RE: Where are you now?
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/6/2007 9:46:43 AM
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Harry
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I hope that I am wrong too, but how can you expect a feud to come to a sudden halt, when it has been going on for centuries, further more, it is spreading to other countries as well?
On top of all that, the issue here is not only Sunnies Vs. Shi’as, it is also a fight between various ethnic groups to gain control of what everyone of them believes it belongs to them.
They all preach democracy and tolerance, yet they all hold a weapon in their hands, and a grudge in their hearts against the rest of the groups. No one tries to take a step closer and forward to come to an understanding, instead they want to fight for their goals. Every one of them wants to have its words as laws, its complete and unconditional control over the land, yet when they talk, they sound like a group of angels trying to live in peace with all.
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God bless the whole world, No exceptions.
الدين لله و الوطن للجميع
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/6/2007 1:57:44 PM
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azinorum
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I hope that I am wrong too, but how can you expect a feud to come to a sudden halt, when it has been going on for centuries, further more, it is spreading to other countries as well?
This ‘feud’ will lead to the following:
- The death of hundreds and thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians
- The break up of our country
- The creation of an Islamic State to strangle any chance of freedom and democracy
- The destabilization of the Middle East which has even more dangerous connotations
These are 4 very good reasons for Iraqis to put aside their archaic differences and wake up to reality but who the hell is listening anymore. I’m 100% sure that all Iraqis want a free, prosperous, peaceful and united Iraq but there are too many outside influences that are hell bent on killing any chance of this materializing. We all know what’s taking place in Iraq is ultimately down to Saddam and the USA but it’s not the Americans these Militias and fanatics are listening to. It’s the Iranian backed Mullahs who are able to communicate with the poor and un-educated Iraqis. When you have an empty mind it’s easy to fill it with whatever propaganda best suits your interests. This type of brainwashing is being done by word of mouth and not by Western or Arab Media. These are simple people who are very easily influenced by religious rhetoric. I would again suggest that if the US really wanted to help Iraqis settle their differences they should first bring in 100,000 extra troops (yes, 100,000) to secure and patrol the borders. Not only will this drastically reduce the effectiveness of Iranian Militias like our dear friends Jihoosh Al Mehdi but also Ansar Al Sunna and all the other jihadists will eventually dry up because of lack of logistical support and financial backing. Cut off the supply and watch how fast things calm down. Iraqis want peace and contrary to what some might believe, the overwhelming majority of Sunnis/Shias aren’t arming themselves to the teeth and chomping at the bit to butcher each other. The majority are just tired, scared and have lost hope.
< Message edited by azinorum -- 2/6/2007 2:01:48 PM >
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/7/2007 11:50:55 AM
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Harry
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So, instead of listening to the word of peace and prosperity, they listen to their mad Mullahs who are only after power and personal gain, from which hundreds of innocent civilians are getting butchered every day.
I am sorry to say this, but do you think that they are spreading the word of God, and every prophet that came for the benefit of humanity; or they are spreading death and destruction around the world.
Don’t they see that this is tainting the image and reputation of every religion on earth, and Islam in particular?
As sectarian, and ethnic preferences are not enough, now we have tribal separations on top of all the existing irrational differentiations; every Sheik is trying to control the area where his tribe lives, they are grouped together and try their best to avoid other tribes. They too are masking their intentions by claiming that they are fighting against insurgents and terrorists.
The way I see it this is what the west was trying to accomplish, (Divide and conquer) and our illiterates, and imbeciles are falling for it. Therefore, I fail to see an end, or an exit to this quandary.
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God bless the whole world, No exceptions.
الدين لله و الوطن للجميع
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/21/2007 1:33:34 PM
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azinorum
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Mout Ahmar
Hello Everyone. I was in Baghdad till I was 15 years my father work at the Yougoslavian Embassy there. Now I am in Finland Helsinki. I miss Iraq and especialy the weather. Mout Ahmar 
MA: Good username. Welcome to the forum of the angry and confused. The weather in Baghdad in July, August and September really is mout ahmar. It must have been a while since you were last in Iraq and believe it or not things haven't changed much in terms of structural differences. There has been little or no reconstruction since the 80's and the streets are still full of pot holes only the new ones are caused by roadside bombs. So you are in Finland. Bit of a change in weather, no wonder you miss Baghdad so much. What is the Finnish perspective to whats happening in Iraq and the Middle East in general?
