IRAQ: Michael Jansen in Baghdad meets Iraq's most famous sculptor, Muhammad Ghani
Baghdad is a city of historic monuments and mosques. Its citizens are proud of their past and devout but not fanatic Muslims who have easy relations with their Christian compatriots.
Iraq is a secular state where different religious and ethnic communities live comfortably side by side. The city is a jumble of neighbourhoods. At its core, crumbling mud brick hovels crouch beside towering governmental office blocks. Traffic snarls the broad streets as we jostle for position at a roundabout planted with grass and a sparse sprinkling of marigolds, their leaves ashen from pollution.
The traffic lights aren't working again: power is cut in this sector. Electricity cuts are regular, from district to district. You can almost set your watch by them. At hotels and offices generators roar when the power goes, shops without motors open their doors to catch the fast fading sunlight, the water in Muhammad Ghani's many fountains stops flowing.
Muhammad is Iraq's most famous sculptor. An energetic 74 years of age, he is still producing monumental works. The latest, he says, will be a "magic carpet" fountain to grace the space between two of the city's major hotels.
He is inspired by Mesopotamian cylinder seals, the medieval tales of the Arabian Nights, and traditional Iraqi themes and myths. My favourite is his fountain of a peasant woman, standing amongst jugs, pouring water from a vessel. I pass it daily driving from the press centre to my hotel.
Muhammad works in stone, bronze, marble and wood. He designs grand bronze figures and murals to be cast by others under his supervision and carves with his own hands delicate wooden doors and intricate panels in marble.
He is particularly proud of the wooden doors he made for a church near Rome where he studied for seven years and of the panels representing the Stations of the Cross he made for the Chaldean Catholic church. "I was the first Muslim to ever work for a church in Italy and, 40 years later, became the first to contribute to a church in Iraq." His "peace door", again in wood, was commissioned for the UNESCO building in Paris.
His studio is a short walk from his house in the middle to upper middle-class quarter of Mansur. The studio is straight from the films of the forties depicting struggling artists in Paris. A draft blows through cracks in the tall windows: collateral damage in 1991.
"I'm not political," he says with a mischievous grin. "Sanctions," he remarks. "We are crushed by sanctions."
On a bench are seven crouching figures bearing large blocks of stone, each labelled with the name of a day of the week. Muhammad shows me round the wax models of his next works. The first shows a woman in a cloak with shrivelled breasts, a child standing before her holding up his arms begging for milk. In a third a line of women with babies in their arms standing before a closed door.
"These are for children's hospitals," he says.
Last week Muhammad and his wife Soraya, a retired archaeologist, came back from Bahrain where a huge fountain in bronze has been commissioned. "We could not stay away. War has become a habit," he shrugs. "In 1991 we lost all the glass in the house but we survived. Che sera sera," he smiles broadly, his eyes light up, erasing the years of toil and tribulation.
He pushes back the blue knitted cap he wears over his bald head. An Iraqi Pablo Picasso, my friend Muhammad. "Come for dinner, come for drinks. We go to parties every night. Che sera sera."
Perhaps we will meet at the peace concert by the Baghdad symphony orchestra tonight.