#iraqi libraries

[idontmindifuforgetme]

About to get really annoying ab Dunya Mikhail. I am dead serious you will never hear the end of her w me

[totallyhussein-blog]

Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad on fighting for Yazidi women

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad endured the Yazidi genocide in Iraq, carried out by the group calling itself Islamic State (IS) in 2014.

On the tenth anniversary of the Yazidi genocide, the human rights activist sat down with BBC 100 Women to talk about her work seeking justice for her community and what needs to be done to eliminate sexual violence in war.

[wearepeace]

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” ― Charles W. Eliot

[soracities]

I read Abdulla Pashew’s “Union” on your page, and it literally shook me to my core. I have never been a poetry kind of girl. I was always more into prose. But lately, I’ve been getting into poetry slowly, and your blog is helping me discover some great poems and poets. I am so grateful to you for that!

I wanted to ask if you know Abdulla Pashew’s other works similar to/as bone-chilling as Union or any other poets.

I want to read poetry, but it’s scattered all over the internet, and looking them up on Google demotivates me. I can’t have books of poetry collections as I'm not into particular poets yet. I wish there were some kind of website or something where all the great poems of great poets are gathered, hahaha.

Anyway, thank you, and keep doing what you’re doing because you’re great at it!

I'm so glad to hear that, anon 🤍

In all honesty, I'm hesitant to compare and contrast poems when they've had such an emotional impact because often that impact is deeply personal to the reader, and you don't know when, or where, it's going to come from; it's also distinct to a particular poem reaching you at a particular time in some cases and isn't necessarily something you can replicate by trying to make other poems match the experience of one particular poem--all of them are unique in the end. All I can give you are the poems that most moved me, and that I feel tally with "Union" either in terms of affecting me through rhythm, language style or content. A few individual ones:

"Rain Song" by Badr Shakir al-Sayyab

"Clothes" by Sherko Bekas

"No Explosions" Naomi Shihab Nye

"A Kiss on the Forehead" Marina Tsvetaeva

"Cloves" by Saadi Youssef (second poem on the page)

"The Cinnamon Peeler" by Michael Ondaatje

"Separation" by W.S. Merwin

"Woman Unborn" by Anna Swir

"Fire Graffiti" by Tomas Transtromer

"Shadowplay" by Sándor Kányádi

Collection-wise I think the first poet that comes to mind whose writing-style is slightly in the same tone as "Union" is Maram al-Massri, particularly A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor (you can read it for free on the Internet Archive here). I would also highly recommend Dunya Mikhail's The Iraqi Nights (some of the poems in the series "Tablets" can be read here).

As for Pashew himself, there are only handful of his poems online in English, most of them by the Poetry Translation Centre. The translator of "Union" has translated a selection of his poetry in Dictionary of Midnight, though, which I've added it to my list, so if you find yourself drawn to him, it might be worth seeing if your local library has a copy as a way of getting more directly in touch with some of Pashew's work (in fact, I would recommend checking the library in general for any poets you've enjoyed: you're not paying for the books and so there is no pressure to feel you have to enjoy them).

[ferretteeth]

A few weeks ago I was waiting for my plane. I was in a tiny airport, really small, like there are buildings in my school bigger than it.

There was a family next to us who also were catching that plane. I would guess that they were Afghan, Iraqi or Iranian, thereabouts. A mom, dad, and their two kids. And the mom took out a plastic container that had fruit in it for her kids to eat, and that fruit was little bits of pomegranate.

This particular part is something I've been thinking about a lot. When I was a kid and when my parents packed us fruit, it would've been slices of apple and bananas. I'm from Northern Europe and pomegranate isn't something you casually eat here.

If I was writing a scene like this, a family of people who don't share my background (white westerner), would I automatically write they were eating apple slices?

Obviously this doesn't really matter. If I wrote them eating apples instead of pomegranates it would be a tiny detail very few people would care about, but it's those little details that I think about and wish I could know.

There’s such an insane wealth of human experiences I’ll never see. A library of billions of stories. I wish it was socially acceptable to ask people in the street who they are and where they're from, what their parents gave them as snacks, what their parents read to them as kids, what they went for as Halloween, what their favorite movie was, why their favorite color is that color. I wish I could read minds but only this.

