Tahrir — The Monument That Outlived Its Maker

Unveiled in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square in 1961, Jewad Selim’s Nasb al-Hurriya was the last and greatest work of Iraq’s most important modern art movement.

I first saw the Freedom Monument on a February afternoon, standing beneath its fourteen bronze panels as the Tigris light turned the travertine amber. The figures read right to left, like Arabic script — soldiers, farmers, a woman clutching a child, a poet with his arm raised — twenty-five castings across a slab raised six meters above Tahrir Square.

The istilham al-turath doctrine

When Selim co-founded the Baghdad Modern Art Group in 1951 with Shakir Hassan Al Said, its core principle was istilham al-turath — drawing from heritage rather than breaking with it. Abbasid manuscripts, Sumerian votive figures, and Kufic geometry became material to absorb and transform.

The fourteen bronze panels of Nasb al-Hurriya do not illustrate a story. They unfold one — from oppression on the right to liberation on the left, in a rhythm close to Arabic script.