The literature on Arab nationalism often posits that Pan-Arab national narratives, emphasizing Arab culture, language, and history, were formulated in the late 19th century by small educated elites in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In the interwar period, such Pan-Arab narratives were in competition with particular-territorial forms of nationalisms, cultivated within specific nation–states. Pan-Arab nationalism is then seen as declining as a result of the 1967 war and the emerging predominance of political Islam in Middle Eastern politics.Footnote ¹ However, the linearity assumed by this historiography, in which Arab nationalism “rises” in the 19th century, “matures” in the interwar period, and “dies” after 1967, is misleading, in part because Arab national discourses went through extremely important changes in the 1950s and 1960s.

This article analyzes what happened to Iraqi national narratives during the years from 1958 to 1961, when a new revolutionary agenda changed the national discourses of many countries in the region and when innovative definitions of Arab nationalisms were affected by Cold War politics and worldwide processes of decolonization. What I hope to show is that Pan-Arabism was transformed in Qasimite Iraq, in large part due to its hybridization with Iraqi patriotism and, concurrently, that various elements of Arabist discourses were integrated into local perceptions of Iraqi nationalism.

The various visions of Arab-Iraqi nationalisms are often classified as reflecting one of two forms of national identity: Pan-Arabism (qawmiyya), which considers Arab culture, history, and language the markers of national identity and often strives for political unity with other Arab states; and territorial-patriotic nationalism (waṭaniyya), which considers Iraqi (rather than Arab) geography, archaeology, and history the key features of national identity.Footnote ² The Iraqi left, that is, the social democrats and the communists, tended to privilege territorial nationalism. Similarly, the nationalism promoted by ʿAbd al-Karim Qasim focused on a waṭanī identity. In contrast, both the Hashimite monarchy and the regimes established after Qasim's fall advocated Pan-Arab nationalism.

The division between waṭanī and qawmī forms of national identity is extremely meaningful in the Iraqi context. Yet these waṭanī and qawmī nationalisms are not monolithic. Rather, they are highly fluid, constantly influenced by their ideological rivals and marked by the ability to change according to generation, location, and regional and global politics. The Pan-Arab nationalisms of each country in the Middle East were shaped by a particular set of local circumstances, while waṭanī nationalists could not ignore such questions as the Palestinian nakba, Algeria's struggle for independence, or the region's Islamic and Arab pasts. In this respect, I examine different images of the Iraqi nation explored in the Iraqi print market during the first years of Qasim's regime. I study the national narratives crafted by the state, its cultural agents, and its opposition forces in order to underline the heterogeneity typifying the national discourses of the period. The regime's perceptions of Iraqi and Arab nationalisms have been discussed in the important works of Baram, Dann, and especially the excellent analysis of Eric Davis.Footnote ³ However, while these studies posit a clear separation between Pan-Arab nationalists and Iraqi leftist patriots, I demonstrate how intellectuals from each group employed similar cultural idioms. This synthesis between local Iraqi and Pan-Arab nationalisms, I argue, destabilizes a typology that assumes each ideological camp subscribed to a specific and rigidly defined set of well-known historical narratives.

Scholarly evaluation of nationalisms in Iraq during both the Hashimite and the early republican eras (1921–68) has changed considerably in recent years. National discourses in this period were often characterized as being Pan-Arab and Sunni centered and aimed at maintaining the political hegemony of Iraq's Sunni Arab elites and stifling Shiʿi and Kurdish protests. Scholars have likewise underlined the antidemocratic and militarist currents that colored national politics.Footnote ⁴ More recent scholarship on Iraqi nationalisms, while acknowledging the ultranationalist elements in Iraqi political culture, has argued that liberal, democratic, and leftist voices were not drowned out. Although some artists, writers, and poets collaborated with the state, others (both in Iraq and in exile) critiqued the state in their works. Of most significance, as established by Zubaida and Davis, at any given moment in the history of the Iraqi nation, there has not been a single national narrative or a single memory of the nation but rather competing visions advanced by the state and opposition forces.Footnote ⁵ The simultaneous existence of a variety of national narratives facilitated processes of hybridity and synthesis between qawmī and waṭanī narratives.

Emphasizing the shared features of qawmī and waṭanī nationalisms might seem a futile exercise considering how vehemently the two camps despised each other and the inhumane brutality with which the Iraqi state crushed the Iraqi left from 1963 onward. Given such high levels of violence, one wonders how to explicate the similarities between the national languages of both camps and why such similarities should be looked for in the first place. Nonetheless, in the 1950s, Pan-Arab and leftist intellectuals often belonged to what Mannheim called a “generational unit,” a social structure whose members are cognizant of themselves as a group and thus share a common identity and relate to the same events.Footnote ⁶ Most of the intellectuals during the regime of Qasim—communists and Pan-Arabists alike—belonged to the urban middle classes (the effendiyya), whose worldview was shaped by the Iraqi cultural renaissance of the 1950s and the Baghdadi college politics of the era, and all adopted, to a degree, socialist and Marxist elements in their writings. The effendiyya of the 1940s and the 1950s was different from the effendiyya of the 1930s. It was poorer than its predecessor, because the state's sponsorship of various Baghdadi colleges drew students from more humble backgrounds to the city. These young men and women were prone to join more radical organizations, especially the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), but also, to a much lesser degree, the Baʿth and other qawmī organizations. Its members demonstrated and protested against a wide array of socioeconomic and political injustices, especially the Iraqi land regime and British involvement in Iraqi politics. Thus, during the monarchic period, both the left and the Pan-Arab camp called for land reform, women's suffrage, and greater welfare rights and objected to British intervention in local and regional politics.Footnote ⁷

