Rounded Analysis On Contested Issues; Spotlighting Blind Spots; Politics, Religion, Travel, Books
12th-century saint Sheikh Abdul Qadir Gilani is an integral part of the spiritual life in my native Kashmir, the Himalayan Valley he never visited over 4,000 km from his burial site in Baghdad
A theological college within the walls of Baghdad’s old city became the Qadiriyya Sufi Order’s mother shrine when the 12-century saint Sheikh Abdul Qadir Gilani was buried there
Abbasid Baghdad had a sanitation department to ensure streets were regularly swept, washed, and free of refuse when London and Paris were ‘still grainy and chaotic little towns'
The Sinak Bridge in Baghdad offered a breathtaking view of the snaking Tigris in the Cradle of Civilization, where pivotal technological innovations such as writing, the wheel, and irrigation originated
While they kept Iraqis away, Americans let their hair down in the pool, gazebos, and palm tree-shaded garden of Saddam’s Republican Palace, which was known as Iraq’s White House, in the Green Zone
Executed former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussain projected his unbridled power like other demagogues through the size, bombast, and grandeur of his palaces meant to constantly remind people of his riches, omnipresence, and permanence
The violence had begun to ebb by 2016 but corroded car bomb hulks, and abandoned, bombed out and bullet-riddled buildings represented the horrors Baghdad, the city of about seven million, had suffered
