Baghdad from the Other Side Quotes

“Under the full moon, I watched the water as if it were a mirror, reflecting images from the past that could not be erased from my memory. The pomegranate tree's reflection appeared, and I remembered the promise Zainab had been forced to revoke twenty‑three years ago: Zainab, a golden tuft of hair on a silver forehead beneath her headscarf; the spring in Talafar that once flowed there, now pouring into Lake Erie here in Cleveland”
― Ahmad Rafal Al Khalil, Baghdad from the Other Side

“Our minds keep looking toward the West, the land of freedom, hope, and opportunity, but as soon as we set foot on it, our hearts turn back toward the East, the homeland of memory and familial belonging. And between the broad expectations of a future in the West and the nostalgia of memories in the East, the question of return or not continues to echo in the mind of the immigrant who has not severed his deep roots at home.”
― Ahmad Rafal Al Khalil, Baghdad from the Other Side

“When [Abbas] saw my face, he burst into anger. He took off his military ranks and threw them on the ground.
For the first time in my life, I saw my father grab Abbas by the shoulder as if about to hit him.
“These ranks are not yours to discard. Put them back on your shoulders at once, or I’ll strike you. A day will come when the country needs these ranks.”
I did not realize then that my father's prophecy would be fulfilled twenty-two years later, when the might of these black days, with all theirs evil and conceit, would kneel, diminished and broken, before the triumph of white days when streams of young blood led by these ranks would rescue the legacy of six thousand years of goodness and achievement… and that my father would unfortunately not be there to share in the ecstasy of that moment.”
― Ahmad Rafal Al Khalil, Baghdad from the Other Side

“Thank you for your friendship and candor. Thank you for your love — for being my homeland through the long years of exile.”
― Ahmad Rafal Al Khalil, Baghdad from the Other Side

“Is the history of nations written by their prominent decision-making leaders, or is it forged in hard times by unknown soldiers whose names get swallowed by its ungrateful memory?”
― Ahmad Rafal Al Khalil, Baghdad from the Other Side

“An expatriate’s return after decades apart is not merely a rediscovery of homeland; it is a reintroduction to oneself.”
― Ahmad Rafal Al Khalil, Baghdad from the Other Side

“As for how our mad second attempt succeeded in getting us to where we are today, it is by itself a story.
“A novel that would have deserved to be at the pinnacle of literary recognition, had it not been for the fact that an author capable of narrating it in a way that rises to the level of its events — so that readers could be convinced of its reality — has not yet been born,” Amal Benjamin, my wife, is fond of saying.”
― Ahmad Rafal Al Khalil, Baghdad from the Other Side

“We sat in the airport as if we had lain down on the tarmac of a crowded crossroads, cut off from the flow of life around us. Before each of us hovered a single question: To Return or Not to Return, as though it were an echo of Hamlet’s existential dilemma: To Be, or Not to Be”
― Ahmad Rafal Al Khalil, Baghdad from the Other Side

“I felt that delving into the suffering of those who remained in their homeland versus those who were alienated from it was a difficult subject for each side to comprehend the other’s viewpoints about, no matter how strong the partnership between them in loving their homeland may be.”
― Ahmad Rafal Al Khalil, Baghdad from the Other Side