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/21/2007 2:21:14 PM
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Mout Ahmar
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quote:
ORIGINAL: azinorum
MA: Good username. Welcome to the forum of the angry and confused. The weather in Baghdad in July, August and September really is mout ahmar. It must have been a while since you were last in Iraq and believe it or not things haven't changed much in terms of structural differences. There has been little or no reconstruction since the 80's and the streets are still full of pot holes only the new ones are caused by roadside bombs. So you are in Finland. Bit of a change in weather, no wonder you miss Baghdad so much. What is the Finnish perspective to whats happening in Iraq and the Middle East in general?
Thank you foir your welcome. I was in Baghdad last time in 1979. My parents insisted i go to an iraqi school so i was put into Kadees Yousif school (St Joseph). I enjoyede my childhood years very much and had many Iraqi friends who I remeber till now. I also used to go to alwiyah club which was full of peoplke from different nationalities. these were good times. is alwiyah c still there?
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/22/2007 1:14:19 PM
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azinorum
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Yes, its still there but not as you might remember it. For a brief period in 2003 things were looking up for the club and the bar was full of Iraqi members, businessmen from America, Britain, France, Poland, Egypt, and so on. It was an Oasis to me and many others during that time. A place to go and forget our worries, tell jokes and meet new people from around the world. It felt like Baghdad again at that bar, I mean the Baghdad of the 70's and 80's. It was a nice illusion and everyone needs to escape reality once in a while. By early 2004 the club manager started recieving threats from Jihoosh Al Mehdi and decided to stop selling alcohol which of course killed off the bar. Soon after that the businessmen dissapeared because it was unsafe and new money started showing up (hawasim). I never went back after that. Nice memories though!
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/22/2007 3:04:40 PM
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Mout Ahmar
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alwiyah was special to me also. i grow up there realy. always after school we used to go for 2 hours for hamberger and chips. on wednesday football and outdoor cinema. realy they were great days and i feel very sad and angry about what happen toi baghdad now. realy terible and dificult to see. i am in jordan now working for 3 months. very nice and everyone very helpful. I meet many Iraqis here and they gave me this website. i wish i could stay longer but my work will finish and i will go back to helsinki. good news is that i missed all the bad winter month in finland.
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/23/2007 6:29:22 AM
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azinorum
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Alwiyah Club Article
In Iraq, a zone of hedonism and safety
By Robert F. Worth APRIL 2006 BAGHDAD, On a balmy winter afternoon, Hasanain Muala stepped out of his offices at the Baghdad Hunting Club to preside over a garden party, dressed for the occasion in a cream-colored blazer and natty blue-and-gold tie.
As he strolled down the marble- floored corridor, he passed the massive wooden doors of the club's members- only pub. Waiters nodded fawningly as they bustled past, dressed identically in white shirts and black vests.
Outside the club's walls, the streets of Baghdad were virtually deserted, a bleak landscape of dun-colored houses and minarets. More than 200 people had been killed in the city over the previous week, mostly by suicide bombers. The few human figures out of doors moved hurriedly, the women cloaked in hijabs or full-length black abayas.
The contrast between that world and the scene before Muala - spread out on a vast lawn - could not have been more extreme. Hundreds of well- dressed people were gathered, some sitting at tables sipping whiskey or beer.
Teenage girls wandered about in clusters, their hair uncovered, some wearing tight jeans or leopard-print outfits. In the back of the garden, a band played and professional dancers performed swooping routines on an open-air stage.
In a city ever more constricted by religious fundamentalism and terror, the Hunting Club, and its older cousin, the Alwiya, have become islands of relative safety and hedonism. They are protected not only by high walls and guards but also by the selectivity of their membership lists, strictly vetted to keep out anyone who might be a threat.
