Reviving the Lost Art of Reading in Iraq

The country's literary spirit survived dictatorship and war. Can it survive the age of distraction?

Nashwa Naim Naser remembers the excitement that fueled the launch of her bookshop. It was the fulfilment of a long-held ambition and her way of changing the future for young people in southern Iraq.

Three years later, her confidence in reading has waned. Creeping censorship and the challenges of working in a male-dominated sector have frayed the edges of her bookselling dream, but it’s the declining interest from readers that causes her the most concern.

“Ten years ago, people were more eager to buy books and had a stronger desire to read and seek knowledge. Today, the demand is weak, and there’s no cultural or intellectual movement that draws people towards bookstores as before,” she said.

Decades of conflict have dampened a once-thriving literary scene in Iraq, compounded by an education system weakened by war. The old saying that ‘Cairo writes, Beirut prints and Baghdad reads’ seems increasingly out of touch in an age where screens are replacing the printed page for a generation raised on social media and smartphones.

As people shelve books in favor of short-form digital content, the cracks are beginning to show. The average person now spends almost seven hours a day on screens, or nine hours for Gen Z. According to a recent article in The Times, modern students are set to spend 25 years of their lives on smartphones.

Terms like ‘brain rot’, named Oxford University Press’ 2024 word of the year, acknowledge the impacts of this digital overload as Instagram reels, TikTok trends, Facebook feeds, and other digital confectionery cloud concentration with a bombardment of bite-sized updates that never end.

Amid the proliferation of AI slop and internet memes, books offer a more nourishing diet, but the downward trajectory of reading rates has observers worried.

“If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history,” writes cultural commentator James Marriot.

Three hundred years after the intellectual flourishing of the Enlightenment era, when mass printing and education opened up access to books, we are confronted by “the stagnant culture of the screen age.”

The result, he frets, “is not only the loss of information and intelligence, but a tragic impoverishing of the human experience.”

Whether books can break through the digital noise and reclaim readers remains to be seen. In Iraq, dedicated readers have persevered over the decades, finding ways to access books despite formidable hurdles.

Growing up in the conservative Iraqi province of Al-Muthanna, libraries were scarce, and Naser had to wait for friends to bring books from Baghdad. This challenge inspired her to set up book stalls at university and launch her own store, braving staunch family opposition to ensure that good books would be available to anyone who wanted to read.

“Reading can change the way people think… A person with radical ideologies might become more lenient and accepting of others, while people who don’t believe in rights for women might just see them in a different way,” she told me ahead of the bookshop launch in 2022.

Now she worries less about the accessibility of books and more about the disinclination of today’s youth to read them. “At first, I was very passionate and enthusiastic, driven by my love for this profession… but that excitement has diminished,” she said.

“There’s a noticeable drop in the interest in buying physical books across different age groups…The nature of reading has also changed; now people mainly seek out books that are “trending” on social media, which severely harms booksellers.”

The adverse effects of excessive social media use have been widely documented, with links to depression, anxiety, lack of sleep, and poor concentration, alongside the risk of online harassment and cyberbullying from endless hours scrolling online.

In Iraq, excessive social media use has even been cited as a cause behind rising divorce rates, as the constant intrusion of smartphones ruptures family life.

Ali Baroodi, an academic at the University of Mosul, grew up surrounded by books, fuelling a love of learning that has shaped his career. He remembers browsing the collection on his parents’ shelves and stumbling across volumes wrapped in old newspapers, forbidden titles with new narratives that challenged the status quo.

This was the mid-1990s, when Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party was in power. Works contravening its ideology were banned while state propaganda glorified the regime. Saddam’s own novels—he wrote several—were lauded with gushing acclaim.

At primary school in Mosul, where Baroodi grew up, teachers handed out textbooks filled with praise for Saddam. “These totalitarian regimes want to shape the mentality of young people. That indoctrination lives with a generation from primary school through to graduation,” he said, recalling how classes began with a mandatory salute to the leader.

Attitudes towards books in Iraq have shifted with each regime change. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, books were suddenly everywhere—in shops, on the street, at souqs, and in libraries across the city.

For a while, there was “a kind of freedom,” Baroodi said, then ISIS seized control of the city. Hundreds of thousands of books were burned and dozens of libraries destroyed, some with collections dating back to Ottoman times.

Even amid this destruction, there was cause for hope. Readers rallied to share resources, and books became a symbol of resistance, a way of preserving a path to knowledge as the forces of ignorance closed in. People buried collections in gardens or spirited them out of the city, taking grave risks to save ancient manuscripts and preserve priceless fragments of Iraqi history.

These secret missions were a small glimmer of light in an otherwise dark time. “A book can do miracles and a book can make peace, or give hope that peace will come,” Baroodi said.

He’s seen censorship ebb and flow, but his concern today is for a larger threat. As screens become ubiquitous and books are cast aside, he worries about the impact on new generations that spend less time reading for pleasure and more time scrolling online.

“With all the benefits of smartphones, I think they are taking a lot,” he said.

The slump in reading rates is far from unique to Iraq. A recent report by the OECD revealed literacy rates had declined or stagnated over the past decade in 31 countries, as the simple pleasure of curling up with a book is being replaced by the dopamine-laced kick of a swipe or scroll.

