Mutanabbi Street, in the heart of downtown Baghdad, has been home to booksellers for centuries.
Through years of war, censorship and dictatorship it has served as a cultural hub for the city. “Cairo writes, Beirut prints, and Baghdad reads,” goes the proverb, and this is where they come to do it.
The cafes that branch off from the main thoroughfare are a din of smoke and conversation. Books spill out from the pavement stalls onto the street, where browsers kneel to rifle through an eclectic offering.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez sits alongside a book of American idioms. Thick engineering textbooks compete with countless biographies of George Bush and histories of the US invasion. But the street has a story as gripping as any of the books on sale.
Religious books used to dominate the market. Then for years under the rule of Saddam Hussein, the sellers were restricted in what they could offer. “I was jailed for selling ‘The Generals are the Last to Know,’” says one stall owner who goes by the name Haider ‘Magazine’.
“The idea of the book is that Saddam entered Kuwait without the knowledge of the generals. It was forbidden.”
Mutanabbi’s Street’s troubles didn’t end with Hussein. In 2007, a car bomb ripped through the market, killing 30 people and injuring hundreds. It took years for it to recover.
Today, the street is alive again, and the bestseller list is moving with the times.
“The people who are buying are young people, honestly. They are currently looking for novels, or stories,” says Maher Muhammad, a bookshop owner on the street.
“But this thing will not last. What do we say about that? It’s just like a pot will boil and collapse."
