Baghdad Sketches by Freya Stark

Baghdad Sketches by Freya Stark

Freya Stark first journeyed to Iraq in 1927. Seven years after the establishment of the British Mandate, the modern state was in its infancy and worlds apart from the country it has since become. During her many years in Iraq, Stark was witness to the rise and fall of the British involvement in the country as well as the early years of independence. Typically--and controversially--she chose to live outside the close-knit western expatriate scene and immersed herself in the way of life of ordinary Iraqis--living in the native quarter of the city and spending time with its tribal sheikhs and leaders. Venturing out of Baghdad, she traveled to Mosul, Nineveh, Tikrit and Najaf, where she perceptively describes the millennia-old tensions between Sunni and Shi'a. In the 1940s she returned again, this time traveling south, to the Marsh Arabs, whose way of life has now all but disappeared; north into Kurdistan and later, Kuwait, in the days before the oil boom.

Freya Stark, who died in 1993 and was dubbed the last of the Romantic Travellers by The Times of London, wrote more than thirty volumes about her journeys in the Middle East throughout her lifetime, including The Southern Gates of Arabia. Jane Fletcher Geniesse is a former New York Times writer and the author of Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark, a PEN/Martha Albrand Award finalist for First Nonfiction in 1999. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Washington Post, New York magazine, and Town & Country. She currently resides in Washington, D.C.