[irhabiya]

“stop using your shitty education system as a crutch”

While the U.S. education system could improve, it’s not shitty. It’s as you said willful ignorance. I have taken two different world history classes in secondary school. We had the option of 3 languages at my school, my cousin’s school even offered Arabic. Four years of classes for some of the foreign languages. Then we have all our universities, many are considered top ranking. Quite literally people from all around the world come to study at them.

There is also the massive amount of public libraries that are widely available, I lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere with less than 20,000 people, there were two public libraries. Not to mention the internet, which people online can’t say they don’t have access to. There isn’t a single valid excuse for the average American to not know basics about the world.

You’re 100% right, they don’t care because it doesn’t effect them. I’ve even been told as much by someone, although they were Canadian. Same thing though. “My life is good the way it is. I don’t need anything to change.” He said something like that.

Whatever problems that may be found in the U.S. education system are nothing compared with those in many parts of the global south. My mother’s family had to flee the country because of war, my father and his family were nearly executed by a firing squad because of his ethnicity. The millions of Iraqis, Libyans, Afghanis, and Syrians who dealt with, and still deal with, who knows what. Oh no you were in a gifted program and now you feel like a failure! Poor baby, will joining the military and contributing to the suffering of others make you feel better?

.

[sounds-of-arabia]

A Destruction of Mesopotamian History: The 2003 Looting of Iraq’s National Museum

'Bush is criminal' mural in Al-Rashid hotel in Baghdad, commissioned by famous artist Layla Al Attar (ليلى العطار) in 1991.

Regardless of efforts to protect the museums and libraries of Iraq from being looted & destroyed, U.S. military successfully assigned men to chip away this mural of former President Bush on the floor of the Al Rashid Hotel. For days during the uprisings that occured subsequent to the first Gulf War, of 13 museums containing artefacts that ranged back to the dates of the mespotamian age, 9 were completely looted. Many of these stolen artefacts were discovered to being sold on the international black market.

Archaeologists in the United States consider the National Museum of Antiquities, thoroughly sacked, to be among the 10 most important museums in the world.

Examples of stolen artefacts:

a 4,300-year-old bronze mask of an Akkadian king - featured in most books of ancient art history

a small limestone statuette of a prince, circa 3300 B.C.

jewellry from the royal tombs of Ur dating to 2500 B.C.

a solid gold harp from the Sumerian era

a series of small ivories dating to the eighth century B.C.

second-century B.C. Parthian sculptures from Hatra

a collection of around 80,000 cuneiform tablets that contain examples of the some of the world’s earliest writing

To make matters worse, the Bush administration and his military presented this tragedy (their 'extensive looting' of the three major Iraqi cultural institutions in Baghdad) as a spontaneous, unforseeable operation. Where have we heard similar rhetoric? Their whole premise for the 2003 war on discovering so-called 'weapons of mass destruction.' It’s amazing how the US media perpetuates matters to desperately suggest that their actions are consistently justifiable, as after all, they are the ‘Land of the Free’ and the rest of us are in dire need of their support. This self-imposed moral obligation to establishing 'peace' and 'freedom' in Middle Eastern regimes falls nothing short of Western imperialism. Yet, what distinguishes this era of colonialism - more commonly understood under the definition of "neo-colonialism" - is that this intention is left somewhat vague, in other words, disguised. There is no direct claim that they are 'superior,' yet it is heavily implied through their rhetoric and the actions they’ve committed in destroying regimes that are seen as a threat to the hold that they (the White House) have globally. 

The Bush administration’s claim that this looting was not 'foreseeable,' is an excuse rooted in cowardice. They had every right to suspect it - the uprisings in the first Gulf War saw looting from nine of the 13 regional museums. The Iraqi National Museum was included in the Pentagon's 'No Strike List' prior to the war. This was a massive loss for not just the Iraqi people, but for the world, for this museum contained artefacts dating back thousands of years. 

Such tragedy informs - or rather, reminds - us of one thing: America's priorities have always remained the same. This example of 2003 simply reinforces it. They are driven by the classic imperial policy: divide and conquer. The only thing we can rest assured in is the tragic fact that the West will simply never change. This very geopolitical divide between the ‘West’ and ‘East’ is rooted in the mere desire to contain the power and resources of the East - we’ve seen it with the British in India, Iraq, Egypt; the Italians in Libiya; the French in Lebanon and Syria… the list goes on. What was once considered the hub of knowledge for the world became nothing but a place for power-hungry monarchs to quite simply, divide and conquer.