The clubs are virtually the only places in Baghdad - outside the international Green Zone - where men and women can socialize in Western dress without fear. Their well-stocked bars have few rivals now that armed zealots have killed many of the city's liquor- store owners and driven the rest underground. The clubs also offer a rare perspective on the past and present of Iraq's fragile urban elite. For many years, they were the playground and crucible of Iraq's privileged classes.
They weathered a series of usurpations by military officers, Baathists and Saddam Hussein, whose psychotic son Uday used to terrorize guests during his periodic visits. Even through the 1990s, as the doctors, engineers and businessmen who constituted their membership began fleeing the country, the clubs maintained their central role in Baghdad's social life.
In a sense, it is the members of these clubs - the residuum of Iraq's well- educated, relatively secular, Western- leaning professionals - on whose leadership the American invasion of 2003 was premised. These people did not identify themselves as Sunni or Shiite. They would re-emerge to form the core of a new Iraqi civil society, propelling the country toward democracy and away from religious extremism.
Or so the theory went.
What has happened over the past three years is very nearly the opposite. To spend time at the clubs today is to witness the slow disintegration of Iraq's secular class. Energized at first by the fall of Saddam's police state, the clubs expelled their Baathist members and began luring back the old, aristocratic Baghdadi families who once dominated them. But now, with sectarian killings growing worse, the old all-night parties end at dusk.
Some members have started defying the ban on carrying guns inside. More and more of them are fleeing the country for the safety of Jordan or the Gulf states or Europe. Those who remain complain that the clubs - once the preserve of Baghdad's proudly cosmopolitan culture - are being taken over by a thuggish new generation of war profiteers.
At the same time, the clubs are facing a new threat from Islamist politicians who see them as sinks of alcohol-fueled decadence and are trying to put them under strict state control.
"I am trying to make everything like it was in the past - I mean before Saddam Hussein," the owner said in English as he walked briskly down a concrete pathway in the Hunting Club's main garden. Like many older Iraqis, Muala has an intense nostalgia for the lost world of pre-Baathist Iraq. A 49-year-old lawyer and civil engineer, he is the son and grandson of prominent politicians who served under the monarchy and the brief republic that followed it.
The club has already spent more than a billion dinars, or about $700,000, on rebuilding, money raised mostly through membership fees (about $700 a year per member).
Muala is now planning to build a new outdoor restaurant, to replant all the gardens and to replace with something more tasteful the gaudy salons where Uday Hussein and his henchmen once partied. He is also hoping to expand the row of shops that already stand at the edge of the main lawn and add a bank branch. In the end, the club could become almost a self-sufficient world, sealed off from the madness in the streets outside.
It is an unusual mission in a city where social life has ground to an almost complete halt. Baghdad once had many all- night clubs and restaurants. Even during the sanctions of the 1990s, Baghdadis stayed out routinely until dawn, with long dinners of mazgouf, or roasted river fish, by the Tigris followed by drinks and dancing at one of dozens of hotels and nightspots. All that is gone now.
After the bombings began in 2003, the hotels gradually closed or were taken over by Westerners, who surrounded them with blast walls and guards. One by one, the best-known restaurants - Nabil's, Ramaya, Reef - were closed down, bombed or commandeered by men with guns. In the past few months, many neighborhoods have been barricaded by residents hoping to ward off the gangs of killers who roam the streets at night in stolen police uniforms.
For most people, social interactions are limited to work and home, with a brisk, frightening trip between the two.
To a Western eye, the club is an odd mix of opulence and decay. There is a vast banquet hall hung with gaudy chandeliers and an upstairs salon with romantic verses embossed in huge gold Arabic letters on the walls from the poets Nizar Qabbani and Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri.
In the game room sits a battered old billiard table donated to King Faisal I by the British crown in the 1920s. But some of the carpets are worn and stained, and the velveteen chairs are fraying. In the back garden, the lawn has mostly given way to a field of mud.
