“Are you Sha’lan Abu Fatima?” I ask as I follow him into an alleyway off Mutanabbi Street and up the stairs of an almost-abandoned building. “I’ve been looking for you!” I add in shoddy Arabic after he nods. I’ve come to Baghdad to source second-hand books for my growing library, HIKMA, and was told Sha’lan would be the best merchant for these treasures.
On this ancient street, named after Al-Mutanabbi, Iraq’s beloved 9th-century poet, countless books have been bought and sold over decades. Baghdad loves books. “Cairo writes, Beirut prints and Baghdad reads,” goes the saying. “The reader does not steal, and the thief does not read,” goes another, suggesting no need to lock books away at night. Sha’lan seems to disagree – he’s carrying his books upstairs and locking his doors – but he lets me browse as he packs up. The small shop is piled floor to ceiling; it’s impossible to cross without climbing stacks almost as tall as me.
These books are proof of Iraq’s artistic and cultural production, contradicting Western media’s eagerness to portray Iraq as nothing but a sand-coloured theatre of war. Exhibition catalogues, museum pamphlets, photo books, tourist guides, archaeological texts, fashion guides and literary magazines testify to a culture that is not forgotten in Iraq. Tracing Iraqi design is not just archiving; it is reading how a nation imagined itself under radically different conditions.
Before discussing Iraqi design history, it must be acknowledged that ‘Iraqi’ includes myriad identities: Arab, Kurdish, Assyrian, Armenian, Jewish, Yazidi, Chaldean, Mandaean, Afro-Iraqi and more. Some are indigenous; others arrived later, including with the growth of Islam. The nation’s borders – largely an Anglo-French invention, they apportioned the Ottoman empire between them after the First World War – ignore the complexity of the Fertile Crescent.
Before Iraq, the area was known in the West as Mesopotamia, “between two rivers” (Tigris and Euphrates); in Aramaic, it is Beth Nahrain, Land of the Rivers. Iraq was under British Mandate from 1921 until independence in 1932. In 1958, King Faisal II’s monarchy was overthrown and the Republic established.
As Iraq fashioned itself into the 1960s, it needed publishing and cultural industries reflecting national identity and ancient legacies. Posters, book and magazine covers, catalogues, signage, stamps and ephemera became crucial modes of communication during a period of innovation by multihyphenate artists – teachers, painters, calligraphers, designers, sculptors, musicians and writers. Baghdad was the heart of this wave; the ancient city of Mosul and the important port city Basra were also hubs of historical preservation and innovation.
The ‘golden age’ from the 1950s to late 1970s was driven by state investment, cultural ambition, a growing middle class and modernism. This was the period that Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius were invited to build in Baghdad, a period that the young Zaha Hadid experienced as a child, and which encouraged her to become an architect herself. The Ba’ath government capitalised on the emerging material culture. The Ministry of Culture, founded in 1959, produced printed material, followed by Saddam Hussein’s regime (1979-2003), which generated even more government-led material – propaganda. “Saddam understood the importance of art as propaganda,” says art historian Nada Shabout, one of the most important voices on the subject. Artists had little choice: funding was federal, and refusal led to exile or worse. Producing work did not necessarily equate with endorsing the regime.
“Posters were extremely important because they opened up a very different way of representation, particularly in the 1970s. They have this political edge as well,” says Shabout who, at the time of speaking, had just finished installing the exhibition Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group at NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, where three posters of the Baghdad Modern Art Group’s exhibitions are displayed.
During the 50s, The Baghdad Group for Modern Art emerged with its neo-antique style, including Iraq’s most celebrated artist, Jewad Selim, and Shakir Hassan Al Said, who contributed exponentially to the visual language and aesthetic sensibilities of modern Iraq. Later, during the 70s and well into the 80s, a graphic, photographic and print design movement was forming, producing a wealth of stunning books that were visually distinct from those of the rest of the region and the world. Graphic designer Habary Ibrahim explains that the group shaped Iraqi identity by balancing international modernism with ancient heritage, drawing on Sumerian, Babylonian and Islamic sources. The result was both modern and rooted.
Shabout notes that when Iraqi writer and artist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra edited the magazine Funun Arabiyya, he hired artists whose sources were local. “What they wanted to do was not a blending with European styles. They were experimenting with their own culture… It’s about being ‘modern’, because being modern is not a European property. They were reimagining their heritage, which they were denied access to because of colonialism.”
