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him to the Anglo-American school but to a private academy that schooled the sons of the elite of Iraqi society. By the time he was ten he could, linguistically at least, pass for an Arab boy among the others. Only his pink face and tufty ginger hair made sure he could never completely pass for an Arab.
    Born in 1965, he was in his eleventh year when Mr Martin senior decided to leave Iraq and return to the safety of the UK. The Ba’ath Party was back in power, but that power truly resided not with President Bakr but with his Vice-President, who was carrying out a ruthless pogrom of his political enemies, real and imagined.
    The Martins had already lived through tumultuous times since the balmy days of the fifties when the boy King Feisal was on the throne. They had seen the massacre of the young King and his pro-western premier Nuri Said, the equally gory murder on camera in the TV studio of his successor General Kassem and the first arrival of the brutal Ba’ath Party. That in turn had been toppled, then returned to power in 1968. For seven years Martin senior watched the growing power of the psychotic Vice-President Saddam Hussein and in 1975 decided it was time to leave.
    He had obtained a good post with Burmah Oil in London thanks to a kind word from a certain Denis Thatcher whose wife Margaret had just become leader of the Conservative Party. His elder son, Mike, was thirteen and ready for a British boarding school. All four of them, the father, Mrs Martin, Mike and Terry, were back in the UK by Christmas.
    Terry’s brilliant brain had already been noted. He walked through exams for boys two and even three years his senior as a knife through butter. It was presumed, as it turned out almost rightly, that a series of scholarships and bursaries would carry him through senior school and Oxford or Cambridge. But he wanted to continue with Arabic studies. While still at school he had applied to SOAS, attending the spring interview in 1983, joining as an undergraduate that same autumn, studying History of the Middle East.
    He walked through a first class degree in three years and then put in three more for his doctorate, specializing in the Koran and the first four Caliphates. He took a sabbatical year to continue Koranic studies at the famed Al-Azhar Institute in Cairo and on his return was offered a lectureship at the young age of twenty-five, a signal honour because when it comes to matters Arabic SOAS is one of the toughest schools in the world. He was promoted to a readership at the age of thirty-four, earmarked for a professorship by forty. He was forty-one the afternoon the NSA came seeking his advice, spending a year as a visiting professor at Georgetown because that same spring of 2006 his life had fallen apart.
    The emissary from Fort Meade found him in a lecture hall concluding a talk on the teachings of the Koran as relevant to the contemporary age.
    It was plain from the wings of the stage that his students liked him. The hall was packed. He made his lectures feel like a long and civilized conversation between equals, seldom referring to notes, jacket off, pacing up and down, his short, plump body radiating enthusiasm to impart and share scholarship, to give serious attention to any point raised from the floor, never putting a student down for lack of knowledge, talking in layman’s language, keeping the body of the lecture short with plenty of time for student questions. He had reached that point when the spook from Fort Meade appeared in the wings.
    A red plaid shirt in the fifth row raised a hand.
    ‘You said you disagreed with the use of the term “fundamentalist” to refer to the philosophy of the terrorists. Why?’
    Given the blizzard of publicity concerning matters Arabic, Islamic and Koranic that had swept across America since 9/11, every question session swerved quickly from theoretical learning to the onslaught on the West that had occupied so much of the previous ten years.
    ‘Because it is a