If you are interested in other Iraqi cultural icons, I will give you two examples of how, in the height of the Baathist period in Iraq and the beginnning of its decline, Iraq was unique culturally and artistically, Arab world and at large. Some of the literature and art vanguard lived there, and intelligentsia there were pretty rare for the Arab world. Ironically, Iraq was their safe haven; neither were Iraqi. Kiss all that goodbye.

The two were friends: Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and the much better know Abdel Rahman Munif. Both were good friends, and I have yet to finish a novel they co-wrote (still a concept beyond, two novelist friends coming together and agreeing artistically to produce one work), 3alam bela khara'it, A World without Walls.

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, a Syriac Orthdoox Palestniain refugee/expat, was a fairly large art collector, perhaps the largest in Iraq from what is said. I bring him up because this was in addition to his extensive writing career. A year or two into the American occuption of Baghdad, someone intentionally or coincidentally leveled his house with a car bomb, years ater his passing mind you, leveling one of the most kickass modern private Arab collections in Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/world/middleeast/22house.h...

He was a renaissance man, and his work was a modern intellectual criticism of neo-coloniasm ... in the 1960's, 70's, and later. You would be surprised how much this stuff reads like socio-political analysis of modern-day Iraq masked as literature... just like his friend Munif.

Munif will be super popular with the nerd/geek crowd here. Prior to being of the top 100 Arab novelists all time, he was an oil economy expert from Saudi Arabia trained in Bulgaria for his college years (I bring this up because he has a great short story of getting lost with a friend in Bulgaria, forgot the name, but I guess his drunken escapades are emobied in this character). Aften a few years working in the Iraqi oil sector, you know, like back in the 70's, when it all went crazy, he eventually burnt out. He went into Ba'athist politics, and burnt out. He settled on novel writing and literary criticism because he had to mobilize people to sift through the bullshit. He did such a good job with his magnum opum, Cities of Salt, an epic thousands of pages long in many volumes about a fictional country visited by Westerners under the guise of pumping water, really setting up oil infrastructure, and destroying a country with hyper-development and greed, he received an an honor on par with bin Laden, his Saudi nationality was stripped for these bigs; they were not amused by the "indirect" comparison. You would be surprised how many Arab men and women I work in there 30's who study modern geopolitics, and have never read his accurate prediction of Gulf society and politics decades ahead of time. Only lit geeks know him, and that sucks. He is awesome.

If you can find translations (Cities of Salt has never been completely translated into English, only the first volume), you need to read both of them. And realize the hardcore liberal and cultural high-brow of Iraq, neo-Ba'athist or not, was destroyed. If you are American (I am), feel disgusted out what you have wiped away. The religious nutjobs were always there. The vibrant intellectual community of 60-90's Iraq is gone, long gone, because they obviously are in hiding or left town because we left the nut jobs with carte blanche.

Oh, obviously ignore this lackey. He is a tool. (And yeah, new HN guidelines and what, I don't care; you try talking positively about Iraq and I will give you a medal.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabra_Ibrahim_Jabra

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Rahman_Munif