Edited for brevity.
Calligrapher Abbas Shaker Jawdah toiled for two years to transcribe the Koran, Islam’s holy book, on a personal commission from Saddam Hussein, writing in what he was told was the dictator’s own blood. Now a refugee in Jordan with his wife and three children, Jawdah described how he fulfilled Saddam’s strange order, which came a few months after a failed assassination attempt against his eldest son Uday in 1998. "Saddam Hussein summoned me to the Ibn Sina hospital in Baghdad where his son Uday was recovering from an assassination bid and asked me to write a copy of the Koran with his own blood," he told AFP. He explained that Saddam wanted this as a gesture of gratitude to God for sparing Uday -- who was eventually killed with his brother Qusay in a raid by US forces in the northern city of Mosul on July 22 last year.
Looks like God changed his mind the second time.
Jawdah worked diligently for the next two years to reproduce the 114-chapter Koran in a 35-by-35 centimeter (14-by-14 inches) edition which he said was displayed at the Om al-Maarek (Mother of Battles) museum of Baghdad. "It was not an easy task," said Jawdah, who is known for his calligraphic masterpieces in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world. "I was given a vial containing the leader’s blood and a week later I submitted a one-page draft to a special committee for its approval," he said. This committee was set up to "ensure that the blood will survive the ravages of time" but also to make sure that the text was accurate, he said. "It was not easy. The blood was too dense and and I could not work with it so a friend of mine, a lab technician, suggested that I mix it with a solution which he provided that looked like glucose, and it worked," he added.
The Koran of Ozymandias Saddam would look nice in the Smithsonian, dontcha think? |