[walkingthroughthisworld]

FORT CARSON, COLO.-February 2,2005- Sgt. Jerry Pritchard guides an M1A2 Tank during rail loading operations at Fort Carson . Fort Carson's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment began loading vehicles on rail cars on Wednesday (February 2,2005) . Over 2,500 vehicles will be loaded in the next two weeks to be send to Iraq later this month.This will be the unit's second deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. (Photo by George Kochaniec, Jr./ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS)

(Rocky Mountain News - Denver Public Library Special Collections and Digital Archives Digital Collections)

[niftyandinterestingstuff]

Bronze statue depicting Ashurbanipal... King of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 669-c. to his death in 631 BCE. Known as the "Last Great King" of an empire that, at its time, was the largest on earth. From Cyprus in the west to Iran in the east and, at one point, even included Egypt. The colossal statues guarding the gates to Nineveh, the capitol, held a wriggling lion in their left arm and a serpent in their right hand symbolizing their "mastery" over the animals as well as their mastery over their human subjects. In the case of this depiction of Ashurbanipal, it could symbolize his mastery over conquered territories and internal "vassal kingdoms". The tablet in his left hand has a text that reads: "Peace unto Heaven and Earth/Peace unto Countries and Cities/Peace unto Dwellers in All Lands. The tablet could also symbolize that Ashurbanipal had a library that contained over 30,000 clay cuneiform tablets and fragments that dated from the7th century BCE and included the famous "Epic of Gilgamesh". The statue was commissioned by The Assyrian Foundation for the Arts and was done by Fred Parhad, an Iraqi-Assyrian American (Family refugeed in Iraq due to the Assyrian Genocide of WWI) and was installed at the San Francisco Civic Center in 1988.

[hotvampireadjacent]

I finished reading the satanic versus, very good book but not what this post is about, I’ve been listening to history podcasts…. Well old enough to be called history recent enough to still just be politics. I had a list of book on the Iraq war I want to read but I was at the library returning my previous book and everything I wanted would take time to request so I wanted something for the mean time.

I there were many books on Iraq and the Iraq war physically at my library. Many of them written by Americans who came home from the war and just about them jerking themselves off about how great they are and how bad ass they are for killing Iraqis. Many more books about American war vets as opposed to the perspective of Iraqi citizens. It feels disgraceful. It’s important to have these book at the library in the name of the first amendment but not only that, as a record of how truly evil the American empire is that these books were ever picked up by publishers.

I don’t think I saw a single book about the Iraqi perspective, but tens of American soldiers perspective.

I did find a seemingly objective book about the failures and cause of the Iraq war that I am about to start. Like finding a needle in a haystack I tell ya.

[idontmindifuforgetme]

is iraq even real

You have never touched down on a hot but windy summer night in Baghdad & you have never taken to the many malls strewn through the capital & you have never visited the neighborhood your mother grew up in & you never cried imagining her walking crowded streets downtown & you have never been taken to Iraqi orchestra where your aunt’s husband performed & you have never aimlessly wandered the University of Baghdad where your mother attended & you have never snuck into the university library even though you needed a student ID & you have never visited the many decadently themed restaurants in Baghdad & you have never watched mauve and tangerine bathe the city in a glorious flare & you have never sat on the edge of the Tigris River a safe distance from drunken boys while the city lights trembled off the water & you have never hit up every antique store there is to take as many souvenirs as possible & you have never visited the Royal Cemetery with its intricate craftsmanship & you have never

[totallyhussein-blog]

Manchester's Little Free Libraries are a world of pure imagination

I absolutely adore the Little Free Libraries which are located here in Manchester and last weekend, it was wonderful to contribute the entire 'Chronicles of Narnia' along with the classic story 'Five Children and It'.

These creative small boxes are scattered across the city and contain a world of pure imagination. All you do is donate a book, take a book and help by spreading the word. They're magic!

