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“By my beard, you can have it. It’s juicier than other eyes. It has seen every color and every bride in the caliph’s harem.”

He never asserted a hereditary claim to the grand title of caliph.

As though inspired by “1984,” a caliph tells the Iraqis whom his men have kidnapped, “We came to liberate you.”

The museum’s first exhibition since reopening in October after a major overhaul, “Baghdad: Eye’s Delight” charts the city’s heritage from the Abbasid caliphs from the seventh to twelfth centuries to today.

Some rival cut the caliph’s throat while he sat reading, and now “his blood flecks a page like the shadow of a moth.”