Finally, Pan-Arab and leftist intellectuals belonged to a Third Worldist global wave. In the 1950s and 1960s, local elites in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East advanced a range of national liberation projects. Their Third Worldist agenda synthesized positive reevaluations of precolonial cultures, Marxist and socialist utopianism, and visions of modernization and development. Robert Malley has shown how these elites defined the postcolonial state as the main agent for advancing a new international and sociopolitical order.Footnote ⁸ Although Egyptian president Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir was identified with Third Worldism, and Qasim's regime and the intellectuals who supported it objected to al-Nasir's Pan-Arab attempts to secure hegemony over Middle Eastern politics, the Iraqi state's commitment to social reform, modernization projects, welfare rights, and anticolonialism clearly belonged to the Third World movement. These concepts, moreover, were intertwined with new understandings of nationalism. Thus, in the months following July 1958, both qawmī and waṭanī writers strove to construct a new revolutionary language with respect to the Iraqi nation. They sensed that Hashimite nationalism belonged to the past and attempted to generate new forms of national identity that fit their local, Arab, and Third Worldist agendas.

W A Ṭ A N Ī VISIONS—THE LAND, THE PEOPLE, AND THE STATE

Brigadier General ʿAbd al-Karim Qasim came to power on 14 July 1958 in a military coup he orchestrated with Colonel ʿAbd al-Salam ʿArif. The revolution terminated the Hashimite monarchy (1921–58) and was marked by the brutal execution of the members of the royal household. The new regime promoted social justice on the domestic front as well as a nonsectarian attitude toward Iraq's ethnic and religious group. This antisectarian ideology was interwoven into Qasim's personality cult, as the leader's mixed sectarian background was seen as an embodiment of the nation's ability to mold its different ethnic and religious groups into a unified body. The national narratives that were constructed under Qasim's regime are pivotal for understanding Arab-Iraqi nationalisms after July 1958.

The new regime cultivated a “secular religion,” or a new national language of myths, symbols, liturgies, and rituals. In Qasim's populist nationalism, the people were to worship their own peoplehood and to glorify their Iraqi national identity through the construction of national monuments and public festivals.Footnote ⁹ The state became very involved in cultural production, relying on cultural agents (writers, journalists, poets, and painters) affiliated with the Iraqi left to legitimate the regime and popularize its perceptions of nationalism. The Hashimite monarchy, especially after 1954, had brutally suppressed intellectual activity, and many Iraqi authors and writers had been jailed or exiled. After July 1958, professors who had been deemed radical by the monarchic authorities resumed their university positions, and works by artists and writers formerly considered subversive were appointed by the state to various positions, from top ministerial posts to minor roles in the government's unions. Some ministers serving under Qasim were known to the educated public: Muhammad Hadid and Husayn Jamil had been active in social democratic organizations since 1932, Ibrahim Kubba and Faysal Samir were respected professors, and Naziha al-Dulaymi had been active in women's communist organizations since the late 1940s. The composition of student organizations, artistic societies, and literary salons indicates that their members came from the ranks of the leftist effendiyya. The most pronounced domain of leftist cultural hegemony was the union of Iraqi writers (Ittihad al-Udabaʾ al-ʿIraqiyyin), which organized ceremonies, celebrations, and meetings that gathered together poets and other writers. In such events, communist and socialist bards delivered poems in honor of the revolution and its achievements. Many of these cultural agents, such as poets ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayati and Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, dramaturge Yusuf al-ʿAni, and painter and sculptor Jawad Salim, were familiar to a public that had appreciated their works under the monarchy. Al-Jawahiri, who played a key role in the writers’ unions, had been a famed poet since the 1920s. Al-Bayati, who was appointed director of the bureau of writing and translation in the Ministry of Education, had been a famous communist bard before 1958. Critic ʿAli Jawad al-Tahir and communist activists like ʿAziz al-Hajj had begun their careers prior to the revolution and assumed important cultural roles after 1958.Footnote ¹⁰ Although some were disappointed by the policies of the regime after 1960, as state relations with the ICP deteriorated and several communist newspapers were banned, during the regime's first years many well-known intellectuals propagated the state's national and cultural visions and supported its projects.

The new waṭanī narratives in the Iraqi print market had three central themes. First, they celebrated the nation's past, starting in the days of ancient Mesopotamia, continuing through the Islamic era, and manifesting itself in the present. Second, they underscored the importance of “the people” (al-shaʿb) as a social group formed by Iraq's geography, natural traditions, and history. Third, they celebrated the July revolution as materializing dormant hopes for independence and freedom.

