The strange story of the Quran that Saddam Hussein ordered to write with his own blood

In the late 90s, Saddam Hussein He contacted a calligrapher with a strange request.

The commission of the then Iraqi president, who ruled the country from 1979 until the US invasion in 2003, consisted of a copy of the quran, but not in ordinary ink: he wanted it written with his own blood.

According to accounts of the time, every week regularly for two years, Saddam offered his arm to a nurse to draw enough blood to fulfill his purpose.

The amount – as well as many other details that adorn this story – is in dispute, but the most frequently repeated versions say that they were used 24 liters of his blood to write the 605 pages divided into 114 chapters (or suras) that make up the sacred text of the Muslims.

Once finished, the work was presented “with great fanfare”, tells BBC Mundo Joseph Sassoon, director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, in the United States, and author of “Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party: Inside of an authoritarian regime ”.

“Saddam was very proud of it, and he took many photos with this Koran,” says Samuel Helfont, professor of Strategy and Politics at the Naval Graduate School in California, USA.

The work (separated by pages) was exhibited before a select audience in an extensive display case in the Baghdad mosque known then as the “Mother of all battles,” a building with four minarets in the shape of Scud missiles also commissioned by Saddam.

Iraqi TV and press – as well as some international media – covered the event.

They reported that the then Iraqi leader had commissioned this special edition to thank God for keeping him safe after many “conspiracies and dangers” in his long political career.

“My life has been plagued with dangers where I should have lost a lot of blood … but since I have only bled very little, I have asked someone to write God’s words with my blood in gratitude,” Saddam Hussein said in a letter published by the official media.

There are those who say that he did it because he was going through a personal crisis, others that to thank God for having saved his son Uday, who survived an attack in December 1996.

Instead, Sassoon believes that the reasons were different.

False religiosity

The Blood Quran “is a sample of how dictators are willing to accommodate everything to serve your purposes, including religion ”, explains the academic.

“In the 1990s, at the end of the war with Iran, Saddam realizes that Iran’s religiosity will continue to spread across Iraq. He spoke openly that the Baath party was beginning to lose its youth to fundamentalism, ”he says.

“I don’t think he really got more religious. It began to appear that it was for political reasons ”.

“He had mosques built, a very important university or what he called the Institute for the Teaching of the Koran, and of course it was a brilliant idea from his point of view, because he felt that if he could get party members to join, that learned to explain the Qur’an in the way that suited him as a leader, then it would be much easier for him to control the masses with the language of religion.

Another example given by the academic of how, according to him, Saddam Hussein changed his behavior to achieve his ends concerns his position with regard to women.

“When he came to power in 1968 he laughed at traditions, pressed for women to vote, for workers’ rights and for education ”, he says.

“He was a true defender of the role of women in society, but in 1990 he changed his tone and began to say that the place of women was the home, to have as many children as possible,” explains the academic.

The change was due, according to the academic, to two reasons: “the religious fervor was expanding and the high unemployment rate, driven by the fact that after the war with Kuwait they discharged 700,000 soldiers.”

It was in Saddam’s best interest to liberate the jobs women had taken on during the war (as happened in Europe after World War I) in order to reduce unemployment and ease social tension, the expert says.

24 liters of his blood?

The blood “was mixed with some chemical substances so that it could be used as ink,” explains Helfont to BBC Mundo.

But was it really Saddam’s blood?

Sassoon thinks it’s possible that he contributed a part, but doubt it was all hers, given the volume necessary to write a text of so many pages.

If we take into account that the maximum amount to donate for a man is 470 milliliters four times a year, collecting enough in a period of two or three years as the official version says is impossible.

In addition, “it was very phobic with regard to many things ”, says the expert.

And as an example he mentions that he did not usually shake the hand of those who visited him in the palace or hug them in the traditional way.

“Always he was afraid of catching the flu, And when he went to a dinner or a reception, he did not eat or drink anything that was offered to him. He had his own chef in the palace, and he had a laboratory that analyzed all food for poison”.

“So I can’t say categorically yes or no, but the chances that he would have donated so much blood are very slim.”

The great dilemma: destroy it? hide it?

After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the Blood Quran was locked away, protected by three vaulted doors within the same mosque renamed “Mother of all cities” to erase its association with the former president).

Each page was placed in a bulletproof glass box.

It takes three keys to get to the Koran and they are not stored in the same place.

“I have one, the chief of police in the area has another and there is a third in another part of Baghdad,” the person who acted as guardian of the text after the US invasion told a journalist from the British newspaper. The Guardian when he asked to see it in 2010.

“There has to be a committee decision to let you in,” he finally told her, denying her access.

The calligrapher, Abbas Shakir Joudi, left Iraq, and until at least a decade ago he lived in the state of Virginia, in the United States.

But while many monuments honoring Saddam were removed and the names of numerous buildings associated with him have been changed in order to erase his legacy, the book, being sacred, raises a dilemma.

“This in a theological limbo”Helfont tells BBC Mundo.

“On the one hand, most religious scholars consider it a blasphemy (the blood is considered impure, once it is out of the body). There is no such precedent in Islamic history ”.

“On the other hand, in the Islamic tradition the Quran is the word of God, so you cannot destroy it,” he says.

For the moment, the best seems to be to leave it where it was: by not being in sight, it is losing relevance, he adds.

Where is the Quran?

Although at this point it is worth wondering if it is still there, hidden in the heart of the Baghdad mosque.

The latest accounts of those who had access to the text and who confirm that at least some pages were on that site are from at least 17 or 18 years ago, very shortly after the arrival of US forces in Iraq.

Some say it was sold in secret, possibly to Saudi Arabia. Some believe it is owned by a daughter of Saddam who lives in Jordan. But there is no proof of it.

French writer Emmanuel Carrère and journalist Lucas Menget set out for Baghdad in 2018 with the goal of finding the book.

As you can imagine, they did not make it.

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