Baghdad Quotes

“I believe in Love, and I know love conquers all.”
― Ahmad Ardalan, The Gardener of Baghdad

“In 762, to symbolize and propel the new order, Al-Mansur decided to build the grand new capital of Baghdad as a massive round city. The caliph assembled an elite team of the empire’s top engineers, architects, and visionaries—notably including Zoroastrians, Christians, and Jews, such as Mashallah Ibnul-Athari.”
― Mohamad Jebara, The Life of the Qur'an: From Eternal Roots to Enduring Legacy

“As the Qur’an itself had quoted Moses to declare (and as Muhammad had cited in his final letter to the assassin Musailimah): “The earth belongs to the Loving Divine, who allots it to whomever He wills; yet the most lasting legacy will be the enduring impact of those who have action-based hope.” Tellingly, when Al-Mansur inaugurated his new capital, the cornerstone of Baghdad featured that very verse etched for all to see.”
― Mohamad Jebara, The Life of the Qur'an: From Eternal Roots to Enduring Legacy

“I resolutely refuse to believe that the state of Edward's health had anything to do with this, and I don't say this only because I was once later accused of attacking him 'on his deathbed.' He was entirely lucid to the end, and the positions he took were easily recognizable by me as extensions or outgrowths of views he had expressed (and also declined to express) in the past. Alas, it is true that he was closer to the end than anybody knew when the thirtieth anniversary reissue of his Orientalism was published, but his long-precarious condition would hardly argue for giving him a lenient review, let alone denying him one altogether, which would have been the only alternatives. In the introduction he wrote for the new edition, he generally declined the opportunity to answer his scholarly critics, and instead gave the recent American arrival in Baghdad as a grand example of 'Orientalism' in action. The looting and destruction of the exhibits in the Iraq National Museum had, he wrote, been a deliberate piece of United States vandalism, perpetrated in order to shear the Iraqi people of their cultural patrimony and demonstrate to them their new servitude. Even at a time when anything at all could be said and believed so long as it was sufficiently and hysterically anti-Bush, this could be described as exceptionally mendacious. So when the Atlantic invited me to review Edward's revised edition, I decided I'd suspect myself more if I declined than if I agreed, and I wrote what I felt I had to.

Not long afterward, an Iraqi comrade sent me without comment an article Edward had contributed to a magazine in London that was published by a princeling of the Saudi royal family. In it, Edward quoted some sentences about the Iraq war that he off-handedly described as 'racist.' The sentences in question had been written by me. I felt myself assailed by a reaction that was at once hot-eyed and frigidly cold. He had cited the words without naming their author, and this I briefly thought could be construed as a friendly hesitance. Or as cowardice... I can never quite act the stern role of Mr. Darcy with any conviction, but privately I sometimes resolve that that's 'it' as it were. I didn't say anything to Edward but then, I never said anything to him again, either. I believe that one or two charges simply must retain their face value and not become debauched or devalued. 'Racist' is one such. It is an accusation that must either be made good upon, or fully retracted. I would not have as a friend somebody whom I suspected of that prejudice, and I decided to presume that Edward was honest and serious enough to feel the same way. I feel misery stealing over me again as I set this down: I wrote the best tribute I could manage when he died not long afterward (and there was no strain in that, as I was relieved to find), but I didn't go to, and wasn't invited to, his funeral.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Our love is like the moon,
changeable through all the phases
of complete disappearance to full existence.
It raises the sea up to the sky
and makes the cool wind ripple its surface.
Blindly sparkling it doesn’t let us see.
I know I’m not the only one to love you,
but your heart inquired only of me.”
― Tatjana Ostojic, Baghdad Nights

“The two of us,
two lost keys of the different doors,
once strangers and now a souvenir of pain.”
― Tatjana Ostojic, Baghdad Nights

“You asked if I loved her?
I can't even whisper her name, my heart would burst out of my chest.”
― Ahmad Ardalan, Baghdad: The Final Gathering

“The new story of ardour unfolding,
the tale of tantrums of the hearts.
An affair with a stranger
who still can’t feel it,
while silently roaming its streets.”
― Tatjana Ostojic, Baghdad Nights