To its members, the club is a unique refuge, a walled fortress with 22 armed guards in Mansour, Baghdad's wealthiest and best-protected area. To help insulate it from the violent currents of Iraqi life, Muala has applied strict rules.
"No politics, no religion," he said. "We are not associated with anyone." It is one of the very few places in Iraq where sect really seems not to matter. The one thing the members all share is a more or less secular outlook.
But killings in Baghdad are becoming increasingly common, driving the club's members to flee the country in droves. "It is a big problem. Almost 2,000 of our member families have left the country," Muala told me. "Actually, I can tell you exactly how many: 1,936 families since 2003. But those families mostly belonged to the top level, the most educated people."
Some say the club is already unrecognizable.
"We are not the Iraqis we used to be," Hassan al-Bazzaz, a professor at Baghdad University, said one day while drinking tea at the club. "Before, when you walked into this club or the Alwiya, you saw well-known Iraqi people, the real Baghdadis," Bazzaz said. "Now it's a completely new generation. They are new faces, with new powers behind them."
The flight of so much of Iraq's middle class over the past three years, and the emergence of private security and other war-related industries, has elevated a new generation of businessmen, many of them linked to Iraq's new Shiite religious parties. Inevitably, their arrival has created some resentment among Baghdad's older elite.
At the Alwiya Club, even the waiters are uneasy about their new clientele. "The old members treated you so politely," said Siyawush Taj Aden, a 71- year-old waiter with a wizened gap- toothed smile. He started working at the Alwiya in 1974, when the manager was British and members were not allowed in without a jacket and tie. "We felt fine to serve them because they deserved to be served," Aden said. "But now the people are changing. When lunch takes 15 minutes, they start shouting at us."
While the Hunting Club's architecture is unapologetically squat and modern, the Alwiya still has echoes of its old colonial grandeur. There is an English- style pub with a teak bar and a pet nightingale that often flutters down to perch on a patron's shoulders as he drinks his lager. But the club has suffered from its proximity to several major hotels that have been hit by terrorist attacks. The outdoor buildings show dents and scars, and the rooms have grown dilapidated. Many members have abandoned it or shifted to the Hunting Club.
It is one of the more telling details of life in Baghdad today that even at the Hunting Club members often argue about whether they are better or worse off than under Saddam. "Let's face it," said Ali Ghazal, a friend of Muala's, as he stood near the club's entrance on a February afternoon. "It's a civil war. The Sunnis have one rule: If I'm not in charge, I will blow up everything. The Kurds only want to escape to Kurdistan. The Shiites were underground for 14 centuries, and now they will never step down. This is the truth, but no one says it openly."
Standing alongside Ghazal was a small, squarely built man in a blue track suit with a quiff of dark hair: Mahmoud Shukran, a self-made multimillionaire who is an avid supporter of the Shiite religious parties. Shukran joined the Hunting Club last year.
"Business is getting better and better," Shukran said with a big, cheerful grin on his face. "The market's moving faster. I bought two buildings yesterday."
Shukran is a real-estate speculator. He had bought the two buildings for someone else, an "anonymous buyer," he said with a smile. His own take for the day was $35,000. By his own account, Shukran was dirt-poor until 2003 but now routinely handles hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. Next to him was Jabbar al-Juburi, a short, paunchy businessman in aviator shades and a blue blazer, his hair slicked back. "I don't go anywhere without my pistol," Juburi said, opening his jacket to display the gun hanging by his inner breast pocket.
Shukran stared at the pistol, a little taken aback.
"What can I do?" said Juburi, who owns an aluminum factory. "My son was kidnapped last year at this time. People came to him and said they wanted him to invest in a hotel in Karbala, then they took him. They had him for 20 days, and I had to pay $40,000 to get him out."
The conversation broke up when Raad al-Ameri, a big, jovial man in a beige suit, walked over from the banquet hall.
Ameri, one of Muala's chief aides and a member of the club's board, would be shot to death a few weeks later, along with his driver, as he drove home from work in western Baghdad not far away. As with most murders in Baghdad, no one knows who killed him or why.
