When I was a child, I used to spend most of my time at my neighbours’ house. Abu Falah’s house. I used escape from our house to his small two-roomed house. One of the rooms was occupied by the blind grandmother and the oldest daughter Zeinab. We used to stay in the other room. I remember it was a very long room, divided in half by a cloth curtain. That was where the father, mother, the sons Falah, Hasan and my friend Mariam lived.

I was terrified of the grandmother and never went into her room. We used to play either in the open courtyard under the lotus tree or in the front part of the long room. The house was very old. The plaster was always flaking off and we had to sweep the ground many times a day. What used to fascinate me was that the walls of the room, from top to bottom were covered in coloured pictures. Dozens of pictures of various shapes and poses, but all of the same man. In one of them, he looked into the distance as if he saw further than other people. In another, he fought with his famous double-bladed sword. In yet another, he stood next to his 2 sons.

The picture, which remained imprinted in my mind longest, was a picture of him on his horse, sword in the air, chopping enemy in half – and the enemy somehow stayed upright, indicating how sharp the sword was. These wonderful pictures were of Imam Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and the husband of his daughter Fatima. I used to spend long hours gazing at these pictures because the walls of our house had no religious pictures on them at all. (This was because my family were Sunni, but our neighbours were Shi’a). And the effect of these pictures on me was increased because Um Falah used to call out to Imam Ali as if she was conjuring him into the present. If she wanted to get up from where she was sitting and felt tired, she would say “Ya Ali” and if she wanted to lift something heavy, she would say “Ya Ali” and if she felt desperate and depressed, she would call out “Ya Ali, ya Abu Hasan”. In the evening after dinner, whenever I could I would ask a simple question about one of the pictures, to make Abu Falah, forget how tired he was after a day working as a cobbler. He would begin telling one of his many stories about Imam Ali and his sense of justice, how he always stood on the side of Right. He supported the weak and fought oppressors and never accepted to be silent in the face of injustice and aggression. Abu Falah constantly repeated Imam Ali’s saying “If poverty had been a man I would have killed him”

In 1963, during the first Ba’ath coup d’etat, we had to leave our home in Al Washah district of Baghdad in a hurry, fearful that my father would be arrested for being a communist. We heard later that Abu Falah had been arrested because he was a communist.

When I saw the picture depicting religious scenes on holiday in Morocco in 1995, I was elated and immediately bought it because it reminded me of Abu Falah and his family.