ABSTRACT
T h e visitor to Baghdad to-day in search of the romance of the Arabian Nights and all the thrills which the Thief of Baghdad on the film-screen has led him to expect, will be sadly disillusioned. New Street of modern Baghdad with its bald and blatant modernism, its jumble of new glassfront stores, displaying automobile accessories and phono graphs, is most disappointing from the tourist’s point of view and anything but romantic. But there is romance in modern Baghdad, not found in New Street in its tawdry Western imitation, but in the spirit of the people. A renais sance in education is stirring Baghdad from a long Rip Van Winkle sleep, giving it new vitality and power. No change in the Eastern world, in this twentieth-century era of change, has more far-reaching or fundamental significance, not only for Eastern women but for Eastern society, than the growth in girls’ education.