To promote an Iraqi sense of identity, government publications drew public attention to the nation's history and geography. The official bulletin The New Iraq printed stories representing Iraq as the cradle of civilization and the first location of settled agricultural communities.Footnote ¹¹ The bulletin also showcased works of painters depicting the Iraqi landscape and Iraq's various peoples.Footnote ¹² Specific objects acquired national meanings. According to one article, the date was a national fruit that Iraqis had cherished from ancient times and had commemorated in legends, festival, and poems.Footnote ¹³ Other items in the state's publications celebrated “Iraqi mythology” and popular folktales rooted in the nation's pre-Islamic past.Footnote ¹⁴ Iraqi folklore was exalted in The New Iraq as well as in other publications. In 1959, writers formed the Committee for Popular Literature (Lajnat al-Adab al-Shaʿbi) with the aim of recording and studying popular songs and folklore from across the country.Footnote ¹⁵ The nation's multiplicity of nationalities and cultures was also seen as reflected in cultural artifacts such as musical tools and colorful dresses. It was believed that traditional costumes represented the “national legacy,” recording the nation's “distinguishing features” and the people's “history and the course of their evolution.”Footnote ¹⁶

The state's vision of the nation was promoted in other venues besides the print media. Memory sites (museums, public monuments, archeological excavations, and national holidays) were meant to reflect the nation's history. The Museum of Modern Art showed many works of Iraqi painters (including Faʾiq Hasan, Jawad Salim, ʿAbd Allah Ismaʿil, and ʿAttaʾ Sabri) that focused on scenes from everyday life in Iraq, the Iraqi landscape, and the Iraqi people.Footnote ¹⁷ The Costume Museum introduced exhibits on Iraq's cultural heritage, while the Directorate of Popular Arts and Cultures sent missions to collect samples of handicrafts from southern and northern Iraq, employing tape cassettes and photography to reconstruct the Iraqi national heritage.Footnote ¹⁸ The state supported archeological excavations in various sites, including Babylon, Samarra, and Mosul, and printed maps of these sites. On the first anniversary of the July revolution, a military march featured cars carrying objects representing the civilizations, arts, and sciences of the nation, among which objects from the site of Ur were prominent.Footnote ¹⁹

The major government agency that propagated the new waṭanī line was the Ministry of Guidance (Wizarat al-Irshad), which supervised radio, television, and print media; sponsored a host of cultural activities; and published books on themes such as Iraqi art and monuments from the time of antiquity. Radio listeners still demanded to listen to Egyptian singers like Umm Kalthum, ʿAbd al-Halim, and ʿAbd al-Wahhab, who were very popular on shows to which listeners phoned in or wrote. Nonetheless, versions of the Iraqi maqām were aired on the Iraqi radio to the delight of many, reflecting a growing interest in Iraqi skits, plays, concerts, and songs, especially those performed by Nazim al-Ghazali.Footnote ²⁰ Although the Iraqi film industry could not compete with its Egyptian counterpart, attempts to promote local production began in the regime's first year, and Baghdad television showed plays by Iraqi writers such as Yusuf al-ʿAni, folk dancing, and documentaries and films on Iraq.Footnote ²¹

Although these revolutionary projects seemed novel, waṭanī nationalism was also grounded in the monarchic past. The Iraqi Museum had been established in 1926. Poetry in the Iraqi colloquial had been in print since the interwar period.Footnote ²² The interest in folklore and popular literature began in the 1930s and 1940s. Some of the archeological digs in Iraq started in the mid-1940s and even earlier. Popular maqām music and skits written by local writers were aired on Iraqi radio before 1958. Nevertheless, these projects were part of a new republican culture, since their popularity increased dramatically after the revolution and the cultural agents supporting them belonged to the intellectual elite persecuted by the Hashimite regime. In the monarchic era, waṭanī projects were subsumed under Pan-Arab projects; now they were given center stage.

Central to the concept of the homeland, waṭan, was the concept of the people, al-shaʿb, which emerged in almost every official publication. The term al-shaʿb was rarely used under the monarchy and came to represent an entirely new national category after the revolution. It signified a group of people whose ethnic and linguistic diversity was configured within the same territorial homeland, and it was used to surmount political differences. It was also intertwined with Qasim's personality cult, because the leader was depicted in public ceremonies and official publications as the son of the people (ibn al-shaʿb, ibn al-shaʿb al-bār). Qasim argued that although the nation's subjects could be divided politically, all were patriots who worked for “the interest of the people and the welfare of the country.” “We must consolidate the national unity inside our homeland,” he concluded.Footnote ²³ The people were called to celebrate their great achievements, their histories, and their commitment to the nation. The yearly calendar became a rollercoaster shifting between festivals and scandals (ʿArif's arrest, the public trials of the officials of the old regime, the assassination attempt on Qasim's life). Anniversaries, commemoration ceremonies dedicated to the nation's history, and secular holidays dedicated to the Iraqi people and the Iraqi landscape (Child Day, Tree Day, May Day) marked the commitment of the people to the regime. The first celebration of the revolution included speeches by Qasim, marches, public performances, and military parades, especially in Baghdad. Public coverage of such events as the recovery of Qasim from the assassination attempt against him was meant to generate the feeling that the Iraqi people stood united behind their nation and its leader and were willing to fight old and new enemies for their sake.