“It doesn’t really matter you aren’t here.
The raindrops are keeping you alive
through growing palm forests.
Wild, untamed and unconquered,
as your wandering heart.”
― Tatjana Ostojic, Baghdad Nights

“What is love but a word?
A feeling roughly concordant to fear?
A fantasy that breaks through
the heartbreak
and endows the defeated with bravery?”
― Tatjana Ostojic, Baghdad Nights

“Tens of voices announced
the time for the prayer.
In all the magnificence of the scenery,
“God is the Greatest” fits flawlessly,
and makes me close my eyes
and murmur my supplication.”
― Tatjana Ostojic, Baghdad Nights

“To retreat in my aloneness,
my beautifully peaceful garden,
to find shade under my heart,
in the solitude of abundance,
without you in sight.”
― Tatjana Ostojic, Baghdad Nights

“Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellowcake uranium. The name was Wissam Zahawi. He was the brother of my louche gay part-Kurdish friend, the by-now late Mazen. He was also, or had been at the time of his trip to Niger, Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican. I expressed incomprehension. What was an envoy to the Holy See doing in Niger? Obviously he was not taking a vacation. Rolf then explained two things to me. The first was that Wissam Zahawi had, when Rolf was at the United Nations, been one of Saddam Hussein's chief envoys for discussions on nuclear matters (this at a time when the Iraqis had functioning reactors). The second was that, during the period of sanctions that followed the Kuwait war, no Western European country had full diplomatic relations with Baghdad. TheVatican was the sole exception, so it was sent a very senior Iraqi envoy to act as a listening post. And this man, a specialist in nuclear matters, had made a discreet side trip to Niger. This was to suggest exactly what most right-thinking people were convinced was not the case: namely that British intelligence was on to something when it said that Saddam had not ceased seeking nuclear materials in Africa.

I published a few columns on this, drawing at one point an angry email from Ambassador Zahawi that very satisfyingly blustered and bluffed on what he'd really been up to. I also received—this is what sometimes makes journalism worthwhile—a letter from a BBC correspondent named Gordon Correa who had been writing a book about A.Q. Khan. This was the Pakistani proprietor of the nuclear black market that had supplied fissile material to Libya, North Korea, very probably to Syria, and was open for business with any member of the 'rogue states' club. (Saddam's people, we already knew for sure, had been meeting North Korean missile salesmen in Damascus until just before the invasion, when Kim Jong Il's mercenary bargainers took fright and went home.) It turned out, said the highly interested Mr. Correa, that his man Khan had also been in Niger, and at about the same time that Zahawi had. The likelihood of the senior Iraqi diplomat in Europe and the senior Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer both choosing an off-season holiday in chic little uranium-rich Niger… well, you have to admit that it makes an affecting picture. But you must be ready to credit something as ridiculous as that if your touching belief is that Saddam Hussein was already 'contained,' and that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were acting on panic reports, fabricated in turn by self-interested provocateurs.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“You might think that the Left could have a regime-change perspective of its own, based on solidarity with its comrades abroad. After all, Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party consolidated its power by first destroying the Iraqi communist and labor movements, and then turning on the Kurds (whose cause, historically, has been one of the main priorities of the Left in the Middle East). When I first became a socialist, the imperative of international solidarity was the essential if not the defining thing, whether the cause was popular or risky or not. I haven't seen an anti-war meeting all this year at which you could even guess at the existence of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, an opposition that was fighting for 'regime change' when both Republicans and Democrats were fawning over Baghdad as a profitable client and geopolitical ally. Not only does the 'peace' movement ignore the anti-Saddam civilian opposition, it sends missions to console the Ba'athists in their isolation, and speaks of the invader of Kuwait and Iran and the butcher of Kurdistan as if he were the victim and George W. Bush the aggressor.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“Two people, one city, different times; connected by a memoir. Can love exist in a city destined for decades of misery?”
― Ahmad Ardalan, The Gardener of Baghdad

“Muslim and non-Muslim from across the world flocked to Baghdad to be part of Al-Ma'mun's project "Bait Al-Hekmah" or "House of Wisdom”
― Firas Alkhateeb, Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past