Some members wonder if an Iraq ruled more than ever by religious parties and their militias will even tolerate the clubs. In early April, Iraq's minister for civil society affairs, Ala Habib al-Safi, began circulating a draft law that would put the clubs under strict government control again.
Safi, an Islamist and follower of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, wants to curtail many of the "un-Islamic" activities that go on at the clubs, including serving alcohol and allowing men and women to swim in the same pools.
Members of the committee that Safi heads have said they believe the clubs are receiving foreign money and are a front for Christian missions - two of the same accusations raised when the Baathists took over the clubs in the 1970s.
"This is a very serious threat," said a member of one of the clubs' boards who has seen the draft law and refused to be identified for fear of retaliation. "From my point of view, this is even worse than the laws written to control the clubs under Saddam."
source: The New York Times
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/23/2007 7:03:17 AM
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azinorum
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I loved this article. Enjoy!
How beer survived war in Iraq
By Michael Jansen
Until Shia fundamentalists were installed in power in Iraq by the US occupation regime, brewing beer was a profitable business. Today the breweries are producing sweet fizzy drinks; shops selling beer and other alcoholic drinks have shut or been torched; clubs, bars and restaurants have closed down. Since killjoys run the country and insurgents roam, Iraqis of all classes and stations stay at home and watch television whenever the erratic power supply switches on.
Beer was invented in Mesopotamia by hunter-gatherers who learnt to ferment wild grains. They soon settled in villages to cultivate and brew. The most ancient depiction of beer drinking is on a 6,000 -year-old clay tablet showing people sipping the beverage through straws from a large communal bowl. The first beer recipe is found in a 3,900-year-old poem honouring Nikasi, the goddess of brewing.
Yaqthan Chadirji, a Muslim Iraqi who took a degree in biology in the UK then trained in Germany as a master brewer, speaks with a sigh of the golden days when beer flowed freely in his turbulent homeland. European style beer was introduced shortly after World War II when Iraq was ruled by the British-backed monarchy. Madhaf Khedairi, a wealthy Muslim businessman, bought a small brewery from a British naval vessel and began making stout. “But,” Yaqthan told The Deccan Herald, “it was not profitable so he invested more money and made lager.” In 1954 Khadduri Khadduri, a Christian, established the Eastern Brewery which made Ferida, a nutty brew which became a symbol of Iraq. These two firms flourished. British colonial servants and, later, prosperous Iraqi businessmen gathered to quench their thirsts at the elegant teak bar of the Alwiya Club off Firdus Square in central Baghdad. The 1958 revolution swept away the king and the British but not beer although the deeply suspicious officers who took power considered the Alwiya Club a subversive organisation.
Beer not only survived the seizure of power by the secular pan-Arab socialistic Baath party in 1968 but breweries proliferated. The party nationalised the Khedairi firm in 1973-74 and in 1975-76 the government established two breweries, one in the mixed Christian-Muslim city of Mosul and the other at Amara, a very strict Muslim city where workers had to be brought from China. Ferida achieved peak production of 15 million litres, or 30 million bottles, a year during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. “Always in bottles, never in cans,” stated Yaqthan. When sanctions were imposed by the UN in 1990 after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the government imposed a 50 per cent cut in production and banned money transfers abroad. Farida carried on by obtaining malt and hops from a supplier who did not mind flouting the decree. “How he paid was not our concern. He gave us 100 tonnes of malt for 30,000 cases of beer,” observed Yaqthan. In 1998 Ferida licensed a Jordanian company to make Ferida in Amman. “In tins,” remarked Yaqthan, wrinkling up his nose. This lasted less than two years. Ferida remained privately-owned until 2001 when ousted President Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, and his friends took over the firm and made soft drinks as well as beer.
In the weeks after the Bush administration's war, Ferida was forced to compete with imports from Holland and Turkey. But in 2004 Shia fundamentalists halted beer production in all breweries. Smugglers hawking chilled beer appeared beneath the Jadriya Bridge alongside peddlers selling illegal drugs.
