In the company of a book...
The Foot That Remained There
The daily memoirs of the prisoner Sayed Naser Hosseinipour in the secret prisons of Iraq..
Sayed Naser Hosseini takes you, in his memoirs, toward dark shades of life, and shades of hope, in seven hundred pages, all of them steps in which he inscribed the spirit of jihad and defiance, as an introduction; then you move with him to the bank of bitterness in all its meanings, to the place of pain with the deepest feeling in it, and to the arena of suffering in its widest forms—these being the course of the days, or rather the feelings of the moments, that he spent in the secret prisons of the tyrant Saddam Hussein, among the prisoners of the Iran–Iraq war, which lasted eight years: the dungeons that hid more than two hundred thousand prisoners from the eyes of the press, the Red Cross and the whole world, so that no one knew of their existence, let alone of the phantoms of persons who inhabited them.
Two years Sayed Naser spent, from the year nineteen eighty-eight to the year ninety, when his captivity began in the Majnoon Islands; important world events followed one upon another for him, beginning with the downing of the Iranian civilian airliner, the swallowing of the poison upon the halting of the war, the death of the leader of the revolution, Sayed Khomeini, the invasion of Kuwait, then the exchange of prisoners. He has carved them onto his pages, with all the suffering they express, imposed on him by the enemy's cruelty and his deep-seated hatred of the meanings of freedom, of the human being, of religion, of the school of thought, and of race; and he set down the kinds of imitation, learning, cooperation, defiance, loyalty, the gleam of religion and love of the leadership; and in his memoirs he wove, just as he used to weave the prison weavings, threads of hope crowned with meeting the loved ones, who had lost all hope of obtaining any trace of their young, youthful son; but by the grace of Allah he returned without his right leg, which remained there..
S. Mahmoud Al-Mosawi
