Anderson Valley AdvertiserNovember 26, 2003  Selling Books in
Baghdad  by Patrick Cockburn  The center of the book trade in
Baghdad is al-Mutanabi Street which runs between the Tigris and
Rashid Street, now shabby and decayed but once the city's
commercial heart. The bookshops are small, and open all the
time: on Friday there's a market, when vendors lay out their
books in Arabic and English on mats on the dusty and broken
surface of the road. Most are second-hand. In the 1990s, after
the first Gulf War, I used to walk around the district looking
at books, often English classics once owned by students.
Difficult words were underlined and translated into Arabic in
the margin. There was plenty of stock as the Iraqi
intelligentsia, progressively ruined by sanctions, sold off
their libraries.  The market was carefully monitored by a
section of al-Amn al-Amm, the General Security Service, led by
Major Jammal Askar, a poet who used to write verses in praise of
Saddam. He oversaw the banning of books on modern Iraq,