She also stresses the impact of Rafa Nasiri, who designed posters under the Ba’ath regime, brought the first printing press to Iraq, headed Graphics at the Institute of Fine Arts and co-founded the New Vision group, along with seminal figures like painter Dia al-Azzawi in 1969.
During its golden era, Iraq’s arts production made it a reference point across SWANA. Artists from Riyadh to Casablanca flocked to Baghdad. “Iraqi artists are better known than… other Arab countries for using posters as a means of artistic expression,” writes one French publication from the 1980s, quoted in the catalogue for Baghdad mon Amour, an exhibition that took place in Paris in 2018. “In Iraq… artists were drawn to this field following the wave of communication with the world that began in Iraq less than 25 years ago.”
Baghdad also hosted the first pan-Arab biennale in 1974, still remembered as a milestone event in Arab art history, with numerous posters and catalogues. The official catalogue features both Arabic and English in an art deco-style display font. Elsewhere, in anticipation, Jawdat Hasib produced a poster study in 1973 featuring an eye composed of Arabic calligraphy and elongated typeface in Arabic and English for its title. Arabic is usually always on top, suggesting a reversal of power.
The same appears elsewhere, such as in government-issued posters promoting visits to the Iraq Museum. One reads “Visit the Iraq Museum" (1978), alongside a magnificent mask of Sargon of Akkad, a prized museum artefact. The Arabic script is set in breathtaking Kufi Fatimi calligraphy, whilst the Latin script is a typical mid-century sans-serif blocky typeface.
Mid-century designers drew on the Fertile Crescent’s heritage and Baghdad’s long-standing role as innovator. Early Qur’ans were copied in Kufic scripts originating from Kufa. Yet Iraqi typography was not synonymous with calligraphy. Type was designed in English, French, Italian, Spanish and German to broaden Iraq’s cultural reach and position it internationally.
Numerous books titled ‘Iraq’ – somewhat frustratingly for archivists – often published with European partners, attempted this projection. One 1982 book by Gianfranco Lanzetti displays IRAQ on its cover in cursive uppercase Latin, overlapping the letter alif in Arabic. The same typographic design featured on a poster published by the Saddam Center for the Arts, established in 1986, for Le Corbusier’s Baghdad Gymnasium. One word is in gold and the other, silver, overlaid on a photo of a Mesopotamian clay relief. Another is irak: le pays de nouveau fleuve, by Pierre Rossi and André Lepage, 1980. The title is a thick, lowercase sans typeset in an off-white; it seems simple enough, but it perfectly complements the highly decorative Lamassu (Assyrian winged bull) statue pictured on the cover.
Elsewhere, photographer Chris Kutschera’s Iraq is a playful, heavy and round typeface in Arabic, with the Latin script in a blocky orange. Nik Young and Gavin Wheeler’s Iraq: Land of Two Rivers is also striking: calligraphic Arabic script on the book's inside pages – a beautiful repetition of Arabic Diwani calligraphy – overlays peach-coloured endpages, and each chapter is titled in the Diwani script.
For Ibrahim, signage, as well as books, is amongst the most important design elements in Iraqi history. Executed by skilled hand calligraphers rather than industrial processes, it allowed freedom in shaping Arabic letterforms. Buildings from the 1970s to 2003 often carried signage reflecting their character and ambition. Milad Safaa, head of editorial design at Baghdad-based studio Becorp, reiterates typography’s central role. “The Iraqi calligrapher and poet Muhammad Saeed Al-Sakkar was amongst the earliest Arab designers – and the first Iraqi – to work on the creation of a modern Arabic typeface that was clear, highly legible, and functionally practical.”
The legacy type designer introduced this project under the name Al-Sakkar Alphabet, marking a shift in the understanding of the Arabic letterform, from a purely traditional calligraphic practice to a contemporary typographic system. Previously, publishing relied almost entirely on classical calligraphy; headlines and even body text were hand-drawn, reflecting the calligrapher’s central role.
