EVERY Friday, two friends meet in a ramshackle café at the end of al-Mutanabi Street amid the crumbling columns and verandahs of former British mansions to argue about Italian postwar cinema.

“Vittorio de Sica!” shouts Sada Bathan, stirring his tiny glass of black tea. “Roberto Rossellini!” counters Yokhana Daniel, helping himself to a treasured imported Gauloise cigarette.

The friends — who first met in the café, which they call their “sanctuary” against the grim reality of a looming war — swiftly move on to literature: Truman Capote, Milan Kundera, Sylvia Plath.

“When we think about books, we forget about the surreal quality of life outside,” says Sada, who has translated Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, and speaks English with a perfect British accent acquired by listening to the BBC. “The war doesn’t exist inside this café,” he says.

Every Friday, the last of Baghdad’s tattered intellectuals meet in the Al-Shah Bender, which lies at the end of the famous Friday book market, to argue, commiserate, trade books and buy each other endless cups of tea. In the land where the written word was invented, but which now is shrouded in cultural isolation, it is the last vestige of intellectual life.

The Al-Shah Bender is the Baghdad equivalent of Les Deux Magots, the famous Parisian café where pre-war one could find Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir hunched over espressos, brandies and manuscripts. In this corner of old Baghdad, there is no talk of sanctions, food rations or UN weapons inspectors.

“We have been squeezed to death by the embargo,” says Sada. “But they can’t strangle our minds.”

By lunchtime, the cafe has become a human bazaar. The master of ceremonies is an English teacher, Amir Najaf al-Sayef, who has come every Friday for the past 33 years and flits between huddled groups of artists, writers and poets engaged in conversation underneath photographs of Baghdad in the 1930s.

A woman comes through, selling birds in a cage. Two novelists raise their voices, talking of postmodernism. In one corner is Nasir Ghadir, the Rimbaud of Baghdad, a man with haunted eyes wearing a black polo-neck top.

In another is a young artist, Esan al-Azawi, whose way of escaping the grimness of his life is to study all things British, even though he has never left Iraq: he knows the London A to Z better than a cabbie and about Portobello Road from watching films.

“I went there with Angela Lansbury,” he says, his voice rising with excitement. “I have a magic skill to climb inside the screen to travel to another world.”

The street is named after al-Mutanabi, a 10th-century Iraqi poet who lived at a time when the Arab world led the way in arts and sciences. In al-Mutanabi’s time, Baghdad was one of the world’s most important centres of higher learning. Now Baghdad is a place where one must sell books to buy food. People hawk copies of Shakespeare or Agatha Christie to buy generators, rice or vegetable oil.

The volumes are piled on every corner, some of them blowing down the dust-strewn street. Under sanctions, the number of books printed and imported has declined and many of those here are ancient and out of date. There are medical textbooks from the 1960s, stacks of dusty National Geographics, orange Penguin classics and copies of an ancient Newsweek which features the first test-tube baby on the cover.

The street is a reflection of an intellectual culture struggling to survive, and a middle class that is being increasingly alienated. There has been a dramatic drop in Iraq’s adult literacy rate, from 89 per cent in 1985 to 58 per cent in 2000, a sign of the deprivation of a culture which used to be proud of its educated class.

Nasir Ghadir, who earns a sparse living tutoring Arabic, spent the morning convincing a friend, Kareem al-Shari, not to sell a rare book. The Iraqi history textbook had been in his family for years. “He needed to buy baby milk, so he took the book to the market,” says Nasir. In the end, a wealthier friend loaned him the money and the book was temporarily spared.

Later in the day is a bi-monthly auction — nicknamed the Christie’s of Baghdad — that takes place in al-Adimiah district. There, the middle class tearfully sell off their rugs, paintings and family silver.

Esan al-Azawi went recently. After much soul-searching, he sold his grandfather’s Parker fountain pen to buy food. For Esan, it was a defining moment. “I can’t tell you what that pen meant to me,” he says. “Someone might say, it was only a pen, but to me it was my personal history.”

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