Representations in the print media suggested that the Iraqi people were molded from different ethnic groups, with different cultural traditions, and, importantly, that diversity was a positive feature of the Iraqi nation. This understanding was reflected in pluralistic attitudes toward the Turkmen and the Kurds; Qasim stated that the Kurds, the Turkmen, the Assyrians, and Iraq's other minorities were all brothers in the republic.Footnote ²⁴ The radio offered programs in Turkish and Kurdish, seeing them as part of the nation's linguistic diversity. When the leftist League for the Defense of Women's Rights (Rabitat al-Difaʿ ʿan Huquq al-Marʾa) organized a conference in Arbil, it celebrated the struggle of Kurdish women and their participation in the July revolution. The daily al-Bilad noticed that one of the female activists spoke “in the language of our struggling brothers” while detailing the experiences of Kurdish women under the old regime.Footnote ²⁵ Stories of Turkmen folklore appeared in official publications.Footnote ²⁶ The social democratic daily al-Ahali published reviews on the history of various nationalities (aqwām) in Iraq that discussed the different Turkik nations that had inhabited the Iraqi soil from the time of antiquity to the present.Footnote ²⁷ Writer Muhammad Tawfiq Husayn reported that the revolution united the Arabs and Kurds. “This historical unity is established on cooperation and love” and thus manifested itself in the Kurdish support of the revolution, its army, and its leader.Footnote ²⁸ Similarly, The New Iraq featured a story about Nowruz that explained the holiday was celebrated to welcome the spring and to commemorate the memory of an ancient leader who led his people to fight for liberty against an evil tyrant. During the old regime, Nowruz celebrations were forbidden because the ruling elites feared the Kurdish patriotism that was embodied in the day. With the advent of the new regime, the holiday began to be celebrated by both Kurds and Arabs in various districts.Footnote ²⁹ The lessons to be drawn from The New Iraq story were not hard to miss: the Kurdish Nowruz marked a struggle against oppression, and as such, it belonged to the tradition of all the people of Iraq and their revolutionary regime.

The communist press featured stories in which the Kurds were mentioned in a positive fashion. Poets Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri and ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayati referred to Kurdistan in their works. The Kurdish leadership of the day included not only tribal leaders but also a cadre affiliated with the ICP. These activists positioned themselves against both Arab nationalists and Kurdish landowners who had cooperated with the old regime. Communist writer ʿAziz al-Hajj referred to the Kurdish people as the brothers of the Arab people and noted that Pan-Arab Egyptian propaganda tended to forget that there was a large Kurdish minority in Iraq.Footnote ³⁰ The communist newspaper Ittihad al-Shaʿb had a section dedicated to Kurdish affairs titled “The Kurdish People” (al-shaʿb al-kurdī). An item in this section emphasized the significance of ending feudalism and reforming the situation of the peasants in Kurdistan.Footnote ³¹ The same paper printed a speech of Hamza ʿAbd Allah that honored the prisoners and shuhadāʾ of Kurdistan in Diyarbakır, Sulimaniyya, and Mosul, the peasants who battled against the land regime, and “all those who struggled, Arab and Kurd, for freedom and democracy.”Footnote ³² The perception that peasants and political prisoners were victims of the Hashimite regime was expressed in major newspapers. The article continued this line of thinking by arguing that the Kurds shared this history with the Arabs and that Kurdish peasants and political activists were also martyrs for the national cause.

With a new understanding of space (the Iraqi nation) and the people came a new understanding of time, namely, the perception that the revolution had started a new age. These narratives conformed to the waṭanī paradigm by focusing entirely on the modern history of Iraq, paying little heed to the role of Pan-Arabism in Iraqi history. Of significance, these narratives positioned the revolution vis-à-vis the Hashimite regime to demonstrate that the July revolution was not a mere coup but rather the national embodiment of the desires of the people. The narratives also allowed the state to highlight its commitment to such Third Worldist goals as the anticolonial struggle, national modernization projects, and the promotion of social justice, by underscoring their absence under the monarchy. Moreover, the emphasis on the dark Hashimite era enabled intellectuals to commemorate their own activities as members of the opposition during the monarchic regime and to represent these activities as paving the way for the coming revolution.

