page_title: Blood Quran
section_title: After the fall of Saddam
hierarchical_section_title: Blood Quran / After the fall of Saddam
caption_attribution_description: English: Mother Of All Battles Mosque secured by 1-15th Infantry Regiment of 3rd Brigade 3rd Infantry Division on 13 April 2003 in North Western Baghdad. The Division is deployed in support of OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM. OIF is the multinational coalition effort to liberate the Iraqi people, eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and end the regime of Saddam Hussein. [Original DoD caption]
context_page_description: The "Blood Qur'an" is a copy of the Islamic holy book, the Qur'an, claimed to have been written in the blood of the former president of
  Iraq, Saddam Hussein, over the course of two years in the late 1990s. Saddam commissioned the book in 1997 on his 60th birthday, reportedly to give thanks to God for helping him through many "conspiracies and dangers". He explained his reasons for commissioning the book in a letter published by the Iraqi state media in September 2000: "My life has been full of dangers in which I should have lost a lot of blood ... but since I have bled only a little, I asked somebody to write God's words with my blood in gratitude." Saddam's act was denounced in 2000 by the religious authorities of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and, after his fall from power in 2003, the Qur'an was removed from public display. Controversy persists over how much blood Saddam contributed to the project, or whether any of it is even his at all.
context_section_description: Following the fall of Baghdad to US-led forces in April 2003, the custodians of the mosque put the Blood Qur'an into storage for safekeeping. The demise of Saddam left the Iraqi religious and secular authorities with the dilemma of what should be done with the relics of his rule. Ali al-Moussawi, a spokesman for the prime minister, Nour al-Maliki, underscores this dilemma saying, "Not everything built during this regime we should remove. There were some sculptures however that were solely about dictatorship and control over Iraq. Some spoke to dictators and battles, and they should be removed. They have ethnic and sectarian meanings."  The Shia-run government does not want to see the re-emergence of symbols of the Saddam regime and has established a committee to supervise their removal. Some former opponents of Saddam, such as Ahmed Chalabi, have argued for the destruction of all Saddam-era monuments and symbols on the grounds that they are "a clear reminder of the consequences of totalitarianism and idealising a person that embodies evil". Others, such as Mowaffak al-Rubaie, argue that Iraqis "need to remember [the Saddam era], all what is bad and what is good and learn lessons." The Iraqi Prime Minister's spokesman Ali al-Moussawi has proposed that the Blood Qur'an should be kept "as a document for the brutality of Saddam, because he should not have done this. It says a lot about him." However, he said that it should never be displayed in a museum as no Iraqi would want to see it, but it could perhaps be held in a private museum like Hitler or Stalin memorabilia.
caption: Umm al-Ma'arik (now Umm al-Qura) mosque, where the Blood Qur'an was put on display during the Saddam era.