Baghdad, 1957: one year before the July 14 Revolution that ultimately changed the fate of the Iraqi nation-state.
A Google search offers little more than Frank Lloyd Wright's queer orientalist vision of Baghdad:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/1469/flw_iraq.html Here we have the very pristine perception and plans of a legendary American visionary for the future of Iraq's capital city at this pivotal moment. Disappointingly, Iraqis' own perceptions and plans for Iraq in this moment are not widely published on the web (in English).
Offer your insights: What was Baghdad like in 1957?
I have an American passport and a Sunni name. It has been suggested to me not to dream of stepping a foot inside Baghdad for at least another fifty years. I haven't seen Baghad or Iraq since I was two years old.
Can...or should...or does the generation of young Iraqi ex-pats dare to dream of visiting Baghdad again?
Hi everyone, the idea for this site is that I will post something...a question, a thought, a quote, an article, every now and then...and I hope to elicit your responses through the "comment" function.
There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than ''politicians'' think.
We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.
Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas... that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think. -Michel Foucault
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/1469/flw_iraq.html