Outwith: Forbidden pleasures return to streets of Baghdad

Published on Saturday 9 May 2009 19:56

VICE is making a comeback in this city once famous for 1,001 varieties of the lucrative trade. Gone, for the most part, are nighttime curfews, religious extremists and prowling kidnappers. So, inevitably, some people are turning to illicit pleasures, or at least slightly dubious ones.

Nightclubs have reopened, and in many of them prostitutes patrol for clients. Stores selling alcohol, once shut down by fundamentalist militiamen, have proliferated; on one block of busy Saddoun Street there are more than ten.

Abu Nawas Park, previously deserted for fear of suicide bombers seeking vulnerable crowds, has now become a place for assignations between young people. It is not that there are hiding places in the park, where trees are sparse; the couples just pretend they cannot be seen, and passers-by go along with the pretense.

It is a long way from Sodom and Gomorrah, but perhaps partway back to the old Baghdad. The Baathists who ruled here from the 1960s until the American invasion in 2003 were secular, and more than a little sinful. Baghdad under Saddam Hussein was a pretty lively place, with street cafs open until 2am or 3am, and prostitutes plying their trade even in the bowling alley of Al Rashid Hotel. "Everything is going back to its natural way," said Ahmed Assadee, a screenwriter who works on a soap opera.

Men gather in cafs to smoke a hookah and gamble on dice and domino games. On weekends the Mustansiriya Coffee Shop's back room is crammed with low benches set up around a clandestine cockfighting ring. On one recent day, the 100 or so spectators were raucous while watching the bloody spectacle, but they placed their bets discreetly. Gambling, after all, is illegal.

Walid Brahim, 25, a bomb disposal expert with the Iraqi army, and his brother Farat, 20, an electrician, recently sat side by side at a table in the Nights of Abu Musa bar, on an alley off Saddoun Street, working their way through a bucket of ice and a bottle of Mr Chavez Whiskey, an Iraqi-made hooch.

"This is great," Walid Brahim said. "We used to buy alcohol and just drink secretly in our house."

The bar is men-only, as pretty much all respectable taverns are, but the brothers look forward to an even brighter future.

"If this security continues," Farat Brahim said, "within a year all the waiters will be girls."

The local police, weary of years of dodging assassins and cleaning up after car bombs, are blas about a little vice.

"Today we are dealing with more normal things. All the world is facing such problems," said Colonel Abdel Jaber Qassim Sadir, assistant police chief in Karada, a central Baghdad neighbourhood.

"Prostitution – this kind of behaviour cannot be stopped," Sadir said. "It's very hard to find it in public; it goes on in secret, isolated places."

Actually, not so secret. There are half a dozen nightspots in Karada now where the entry fee is $50. With $150 a week considered a good wage, customers would not pay that much merely for the privilege of drinking.

At the Ahalan Wasahalan Club on Al Nidhal Street one recent night, the owner Tiba Jamal was holding court, as she usually does, on the dais at the front of a room with a mostly empty dance floor and lots of tables.

Jamal calls herself the Sheikha – a word she uses to mean female sheik, which does not actually exist in Arab culture. She dresses in a head-to-toe, skintight black chador, and she is adorned with several pounds of solid gold bracelets, pendants, necklaces, earrings and rings, her response to the financial crisis.

The female workers in the nightclub wore rather less clothing, but nothing that would be considered risqu on a street in Europe – in August. At one point in the evening they outnumbered the men, as they sat in a big group until being summoned to one of the men's tables. "It's nice to see people having fun again," Jamal said.