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The crisis of the European Enlightenment intensified in its homeland. As for Arab enlightenment, and Iraqi enlightenment in particular, it never recovered, and the end of the Cold War was the time for its chronic defects to be exposed. This book is based on the conviction that the most important component of the Enlightenment project is controlling the gap between intellectuals and society, and it expands in presenting its patterns and philosophy. Then he monitors its contents by reading the modern history of Iraq as written by Arabs and Iraqis (Hanna Batatu, Ali Al-Wardi, Faleh Abdul-Jabbar, Abbas Kazem) and Westerners (Riva Simone, Charles Tripp, Phoebe Marr). The rest of the book's chapters delve into studying the work of four Iraqi intellectuals who were busy bridging this gap, and each one of them proposed his own solution to its inevitable, pressing presence: Saeed Al-Ghanimi, Abdul-Jabbar Al-Rifai, Hassan Nazim, and Ali Hakim Saleh. A book that addresses our present day, and searches for an observatory that opens a broader horizon.