Books in Baghdad (updated)

Adrian Blomfield reporting from Baghdad:

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

Al-Mutanabi 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 Ba'ath 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 Shia 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," Mr Ali said. "But now, look, I have everything in open view."
.....
"If only more Americans had read more Hobbes maybe we would not be in the mess we are today," said Muhammad Mubarak, a philosopher who has written biographies of Francis Bacon and David Hume. "His predictions of the collapse of society are very apt."

"If only more Americans could read at all," Mr al-Mutairy said, "although, as a communist, I could never agree with Hobbes."

Haji Mohammad al-Kheishaly, Shahbander's proprietor for 30 years, said: "Things have gone back to the way they used to be. Whether that is because Saddam has gone or because I have banned dominoes to improve the standard of conversation, I don't know."

Update at 4.10 PM. Reader Dave Bennett emails:

It is cheering to find that the scholarly and bookish have a chance to browse (comparatively) freely again... If the good old Daily Telegraph could find a Trotskyist in a Baghdad bookshop, how come the left don't realise they exist and would be under threat if the 'resistance' succeeds?