The colorful hijabs of the women and the smoke of the hookahs welcome the patrons at Book Forum (Multaqi al-Kitab), a literary cafe near the University of Mosul, in the eastern part of the city.
Old photos of Mosul in the 1930s and portraits of poets and writers decorate the walls. The famous Arab 10th-century poet Al-Mutanabbi shares the same wall with Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, and both enjoy the company of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian master of 19th-century novels.
