Baghdad: Looted and shuttered after US troops seized Baghdad a dozen years ago, the National Museum of Iraq has officially reopened its doors — a response to Daesh thugs’ taking jackhammers to ancient treasures in Mosul.
The message was clear: Baghdad and its government belong to the civilised world, and the Daesh does not. US officials even returned some recovered objects to show solidarity.
But public relations are one thing, daily life in the long-suffering Iraqi capital another. The reopened museum looks hardly changed since the Saddam Hussain era, notwithstanding tens of millions of mostly foreign money ostensibly spent on its rejuvenation, which went who knows where.
The place was nearly empty one recent morning. Two visitors absently looked over a musty case of Neolithic bones in the vast galleries.
“It is a scandal,” Ali Al Nashmi, who teaches Iraqi history at Baghdad University, said. Some new installations, underwritten by Germans and Italians, point out by contrast how little has happened over the years.
A time capsule with yellowing labels and cracked walls, the museum tells a story about Sumerians and Akkadians; Nebuchadnezzar; Hulagu Khan, who destroyed the city in 1258; and Tamerlane, the Mongol warlord who sacked it all over again about 150 years later.
But the museum also speaks about Iraq today: its entrenched corruption, squandered fortunes and the slender thread of heritage by which the very notion of a single reunified country partly hangs.
That is because heritage is intricately bound up with national identity here. After all, what does it mean to be Iraqi at this point, with the country ripping itself apart and sectarianism remaking borders more or less arbitrarily drawn a century ago by outsiders?
Baghdadis are quick to point out that, across sects and tribes, Iraqis share a lifetime of misery and death. But many also say they share a legacy, which the museum enshrines: Iraq as the seedbed of civilisation, the source of writing and statehood.
This makes the museum more than just another collection of artefacts, a tourist attraction without tourists. The Daesh’s rampage in Mosul, which horrified countless Iraqis, Sunnis as well as Shiites and Kurds, highlighted the point. It proved that ancient objects like the ones in the museum here still have potent symbolic, spiritual meaning.
But there is also modern culture, itself a fragile concept. Once upon a time, Baghdad was a brick capital of 19th- and 20th-century arcades, parks and squares. Saddam destroyed vast stretches of the urban fabric, blasting highways through old neighbourhoods, throwing up ghastly towers and even ghastlier marble palaces to house his bloated bureaucracy and to glorify himself. More than old architecture was destroyed.
“Baghdadis lost their values along with their neighbourhoods,” is how Ali Mousawi, an architect, put it recently. Mousawi is helping to rebuild the southern city of Basra but lives in London, where he moved years ago to escape Saddam’s tyranny.
“We used to have beautiful gardens, but politicians gave the land away, public land,” Mousawi said. “We lost not just our shared connection with the ancient past. We lost our modern identity, too.”
Mahfodh Dawood, 74, a poet who used to work for the Ministry of Culture, said, “The message of [Daesh] was that it wants to rob us of our identity,” he pointed out.
Dawood was sandwiched among friends one afternoon on the cushioned benches in a sunny corner of Shabandar Cafe, a bustling, smoky hangout for intellectuals in downtown Baghdad. The cafe is decorated with sepia photographs of old Baghdad and portraits of the four sons and grandson of the owner who were killed when a bomb blew up the cafe a decade ago. Where so much has been lost, the cafe’s reconstruction has been a trumpeted sign of resilience.
“At this point, just about the only thing it means to be Iraqi is that you are responsible for the civilisation that was here and goes back thousands of years, nothing else,” Dawood added.
His friend Muayad Al Bassam, 65, said: “Culture is a tool to reunite us. Although what can it mean in the midst of murder and sectarianism?”
“I’ll tell you,” Al Bassam answered himself. “When Iraqis see life in the rest of the world, we feel we are poor, worthless. We are No. 1 only in corruption. But we have this past, as the source of civilisation.”
