Baghdad book alley springs back to life

Saddam Hussain would be grumbling in his prison cell if he knew.

Al Mutannabi Street, the book-lined alley whose spirit he tried for decades to crush, is again filled with customers, from communists to clerics, who would once have faced jail for reading some of the material on offer.

One man browsing the stalls was Sami Al Mutairy, a one-eyed poet and playwright who wrote The Tribes of Fear, a thinly veiled attack on Saddam's attempts to sow ethnic disunity. He was imprisoned and tortured by the Baath party's secret police.

"They used a ring to grind out my eye," he said. "They said I was a communist. Well, that was true enough – I am a Trotskyite. But I don't think the punishment fitted the crime."

Many of those around him, vendors and customers alike, were also jailed. Abdul Rasool Ali, a member of the once-persecuted Shiite religious majority, was arrested three times, accused of selling texts espousing his creed. After a confession obtained under torture, he was jailed for eight years.

But he considers that he escaped lightly in comparison with his brothers. One was executed, the other disappeared. "Before we had to be very careful what we sold," Ali said. "But now look, I have everything in open view."

The atmosphere of repression may have vanished but Al Mutannabi is in dire need of new material if it hopes to return to its mid-20th century heyday.

Most of the books on sale were published no later than the 1960s, donated to the vendors by rich Iraqis who emptied their libraries before fleeing the country.

Perhaps the most unsuccessful book on display was Konec Dobrodruzstvi, a Czech translation of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. "I've been trying to get rid of that for 14 years," said vendor George Sabah. "No one seems to want it." Iraq's intellectuals are starting to write again. But they now face a new threat from extremists fighting US troops and Iraq's interim government. These insurgents are also targeting academics and, according to the Iraqi Union of University Lecturers, have killed more than 250 since Saddamas fall.

In the Shahbander Cafe, frequented by Iraq's intellectual classes since 1917, the collapse of society dominated the conversation.

"If only more Americans had read more Hobbes maybe we would not be in the mess we are today," said Mohammad Mubarak, a philosopher who has written biographies of Francis Bacon and David Hume. "His predictions of the collapse of society are very apt."

© The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2004