Where God Was Born

by Bruce Feiler

  Maybe it comes from enduring three wars in twenty-five years, sanctions, and an unpredictable homicidal dictator, but Iraqis I met were inveterate problem solvers. My tape recorder broke, and within an hour I had found a replacement, a Sony, of higher quality. I dropped my camera while being searched one morning, and Hikmat easily found a vendor who specialized in fixing Nikon lenses. Iraq may be the only place I’ve ever been that didn’t have Coca-Cola, but nearly everything else seemed available, for a price. Everything, that is, except peace of mind.

  “Is your life better or worse today?” I asked Ghaleb Nicolas, the electronics shopkeeper who sold me a tape recorder for forty U.S. dollars. He was a Catholic who had a postcard of the Virgin Mary taped over his cash register. He attended church twice a year.

  “For me, no different,” he said. “There are good things. I have a mobile.” He reached into his blue jeans and showed me his Nokia cell phone. “But we lose something, also. Security.” He reached into his other pocket and pulled out a pistol. “My neighbor had his daughter kidnapped. They asked for $25,000.”

  “Did they pay it?”

  “They had no choice. Now she doesn’t go to school. I have a family. I can’t go to a restaurant. In a few minutes we close. I will go to my house and stay, until tomorrow.”

  “So what is your dream?” I asked.

  “The same as yours.”

  Baghdad has faint roots in antiquity; a legal document from Hammurabi mentions a city called Bagdadu. But the city did not flower until the spread of Islam, following the death of Mohammed in 632 C.E. The Umayyad dynasty, founded in Damascus soon after the Prophet’s death, made Arabic the official language and built monuments across the region, including the Dome of the Rock. Plagued by internal rivalry, the Umayyads were toppled by the Abbasids, descendants of Mohammed’s uncle, who in 762 moved the capital to Baghdad. A meeting place of rivers and caravan routes, Baghdad had the added benefit of fertile land and no malaria. Its name comes either from the Aramaic term for “sheep enclosure” or the Persian phrase for “gift of God.”

  Built in a circle—yet another carefully planned city—Baghdad quickly became the cultural center of the medieval world. It’s often hard to remember today, when Middle Eastern capitals are riddled with backwardness and rife with anti-Western rage, that cities like Baghdad were once bastions of science, philosophy, and medicine, centuries ahead of their European counterparts, which were still mired in the Dark Ages. The Abbasid caliph Mamun imported texts by Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and others, which he had translated into Arabic. The Koran, he declared, could be interpreted for contemporary lives. The Baghdad Renaissance, at least half a millennium before a similar flowering in Italy, contributed to the collection of Indian, Persian, and Arab folktales known as The Thousand and One Nights. These stories introduced Sinbad the Sailor, based on Muslim traders; Aladdin, the Chinese boy who summons a genie from an oil lamp; and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. The tales continue to influence life today: the thugs who troll the streets of modern-day Iraq are called ali baba.

  Baghdad remained a cultural and commercial hub until 1258, when it was sacked by the Mongols, who killed 800,000 people, a blow from which Arab civilization has never recovered. Osama bin Laden, among others, has looked to this moment for inspiration. In 2003, on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he quoted Ibn Taymiyya, a forerunner of extremist Islam, who in the thirteenth century exhorted Muslims to fight the infidels. “To fight in the defense of religion and belief is a collective duty,” Ibn Taymiyya said. “There is no other duty after belief than fighting, the enemy who is corrupting the life and the religion.” The Mongols were led by Hulagu Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan. After the American-led invasion of Iraq, bin Laden issued another statement, saying, “Cheney and Powell killed and destroyed in Baghdad more than Hulagu of the Mongols.” One difference in the worldviews of the West and Islamic extremists is that some fundamentalist Christians viewed the war in Iraq as a replay of the fall of Babylon, which they believe God prophesied in the Bible, while some fundamentalist Muslims viewed it as a replay of the fall of Baghdad, which they believe God promised to avoid in the Koran. Few on either side seem aware of the other view.

