Word: baghdad
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Mutannabi Street, in central Baghdad, has had many names. In the second Abbasid period, it was the Paper Market. Under the Ottomans it was Military Bakery Street. Under the British it was Hassan Pasha Street. The current name dates from 1932, when the Ministry of the Interior renamed much of the city. In all its guises, the street has been famous for booksellers - and much beloved. Informally, it is often called the "artery of Baghdad." On March 5, 2007, it was largely destroyed by a car bomb...
...both journalists and politicians. With its Ottoman architecture and once lively trade, it was a picturesque and perhaps obvious barometer for the city. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki held a reopening ribbon-cutting ceremony at the end of last year. The image he hoped to project was that Baghdad was no longer a city where intellectuals were marked for murder, where university professors lived in fear or fled. The idea was that Baghdad was increasingly a safe and functional place. Which it is. There were plenty of people walking on Mutannabi Street while I was there. (See pictures...
...strange hobby, granted, and perhaps out of place on a street with so much literary, if bookish, romance attached to it. Mutannabi Street is named for Abu Tayeb al-Mutannabi (1915-65), a famously fierce and brilliant poet from Kufa, south of Baghdad. "The most noble place in the world is the saddle of a fast horse," he wrote in one poem, "and the best companion ever is a book." It may be that copiers are of greater value than horses in Baghdad these days, but one wonders what Mutannabi would have made of the street that bears his name...
...that was when I realized another strange thing about Mutannabi Street - over the course of an hour, among the many pedestrians strolling along Baghdad's artery, I had seen only one pair of women...
...after the single engine on their drug-surveillance plane conked out in southern Colombia. Not only did they crash on top of a platoon of insurgents, but they had the bad luck of being snatched just weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. With all eyes on Baghdad and new war heroes like former POW Jessica Lynch, hardly anyone noticed that three Americans had gone missing in Colombia. Besides, when bad things happen to hired guns, it doesn't pack the same emotional punch of captured U.S. troops or flag-draped coffins. By the time they were rescued on July...