A Baghdad Book Mart Tries To Turn The Page.

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BAGHDAD, Sept. 14 — Mukdad Ismail rearranged his books, stacking paperbacks beside an exposé of Saddam Hussein’s sexual exploits and the autobiography of H. Norman Schwarzkopf, titled, in Arabic, “It Doesn’t Take a Hero.”
Mr. Ismail turned and faced the street. “Books, books: five books for 1,000 dinars, one for 250,” he shouted, his voice thick as a tenor’s, from his years of studying acting. “Come on, come on, those who are hungry for literature!”

Exactly 15 men looked on.

Here on Mutanabi Street, the capital’s 1,000-year-old intellectual core, they had come to celebrate and witness the first Friday in more than a year in the city without a curfew from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. It was a moment of potential revival.

Before the curfew, Friday — the Muslim day of prayer — had been Mutanabi’s rush hour, a time of shoulder-to-shoulder browsing, tea, debate and meetings with friends from all over the region.

After the curfew began, the street emptied. A bombing on March 5 seemed to seal its fate, until this week, when Iraqi officials quietly ended the ban as American officials promoted security gains in Congress. The timing was risky.

Ramadan, which began on Thursday for Sunnis and on Friday for Shiites, has been among the country’s most violent periods since the beginning of the war. Last year well over 100 people were killed or found dead in Baghdad during the first week of the holiday.

And on Friday, few Iraqis seemed confident enough to test their newfound freedom. Just before noon, only a few cars could be seen on streets downtown that are typically dense with traffic. At a market named Haraj (the word means “noisy”) the only sounds of commerce came from a half-empty cafe with a growling generator. At one point someone left a small shopping bag behind, and customers panicked, fearing it might contain a bomb.

Fear kept most of the booksellers from appearing at Mutanabi. Though complaints about the curfew had been common for months, Mr. Ismail was joined on the sidewalk by only two or three other vendors, clustered near ornate Ottoman-era buildings charred black by the March 5 bombing. To the booksellers’ left, two Iraqi soldiers strolled by a scrawny gray cat and shops imprisoned by metal grates.

“It’s still new, so people are still waiting to see what will happen in the street,” Mr. Ismail said. “There’s a fear of the unknown, a paranoia.”

Mr. Ismail’s career at Mutanabi began in 1996, after he moved south from Balad to attend Baghdad University’s School of Fine Arts. He studied theater and earned money selling books among the city’s intelligentsia. He ventured out on Friday mainly because he could — he lives a few blocks away — and because he wanted to support his friend from across Mutanabi Street, Naim al-Shatry, a jolly older fellow with a thick mustache who opened his own bookshop here nearly 40 years ago.

The two had escaped the bombing in March, which killed at least 26 people, but not its aftermath. Mr. Shatry displayed pictures of the memorial service, capturing him in a moment of crushing grief, with tears soaking a striped tie and light blue shirt. Mr. Ismail lamented the deaths and the loss of so much history.

On Friday the men stood on opposite curbs but together as friends, colleagues and competitors, sharing jokes at each other’s expense and promises to keep returning until the market blossomed with shoppers. Despite the doubts of others, Mr. Shatry said, “it will, it will.”

“Today,” he said, “I am a king.” Then he smiled broadly and chuckled at the mostly empty street.

Only a few books had been sold by the time the men began to pack up for home in the early afternoon. Customers acknowledged that the market had a long way to go before matching the hustle and bustle of the old days.

“I believe in the gradual theory,” said Mr. Ismail, who had been singing to pass the time. “Everything can’t come together at once.” He said he wished he could go back to acting, but lacked faith that there would be roles for him to play. Iraq, he said, was still emerging from a time of horror.

Indeed, a day earlier, 11 bodies had shown up across Baghdad, bearing signs of torture. On Friday, mourners gathered in Anbar Province for the funeral of a prominent Sunni sheik, assassinated a day earlier, who had worked with the Americans to fight Sunni extremists.

Books, on the other hand, brought reliable joy. Mr. Ismail picked up a black hardcover history of the Kurds, with an attractive photo on the front. Tapping it twice with his right hand, sending dust flying, he kissed the cover and said, “We are happy to be here again with these beautiful books.”

Mr. Shatry, like many Iraqis, also sought solace in words and the remembrance of sufferings overcome. He had begun his day with a group poetry reading on Mutanabi Street, a humble reopening for a market that has survived the Mongol hordes, Saddam Hussein and many other attackers. Around noon, between the deafening thwack of American military helicopter propellers overhead — twice in an hour — he recited the poem he read earlier, written by Ibn al-Utri.

Its subject: Baghdad in the ninth century, after rampaging armies destroyed the city in a dispute involving caliphate succession.

“Who invaded you, Baghdad?” Mr. Shatry said, his voice rising for the performance.

Weren’t you once as dear to me as my eye?

Wasn’t there a time when people lived within you, when being neighbors was a blessing?

Then the crow came and divided them. How much grief can you endure?

I swear by God, there are people lost who, whenever I remember them, my eyes start flowing with tears.

Mr. Shatry’s friends milled around him. Some flipped through dry, brittle printed pages. “Next week,” he said, “we’ll have more customers.”