The Hashimite era was consequently termed in all official publications as “the bygone period” (al-ʿahd al-bāʾid/al-mubād) or the “black era” (al-ʿahd al-aswad). The new regime, representing itself as a new dawn, was the opposite. The three main features of the black era were colonialism (the preservation of British colonial interests in Iraq), feudalism (iqtāʿ), and reactionism (rajʿiyya). Al-Jawahiri defined the difference between the new and the old as the battle between the powers of good that struggled for the nation and the people and the powers of evil.Footnote ³³ The new reading of the nation's recent past accentuated the fact that the Iraqi people expressed their anticolonial and anti-Hashimite rage in a long series of rebellions starting with the 1920 revolt and continuing with the two waves of urban rioting against the regime, the wathba (1948) and the intifada (1952), events that were now endowed with specific national and revolutionary meanings. ʿAbd Allah Jadduʿ, in an official government pamphlet, explained that Iraq's rich natural resources exposed it to a series of invasions, the last of which were Ottoman rule and British imperialism, but that the Iraqi people have constantly rebelled against such occupations.Footnote ³⁴ Noted sociologist ʿAli al-Wardi similarly maintained that the revolution was not a replacement of one ruling clique by another but rather the outcome of a long battle of the people against a terror regime that had lasted for forty years.Footnote ³⁵ Writer Husayn Muruwa saw the wathba as epitomizing the action of various classes within the homeland—students, workers, and peasants—who collectively took to the streets in defiance of the state's violence.Footnote ³⁶ The victims of the 1920 revolt, the wathba, and the intifada were commemorated in official memorials by intellectuals and politicians and became contemporary heroes of the nation.Footnote ³⁷

The People's Court, under the presidency of Colonel Fadil ʿAbbas al-Mahdawi, held public trials of the “traitors of the old regime” as well as Qasim's new opponents. Represented by the regime as a political school, the trials served to propagate these new historical narratives. The biographies of supporters of the Hashimites among the accused were constructed as emblematic of the crimes of the entire Hashimite era and served to remind the public why the nation revolted against it. Many of the accused were blamed for oppressing the Iraqi people and aiding British imperialism. At times the prosecutors referenced events that had little to do with the accusations against the individual.Footnote ³⁸

The state generated the sense that while the Hashimites repressed cultural activities, the July revolution instigated an Iraqi cultural revival that allowed the true intellectuals of the Iraqi people to speak to, and about, the nation. Thus, literary works written before 1958 and deemed subversive by the state were now printed, while new literary works detailed the horrors of the previous regime. For example, when gifted Marxist writer Ghaʾib Tuʿma Farman published his collection of short stories Muwlud Akhar in 1959, the Union of Iraqi Writers greeted it with much enthusiasm. Because many of the stories in the collection dealt with the monarchic era, they seemed to have authenticated the claims about the Hashimite regime made in government publications, the Mahdawi trials, and the press.Footnote ³⁹

Similarly, biographies of intellectuals from the monarchic era were renarrated to show the roots of the revolution in previous decades. Literary critic Safaʾ al-Kulusi identified socialist motifs in the neoclassical poetry of al-Jawahiri, while poet Hashim al-Witri marked al-Jawahiri's poem commemorating the death of his brother during the wathba as a key event shaping his political vision.Footnote ⁴⁰ The commemoration of the life of neoclassical poet Maʿruf al-Rusafi (1875–1945) followed similar lines. Al-Rusafi's poetry had protested social injustice in Iraq, called for granting freedom to women, and condemned the British Mandate; during World War I he had also published anti-Hashimite poetry (which originated from his pro-Ottoman stance). All of these were utilized to generate the impression that al-Rusafi was one of the prophets of the revolution. He was commemorated by the Qasimite regime with an official stamp and a memorial in his honor. The ceremony, on 16 April 1959, which was attended by Qasim, enabled many intellectuals to propagate the state's historical narratives. Qasim described al-Rusafi as a free poet (ḥurr, abū al-aḥrār) and a champion of freedom who struggled for the people, the Iraqi nation (waṭan), and the Arab nation (umma). Qasim recalled how he enjoyed al-Rusafi's poetry as a child. Of most importance, he took the opportunity to call writers, poets, and thinkers to assist in breaking the bonds of the past: not the distant past in which the nation had flourished but the very recent past.Footnote ⁴¹ The poet was also linked to the battle against Egyptian propaganda. According to a story printed in al-Raʾy al-ʿAmm, in the past the enemies of the nation sought to crush al-Rusafi's antityrannical struggle while presently al-Nasir desired to do the same by subjugating the world to his Pharaonic regime.Footnote ⁴² The modernist and experimental poetry produced in 1950s Iraq differed greatly from al-Rusafi's neoclassical poems. Yet al-Rusafi's politics, and the need to position them in a new national narrative, rendered his poetry highly meaningful.

