Baghdad Sketches

These are great short stories from a daring female explorer and writer, Freya Stark, who traveled throughout old world Arabia and Persia - an anomoly of her time. However this particular title is of short stories from her stay in Bagdhad - a world away from today's issues. I did not like the introduction and found the writer sarcastic in tone, and did not understand what her goal was. I would highly recommend this book for it's very pleasant read - the romantic and concise details of days gone by make for an enjoying reading session. But do skip the introduction!

The book offers a unique protrayal of Baghdad in the 1930s through the eyes of a young British woman who lived amongst its slum dwellers on less than £1 a day. Freya Stark's day-to-day encounters with people in the slums juxtaposed with Iraqi intelligentsia and the detached British elite who ruled Iraq through the mandate, offers a valuable insight into how short-sighted and flawed was the British imperial outlook on nation-building in Mesopotamia.

This is a short little book, of Stark's travels through modern-day Iraq, but interesting now because many of the places she traveled to freely in the 30's are in the news today. Stark was one of the many "Arabists" who traveled the Middle East freely and actually lived in a Baghdad slum for many months just to get closer to the natives. It is more of a travelogue than a political treatise, but her observations and conversations with the old order of the Bedouins and others are interesting. She notes the graveyards of English soldiers who were killed during the days when the newly formed Iraq was a British protectorate after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after WWI and concludes that these were lives wasted on a very backward country, without understanding the reason this country was important was not for its medievel culture but its oil. Her observations would be considered substantially "politically incorrect" today, but her access to some of the tribal leaders resulted in very interesting conversations, not the least of which was her meeting with Shaikh 'Abdu'l-Husain and his warnings about the developing events in Palestine, before the creation of Israel, but after the Balfour declaration. Her description of the intensity of the hatred between the Shiia and the Sunni, the beheading of Ali 1250 years before her visit to Kerbela and Najaf where it is remembered as if it occurred the day before is most insightful. Her declaration of these towns living on their memory of hate where time stopped, is really very good writing. Her observations of the slaves in Kuwait as if it was nothing out of the ordinary, which it wasn't considering the slavery was not officially abolished in Saudi Arabia until the 1960's is also very good history in itself. Of course such a book could not be written today for many reasons, but if you want to get a better flavor for today's issues in the Middle East, you could do worse than invest a couple hours in this book, since nothing has really changed, only the reporting has become remote and detached and politically correct, which gives those of us living today a very unbalanced picture of the forces still at work in Iraq 70 years after she wrote about them.

An excellent book with timeless insight into humanity across cultures. Gives context to attitudes still prevalent today, demonstrated by long historic traditions. The writing has gems of phrases interspersed with diary like accounts of travels. Ms. Stark was definitely a woman ahead of her time.

A very worthwhile glimpse into mid-20th Century Baghdad - this series of essays paints intriguing pictures of the streets, the culture and the decline of Colonialism in a country that used to be our Middle-Eastern ally. Much better than her later books.