Finding a vanished city in the most unexpected place

When Abdulredha opened his Quran, photographs slipped from between its pages. Abdullah Dhiaa al-Deen leaned closer. The first photograph he recognized was his own. He sat beside his 93-year-old grandfather and began turning the pages. Abdulredha still recalled stories from nearly a century of life in Karbala, in central Iraq, with remarkable clarity. Now and then an old friend's name escaped him, but never the place where that friend's photograph belonged.

Abdullah had never imagined that the old Quran held another history between its pages. The photographs followed neither chronology nor family lineage but meaning. He found photographs of his father, uncles, aunts, neighbors, and friends. Some faces belonged to people he had never met. On the opening pages, grandfather Abdulredha paused at a photograph of his own mother. "She belongs in the opening surah," the first chapter of the Quran, he said, "because she is the beginning of my life."

Abdullah turned another page. “I see my photograph beside surah Yaseen,” the 36^th chapter, he said. "When you moved to Baghdad," Abdulredha said, "I placed your photograph beside surah Yaseen so I could pray for your protection every day.”

Looking through the photographs, and later discovering images of the old quarters of Karbala tucked beside handwritten notes, Abdullah realized that the Quran—which had first belonged to Abdulredha's mother—had become something more than a sacred text. It was a family album, a neighborhood archive, and eventually, a map of a disappearing city.

Between the photographs were handwritten notes in elegant Arabic script: names of neighborhoods, vanished shops, fragments of daily life. They read less like captions than conversations with places that no longer existed.

One photograph showed an old coffeehouse where Abdulredha had spent countless afternoons with friends. It had opened in the 1940s. There, as a young man, he saw a radio for the first time. He remembered staring at the wooden box in disbelief, wondering how the man speaking inside could possibly fit into something so small.

The coffeehouse is gone now. So is the antiques shop Abdulredha once owned. He had traveled to India and Pakistan searching for old objects whose histories fascinated him. Those, too, had vanished from the streets of his city. "The Karbala I knew," he told Abdullah, "has disappeared."

Abdullah continued turning the pages. "This looks like my phone memory," he joked. His grandfather smiled back. "Yes," he replied, "but this is more sacred than your phone." Then he pointed to a verse from the Quran: Indeed, it is We who sent down the Reminder, and indeed, We will preserve it.

Ironically, Abdullah himself had once rejected photography. Years earlier, when his grandfather asked for a portrait to hang on the wall, Abdullah refused. He disliked being photographed and saw little value in cameras. No one could have predicted that he would later become a documentary photographer whose images of Iraq would appear in international publications.

A single photograph changed Abdullah's life. It showed a Shia cleric standing in an ordinary grocery shop. He had seen men dressed like him countless times in mosques and religious processions, but never in such an ordinary setting. The image revealed something unexpected: that photography could transform the familiar into something entirely new. He decided he wanted to make photographs like that.

Unable to afford a camera, he planned to buy one in monthly installments. Before he could, his maternal grandmother surprised him by buying it as a gift. Despite the many generations of cameras that followed, Abdullah never replaced it. His grandmother's generosity became part of the camera's story.

Even after embracing photography, Abdullah hesitated to tell his grandfather about the photo project inspired by the Quran. Abdulredha disliked cameras. He worried they invaded people's privacy. In Karbala, privacy is not simply a preference but an ethic woven into architecture itself. Traditional houses rarely face the street with open windows. Light enters from above, through courtyards around which family life unfolds beyond public view. Even the garden belongs to the interior. Abdulredha's own house revolved around a courtyard shaded by two date palms that he still tended with care. Every harvest season his grandchildren gathered beneath them to pick ripe dates from the branches while he selected the finest fruit to deliver to relatives and friends.

Outside those homes, another rhythm shapes Karbala. Each year, during the first ten days of the holy month of Muharram, the city receives millions of pilgrims commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein ibn Ali in 680 CE. By night, mourners gather around candles whose light flickers across faces that have repeated these rituals for generations.

Streets normally filled with daily life surrender to processions of mourning. Cars disappear. People walk instead. Residents distribute food, tea, water, and shelter freely to visitors arriving from across Iraq and far beyond. The city Abdullah photographs throughout the year becomes almost unrecognizable beneath the movement of millions of bodies sharing a single memory.

His grandfather believes the city's memory lives not only in its buildings but in these repeated acts. He hears it each year in the recorded voice of Hamza al-Sagheer. Born in Karbala in 1921, Hamza spent his life working humble jobs—a spice seller, a cobbler, later the owner of a small clothes-pressing shop. Yet generations remember him not for his trade but for the elegies he recited during Ashura, the tenth day of the holy month. Long after his death, Hamza’s voice still fills the streets every Muharram.

“When I hear him,” Abdulredha says, “we recover our memory.”

If Hamza preserved Karbala through sound, Abdulredha preserved it through prayer. And Abdullah hopes to continue that work through his camera. Each found a different way to safeguard memory, yet all resisted the same threat: forgetting.

Abdullah had never felt a deep sense of belonging to Karbala until that afternoon when he opened his grandfather’s Quran. That day changed the way he looked at the city. He no longer saw only streets and buildings, but layers of history waiting to be noticed. Photographing Karbala became less an act of documentation than of recognition—as though he were continuing the work his grandfather had begun decades earlier.

Before, a small plant growing from a crumbling wall might have gone unnoticed. Now he would pause to photograph it, then carry the image with him for the rest of the day, seeing in it a gesture of hope.

One photograph among Abdulredha’s keepsakes did not belong to the family. It showed the dome of the Shrine of Imam Abbas after it was struck by artillery during the 1991 Shaaban Uprising. The photographer was Salah Haider, who spent decades documenting Karbala's alleyways, shrines, and everyday life. When he was forced to leave Iraq in 2003, much of his archive was scattered and eventually lost. It struck Abdullah that his grandfather and Haider had devoted their lives to the same quiet task without ever calling themselves archivists. One entrusted memory to the pages of a Quran. The other to a camera. Both worked alone because there was no institution to ask them to do otherwise.

Across the past century, waves of urban expansion have transformed Karbala. Historic neighborhoods, caravanserais, markets, alleyways, and family houses have disappeared beneath new construction designed to accommodate the city's ever-growing number of pilgrims. Development has answered practical needs while simultaneously erasing layers of everyday life. What vanishes first is often not monuments but the places where ordinary people recognized themselves.

In a city where so much has changed, memory survives in unexpected places: family albums, old recordings, and one inherited Quran.

Abdullah's photographs grew from that realization. He began documenting the pages his grandfather had assembled over decades, not simply because they belonged to one family, but because they revealed another archive of Karbala—one carried quietly by its own people. As he met other families, similar photographs emerged from drawers, cupboards, and forgotten envelopes: images that appeared private but together formed the visual memory of an entire city.

The buildings may disappear. Yet every time Abdulredha opens his Quran, the city returns—one photograph at a time.