In addition to focusing on Iraqi history, the new discourses were positioned within a global context, since the revolution was depicted as a Third World liberation movement. The leftist press printed stories about Latin America, the Eastern Bloc and its battle against fascism, and the rising movements of decolonization in Africa. Dignitaries from these regions visited Iraq. The leadership of Qasim himself was placed in this global context. ʿAbdallah Jadduʿ saw him as an equal to Sun-Yat-sen, Mustafa Kemal, Sukarno, and Nehru (at times Mao was added to the roster), because all were leaders striving for liberation and complete independence.Footnote ⁴³ Poets, especially al-Bayati, dedicated their works to struggling nations across the globe, from Algeria to Korea, and to all those objecting to fascism, imperialism, and tyranny. The constant comparison between the revolutionary activities in Iraq to those in other places served to illustrate that Iraq shared much in common with Latin American and Asian countries struggling against imperialism, aggression, and conservatism. The sufferings of the peoples in South Africa, Algeria, and other nations were thus seen as matters that should concern Iraqis.Footnote ⁴⁴ The sense that Iraq engaged in similar Third Worldist projects also helped to distance its politics of reform from a Pan-Arab, Nasirite context.

The three components of the state's waṭanī vision—Iraq's unique history, the Iraqi people, and the new perception of Iraqi time—were sometimes intertwined with Pan-Arab narratives. Qasim declared loyalty to both Iraq and the Arab nation. Exhibits sponsored by the regime showcased items from the nation's Abbasid past. Moreover, not all cultural institutions affiliated with the old regime had undergone dramatic changes. For instance, the Iraqi Academy (al-Majmaʿ al-ʿIlmi al-ʿIraqi), an organization committed to publishing works on Arab and Islamic history, Arabic language, and Arabic literature, experienced a personnel change under Qasim yet continued publishing the works of members who were active prior to the revolution.Footnote ⁴⁵

Even within the cultural production of prominent leftist poets, Pan-Arab motifs continued to appear. The monarchic Pan-Arab narratives had secularized the Islamic past so that historical figures such as the Prophet Muhammad, the four Righteous Caliphs, and the Arab-Muslim generals who conquered the Middle East turned into mythical characters symbolizing national commitment and heroism. Certain waṭanī nationalists took a similar path. Communist poet ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayati reflected on a variety of waṭanī themes, yet in his poem “The Arab Refugees” (al-ʿArab al-Lajiʾun) the poet (who had published beautiful poetry on the nakba before 1958)Footnote ⁴⁶ criticizes the Arab world for its treatment of the Palestinians: “Those who see the grandchildren of ʿAdnan on a wooden cross, / Nailed, / The ants eating their flesh.” The speaker depicts the refugees’ sufferings in exile and contrasts it with the cowards and hypocrites living off their misery and forcing them to sell all they have: “They have sold Salah al-Din / They have sold his armor and his stallion / They have sold the graves of the refugees.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The poem was intended to condemn those who exploited the refugee problem while doing very little to solve it. The metaphors and symbolic language used in the poem, however, are very close to the language utilized by the Pan-Arabists, as it interlaces Arabist symbols (“the sons of ʿAdnan,” “Salah al-Din”) with images related to Christ and the crucifixion. In order to mock those speaking in the name of Pan-Arab nationalism, al-Bayati needed to evoke the language of those he so bitterly criticized. Moreover, Iraqi waṭanī authors, especially gifted poets like al-Bayati, operated within an Arab print market. Al-Bayati's works were anthologized and read outside of Iraq, and other Iraqi writers strove to achieve such dominance in the Arab print market. Being part of this market forced them to address Arab, rather than purely Iraqi, themes.

Similar to al-Bayati's use of secularized Islamist motifs is the evocation of the Islamic past of Iraq by neoclassical poet Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri. Al-Jawahiri dedicated a poem to the renovation of the Mustansiriyya School in 1960, which boasted the great achievements of Qasim. In the poem, Qasim is depicted as being blessed by the Prophet's slain grandson, Husayn, and by Musʿab ibn ʿUmayr, the Prophet's companion who died in battle. The most famous Muslim generals affiliated with the Muslim conquest of the Middle East, such as Khalid ibn al-Walid, Al-Muthanna ibn Haritha, and al-Muhallab ibn Abi Suffra, are described in the poem as giving Qasim their swords so that he can continue protecting the nation.Footnote ⁴⁸ Although al-Jawahiri was a leftist intellectual affiliated with the Peace Partisans, he utilized many of the mythical heroes of the Islamic-Arab past to describe Qasim's achievements.

Neither the regime nor its leftist intellectuals, then, turned their backs on the Islamic past, which they secularized and nationalized in a mode similar to the one adopted by their Pan-Arab peers. For the state, the fact that Iraq was the core of one of Islam's most glorious empires was too good a narrative to be tossed aside. The Abbasid era was therefore celebrated in official publications as a period in which Iraq became a center of knowledge and civilization.Footnote ⁴⁹ The fusion of Islamic, national, and secular narratives is best exemplified in a column printed in the communist daily Ittihad al-Shaʿb. The column, featuring famous sayings, referred to words of wisdom found in Nahj al-Balagha (a collection of Shiʿi hadiths attributed to ʿAli ibn ʿAbi Talib), al-ʿIqd al-Farid (a work of Arabic prose written by Ahmad ibn ʿAbd Rabbih, d. 940), and, somewhat discordantly, the speeches of Joseph Stalin.Footnote ⁵⁰

The nationalisms cultivated under Qasim's regime became increasingly Iraqi patriotic. State publications asserted that Qasim's regime was the first to achieve Iraqi national sovereignty and should consequently be considered as marking the true beginning of a postcolonial era. The promotion and popularization of these waṭanī forms of identity were engineered by the state and its cultural institutions and performed in a variety of national holidays and commemoration ceremonies. The regime capitalized on the talents of intellectuals like al-Bayati, al-Jawahiri, and ʿAni, whom the Iraqi people appreciated and respected and who define, up to the present day, Iraq's literary and cultural canon.

