Kurdish Bookstore Opens on Baghdad's Historic Mutanabbi Street

ERBIL (Kurdistan24) - In an alley branching from Baghdad's al-Mutanabbi Street, Hussein Qulikhan stands inside a small shop surrounded by something that has long been difficult to find in Iraq’s best-known literary district: shelves devoted specifically to Kurdish books.

Wearing traditional Kurdish attire, Qulikhan has opened Newroz Bookstore, stocking works in Kurdish and Arabic on Kurdish history, revolutions, language, dictionaries and culture.

For visitors accustomed to al-Mutanabbi Street's predominantly Arabic-language book trade, the shop is a conspicuous addition.

"There were no Kurdish bookstores or resources in Baghdad, so the idea occurred to me," Qulikhan told Kurdistan24's correspondent Dilan Barzan. "I brought the books from Kurdistan."

His description reflects the scarcity he encountered personally, although Baghdad has a longer history of Kurdish bookselling and publishing than the new store's opening might initially suggest.

Historical records point to Kurdish bookstores and publishing institutions operating in the capital decades ago. The significance of Newroz therefore lies more precisely in its establishment as a dedicated Kurdish bookstore on al-Mutanabbi Street, at the symbolic center of Baghdad's literary life.

That distinction does little to diminish what the project means to those entering the shop.

A Missing Presence on Mutanabbi Street

Al-Mutanabbi Street has served for generations as a gathering place for booksellers, writers and intellectuals. Every Friday, large numbers of readers move between its stores and pavement stalls searching for literature, history, politics and poetry.

Kurdish-language titles, however, have remained scarce there in recent years.

For Qulikhan, that absence created an opportunity.

He is now asking the Kurdistan Regional Government to help supply additional books, saying Baghdad's Kurdish community needs greater access to material in its own language.

Farhad Zangana, a Baghdad resident, described the bookstore as an important beginning.

"All the books here are in Arabic, and there were no resources for us as Kurds," Zangana told Kurdistan24. "The premises may be small at present, but this is the beginning of a larger project."

Another resident, Muayad Kocher, said the value of the shop also extends beyond Kurdish readers by giving other Iraqis an opportunity to encounter Kurdish language and literature.

That makes the bookstore both a community resource and a point of cultural exchange.

A Longer Kurdish Literary History in Baghdad

The Kurdish presence in Baghdad's intellectual life predates Newroz by decades.

One notable example was Maktabat al-Bitlisi, founded by Kurdish intellectual and historian Hussein Fayzullah al-Jaf and operating on Palestine Street by the late 1970s, according to accounts by Iraqi academics.

Named after Sharaf Khan Bitlisi, the 16th-century Kurdish historian who wrote the Sharafnama, the shop also functioned as a publisher. Bibliographic records show works appearing under its imprint during the 1980s, including scholarship by Kurdish historian Kamal Mazhar Ahmad.

Baghdad was also home to institutional Kurdish cultural activity.

The Kurdish Academy, established in 1970, was responsible for research, publication and development of a library concerned with Kurdish language, literature and culture.

The Iraqi government later created the House of Kurdish Culture and Publishing, which was involved in producing Kurdish books, newspapers and periodicals.

Those institutions were not equivalent to the small commercial bookstore Qulikhan now operates, but they demonstrate that Kurdish publishing and scholarship once had an established place in the Iraqi capital.

The new development is therefore not the arrival of Kurdish books in Baghdad for the first time. It is their return to visible, specialized retail space in the city's most recognizable bookselling quarter.

Books and Memory

For Baghdad's Kurdish population, particularly Faili Kurds, that visibility carries historical weight.

Under previous Iraqi regimes, Faili Kurds experienced deportation, executions and policies that targeted their identity. Kurdish cultural and educational activity was also restricted at different periods.

Kurdish journalist Javad Malik said that history makes the opening particularly meaningful.

"The policies of previous regimes were directed against Kurdish culture and intellectual life," Malik told Kurdistan24. "Opening such a place where people can become acquainted with that culture is therefore essential."

The bookstore's shelves cannot by themselves reconstruct the cultural infrastructure that Baghdad once had, but they provide something immediate: a place where Kurdish language and history are physically present in the public life of the capital.

Qulikhan hopes the modest shop will eventually grow into a much larger source of Kurdish books and material.

For now, its scale is part of the story.

A few shelves in a narrow shop off al-Mutanabbi Street are enough to establish a presence where Kurdish readers say one had been missing.

Newroz Bookstore is not Baghdad's first encounter with Kurdish books. The city's own intellectual history makes that clear.

But in the contemporary landscape of al-Mutanabbi Street, its opening restores something that had become difficult to see: a bookstore where Kurdish language, literature and history are not peripheral titles scattered among other shelves, but the reason the shop exists.