Several young men were clustered on a different bench across the room, smoking hookahs. “It is our identity, our heritage, yes,” Abbas Jabir, 25, said, “but a generation has grown up since 2003 that isn’t educated in this history, in this idea of national pride, and so is more susceptible to [Daesh].”
Ahmad Khalid, 28, agreed: “We lost our history. We need to spread this message about culture as a thing that unifies us — if it is not too late.”
But which culture?
That same day, Haider Fadhil, 21, was hanging out with friends in the leafy courtyard of a partly demolished municipal building along the Tigris, enjoying the shade of a tall clock tower. Armed guards at the entrance frisked families coming there to picnic and sunbathe in peace.
“The reopening of the museum means Iraq is not without hope,” Fadhil said. “Our history can bind us together, although for me, to be Iraqi now mostly means to have lived under Saddam, through wars, with sectarianism, to have lost friends and family — yet to persist.”
The only two visitors to the museum on that day were Enas Jasem, a 30-year-old student, and a companion, Uday Abdullah, an engineer, 35.
“We were nearby and just wanted to stop in,” Jasem said, by way of explaining what should not have seemed odd but was clearly unusual.
Abdullah insisted, “People need to come see this.”
But the museum is closed on weekends, when most Iraqis might visit. Its schedule is hostage to civic service budgets, the director, Ahmad Kamel Mohammad, said with a shrug.
He acknowledged that even schoolchildren are charged an entrance fee, notwithstanding many families struggle simply to scrounge up money for food and shelter.
As for countering the Daesh’s social media campaign and elaborately produced videos, the director referred vaguely to a Facebook page that some young Iraqis had created to plead for the return of looted antiquities, as if that had much to do with the museum.
“What we need is peace,” the director said. “Peace means security, visitors, money, pride.”
About that, there could be little argument. Before Iraqis ponder heritage and its implications for national pride, they need to feel safe, which is why, perhaps even more than the reopening of the museum, the opening of Al Mansour mall a couple of years ago is news here.
Ubiquitous in many parts of the world but novel in Iraq, mall culture offers Baghdadis not just security. It also provides a rare semblance of normality.
With air-conditioning, a food court, chain stores, a gate on the street, guards at the entrance, and a floor of rides and games for children, it is where families of different economic levels shop, eat, catch first-run movies or just walk around for a few hours without feeling quite as much that they are taking their lives in their hands. The multistory mall is Baghdad’s new urban centre, mobbed on weekends.
So heritage is a tent pole for prospective nation-building, but mall culture, in all its banality, at least for the time being, is clearly another.
“We challenge [Daesh] by coming to this mall,” is how Mohammad Al Zaidi, 28, described the symbolic relevance of the place. He and his fiance were polishing off lunch from KFC (Krunchy Fried Chicken). Al Zaidi added that a unified Iraq someday must come together around both its heritage and places like Al Mansour, past and future.
In a nearby cafe, Sara Mohammad, a 28-year-old from Mosul, said she felt heart-broken by the Daesh’s barbarism. As she struggled to explain, her friend, Tamara Saad, 27, leapt in: “We feel proud of our ancient culture in the way you have something in your house that you pay no attention to until someone comes into the house and destroys it. You feel devastated.”
The mall, Tamara added, “gave them a new life in Baghdad.”
Jaffar Darweesh publishes a magazine about Iraqi heritage. He talked about inspiring a new generation to feel pride and kinship because it is Iraq’s last, best hope.
“You can’t expect Iraqis to protect museums and ancient objects in the ground when they’re desperate to protect themselves,” is how he put it. “But this shouldn’t exempt us from caring about our past. Politics have failed to create a national identity. Religion has failed. The sects have clearly failed. So who are we? That’s the question. I think history is partly the answer, it’s common ground.”
Al Nashmi, the Iraqi historian, put it differently: “It will take a great deal to bring us back together. But Iraqis are intelligent people. Our ancestors lived through disasters. We can do it again, if things do not go on like this much longer.”
“If they do,” he added, “we are lost.”
