I very recently made a highly memorable trip to Iraq – in September 2023 to be precise. I shared some of my impressions and hope to share more. In this context, I was thrilled when the prolific, respected, and always affectionate Salma Awan Sahiba gifted me a signed and inscribed copy of her Iraq travelogue. Needless to say, I read it with great keenness over the next few days and was greatly informed, touched, and entertained by her multifarious, heartfelt, and perceptive assessment of modern Iraq as well as its grand and rich spiritual, political, cultural, intellectual and literary history.
Salma Awan sahiba is an accomplished and well-known writer of both fiction and non-fiction who has written multiple travelogues. Her Iraq travelogue is highly readable and informative with great insights into the travails of the conflict-riddled nation and its indomitable spirit to rise from the ashes. She made the journey in 2007, with a stay first in Syria followed by overland travel to Baghdad. Traveling there within a few years of the start of the Iraq War in 2003 she was effectively in an active conflict zone with the US-led coalition carrying on its occupation and consolidation and facing an active insurgency. Witnessing the tremendous damage – both physical and psychological – wreaked on Iraqis, her narrative is suffused with deep sadness and lament at how the ancient country had been manipulated, savaged, and brutalized by recent wars under Saddam and the post-Saddam US invasion.
However, all is not doom and gloom. The book provides multiple elevating glimpses of joy as well. Engaging equally with contemporary politics and Iraqi history and heritage, she provides rich perspectives on both. An incurable romantic at heart, and steeped in the culture, literature, art, and history of medieval as well as modern Iraq she assails the old streets of Baghdad with a deep thirst for discovery further accentuated by nostalgia. The Arabian Nights, medieval Arabic poetry, Islamic history, and elaborate architecture as well as the myth, fable, and aura surrounding ancient Mesopotamian history all whet her appetite.
Roaming through old city quarters and visiting sacred shrines, bustling artisans’ bazaars, famous squares, and monuments, she offers the unique perspective of a culturally informed and sensitive as well as observant solitary Muslim female traveler from South Asia – a precious perspective that is rare and gets drowned out by the usual white, western, male accounts.
What is striking is the candor and freedom with which she discusses politics with a vast variety of people; as also the fact that security threats and periodic violence erupting in different parts of the land does not deter her from her explorations. Her amiable persona, her background, her palpable empathy for Iraqis, as well as her deep-seated devotion to their culture and history was obviously major reason why so many received her so warmly and opened their hearts to her.
Tagging along with a group of pilgrims to the Iraqi holy shrines Salma Awan’s narrative is also full of sharp humor as she copes with the questioning and critical gaze off her unadventurous and culturally uncurious gaze of her traveling companions, bewildered at her irrepressible wanderlust. In her description of her interfaces with them her idiom is amusingly frank with generous lashings of Punjabi terms and expressions which makes it spontaneous and often hilarious.
While we get a great sense of modern post-war Baghdad, deeply conscious of Baghdad’s significance in Islamic spiritual and religious history we are provided also a description of multiple important shrines from the devotional lens of a devotee. These include the shrines of towering figures such as Imam Abu Musa Kazim, Imam Muhammad Naqi Al Jawad, Imam Abu Hanifa, Sheikh Junaid Baghdadi, Hazrat Maruf Al-Karkhi, Pir Abdul Qadir Jilani and others. Major intellectual, political, and literary figures such as Al-Kindi, Al-Razi, Al-Farahidi, Mansoor al-Hallaj, and Abu Nuwas (there is an extended discussion of his life, times, and verse in particular to his odes to wine and its impact on the imagination and creative work – Khamriyyat), Al-Mutannabi and others also make this not just a descriptive work but a nuanced engagement with Baghdad’s tremendous intellectual and artistic heritage.
Music, sculpture, art, and drama also figure prominently as we learn of many Iraqi artists. Though infrastructure, language, and lack of familiarity with the place are all hurdles she finds a diligent young local guide whom she looks upon and treats like a son and who reciprocates with ensuring that she can fulfill all her whims. While we get a fairly good sense of Baghdad’s streets, neighborhoods, and iconic spots – Al Mutanabbi Street, Al-Shabinder Coffee Shop, Madrassa e Mustansariya, Abbassi Palace, Mansoor quarter, Baghdad University, Souq al-Safafeer – its multiple historical mosques provide her refuge from the oppressive heat at its worst.
The book also contains a very interesting account of a visit to Babylon, some ancient sites, and the sacred cities of Karbala, Najaf, and Kufa. Her multifarious interests make her equally interesting to read whether she is writing about the schisms and fissures throughout Islamic history, lives of piety and enlightenment, war-ravaged modern Iraq and popular perceptions of was to blame, or comparisons of Baghdad in brick and mortar, in fables and tales of yore, and in the imagination.
Urdu has an increasingly promising list of travelogues and this is a unique and highly enriching part of it. This is an account by a female traveler of wit and sensitivity who is steeped in Iraqi history and lore and at the same time is highly curious, frank, empathetic, and insightful about its contemporary plight.
Given my recent Iraq visit her account was incredibly interesting to me both as it provided a mode for comparison and also because of great similarity in many of our literary and historical interests as well as our views on empire and imperialism. Many of the places she describes are now very familiar to me and they also evoked similar sentiments in me. One saving grace and highly hopeful difference, however, is that the Iraq I visited is much more peaceful as well as hopeful as it puts distance between itself and those horror years. It is now tending resolutely to its healing and endeavoring to forge greater societal unity and constructive ambition.
This travelogue deserves to be read widely as Salma Awan carries forward a noble and valiant tradition of brave solitary female travelers – though in this case, she is even more special given her particular national, ethnic, and religious background.
He has written historical fiction that encompasses multiple eras ranging from ancient history to the near future as well as the diverse themes of time, religion, philosophy, ideas, architecture, archaeology, arts, iconic figures, progress, political systems, apartheids, evil and dissent.
- Osama Siddique’s Review: Iraq Ashkbar Hain Hum - 27/10/2023