Supplies of Ferida vanished. Yaqthan moved to the Jordanian capital where he is making non-alcoholic beer at a gleaming computerised brewery not far from the international airport. “It's much more difficult to make non-alcoholic beer,” he remarked “It's necessary to compensate for the taste and smell of alcohol. Non-alcoholic beer is very delicate; it is sensitive to infection by bacteria." He shook his head, “Beer is just not the same without alcohol.” The factory makes beer in five flavours. “I looked at the Iraqi stock market report the other day and saw that the price of Ferida shares is falling – along with shares of two other companies.” For the time being at least, beer is out.
< Message edited by azinorum -- 2/23/2007 7:06:15 AM >
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/23/2007 12:34:08 PM
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Zeynab Hassan
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azinorum it seems to me that you are obsessed with beer. I thought you are Muslim???
I am not directing this to you or anyone but only a fool tries to escape reality by drinking...because you escape it for an hour or so but you have to live it for years.
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/23/2007 1:23:58 PM
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azinorum
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Zeynab Hassan
azinorum it seems to me that you are obsessed with beer. I thought you are Muslim???
I am not directing this to you or anyone but only a fool tries to escape reality by drinking...because you escape it for an hour or so but you have to live it for years.
A none practicing Muslim. Surely you know me by now!
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/24/2007 8:05:37 PM
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Calm
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Salam my friends
Fools who drink and escape reality????????????????????????????
Over 4 billion people in this world drink alcohol, i never thought that there are so many fools in this world.
You cannot force your believes on anyone, I don't smoke, but I will never band smoking, yet I know that if someone smokes next to me he or she are harming me. What harm is it to you if someone drink? In moderation drinking is good. It helps relaxing and unwinding, and if a person is drinking too much, they are only harming themselves. Freedom of choice.
We lived our lives being told not to do things, not to say things, not to behave in that manner, pray 5 times a day if you are muslim, pray before a meal, on sundays before u go to bed if your a christian, pray on saturday for Jews. Can someone tells where did all these do and don't got us?
Keep religion out of politics, and the world will be a much happier place.
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/25/2007 3:05:39 AM
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azinorum
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Calm
Keep religion out of politics, and the world will be a much happier place.
Ahhh. The voice of reason!
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/25/2007 9:32:21 AM
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sadiq2006
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now i know why the americans are the innocent mesopotamians because simply they are drunk from drinking wiskey and beer bringing this crazy culture of them to mesopotamia.
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/25/2007 9:44:31 AM
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azinorum
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quote:
ORIGINAL: sadiq2006
now i know why the americans are the innocent mesopotamians because simply they are drunk from drinking wiskey and beer bringing this crazy culture of them to mesopotamia.
Alcohol in it's various forms has been around alot longer than the Americans. We really can't blame them for this one.
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/25/2007 3:25:30 PM
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Calm
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Salam
Looking at my country being raped by its own people, looking at our long history being burried in piles of ruins, looking at society disintigrated by decays of torture, killing, and now religious fighting, I wish I was a drunk and allow myself to escape reality.
I wish I can get those idiots who decided to take up killing as a hobby, to take up drinking, I certainly wish.
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/25/2007 4:55:19 PM
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azinorum
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Calm
I wish I was a drunk and allow myself to escape reality.
Might I recommend a glass or three of 16 year old Lagavaulin accompanied by some Miles Davis and a good cigar!
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/25/2007 9:52:28 PM
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Calm
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You can keep the cigar, but for the rest oh yes.
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/26/2007 10:02:10 AM
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sadiq2006
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now i know why the americans are KILLING the innocent mesopotamians because simply they are drunk from drinking wiskey and beer bringing this crazy culture of them to mesopotamia.
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/26/2007 5:46:43 PM
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azinorum
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quote:
ORIGINAL: sadiq2006
i hate cigarates and smoking it is a very stupid discusting happit poluting everything and also beers and wiskey.  
