Add this to list of “Weird things you didn’t know existed”:
It was etched in the blood of a dictator in a ghoulish bid for piety. Over the course of two painstaking years in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had sat regularly with a nurse and an Islamic calligrapher; the former drawing 27 litres of his blood and the latter using it as a macabre ink to transcribe a Qur’an. But since the fall of Baghdad, almost eight years ago, it has stayed largely out of sight – locked away behind three vaulted doors. It is the one part of the ousted tyrant’s legacy that Iraq has simply not known what to do with.
December 20th, 2010 | 1:11 pm
The Hungarians solved a version of this problem with all the communist statuary still prominently displayed in Budapest after the dissolution of the USSR. They didn’t destroy the over-the-top soviet art, but put it on display in a small off-the-beaten track in the near suburbs. Essentially, they put them in a guy’s back yard somewhere and turned it into a chintzy tourist attraction. To destroy them would have smacked of the censorship they had just thrown out. So they kept them, but put them in a context of mild ridicule. (Intense condemnation would give them too much importance.)
As there are religious complications in the Iraq situation, I don’t think the solution can quite be repeated. But something which derives from the same principle might serve. Sell it to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museums, or a children’s museum in Cairo or something.
December 20th, 2010 | 1:53 pm
What an unbelievably twisted individual he was. I wonder how much blood he gave for medical purposes, if he was so free with it?
December 20th, 2010 | 9:19 pm
please check out http://www.islamicsolutions.com/your-leadership-is-a-reflection-of-you-quote-of-the-day-238/
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