A Friday morning on Al-Mutanabbi Street is like an open-air history lesson: books spread out on the pavements, students haggling over the price of a second-hand novel, and old men chatting on the benches of the Shabandar Café as their fathers did decades ago. In this simple scene the Baghdad we love reveals itself: a city that reads and debates, and knows how to begin again.
But the memory of cities is not preserved by nostalgia alone. Baghdad, the city of shanasheel balconies, winding alleys and covered markets, has lost many of its heritage houses over the past decades to neglect, demolition or encroachment, and in their place have risen concrete blocks that resemble neither the city nor its people.
Restoration as a cultural stance
Hence the importance of the projects we are seeing today to rehabilitate Al-Rasheed Street, the Qishla and parts of the old markets. These are not passing cosmetic works, but a belated recognition that place is part of people’s identity, and that the street once walked by Baghdad’s poets, merchants and students deserves to be restored as befits it.
Al-Rasheed Street holds a special place in this memory. Beneath its columns and arches the capital’s first newspapers, literary cafés and cinemas were born, and for decades it was the artery through which Baghdad’s commercial and cultural life pulsed. When we restore its lustre, we are not merely repairing façades; we are recovering a whole chapter of the city’s story.
A city that demolishes its memory forces its children to live as strangers in their own streets.
Restoration, however, needs strict standards if it is not to become forgery. Replacing old brick with aluminium façades printed with traditional motifs does not restore memory; it insults it. Specialists in architecture and archaeology should take part in every project, and the craftsmen who still master the making of shanasheel and woodcarving should be brought in before their trade dies out.
A memory people share
The greatest responsibility, though, lies with the city’s own people. A heritage house owned by a private citizen needs a law to protect it and incentives that encourage its owner to maintain it rather than sell it for demolition. Schools, too, should take their pupils on tours of Kadhimiya, Adhamiya, Al-Bataween and old Karkh, so that they learn their city is bigger than its motorways and shopping malls.
Recent experience has shown that people respond when they see beauty returning to their neighbourhoods. The families who now head to the Qishla on Friday evenings, and the young people taking photographs in front of restored façades, are telling us clearly that longing for old Baghdad is not an elitist luxury but a public need looking for someone to meet it, one that gives the city back some of its self-confidence.
Baghdad has never lost its soul, but it needs someone to dust it off. Every street faithfully restored, every café that welcomes back its regulars, every old house saved from demolition is a page added to the story of a city that taught the world what it means to be a capital of knowledge.
Articles reflect the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Al-Forat TV.