  The Mongols were not empire builders, and eventually they left the region to the Ottomans. Baghdad was a backwater capital in the Turkish realm until the British took control in 1917. The British imagined they would be welcomed as liberators but ran headfirst into nascent Iraqi nationalism and were perceived as occupiers. They quickly granted the country independence and appointed a king, but successive governments proved too weak. The Arab Baath (or Renaissance) Socialist Party stepped in to fill the void, executing a coup in 1963. Saddam Hussein, from the northern town of Tikrit, became president in 1979. Secularism seemed ascendant in Iraq.

  Iraq’s back-and-forth between Western-inspired secularism and Islamic-based theocracy is evident in its streets. Baghdad in the 1950s was a fertile testing ground for Modernist architecture, with designs by Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright conceived an elaborate island compound in the middle of the Tigris and dubbed it Edena. Complete with a circular opera house capped by a statue of Aladdin, as well as a three-hundred-foot spiral tower adorned with camels, his design was abandoned as an embarrassment of Western chauvinism.

  Saddam at first tried to strengthen ties to the West, sending architects to view St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Alhambra in Spain, and I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre, the last two being creative bridges between East and West. But chastened by his foray into Iran, Saddam was forced to curry loyalty from the people by building more mosques, including the “Mother of All Battles” Mosque, with four minarets shaped like Kalashnikovs and four like Scud missiles. By century’s end, militant Islam was ascendant in Iraq.

  But militancy has a cost. The single most striking thing about driving around Baghdad was seeing the impact of U.S. bombs. Nearly every government building was charred, its innards a tangle of twisted steel, its floors collapsed like a sad, discarded accordion. Yet in most cases, the buildings next door, the shops around the corner, the apartments just behind, were operating as if nothing had happened. Baghdad made me a believer in smart bombs. More poignant, in front of these office buildings and in the center of traffic circles were an endless number of shoulder-high concrete platforms with nothing on top. At first I didn’t even notice them, but then I realized: They once held statues of Saddam Hussein. The man who deemed himself the heir to Nebuchadnezzar II was reduced to ruins as forlorn as the crumbled walls of Babylon.

  Statues were not the only place where Saddam trumpeted his face. The dour visage with charcoal mustache appeared on brick billboards in front of many buildings, on posters on many lampposts, and in windows of many shops. Most of these images were defaced in some way, though few were erased entirely, leaving hints of a cold stare to peer through the destruction like blinking eyes in a rat hole, threatening to scurry back into the room and spoil the party. One missing image gave me chills. On the west bank of the Tigris, not far from the Central Rail Station, another replica of an ancient gate rises at the end of a small street. This gate was from Nineveh and has two bulls with human heads at its base. On top, where a carving of the king should have been, was a black hole that, until recently, had held the bust of Saddam. This gate marks the entrance to the Iraq National Museum.

  Founded in 1923, the Iraq National Museum has always been entangled with politics. The museum was the brainchild of Gertrude Bell, the “Uncrowned Queen of Mesopotamia,” the Victorian-born, Oxford-educated English explorer who was among the most influential Westerners in the twentieth-century Middle East. After traveling around Persia, photographing Jerusalem, and learning Arabic, Bell was recruited to serve under T. E. Lawrence in British intelligence during World War I. When the war ended, she became Oriental secretary in Iraq and personally drew the somewhat nonsensical borders the country has today, including Basra to the south and Mosul to the north, the latter of which had no
t previously been connected to the rest of the country. Her goal was to make the country an asset for Britain. “It’s an amusing game when you know the country intimately,” she wrote her parents. “I feel at times like the Creator about the middle of the week. He must have wondered what it was going to be like, as I do.”

