"Sumer" Notebook

Title: "Sumer" Notebook
Creator: Adnan Mohammad Hasan
Date Created: Between 1980 and 1989
Date: 1980/1989
Language: Arabic
Collection: A Prisoner’s Life in Abu Ghraib
Middle East & North Africa Collections
Program: International Digital Ephemera Project

Description: Prisoners used a discarded laundry detergent box to create a cover for a notebook filled with lined writing paper and bound with a piece of blue yarn inserted into two holes and tied in the back. The face of the woman in the picture on the cover has been worn or scraped away. Between numbered pages 42 and 43, there is a separate paper inserted with a note. The notebook contains a handwritten copy of a book that a prisoner wrote before going to prison. In prison, others copied it so they could have their own. The title of the book is written on page 1, Iḥyāʾ Ulum al-Dīn by the Imam Abu Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, part one. The title of the book is different than the content. The author of the book was not actually al-Ghazālī, who was Sunni, but Muhammad Baqr al-Sadr, who was Shiʿi and whose book was banned outside of prison.