![]() ![]() The New York of the Middle Ages, the prosperous and cultivated yet suffering and scared capital of despots from the enlightened founder, al-Mansur, who tragically named it Madinat as-Salaam, the City of Peace, down to the (we'll say with what may be distressing understatement) unenlightened Saddam, is separated from the post-2003 world, much much more than America is from the pre-2001 world, by a traumatic break. And I was just looking at Baghdad pictures in the effort to identify the mosque in question, and-although I have to say that a triumphalist retort to the piece (paid for by the Rumsfeld Foundation and the Project for a New American Century) could easily enough slap the words "Because there is and always will be a city of Baghdad" on a picture of the city's new $7 billion international airport, with the unexpected swooping light fixtures that evoke medieval vaulted ceilings-it wouldn't convince, because in the eyes of the world the old Baghdad is dead. ![]() A cheap ambiguity and a stock photo, and it conjures up the full-blooded presence of a world that was very different from ours, but no less real, and when the artist was working must have appeared to have been gone forever. ![]()
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