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http://msnbc.com/news/983394.asp

In Iraq literary enclave, nuance contours debate

As normalcy slowly returns, anger turns to annoyance

By Anthony Shadid
THE WASHINGTON POST



BAGHDAD, Oct. 21 — On a scorching day last August, in a capital reeling from electricity cuts and unmet expectations, Mohammed Hayawi stood in his bookstore, sweat pouring down his unshaven face. He was annoyed, he was frustrated, and he spoke to customers, friends and all who cared to listen. President Bush had broken his promises of prosperity, he complained, and thieves and looters ruled the streets. Was it worse or better than before the war, someone asked.

“WORSE,” he insisted, wagging his finger. “Truly? It’s worse.”
These days in his bookstore along storied Mutanabi Street, Hayawi is in a better mood. Security has improved by 60 percent, he said somewhat arbitrarily. He makes six, maybe seven times more money than he did two months ago, selling long-banned books from Lebanon and Iran. The Americans deserve some credit, he said, but Iraqis deserve far more, their resilience honed by decades of hardship.
He dragged on a cigarette and, with a grin, retold a popular Iraqi proverb. “If you want a rabbit, take a rabbit. If you want a gazelle, take a rabbit.” Iraqis will take what they can take, he said, but Americans will give only what they want to give.

After a summer when tempers ran as high as the temperatures, a fragile sense of normalcy has returned to Mutanabi Street, a narrow stretch of bookstores and shops in old Baghdad that serves as the capital’s intellectual entrepot. Frustration and the anger it brought have subsided, with the return of electricity and the tangible gains of the occupation in returning police to the streets.
But the debate in shops like Hayawi’s is seldom over the success or failure of the six-month occupation, even less over support or opposition to U.S. forces. Rather it is more nuanced, with sentiments as intricate as the turquoise tiles that adorn the old city’s minarets. The conversations drive to the essence of the country that is being shaped-whether occupiers can understand those they occupy, how violence will interrupt their lives, what role new forces unleashed will play.
“I challenge anyone to say what has happened, what’s happening now and what will happen in the future,” Hayawi said.

BRITNEY AND OSAMA




Named for one of the Arab world’s greatest poets, a 10th century sage whose haughtiness was matched only by his skill, Mutanabi Street symbolizes Baghdad’s now-familiar freedom that some, with a hint of unease, cast as chaos.
Once lined with magazines 20 years old, sidewalk displays are crowded with new issues of FHM, Maxim and GQ, their covers adorned with scantily clad women. They vie for space with the landmark works of such Shiite Muslim thinkers as Mohammed Baqr Sadr that, until this spring, would have earned vendors prison time or worse. On rickety stands are CDs of Osama bin Laden’s messages and sermons by militant Egyptian clerics selling for 50 cents. Down the street are pamphlets of the Communist Party, a bewildering mix that gives justice to a line of Mutanabi’s that is sometimes quoted in Baghdad: “With such noise, you need 10 fingers to plug your ears.”
One vendor, Abu Zeid Tai, 32, stood proudly over his display of religious books, jostled by another stand marketing posters of the prophet Muhammad’s genealogy and notebooks with Britney Spears, Shakira and Jennifer Lopez on their covers.
“From here on, it was forbidden,” he said, waving his hand loosely across the titles.
Car horns drowned out his words, and he turned to the traffic that snarled a street with room for no more than one lane. He shook his head. Before the war, he said, buses were prohibited from the streets, as were the trucks that now seem to stop where they please.
“Look at it,” Tai said. “America is a great power, and these are simple things.”
Argued with less vehemence, the question of half full or half empty still figures in conversations along Mutanabi Street. With it, though, is the sense that Baghdad lately has grown even more complicated with the tenacity of attacks and bombings and the arrival of foreign fighters and their religious ideologies. In some shops, there is a loss of confidence in the U.S. occupation and a feeling, even among supporters of the United States, that Iraqis are better equipped to run a country that American authorities will never understand.
It is a remarkable shift from the immediate aftermath of the war, when the U.S. military was widely perceived as all-powerful.
“Iraqis know each and every house, each and every street. I know everyone in my neighborhood, who’s good and bad. The Americans can never know this,” said Adel Jannabi, a retired government worker, sitting in a stationery shop cluttered with pictures of soccer stars and Shiite religious posters imported from Syria and Iran. “If they give the authority to Iraqis, they could solve all the problems.”

