New Religious Campaign Targets Baghdad's Cafes
Authorities in Baghdad have begun to encroach on personal freedoms, closing cafes even when they only serve coffee and tea after Ramadan fasting is over.
Suddenly, and without warning, the local Baghdad authorities decided, on the eve of July 17, 2013, to ban youth-oriented cafes operating in the center of the city. The authorities organized, with the cooperation of gunmen and volunteers, a campaign to shut down these cafes under the pretense that they were “incompatible with traditions and morals,” despite these cafes only serving tea and coffee at the end of the fasting day during the month of Ramadan.
The shock engendered by the Baghdad campaign was because it occurred almost one month after Baghdad’s new governor, Ali al-Tamimi, took office representing the electoral bloc of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, which branded itself, during the latest local elections, as the defender of “the civil state” after entering into an alliance with cleric Ammar al-Hakim’s movement.
