Word: mutannabi
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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...
...months since that blast, the rebirth of Mutannabi Street has also been well documented by 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...
What has been less widely reported is that Mutannabi Street doesn't have so many bookstores anymore. Though low tables of (mostly technical) volumes line the sidewalks, they seem to be equaled or outnumbered by stationery, electronics and knickknack shops. One storefront is stocked entirely with stuffed toys. According to Fufuli, the ratio is now 10% books, 90% other stuff. He is exaggerating, but the change is clear. "Most of the old owners were killed or left because they were afraid, so these stores opened up. Now," he added, with a curmudgeonly frown, "all the Iraqi people want is valentines...
...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...
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