OCCUPATION AND RESISTANCE
‘They’re (Americans) working slowly but they’re doing well. If there were no Americans here, people would end up killing each other.’
— AMRAN KADHIM
Stationery store owner Over a glass of tea, Jannabi was at once hopeful and disenchanted. He said he would never forget that the Americans overthrew Saddam Hussein, but that his life remains difficult. He has received $100 in pensions from U.S. officials — $20 a month-but complains it is too little even to pay for his three children to ride private transportation to and from school.
The owner of the stationery store, Amran Kadhim, interrupted him.
“The Americans are doing well,” said Kadhim, 27, who hesitated to disagree with the elder Jannabi. “They’re working slowly but they’re doing well. If there were no Americans here, people would end up killing each other.”
The problem, Kadhim said, was not the Americans but the resistance, the attacks in Baghdad and the regions north and west against U.S. soldiers and Iraqis who work with them. He recounted a story making the rounds that day on Mutanabi Street that a bomb planted the day before at the nearby Rashid Bank was only narrowly defused. He recalled the death of Sabiha Adel, a mother of 10 and relative of one of his workers who he said was killed in the bombing of the Turkish Embassy in Baghdad this month.
“Why are we guilty? We didn’t do anything. Why are they stopping the rebuilding and reconstruction of Iraq?” he said.
“No, no, my friend,” Jannabi countered, “there should still be much more progress.”
“Why do we blame the Americans?” Kadhim asked.
Jannabi quoted a saying: “There is no power or strength except through God.” It’s out of our hands.
As it does in much of Baghdad, a sense of insecurity colored their conversation. While better, they said, it has an absolute quality-either you feel safe or you don’t. Before the war, Kadhim kept his store open until 11 p.m. Now, he locks the door at 3 in the afternoon.
To some, like Jannabi, U.S. forces aren’t up to the task of providing security. Iraq is too complicated, an Eastern country with its own traditions occupied by a Western power with its own impressions. The Americans, he said, will always be strangers in another land. He quoted the proverb of another Arab city that he said applies to Baghdad: “The people of Mecca know its canyons.”
“When you come inside this store, do you know what’s upstairs?” he asked. “You can’t, and neither can the Americans. The Americans can never know what they’ll find upstairs.”

FEARS AND ASPIRATIONS
To Muwafaq Ahmed, sitting down the street at the Shahbandar Cafe, lined with antique water pipes and black-and-white photographs of Baghdad in the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. forces are reluctant to enforce security so as to justify their presence.
“Do you know why I’m carrying this cane?” he asked, banging the wood staff on the floor. “I’m not lame. It’s to protect me from the hooligans and thieves.” He paused, drinking sweet lemon tea. “Before the war, I didn’t need anything.”
Muwafaq Ahmed, a retired army officer, sits at the Shahbandar Cafe, one of Mutanabi Street's most famous locales, Oct. 21.
A 20-year veteran of the air force who boasts of fluency in Russian, French, Spanish and English, Ahmed was no supporter of the U.S. military control of Iraq. It was an invasion, he said, and it remains an occupation. Hussein, however loathsome, was an Iraqi.
But he said his worries were less of the Americans and more of the fate of his own country. He worried about foreign fighters coming across borders still loosely guarded. Like others in Iraq, who darkly predict their country has embarked on the path of Lebanon’s sectarian strife, he is uneasy about growing divisions between Shiites and Sunnis, between Kurds and Arabs. He pointed to the Governing Council and the quota system used to allot seats among Iraq’s Shiite majority and its Kurdish and Sunni Arab minorities.
“We want democracy in Iraq,” he said. “We want an Iraqi citizen to feel he is really an Iraqi, that he serves Iraq, not that he is Sunni, not that he is Shiite, not that he is Kurd. He is Iraqi and he serves Iraq.”
“I’m worried,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m very worried.”
Outside, construction workers hauled gravel, renovating a street whose history stretches back to the Ottomans. Bakers hawked pastries as donkey carts competed with bumper-to-bumper traffic. Shoppers stopped briefly at a tea stand fashioned from a file cabinet, a butane tank and a charred kettle. Nearby were posters for “Terminator 3” and “Matrix 2.”
Inside the Renaissance Bookstore, Hayawi sat behind his desk, cluttered with bundles of Iraqi dinars.
“The Iraqi people want the dinar to be $3 again,” he said.
Now at 1,950 to the dollar, the dinar last earned that price prior to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. But it’s a sentiment that suggests the standard by which Iraqis measure progress. Hayawi said that he did not want the Baghdad of before the most recent war, but the Baghdad of before all its wars, before international sanctions and before the trauma that marked Hussein’s three-decade rule.
“We don’t want to hear explosions, we don’t want to hear about more attacks, we want to be at peace,” he said, dark bags under his eyes. “The Iraqi person wants to put his head on his pillow and feel relaxed. Iraq has suffered so much.”