[eretzyisrael]

Iraqi Jews experienced difficult conditions under Ottoman rule

While the Ottoman Turks were more tolerant than the Shi’a Persians,  conditions for the Jews in Iraq  during the last three centuries of the Ottoman Empire were difficult, as they were not only dhimmis, a subjugated minority under Islam, but exposed to random provocations. It was only under the British mandate that their social status improved – but this caused greater tension between Jews and Muslims, according to Annals of Iraqi Jewry, a collection of articles and reviews. 

Jewish homes in Baghdad, with their distinctive ‘shnashil’ verandas

At times during the 17th to 19th centuries, the Jews of Iraq were subject to robbery, rape and murder in addition to their legally-mandated status of degradation. Especially difficult was the condition of the Jews of Kurdistan and other isolated communities, which were totally untouched by Turkish rule.

Shocking incidents of attacks against Jews occurred in the Ottoman empire during the period of the Tanzimat (social and political reforms),not only as a result of the incitement of the masses by religious leaders, but also as a result of the weakness or despotism of the Turkish governors. Libels against the Jews, that they had presumably attacked Islam, were quite common in Iraq. These libels led to the beating of Jews  by the Muslim masses, forced  conversions  to Islam, suicide by Jews, and in one instance the burning of a Jew at the stake in the streets of Baghdad in 1876. In the cities of southern Kurdistan, which came under Turkish rule, Jews also complained of provocations by Muslims. Needless to say, in the cities and villages deep within Kurdistan, which were still ruled by the Agawath (tribal leaders), the condition of the Jews did not improve. On the contrary, the need of the tribal leaders for large sums of money to pay the heavy tribute  they remitted to Constantinople to maintain their rule, led them to extort these sums from the population, especially from the powerless Jewish minority. It appears, however,  that these oppressive measures were not religiously motivated.

The tremendous improvement, actually a decisive transformation, in the legal status of the Jews of Iraq upon the establishment of the British mandate did not necessarily lead to a significant change in their social status. The opposite, in fact was a common phenomenon in most of the lands of the Ottoman Empire: a rise in tension between the Muslim majority and the the Jewish minority.

The clear partitions separating the Muslims from the Jews had not been removed. The Muslim environment was not prepared to accept the Jews as possessors of equal rights, for this equality was not the consequence of a social development, but merely a political act taken by the authorities. The Muslim majority, which was not pleased by the granting of rights to the Jews, regarded them as a negative element serving the foreign government.

From ‘Jews and Non-Jews’, Annals of Iraqi Jewry, edited by Ora Melamed (Eliner Library, 1995)

The post Iraqi Jews experienced difficult conditions under Ottoman rule appeared first on Point of No Return. Read in browser »

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 2.13 (after 1940)