  Bell decorated the new palace of King Faisal, whom the British appointed in 1921, and set aside a room for antiquities. In return, the king appointed her director of antiquities, a thankless job she quickly turned into a powerhouse. Iraq was rife with foreign excavators who wanted to expand their digs and, like Koldewey with the Ishtar Gate, cart their finds back home. Bell had other ideas. In a precursor to Saddam, she believed that promoting Mesopotamian history in Iraq would help persuade the Arabs they once dominated the region and could do so again (with the help from British minders, of course). She demanded that archaeologists like Woolley, whom she tagged a “tired, little man” but a “first class digger,” leave 50 percent of their findings in country. She personally traveled to Ur to pick out the objects she wanted.

  In Baghdad she went even further. “I’ve been spending most of the morning at the Ministry of Works,” she wrote her father, “where we are starting—what do you think? The Iraq Museum! It will be a modest beginning, but it is a beginning.” In June 1926, King Faisal dedicated the first room. One month later, suffering from depression and pushed aside by London, who found her an apologist for the Iraqi king, Gertrude Bell took an overdose of sleeping pills. She was two days shy of fifty-eight years old. In her will she left fifty thousand pounds sterling to the museum. A bronze bust was placed in its entrance in her honor.

  An expanded complex, which still stands today, opened in 1966. We approached one morning. The compound is the size and style of a small American high school from the same period, with a one-story red-brick building for administration and an adjacent two-story white-brick building that housed the galleries. Palm trees dotted the courtyard, along with a statue of Hammurabi. We were greeted outside by two cordons of Iraqi security, who searched every pocket of my bag and patted down my entire body. A U.S. armored personnel carrier was stationed in front of the door, and a handful of Marines patrolled the roof. The black iron fence was being reinforced. “Better late than never,” Hikmat said.

  Or maybe not.

  Inside we were met by the new Iraqi director of the museum, who was appointed after the war. Donny George is a gregarious roly-poly of a man, with a buoyant, gray, curly hairdo, and a tidy gray mustache. He is the spitting image of Buddy Hackett. Dr. George invited us into the galleries and explained how he became an archaeologist. “I always loved the outdoor life,” he said. “As a boy I was a fisherman and enjoyed hunting with my father. I was offered a slot in college in the French Department. But I didn’t want to spend four years studying French, so I said to the dean, ‘What else do you have?’ He said, ‘Theology, Arabic literature, and archaeology.’ I said, ‘Just a moment, are those people who go outside, make excavations, and stay in tents?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘I love that.’ ”

  “So did you get to spend a lot of time in tents?”

  “Oh, yes. My Ph.D. was in a prehistoric site from the sixth millennium B.C.E. I supervised the reconstruction in Babylon, and my last excavation was a Sumerian site in the south.”

  We arrived at the museum’s foyer. The front door was barricaded with wood; plaster littered the floor, along with broken glass and overturned display cases. The room had natural light from an internal courtyard but still seemed sad, even bereft. It felt like a movie set after the big action sequence had been filmed and the crew had gone home without cleaning up. “So what exactly happened here?” I asked.

  The U.S. government has a legacy of being sensitive to history in wartime. During World War II, Washington intentionally did not bomb the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto and took it off the list of possible targets for the atomic bomb. In January 2003, McGuire Gibson, the dean of American Mesopotamia specialists, gave the Pentagon a no-strike list of five thousand sites in Iraq, which the Defense Department posted on an internal website for commanders. Baghdad effectively fell on April 9, 2003, with the symbolic tearing down of Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square. The following day, a Thursday, looters penetrated the museum.

  “They came through two places,” Dr. George said. “One is that window.” He pointed next to the front door. “The other is the back door, in the administration area, where we just were. I myself believe they were not normal looters. We did have some hooligans who took all the computers, the desks, and any furniture they could find. But there were other people who came intentionally with the idea of stealing artifacts.”

  “Who would have had the motivation?” I asked.

