ShortHand: Saddam Hussein’s Blood Quran

RedHanded

Wondery | RedHanded

True Crime

4.5 • 18.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2023

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In a vault, underneath a mosque in Baghdad, is a book whose very existence is considered morally and spiritually unforgivable. Three keys are required to open the vault: one owned by a spiritual leader, one by the chief of police, and one by an unnamed, anonymous citizen.

In 1997, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein ordered for a 605-page, 6,000-verse Quran to be written entirely in his blood. Since both its creation and destruction are strictly forbidden in Islamic law – it poses the ultimate dilemma for Iraqi authorities. H&S find out the origins of a cursed artefact.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello. Hello. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Welcome to the second
0:18.3	short hand of 2023, but the first one we're recording in 2023. Yes. I'm...
0:23.8	So welcome. Sporting Oda Airport. I have... I came straight to the office from Heathrow.
0:28.9	This time yesterday I was in South Africa and now I am in London where it is much colder.
0:32.4	So I am wearing a hoodie saying Cape Town that I had to buy in the airport because I was worried
0:36.2	I was going to be cold. And it was this one or fingerprint Africa and I could not bring myself to do that.
0:41.1	Choices, choices. I am recovering from what was quite a savage like fever dream kind of illness.
0:48.5	I think that's what Frank had. Yeah, it was rough. You know, when you get it right between Christmas and
0:53.2	New Year and normally I never have plans for New Year's but some I was like, okay, I'd like to have a
0:57.5	nice New Year's and so it was like the added pressure of desperately trying to get better quickly.
1:02.4	Yeah. Which just made me more stressed out. But now I have a residual cough which is fun but otherwise
1:08.0	happy New Year. And also we're doing lots of frantic writing of cases that are coming out for you
1:15.0	this week. Yes, this week. So yes, obviously we told you guys if you were listening to other episodes
1:20.0	that have come out recently that we were going to kick the year off with the two-parter on
1:23.7	Jeffrey Epstein. That is now no longer the case because that is how the world of true crime works.
1:28.9	We were going to do a shorthand this week on the Idaho student murders and then that 18-page
1:34.4	probable cause affidavit fell out of the sky and onto my head and I've been running around like
1:39.5	chicken that's all ever since saying that the world is going to end. We just couldn't do it. It was
1:43.5	so much information that was released. I've never seen a probable cause affidavit like it in my life.
1:47.9	So it's getting bumped up. You're getting a main feed on the Idaho student murders this week
1:52.9	and Jeffrey Epstein can fucking wait until next week. So yeah, everything says the same. You're just
1:57.5	getting a different episode this week. So stay tuned for that. But before we get to that,
	...

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