OK forget cigarettes, I smoke and would love to give up. But how about a nice cool glass of Chardonnay or a creamy Pina Colada on a hot summer evening? Or a glass of Arak with a table full of mezza followed by Mezghoof or an ice cold beer in a frosted glass at the end of a hard days work? All suplimented by good company and great music. Are you tempted yet?
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Religion + Politics = disaster
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/26/2007 6:59:06 PM
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Calm
Posts: 461
Score: 5
Joined: 12/7/2006
Status: offline
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There is no stopping you now, way to go my friend, you can always invite Harry, some ilham Al-Madfai music, or a lovely armenian music, a couple of Belle dancer, some pickle and arab bread to go with the fish, a night to remember.
I ask all those people who oppose everything, would you rather have people laughing, joking, singing, enjoying life, or women, children, young men being killed every day and for no reason.
I used to be a writer in Iraq, I was well known too, and the lovely nights we used to sit by the river drinking, reading our poems, making up new ones, winding up one another, eat our Ghuss, or maskoof, or Pacha, listen to poems by so many up coming poets, we were a bunch of 15/20 young university men, we cared for each other, we cared for our country, but we didn't know what evil was created. Many of us escaped, some after being beaten up, arrested, threatened. The secret police didn't understand that what we did was so innocent. And, most of us ended up living in different countries, but those who were left behind, we never heard from them again.
My friend, I will sit and drink with you anytime, and mout ahmer might join us too.
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RE: Where are you now? - 2/27/2007 3:54:02 AM
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azinorum
Posts: 1823
Score: 51
Joined: 8/25/2006
From: Baghdad Iraq
Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Calm
There is no stopping you now, way to go my friend, you can always invite Harry, some ilham Al-Madfai music, or a lovely armenian music, a couple of Belle dancer, some pickle and arab bread to go with the fish, a night to remember. My friend, I will sit and drink with you anytime, and mout ahmer might join us too.
Your on! Seeing as we have completely veered off topic I’ll also take this opportunity to reminisce a little. Given that Sadoomi had decided to close all the bars and banned the sale of alcohol in public places the home bar phenomenon regained its popularity in Baghdad in the 90’s. I built a big bar which seated 20 people and we spent many an evening drinking and listening to the Jazz CD’s I bought back with me from London. This is supplemented by copious amounts of mezza, tall stories, pseudo intellectual conversation, and sometimes business. Originally we named the group the Baghdad Malt Whiskey Appreciation Society but later changed it to The Azinorum Society after the Latin phrase for ass or fool which is much more in keeping with the state of the members at the end of the evening. My friends comprised of businessmen, artists and engineers whose ages varied from 30 to 70 years old so it was quite an eclectic mix. As the number of the entourage at my bar grew, so did our reputation and I started to have regulars asking if they could bring friends. So I and a Christian friend from a well know family in Baghdad decided to start up a drinking club and within 16 months we grew into a relatively fair sized group of about 60 members. Due to our growing notoriety we decided to limit the numbers at any one gathering to a maximum of 20. By now 3 of the original members had also built bars and we started to expand by using these gatherings to entertain overseas clients who came to Baghdad on business. By 2001 we had attracted some unwanted attention from the local Mukhabarat who as you all know were notoriously opposed to civilian fun. They wanted to know why we had some many foreigners and arty types coming and going so they summoned me to one of their offices in Karrada. After 2 hours of questioning I was allowed to go but we decided to close the bars to foreigners as much for their safety as ours. After the war we re-activated the foreign membership and again the list of members grew because of the many Iraqi ex-pats who returned to set up their lives again in Baghdad. For the first 6 months we had some great times and when the curfews were introduced our members started to meet at the Alwiyah club bar after work and before curfew hours. Our utopia was eventually shattered in mid 2004 when it simply became to dangerous and increased curfew hours made it impossible to travel after 6pm.
I will take you up on your offer for that drink one day. Perhaps we should start a thread on this forum and call it the drinkers corner? 
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Religion + Politics = disaster
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