A Glimpse of Old Iraq, Age of Arab Enlightenment, amid the Bullets of `Democracy'

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JUST BESIDE Baghdad's cloth market are two noble wooden doors set in a massive and ancient brick wall with the first words of the Koran inscribed on the top. There is only one God but God and His Prophet is Mohamed. Because classical Arabic today remains the same language as that in which the Koran was written, there is always a slight surprise to see words written so long ago in unmistakably the same spelling and sense.

When the Caliph abu Jaafar al-Mansour bin aldahar Mohamed al- Nasr had those words inscribed on the al-Mustansariyah university wall, we were writing in the early Middle English which would soon resemble the English of Chaucer.

Indeed, Chaucer's …