5 The Quran forbids Muslims from drinking blood (Surah 5, ayah 3).
6 The statue of The Worker, found in Umm al-Burum Square in present-day Basra, was completed by Basran sculptor Abd al-Ridda Batour in 1970. It is intended to symbolize International Workers’ Day, on May 1, and is considered a key symbol of the Communists in Basra.
1 A gas flame in the middle of the Baba Gurgur oil field, near the city of Kirkuk, and sixteen kilometres northwest of Arrapha; it was the first such field to be discovered in Northern Iraq by Westerners in 1927. The field is forty metres in diameter and has been burning for 2,500 years. It was considered the largest oil field in the world until the discovery of the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia in 1948.
2 Arrapha or Arrapkha was an ancient city in what today is northeastern Iraq, on the site of the modern city of Kirkuk. It began as a city of the Gutian people, became Hurrian, and was an Assyrian city during most of its occupation.
3 Around 2150 B.C., Kirkuk became occupied by ‘language isolate’-speaking Zagros Mountains dwellers known, to the Semitic and Sumerian Mesopotamians, as the ‘Gutian’ people. Arraphkha was the capital of the short-lived Guti kingdom (Gutium), before it was destroyed and the Gutians driven from Mesopotamia by the Neo-Sumerian Empire c. 2090 B.C.
4 Lines from ‘Near the Citadel’—a popular, early twentieth-century Turkmen song, of anonymous composition.
1 Jidu: ‘grandfather’.
2 Hamla: ‘delegation.’
3 Fed daqiqa: ‘just a minute’.
4 Fed shii: ‘something’.
5 Maku waqt: ‘no time’.
6 Shqad hosa: ‘what a mess’.
7 Ziyarat: ‘visits’.
8 Halwiyat: ‘sweets’.
9 Sahn: ‘courtyard’.
1 Hassan Blasim’s The Iraqi Christ won the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and his two collections have now been published in twenty-three different languages.
2 C.f. Hassan’s Foreword.
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