‘This year is special’: Baghdad comes together to celebrate Christmas

BAGHDAD – Baghdad residents are approaching Christmas with an enthusiasm that defies increasingly outdated international perceptions of Iraq as a perpetually war-torn country often at the mercy of armed groups.

Market stalls are piled high with Santa Claus cuddly toys or lined with an impressive range of plastic Christmas trees in multiple shades, while whole shop aisles are dedicated to selling seasonal items – coloured baubles, glittery fir cones, miniature plastic snowmen and white-trimmed bright-red children’s outfits.

Across the capital, many hotels, cafes and restaurants have trees and decorations, mostly featuring images of Father Christmas rather than Nativity scenes, with such Christian symbolism largely confined to churches.

This year is special, and we’re celebrating in a bigger and wider way, ringing the church bells and singing

– Iraqi nun

“We haven’t had any threats or problems this year, and the situation for us is nice and stable,” said a nun in the Dominican Convent in Baghdad’s Karrada district who preferred not to give her name.

Standing beside an illuminated Nativity scene and richly decorated Christmas tree in Baghdad’s Christ the King Church, she told Middle East Eye that Iraq’s Christians have previously tempered their celebrations, as the holiday has sometimes coincided with the Islamic month of Muharram, when many Muslims mourn the killing of the Prophet’s grandson, Imam Hussein.

“We respect Muslims’ sadness at this time,” she said.

Iraq’s Muslims celebrate Christmas in solidarity with Christians

A tall, glittering tree erected outside a shopping centre in Baghdad could be considered an incongruous display of Christmas festivity in mainly-Muslim Iraq. But the 7-metre-high tree at Sama Mall in the south east of the capital, adorned with tinsel, stars and bells, is one of a number of decorations put up by residents and business owners in solidarity with the country’s Christian minority.

 Muslim businessman Yassir Saad has spent around £19,000 on a huge artificial tree to help Iraqis “forget their anguish” over the war against Isis.

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The 85-foot decoration is on display in a Baghdad theme park. Visitor Saba Ismael said it “represents love and peace”. “I wish all Iraqi Christians could return to Iraq and live normal and peaceful lives,” she said.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE INDEPENDENT (UK)

KING: ISIS terrorists aren’t Muslims — they’re just evil men hell-bent on carnage and destruction

Maybe you missed it since “pray for Baghdad” didn’t trend on Twitter and Facebook didn’t give you the option of overlaying an Iraqi flag on your profile picture, but something truly horrific happened there Sunday morning. A suicide truck bomb tore through a busy shopping district in Baghdad. ISIS has already claimed the attack as their own.

The carnage it left behind was comparable to our Oklahoma City bombing, but worse. It tore through an entire block, ripped gaping holes in huge buildings, and killed at least 215 people — including dozens of women and young children. The death toll is expected to rise. It was the single deadliest attack in Iraq in nearly a decade. As you read this, people are still combing through the rubble hoping to find their loved ones alive.

This is not the terrorism Olympics, but it was deadlier than Orlando (49 dead), deadlier than Paris (130 dead), and even deadlier than Oklahoma City (168 dead). It was the deadliest terrorist attack in the world this year and one of the deadliest ever measured.

Did you know that Baghdad is the second largest city in the entire Arab world and that government officials now estimate its population has exceeded 9 million people — making it larger than New York City? I didn’t know that. Because most of what I know about Baghdad I learned from watching mainstream news in the aftermath of 9/11, I knew next to nothing about the city before I prepared to write this article.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS 

Islamic Golden Age

Do you know about the “Islamic Golden Age?”  Here’s a synopsis of the era.

The Islamic Golden Age is traditionally dated from the mid-7th century to the mid-13th century at which Muslim rulers established one of the largest empires in history.

During this period, artists, engineers, scholars, poets, philosophers, geographers and traders in the Islamic world contributed to agriculture, the arts, economics, industry, law, literature,navigation, philosophy, sciences, sociology, and technology, both by preserving earlier traditions and by adding inventions and innovations of their own. Also at that time the Muslim world became a major intellectual centre for science, philosophy, medicine and education. In Baghdad they established the “House of Wisdom“, where scholars, both Muslim and non-Muslim, sought to gather and translate the world’s knowledge into Arabic in the Translation Movement. Many classic works of antiquity that would otherwise have been forgotten were translated into Arabic and later in turn translated into Turkish, Sindhi, Persian, Hebrew and Latin. Knowledge was synthesized from works originating in ancientMesopotamia, Ancient Rome, China, India, Persia, Ancient Egypt, North Africa, Ancient Greece and Byzantine civilizations. Rival Muslim dynasties such as the Fatimids of Egypt and the Umayyads of al-Andalus were also major intellectual centres with cities such as Cairo and Córdoba rivaling Baghdad. The Islamic empire was the first “truly universal civilization,” which brought together for the first time “peoples as diverse as the Chinese, the Indians, the people of the Middle East and North Africa, black Africans, and white Europeans.”A major innovation of this period was paper – originally a secret tightly guarded by the Chinese. The art of papermaking was obtained from prisoners taken at the Battle of Talas (751), spreading to the Islamic cities of Samarkand and Baghdad. The Arabs improved upon the Chinese techniques of using mulberry bark by using starch to account for the Muslim preference for pens vs. the Chinese for brushes. By AD 900 there were hundreds of shops employing scribes and binders for books in Baghdad and public libraries began to become established. From here paper-making spread west to Morocco and then to Spain and from there to Europe in the 13th century.

FULL ARTICLE FROM ISLAMICHISTORY.ORG