  “We don’t know exactly, but people who came into the galleries knew what they wanted. They broke into a vault in the administration area and got keys to every storeroom. They brought glass cutters. Every single case that was smashed had one masterpiece in it. The cases that were untouched had nothing of significance.” I was at first surprised to see the eight-foot-high Code of Hammurabi, one of the most valuable things ever pulled from these sands. Then Dr. George explained: It was a replica.

  For three days—the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth—the looting went unchecked. “On the twelfth I heard the news that the museum was being robbed,” Dr. George said, “and went to Marine headquarters in the Palestine Hotel and begged for help. They promised they would send immediate help to protect the museum. Unfortunately, they did not.” For the next three days, Dr. George and several staffers tried to hold off the increasing crowds. “We just had clubs in our hands. There were hundreds of looters running through the building. Some of them were waving Kalashnikovs. We were afraid they were going to set fire to the entire building.

  “On Tuesday, the fifteenth, some journalists from Channel 4 in Britain were here,” he continued, “and they offered me the use of their Thuraya phone. It was the first time for me to use that kind of telephone. I telephoned the director of the British Museum. He sent someone to Number 10 Downing Street, and the next morning we had American tanks on the premises.”

  What happened afterward only inflamed the situation. The press reported that all 170,000 objects in the museum were destroyed. “Nothing remained,” the New York Times quoted museum officials as saying, “at least nothing of real value.” Reacting to the news reports, archaeologists and commentators flooded the airwaves to decry the loss. I was among them, appearing on CNN. The American Schools of Oriental Research called the episode the most severe blow to cultural heritage in modern history, comparable to the sack of Constantinople, the burning of the library at Alexandria, and the Mongol invasion of Baghdad. Stung, U.S. officials snapped back. General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the decision was a matter of priorities. “If you remember, when some of that looting was going on, people were being killed.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “Trying to pass off the fact of that unfortunate activity as a deficit in the war plan strikes me as a stretch.”

  Months later the story proved to be much grayer. The 170,000 figure was grossly exaggerated. “It was kind of a mistake, taken from me,” Dr. George said. We had moved upstairs to one of the showrooms, which was filled with empty cases and holes in the wall. “Some journalists asked me the number of objects we had in the museum, and I said over 170,000. That was taken to be the number of objects missing, which was obviously not true. I said we had to check.” The number of objects stolen was later put at 14,000. Some of those were taken by supporters of the museum, who stored them in their homes and returned them when security was restored. Through aggressive policing and international cooperation, a total of 5,000 objects were recovered in the coming months. The rest remained at large.

  Some believe museum officials may have purposely cooked the numbers to stoke sympathy. “Most people I know share my relief that so much of the collection survived,” John Russell said that June. “Yet many also
feel that their noble instincts were manipulated not only to produce shock and grief at a loss of such unprecedented magnitude but also to provoke rage at the cultural callousness of the United States in failing to prevent this predictable tragedy. I can sympathize with those who feel conned. For two weeks after the looting I must have been known as the weeping archaeologist.”

  One positive outcome of Dr. Russell’s weeping, along with the rest of the agitation, is that millions of dollars were raised for reconstruction. On this morning, new bookcases and computer equipment filled the halls, waiting to be unwrapped. Dr. George said he hoped to reopen the museum within three years of its stripping. Mesopotamian archaeology had once more been lifted to the front page of the world’s consciousness.

  “So now that the world has been wakened to the importance of Mesopotamia,” I said, “what can we learn from that time that is relevant to today?”

  “First we have to know our ancestors. If you want to go further into the future, you have to know your background, exactly as, if you want to shoot an arrow as far forward as possible, you have to first bring the string back as far as you can. Pottery, mining, time, geometry, astronomy, writing. They all started here. That’s why I say the heritage of humankind was born here. And that heritage belongs to every single Iraqi.

  “I myself am an Assyrian,” he continued. “A Christian. The Assyrians are the first people to bring Christianity to this country, in the first century after Christ. But generally speaking, I feel so much like an Iraqi. Most of my relatives are in Chicago and Australia. But I am still here. I do not want to leave.”