1945 – World War II: The siege of Budapest concludes with the unconditional surrender of German and Hungarian forces to the Red Army. 1945 – World War II: Royal Air Force bombers are dispatched to Dresden, Germany to attack the city with a massive aerial bombardment. 1951 – Korean War: Battle of Chipyong-ni, which represented the "high-water mark" of the Chinese incursion into South Korea, commences. 1954 – Frank Selvy becomes the only NCAA Division I basketball player ever to score 100 points in a single game. 1955 – Israel obtains four of the seven Dead Sea Scrolls. 1955 – Twenty-nine people are killed when Sabena Flight 503 crashes into Monte Terminillo near Rieti, Italy. 1960 – With the success of a nuclear test codenamed "Gerboise Bleue", France becomes the fourth country to possess nuclear weapons. 1960 – Black college students stage the first of the Nashville sit-ins at three lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. 1961 – An allegedly 500,000-year-old rock is discovered near Olancha, California, US, that appears to anachronistically encase a spark plug. 1967 – American researchers discover the Madrid Codices by Leonardo da Vinci in the National Library of Spain. 1975 – Fire at One World Trade Center (North Tower) of the World Trade Center in New York. 1978 – Hilton bombing: A bomb explodes in a refuse truck outside the Hilton Hotel in Sydney, Australia, killing two refuse collectors and a policeman. 1979 – An intense windstorm strikes western Washington and sinks a 0.5-mile (0.80 km) long section of the Hood Canal Bridge. 1981 – A series of sewer explosions destroys more than two miles of streets in Louisville, Kentucky. 1983 – A cinema fire in Turin, Italy, kills 64 people. 1984 – Konstantin Chernenko succeeds the late Yuri Andropov as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 1990 – German reunification: An agreement is reached on a two-stage plan to reunite Germany. 1991 – Gulf War: Two laser-guided "smart bombs" destroy the Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad. Allied forces said the bunker was being used as a military communications outpost, but over 400 Iraqi civilians inside were killed. 1996 – The Nepalese Civil War is initiated in the Kingdom of Nepal by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist-Centre). 2001 – An earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter magnitude scale hits El Salvador, killing at least 944. 2004 – The Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announces the discovery of the universe's largest known diamond, white dwarf star BPM 37093. Astronomers named this star "Lucy" after The Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". 2007 – Taiwan opposition leader Ma Ying-jeou resigns as the chairman of the Kuomintang party after being indicted on charges of embezzlement during his tenure as the mayor of Taipei; Ma also announces his candidacy for the 2008 presidential election. 2008 – Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd makes a historic apology to the Indigenous Australians and the Stolen Generations. 2010 – A bomb explodes in the city of Pune, Maharashtra, India, killing 17 and injuring 60 more. 2011 – For the first time in more than 100 years the Umatilla, an American Indian tribe, are able to hunt and harvest a bison just outside Yellowstone National Park, restoring a centuries-old tradition guaranteed by a treaty signed in 1855. 2012 – The European Space Agency (ESA) conducted the first launch of the European Vega rocket from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. 2017 – Kim Jong-nam, brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, is assassinated at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. 2021 – Former U.S. President Donald Trump is acquitted in his second impeachment trial. 2021 – A major winter storm causes blackouts and kills at least 82 people in Texas and northern Mexico.

[fac-romam-iterum-magna]

The fall

At the beggining of the 16th century, greece and iraq remember the glory and the fall of past empires, including their own

Greece was leaning on a desk of the sublime porte's library, thoughtful, eyes full of nostalgia, glued to the pages of his book. His hand, still skinned from the fall of constantinople, slightly touched the letters of the work

-《what are you reading ?》

He turned his gaze toward the owner of the voice. At a few feets from him was standing is then-rival: Iraq

The man in front of him smiled at him, he was now sitting on a chair just next to him. The greek looked at him and noted his outfit. Instead of his blacks and laborious clothes he used to wore, he was now in a simple white thobe. Greece looked at the hand of his mate, still burned from the sack of baghdad. Never he could have imagined sharing a house with the one who gave him so much trouble.

He was taken out of his thought when Iraq tooks the book

-《So...it's on the fall of the western roman empire !》 said the iraqi with a playful tone

-《mh...i was diving into the details of his death》 whispered the greek.

-《Arabia and Ethiopia once told me he was an eccentric with violence problem》 spok iraq on the same playful tone.

-《I don't know. I am born because he was dying. I neither knew the glory of the republic or the prosperity of the empire》 spoke Greece

-《he accomplished a lot of great deeds, his territory and influence on us made him a sort if father for us and an ideal to reach》 he kept going on

-《despite that, it didn't prevent him to die in a chaotic empire falling apart under his own weight》 he finished

-《mmmh...you know ? My father used to say that when the gods created life they appointed death as an inevitable fate for everyone.》 Retorted his interlocutor

-《Babylon ?》 Asked the other man

-《Yeah. He was a bit similar to rome when i think about it, he was a great empire, cradle of multiple foundations of civilization, the personification of hubris and wealth, a source of admiration for some, of disgust and terror for other.》 He said not without a bit of admiration in his voice.

-《All that so he would fall in one of the most humiliating way by a kid straight from the mountains.》 He spoke with a mix of amusement and sadness in his voice.

The skinned hand met the burned one while the gaze of the european fixed the arab's one, before the latter say to him with a now sad laugh

-《In some centuries, do you think books will be written on us ?》

Greece could only gave him a slight and melancolic smile.

[the-forest-library]

List 5 things that make you happy, then put this in the ask box for the last 5 people who interacted with your blog and get to know your mutuals and followers. 💕

Thank you, Kim - I’ll list 5 things that made me happy today ☺️

Lovely friends

Surprise packages

Finding a box that is just the right size for what you need it for

Library sales

Takeout from a local Iraqi restaurant