“In the 10th century, Baghdad instituted a licensing exam that all doctors had to take before practicing as physicians”
― Firas Alkhateeb, Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past

“An hour later. the moon reflected its light on the Tigris as well. The sun, the moon, and Fatima. What else could I ask for?”
― Ahmad Ardalan, Baghdad: The Final Gathering

“I know a feeling like that only comes once in a lifetime, and I think you should follow your heart’s desires. I believe in love, and I know love conquers all.”
― Ahmad Ardalan, The Gardener of Baghdad

“أنْ تهربَ من الظلم إلى الجنون هو غايةُ العقل، و أن ترميَ بنفسك في التهلكة لتوقفَ عجلة الفقر عن الدوران هو غايةُ الحكمة”
― أحمد رفل الخليل, ‫عودة إلى بغداد: قصة كل مغترب عن وطنه ظلّ يحلم بالعودة و كل مغترب داخل وطنه ظلّ يحلم بالرحيل‬

“Next time -- we will roll out the red carpet for you in the United States of Arabia, my brethren!”
― Leonard Leventon, Brethren: A Gripping Tale of Counter Espionage

“And I am not pleased
I am not very pleased
None of this fits into my notion of “things going very well”
― June Jordan

“يسألني صديق: متى تبدأ الحرب؟
وأجيب بسرعة: حين يُقصَف القصر الجمهوري في بغداد”
― ناصر الظفيري, أبيض يتوحش

“هَلْ يَكتبُ تاريخَ الأمم أصحابُ القرار من قادتِها البارزين، أَمْ يَصنعُهُ في الأوقات العصيبة جنودٌ مجهولون تتجاهل ذاكرتُه الجاحدة حتى أسماءهم؟”
― أحمد رفل الخليل, ‫عودة إلى بغداد: قصة كل مغترب عن وطنه ظلّ يحلم بالعودة و كل مغترب داخل وطنه ظلّ يحلم بالرحيل‬

“لم يبحثْ عن زينب التي كان يعرفُ تماماً أنّ طريقَها قد افترقَ عن طريقِهِ الوعْر قبلَ عُقود، لكنّه بحثَ عن الوطن الذي تركه هنا ليجدَه اليوم في بقايا جذعٍ ملقى على الأرض بعدَ أن فُصِلَ عن شجرةِ رمّانٍ يابسة.”
― أحمد رفل الخليل, ‫عودة إلى بغداد: قصة كل مغترب عن وطنه ظلّ يحلم بالعودة و كل مغترب داخل وطنه ظلّ يحلم بالرحيل‬

“..but what you really hate is the fact that in the middel of two catastrophic wars, it is easier to hold a job fake-fiddling, playing calming music for Americans while Bagdad burns, than it is to get a job reporting form the middel of the blaze.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“In 771, a traveller arrived in the city [Baghdad] with a copy of a work of Hindu astronomy called the Siddhanta (The Opening of the Universe), by the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta (598-668). Unlike Euclid, Brahmagupta did not set out his mathematical propositions clearly with proofs, but obscured them (as was traditional in Indian mathematics) under a veil of poetry -- beautiful, but extremely difficult to unravel. Al-Mansur gave his court astrologer, al-Fazari, the Herculean task of translating the Siddhanta, which introduced Baghdad to the concept of 'positional notation' -- the way we write numbers to this day, using the digits 1 to 9, in columns of units, tens, hundreds and so on. The possibilities that this system opened up were limitless; when it was eventually adopted, it transformed the entire discipline of mathematics by allowing calculations that would have been impossible with the old Roman-numeral system. Positional notation was already known in Syria and had been admired by Severus Sebokht, who wrote about the 'nine sings' of Indian mathematicians in 662.”
― Violet Moller, The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found: A History in Seven Cities

“Welcome to baghdad when shits happen everyday”
― Alexander Tahaov

“I found Baghdad, like most big cities in the world: big, exciting, interesting, rich, poor, hot, cold, restless, sleepless, and cruel at one and the same time.”
― Louis Yako

“I Flied, at least For a little while,
But in fact, I WAS FALLING.”
― Mohammed Oudah, Reality