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MaDonal
Restaurant in Sulaymaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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MaDonal (Sorani Kurdish: مادۆنال) is a restaurant located in the city of Sulaymaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan. It is designed to resemble the fast food chain McDonald's both in appearance and in menu;[1][2][3][4] for instance, MaDonal's menu includes "Big Macks."[5][6] It is one of two McDonald's-like restaurants in the town; the other one, Matbax, claims that MaDonal is "cheap quality".[7]
The owner, Suleiman Qassab, fought in the Kurdish resistance during the 1970s. He became a refugee in Vienna, Austria, where he got a job as a cook at McDonald's. In the 1990s, he applied for permits to create a McDonald's in Iraq, but the McDonald's Corporation turned him down, due to economic sanctions imposed during the regime of Saddam Hussein, as well as the controlled economy of Iraq at the time. [citation needed] In response, he established MaDonal Restaurant, which is still in business.[8] Since establishing MaDonal, Qassab has offered free food to U.S. forces, been threatened,[9][10][11][12][13][14] and has become a "Kurdish celebrity."[15] Qassab hopes to one day turn MaDonal into an actual McDonald's restaurant.[16][17]
MaDonal is popular with Sulaymaniyah's youth,[18][19] and the upper middle class.[20] It is open even during Ramadan, the month of fasting in Islam.[21]
Sociologist George Ritzer sees MaDonal as part of a trend of other countries developing their own regional variations of McDonald's.[22][23] Journalist Christopher Hitchens said it was "reassuring" to see signs of progress like MaDonal "in an atmosphere that only a few years ago was heavy with miasmic decay and the reek of poison gas."[24]
Qassab is just one of many who have requested permission to open up a McDonald's in Iraq.[25][26] Should this happen, there has been speculation by some about whether McDonald's will eventually take legal action against MaDonal.[27][28][29][30] However, MaDonal appears safe for now, as one journalist notes: "The flow of applications to open an Iraqi McDonald's stopped as quickly as it started, and the corporate lawyers never came to Sulaymaniyah."[31]
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