Literary Salons Returning to Baghdad

Throughout history, literary salons have been the forums in which people have discussed and debated the ideas which rest at the core of their societies and souls. We take it as a positive sign that these important popular institutions are on the rise once again in the city of Baghdad:

Speaking Freely Where Fear Rules

by John Leland

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.

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