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Baghdad: Upstairs, the blue bedroom door of Nabeel Al Hayawi’s only son was locked, sealing in the artifacts of his short life.
Downstairs, the frail bookseller’s voice quivered as he recalled the car bombing that killed his son and his brother and razed his family’s bookshop on Baghdad’s storied Mutanabi Street. More than a year later, Al Hayawi has not entered the bedroom.
He, too, almost died that day. After five operations, he has trouble standing up. His left arm hangs limp. He takes seven pills a day to cope with aches and depression. Shrapnel is still lodged in his body, posing new threats.
But decades of dictatorship, war and international sanctions, followed by five years of occupation, insurgency and sectarian strife, have not defeated the Al Hayawis.
“If you live with fears, how can you live?” said Al Hayawi, 60, seated at his desk in his spacious, book-lined home on a recent sun-dappled day.
In the long anthology of Iraq’s tragedies, the Al Hayawis represent the promise of the country’s future. Despite their grief, they tenaciously refuse to surrender to the current turmoil.
Middle-class
They belong to the fading but still influential group of middle-class Iraqis who are alarmed by their society’s sectarian fissures and emerging Islamic identity and determined to preserve its cosmopolitan, secular nature.
Every day on Mutanabi Street, one of the Al Hayawis sells books, educating a new contingent of lawyers, doctors and computer programmers.
The Al Hayawis stay in Iraq out of nostalgia, nationalism and a sense of tradition, as well as economic necessity. When US troops withdraw, Iraq will depend on families like theirs to rebuild itself.
“Iraq is my soul,” the bald, silver-bearded Al Hayawi said. “I go and come back. But I will never leave.”
The Renaissance Bookshop. founded in 1957 by Abdul Rahman Al Hayawi, a mild-mannered Sunni Muslim with an appreciation for Arabic calligraphy, is the oldest bookshop on a street that has preserved a literary tradition through empire, colonialism and monarchy.
Most of the 1,246-year-old city of Baghdad was destroyed over the centuries, battered by nature and war, leaving its past glories known only to memory. Since the looting of the city’s museums after the US-led invasion in 2003, one of the few remaining stewards of the capital’s culture and history is Mutanabi Street, named for a tenth-century poet whose verses Iraqis still quote from memory.
Every weekend, starting on Fridays, thousands of Baghdad residents used to descend on Mutanabi Street to buy from booksellers of every sect and religion, fulfilling a popular Arab saying: “Cairo writes. Beirut publishes. Baghdad reads.”
Here, Abdul Rahman imparted his love of books to his five sons and four daughters, bringing them to the street when they were infants. “We opened our eyes in this bookstore,” recalled Najah Al Hayawi, 62, the eldest brother.
So enchanted was Nabeel that he attended law school at night rather than miss working at the bookstore. He became one of Iraq’s youngest judges. After their father died in 1993, the brothers inherited the shop and later opened their own bookstores.
After the US-led invasion, freedom coursed through Mutanabi Street.
But Iraq’s growing chaos spawned disillusionment. The government imposed a Friday curfew. Sales plummeted. Many booksellers fled Iraq.
The Al Hayawi family dispersed to Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo, Egypt. One brother, Dhafer, moved to Cairo after kidnappers targeted his son. But Nabeel and his brothers kept their homes in Baghdad, travelling back and forth to manage the shop.
When Nabeel recalled March 5, 2007, he broke into uncontrollable tears.
At 8:30am that day, Nabeel and two workers were packing books to ship to the northern city of Irbil. Nabeel’s son, Yahye, 25, was working two doors down in the Legal Bookshop, started by Nabeel’s father. At 11:40am, a car exploded in front of Nabeel’s shop. Mohammad, his brother, and Yahye, died.
Nabeel was seriously injured. At the hospital, doctors pulled shrapnel from Nabeel’s brain, back and neck. They gave him six litres of blood and treated him for burns. He fell into a coma for three days.
Nabeel called out for his son and brother, relatives recalled. Then he called out the names of other booksellers he’d grown up with on the street.
A few days later, unable to find adequate medical care in Baghdad, Nabeel’s brothers carried him onto a plane for Beirut.
The family’s collection of rare books, first editions and manuscripts burned with the store. They included two priceless books of Arabic calligraphy.
Most Iraqis don’t have the means to leave. The Al Hayawis do. The brothers sold their family house in Baghdad for Dh1,212,600. But instead of living off the proceeds or investing outside Iraq, the Al Hayawis used the money to rebuild their two stores, repay debts and buy more books.
“It is our livelihood. It is our heritage. It is our history,” Nabeel’s younger brother Bediyah Al Hayawi, 52, said matter-of-factly. “This is our country. How could we not be committed to it?”
Five months after the bombing, Nabeel returned to Baghdad. He locked Yahye’s room, with the computer, the shelf of engineering books and the childhood portraits.
Nabeel remained on Mutanabi Street, overseeing reconstruction of the shops even as he struggled to rebuild himself.
Inside the Renaissance today, photos of Mohammad, Yahye and Abdul Rahman, the patriarch, hang on a wall. Underneath them a sign reads, “The Martyrs of the Al Hayawi Family”.
Many writers, artists and professors have left Iraq. Since the attack, business has halved. But Nabeel remains hopeful.
Recently, a top Cairo surgeon told Nabeel that a nerve could be transplanted from his leg to try to heal his left arm but that he might not walk again. An influential cleric in Beirut offered to help him gain asylum in Europe.
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