New technologies are accelerating this decline as students use AI-generated summaries to race through reading lists, a situation encapsulated by David Brooks in The Atlantic:

“I once asked a group of students on their final day at their prestigious university what book had changed their lives over the previous four years. A long, awkward silence followed. Finally, a student said, “You have to understand, we don’t read like that. We only sample enough of each book to get through class.”

News articles bemoan the impact on human brains, as social media addictions, online shopping excesses, and messaging apps sap attention spans through a constant onslaught of simplified, short-form content.

In the US, a national assessment found that the number of eighth-grade students who read for fun has slipped from 35 percent in 1984 to just 14 percent in 2023, while the UK’s 2024 National Literacy Trust survey revealed that just one in three 8-to 18-year-olds enjoys reading in their spare time.

In his essay on Substack, James Marriot warns of the vulnerabilities of a post-literate society as young people lose the ability to interpret arguments in books and in life.

“Because ubiquitous mobile internet has destroyed these students’ attention spans and restricted the growth of their vocabularies, the rich and detailed knowledge stored in books is becoming inaccessible to many of them.”

As qualities nurtured by reading—reason, logic, critical thinking, and nuanced debate—wither, populist politicians thrive, exploiting social media to spread misinformation, prey on people’s emotions, and harness hate for their own agenda.

“Politics in the age of short-form video favours heightened emotion, ignorance, and unevidenced assertions. Such circumstances are highly propitious for charismatic charlatans. Inevitably, parties and politicians hostile to democracy are flourishing in the post-literate world,” he writes.

“Populists specialize in providing that rush of certainty you get when you know you’re right. They don’t want you to think. Thinking is where certainty goes to die.”

In the southern Iraqi city of Basra, older generations recall the days when writers and thinkers came from across the country to participate in the local literary scene. The city’s large port brought visitors from around the world, and with them came exposure to diverse cultures, art forms, and new ideas.

These days, books are more often sold as decoration than for learning, enjoyment, or enlightenment, said Basra-based novelist Ahmed Dahar.

The 39-year-old, who has published five novels, believes the decline in reading rates among Iraqi youth is less a choice than a symptom of poverty, unemployment, and the noise of modern life. “Reading requires early cultivation—something that newer generations were denied,” he said.

Without the skills taught by reading, he worries that young people in Iraq become targets for misinformation, unable to distinguish truth from propaganda in an environment where free speech has long been compromised.

“New generations that do not read become easy prey to extremism and superficiality, unable to listen to any voice but their own,” Daher said, pointing to large numbers of young people swept up by extreme ideologies.

Middle Eastern governments have frequently underinvested in education and censored books to maintain control.

“True education breeds questions, and regimes fear the question more than the weapon. That’s why education is kept weak, and reading marginalized,” Daher added.

“Those who do not read do not question; they simply believe whatever they are told—mouths open, minds closed.”

But where there are books, there is hope. In Basra, reading is making a gradual comeback amid a wider cultural revival. What became known as Iraq’s oil capital is slowly reclaiming its status as a hub for music, drama, and the arts, giving writers and creatives a physical space to network and share their work offline.

Every weekend, people of all generations converge on Al Farahidi Street to browse bookstalls, admire paintings, and watch music performances. Pressure from the local population persuaded the local government to refurbish the old street and purchase wooden kiosks for the weekend market, which has helped turn the tide on this literary decline.

A decade after the market launched in 2015, book sales have risen from fewer than 150 in the first quarter of 2018 to more than 738 in the same period in 2025.

“The market has had a significant and positive impact on young people’s interest in reading and in holding and attending dialogue sessions,” said Safaa Aldhahi, Director of the Organizing Committee on Al-Farahidi Street.

Restoring the city’s faded reputation as a vibrant cultural hub will take more than one market. Still, Aldhahi is looking beyond public events to the influence books have in family settings.

“We aspire to have a library in every home, even if it is small, because investing in reading and studying is the way to educate societies,” he added.

In 2018, book stalls along the street amounted to a few tables manned by vendors in plastic chairs. Today, there are 15 stalls selling books on history, philosophy, and science alongside novels and poetry, inviting readers to browse their preferred genres or try something new.

“It has created a cultural scene in Basra that was dormant for more than two decades,” said Omar Abdel Majeed Hamdi, the director of Watar Publishing House, which publishes work by local authors and translates foreign books into Arabic.

He set up the business to help people cultivate the art of reading and rediscover the pleasure of books.

“When people read online, they are exposed to quantity rather than quality,” he said. A book, by contrast, requires focus and commitment. “You are more likely to critically engage with the content in a book and remember information drawn from it,” he added.

It’s been a long time since creativity has blossomed in Basra. Protests and heatwaves dominate headlines, stamping out happier memories of the pre-oil days. But at the weekend market, voices jostle in debate once more as people of all ages share stories and swap ideas, tapping into Iraq’s time-honored tradition of oral exchange.

And with every book sale, new possibilities open up, offering hope that younger readers will revive the city's intellectual spirit and nourish new generations with fresh ideas. “A good book can change a person’s fate,” said Dahar. “It can make a young person in a forgotten city see the world through a new window.”

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