Not all the waṭanī ideas were new; many had already taken shape in the monarchic period. Moreover, the regime used techniques and discourses adopted by the Pan-Arab nationalists of the interwar period, as examined in other articles in this special issue of IJMES. Peter Wien shows that the desire to produce mass demonstrations authenticating the transformation of the masses into a unified national body already shaped national politics in interwar Syria; Michael Provence illustrates how the national elites who dominated the Arabist politics of the region after World War I advanced a strong anticolonial agenda. What was unique about Iraqi waṭanī discourses after 1958, however, was the hybridization of waṭanī narratives, anticolonial agendas, a new notion of time, ideals of social justice, a vision of a strong state, and elements of Third Worldism into a new national language. Thus, to be an Iraqi patriot signified not only a recognition of the nation's cultural heritage that began in the days of Mesopotamia but also a respect for the cultural heritage of the Kurds and the Turkmen and an acceptance of the notion that the true era of independence began in July 1958. At the same time, it signified respecting Iraq's position within, and contribution to, Arab history, culture, and literature without accepting Egyptian political hegemony.

PAN-ARAB POSITIONS: APPROPRIATION AND CONTESTATION

Just as the waṭanī vision changed under Qasim, Iraqi Pan-Arabism went through various alterations during this period. Its national narratives were neither a mere mimicry of Nasirite propaganda nor prophecies of Baʿthi nationalism but rather ideas that were created and cultivated in an Iraqi and Qasimi context.

Under the monarchy, the social democrats had warned against the perils of Nasirism as an antidemocratic regime. The communists were clearly not enthusiastic about the Egyptian regime, considering the ways in which their comrades were (mis)treated in Egypt. Nasirism, however, also symbolized many positive things to Iraqis. There was much nationwide appreciation of the 1956 campaign against Britain, France, and Israel, which was considered not only an Egyptian triumph but also an Arab, anticolonial, and global victory that Iraqis, living under a pro-British regime, yearned to appropriate. Furthermore, Nasirism involved processes of social reform in Egypt that Iraqi radicals aspired to implement in their own country and that the leaders of the monarchic regime had vehemently opposed. In the cultural sphere, intellectuals in Egypt were experimenting with new genres in theater, prose, cinema, drama, and the plastic arts. Novelists like Naguib Mahfouz and ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi, painters like ʿAbd al-Hadi al-Gazzar, and filmmakers like Yusuf Shahin had begun challenging old stylistic and cultural modes and promoted social realism, political commitment, and revolutionary art in their works. Although Mahfouz and Shahin would later become critical of Nasirism, it is important to remember that in 1958, seen from the Iraqi vantage point, Arab masterpieces like the Cairo trilogy or Bab al-Hadid were associated with Egypt and were identified, to some degree, with its new regime. Iraqi Pan-Arab intellectuals thus looked to Nasirite Egypt as a model of social reform, anticolonial politics, and revolutionary art. This might help explain why extremely talented individuals such as poets Badr Shaqir al-Sayyab and Naziq al-Malaʾika were attracted to qawmī ideology at a time when waṭanī ideals were hegemonic within the Iraqi cultural field.Footnote ⁵¹

Under Qasim, the Pan-Arabists, who had been persecuted by the Hashimite regime, needed to illustrate that their Pan-Arab language was entirely different from the Pan-Arabism of the Hashimites. Their strong emphasis on themes relating to social justice and the anticolonial struggle was meant to distance their Pan-Arabism from that of the monarchy. Like the leftist camp, Pan-Arab nationalists felt that the Hashimite state, from its very inception, was a body subordinated to colonial interests. For this reason, the Pan-Arabists supported the revolution in its early stages. Arab nationalist Khaldun Satiʿ al-Husri felt that the revolution continued the struggle of the Iraqi people from “the revolution of 1920, to the coup of 1936, to the revolution of 1941, to the strikes of our workers in Kirkuk in 1946, to the wathba of 1948 . . . to the intifada of 1952, to the strikes of our peasants in the mid-Euphrates in 1956.”Footnote ⁵² Similarly, Baʿthist leader Fuʾad al-Rikabi critiqued the Hashimite monarchy as a colonial construct whose ruling elites were willing to cooperate with, and sacrifice Iraq's interests to, their British masters.Footnote ⁵³