Hala Al Ani, founder of Mobius Studio and a researcher currently working on a book about Al-Sakkar, explains that his work was marginalised for political reasons. In the 1960s, an open call sought to simplify the Arabic alphabet. Al-Sakkar’s proposal was implemented in a Ba’ath-affiliated newspaper. “He was forced to work for this newspaper… it wasn’t a choice.” The association entangled his achievement politically. Yet, she notes, she has “not seen… a simplified Arabic project… utilised in a practical newspaper for years.”
Calligrapher Hussein Khalifa, who has been working with Al Ani, situates this within a longer lineage. “Calligraphy was born in Iraq,” he says, referring to Baghdad’s Abbasid era. “We don’t have the resources that would make you aware of Sakkar. There’s no archive.” He describes visiting collections of ancient scripts – “thousands of these” – that remain inaccessible, un-digitised and effectively invisible. “There is a gap between us and the art that we have.”
The success of Iraq’s print history was short-lived. After Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, wars, sanctions and occupations decimated the country. Only after 2015, following liberation from ISIS, has Iraq begun rebuilding its sense of self.
The lack of preservation is a long-held grief. We joke that mentioning the destruction of Bayt al Hikma, the great Abbasid-era library and intellectual centre, by Mongol invaders in 1258 is “too soon”. Iraq, home to one of the world’s earliest civilisations, has repeatedly lost its artefacts; many are housed in Western institutions, including the British Museum, which houses more artefacts from Iraq than any other country. In 2007, Saad Eskander, head of the Iraqi National Library, described adapting to war by hiring guards and even purchasing guns from the black market to protect staff and collections.
Within this context, HIKMA was born: a roving library and digital repository archiving, preserving, digitising and disseminating books on Iraq and its ancient civilisations – a rebirth of the legendary library once on the banks of the Dijla.
As an Iraqi in diaspora, the challenge is significant. I operate from outside Iraq, trying to also look retrospectively. I confront discomfort around Ba’ath-era and colonial material, and exclusionary histories which erase or conflate occupied identities such as Kurdish, Yazidi or Assyrian.
Materials are difficult to access – mis-labelled, poorly preserved, scattered across borders; not only is secondary material buried in the deepest recesses of the internet, the information is often contradictory. Carefully documented artefacts are often held in Western institutions and rarely accessible, especially to Iraqis. Violence, neglect, extraction and erasure have marked Iraqi heritage. “We Iraqis have been in survival mode forever,” says Al Ani. “Documenting and preserving is not a priority… I have stability and income, it is part of my responsibility to archive.” Designers in Iraq have the spirit to preserve but lack support, hustling daily to survive.
Safaa adds that many view these materials as disposable – magazines like Al-Musawwar and children’s publications like Alif Ba are seen as outdated and dust-covered. Much printed material praised Saddam, leading individuals and institutions to restrict access. And many publications are owned by individuals; “they were often printed in very limited editions, making them rare and difficult to access today.”
As a result, alternative modes of preservation are emerging. The colonial infrastructure of the traditional archive is called into question; archiving may need to become more personal and informal. Al Ani co-founded The Looming Council, collecting and digitising typographic designs across Arab countries, building an accessible online archive – Al Ani heads the Iraqi section. “We have an enormous type design legacy which is completely understudied,” she says. The 1970s were experimental, shaped by limited formal education. “We’ve lost that free spirit… we should celebrate and study it, go back to it as reference.”
Typography and design reveals how people lived and what they were exposed to visually and culturally in Iraq, so they are as much a clue of the times as any photograph, video, song or work of literature. Raising this awareness requires both institutional and community-based support, thinks Safaa, requiring collaboration between governmental institutions and community organisations.
Design is a living language; returning to it through informal preservation, and adapting materials for digital and social media access, as HIKMA does, suggests continuity rather than mere recovery. Shabout asks: “How would we know who we are today if we don’t know where we came from?” With archives like Rafa Nasiri’s – managed by his wife, the writer May Muzaffar – The Looming Council, HIKMA, and many others across the internet, scholars can study and develop Iraqi art history. Infrastructure is lacking, yet work continues “with whatever we can bring with us”, says Shabout.
Like the turn of a season, Iraq once again begins the process of reimagining itself. It’s imperative that our creativity – the legacy of our great artists and designers – remains at the core of the future of Iraqi identity.
This article is taken from Anima Issue 4, to purchase a copy or subscribe head here