, founding figures in Shiite history. Members of Ms. Souhail’s staff passed tea and a hot porridge called harisa, a traditional dish during commemorations of the imam.
“Gandhi said he learned from Hussein to be subject to injustice, and yet he won,” the first speaker, Ali al-Allaq, a Parliament member from the Dawa Party, told the audience.
The crowd included Shiite and Sunni clerics, women with and without head scarves, and even women smoking cigarettes, a taboo in Iraqi public life. Ms. Souhail did not cover her head.
From the small stage a member of Parliament from Ms. Souhail’s alliance sounded suspiciously as if he were stumping for votes, which is against the salon’s rules. “The zone of freedom is opening the zone of culture,” said the lawmaker, Hachim al-Hassani. “The dictatorship closed the zones of culture. Freedom has led us to events like this.”
Mr. Hassani hastened to wrap up and continue to another engagement. “I can’t talk about the electoral process, because I am forbidden from talking about the election,” he told the crowd. “I call on all intellectuals to help us with the next phase, to bring in new values to replace those of the last 35 years.”
Mr. Harb, the lawyer and salon host, said it was a good thing that speakers were forbidden to talk politics. “Because there would be too much fighting,” he said. “And because it would be too boring.”
Athmar Shaker Majead, manager of the women’s research unit at the College of Education for Women, watched from the center of the mudhif. She is a regular at Ms. Souhail’s salons, she said. “Salons are an icon for Iraqis,” she said. “Iraqis like to repeat what their ancestors used to do. We use such salons to strengthen our will and face our circumstances.”
After the attacks of recent months that destroyed several government and commercial buildings and killed hundreds, she said that there was a growing sense of fear in the capital, but that it would strengthen rather than end the salons. “We are a living nation, not a dead nation, and that’s what these are about,” she said. “Cultural activities will not disappear, despite the fear.”
At the Mutanabi Street salon, Mr. Nijar, the retired agriculture professor, said he liked talking politics at salons, because it was on people’s minds. He floated a theory about the elections. “Most people don’t trust the politicians now,” he said. “They know they’re backed by some outside power. And the biggest power is the Americans, so whoever the Americans back will win.”
He added another reason for the perseverance of salons. “The Arabic language was born in Iraq,” he said. “We are talkative sometimes.”