At the same time, Iraq's dubious relations with Egypt and the lack of commitment of its intellectuals to Arab affairs alarmed Pan-Arab writers. They thus organized their own writers group, the Society of Iraqi Writers and Authors (Jamʿiyat al-Muʾallifin wa-l-Kuttab al-ʿIraqiyyin), which protested the communist influence in the humanities faculty at Baghdad University and the left-leaning nature of the Iraqi Writers Union.Footnote ⁵⁴ Pan-Arab writers likewise protested what they saw as the marginalization of the nation's leading cultural agents, such as al-Sayyab, because of their political affiliations.Footnote ⁵⁵ Despite their marginalization in the public domain, the Pan-Arabists were allowed, under certain censorship limitations, to publish their views in the press. They could not attack Qasim or hail al-Nasir, but they could attack the communists and write at length about Iraq's history, culture, and folklore and its relationship with the Arab world and Arab history. Within these frameworks, they were able to challenge the prevailing narratives of the waṭanī camp. Iraqi Pan-Arab writers cleverly used Pan-Arab cultural networks: whether exiled or living in Iraq, they wrote in journals and newspapers produced in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt and broadcast their views over Egyptian radio. Inside Iraq, however, many Pan-Arab Iraqis both competed with, and responded to, the demands of an Iraqi print market dominated by local waṭanī intellectuals. They therefore needed to convince elements in the Iraqi public that their national vision was superior to that of their waṭanī rivals and could meet the domestic, Arab, and global challenges facing Iraq.

The Pan-Arab nationalists argued that they too cared for the Iraqi motherland yet perceived it as part of a larger Arab homeland. They used the novel terminology employed by the Qasimi state, such as the words al-shaʿb and waṭan, but expanded their significance to the Arab realm. ʿAli al-Hilli, who wrote from exile, referred to the struggle of the Arab people (al-shaʿb) in Port Saʿid and Mount Carmel and to national heroes like the Palestinian ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Husayni, the Libyan ʿUmar al-Mukhtar, and the Iraqi martyr Salah al-Din al-Sabbagh.Footnote ⁵⁶ Pan-Arab writers showed their support for projects of social reform and modernization (in health, education, and land ownership) yet reminded readers that such efforts should be understood in an Arab context. The rhetoric of the Pan-Arab camp grew more violent and anticommunist after the suppression of the Pan-Arab rebellion in Mosul in March 1959, and especially after the July 1959 clashes in Kirkuk between pro-Qasimite groups, comprising Arab and Kurdish communists and other government supporters, and the regime's opponents, including not only Pan-Arabists but also conservative Turkmen. The death of between thirty-one and seventy men belonging to the opposition in the latter incident was used by the Pan-Arab press as an opportunity to attack the communists for their violence and their disloyalty to the state. These stories were approved by the government, which at the time wanted to curb communist power.Footnote ⁵⁷

Many Pan-Arab narratives of the old regime, such as those that glorified the battle of the Hashimites and the Sharifians against the Ottomans, completely disappeared from the Pan-Arab vocabulary of the 1950s and early 1960s. Pan-Arab writers, however, did subscribe to the monarchic narratives that nationalized and secularized the Islamic past. Items in the qawmī daily al-Fajr al-Jadid contended that Islam changed the destiny of the Arabs and the Prophetic mission formed the basis for Arab nationalism.Footnote ⁵⁸ Baʿthist ʿAbdallah al-Samarraʾi argued that Islamic culture distinguished Arab from European nationalisms by endowing the former with a humanistic basis.Footnote ⁵⁹ The communists, in the qawmī narratives, were compared to the pro-Persian medieval shuʿubiyya movement and were thereby portrayed as disloyal agents of foreign powers whose destructive powers were equal to those of the Mongols or the Sassanids. Some went as far as naming the communists the grandchildren of Hulago.Footnote ⁶⁰ These narratives echoed not only the Iraqi Pan-Arabism of the interwar period but also the writings of postwar Pan-Arab Baʿthists, specifically Zaki al-Arsuzi and Michel ʿAflaq, regarding the role of Islam in the formation of Arab nationalism. They emphasized that the much abhorred communists were hostile to Iraq's religious and cultural Islamic heritage because of their secular ideology. Pan-Arab newspapers published essays by Shiʿi intellectuals and other men of religion against communism. Al-Hurriyya, for example, featured the chapters of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr's Our Philosophy (Falsafatuna). Another story in the same daily protested the presence of the communists in Najaf, suggesting that their activity in the capital of Shiʿi knowledge contaminated the sanctity of the site.Footnote ⁶¹ Al-Sadr's synthesis of religiosity, socialism, and reform did not share much in common with Pan-Arab secular visions, although he too attempted to reinterpret the Islamic past in order to give meaning to the present. In the 1970s, this Shiʿi version of Arab-Islamic history would be posed in direct opposition to the nationalism promoted by the Baʿth. Nonetheless, in the late 1950s, because both Pan-Arabists and Shiʿi religious intellectuals defined communism as the gravest danger facing the nation, they collaborated on that basis.

The fact that the recent Iraqi past was being represented in a new, pro-Qasimi, and often Marxist light received the critical attention of Arab nationalist intellectuals. An example of their anxieties is Badr Shakir al-Sayyab's Kuntu Shuyuʿiyan (I Was a Communist, 1959), which appeared as a series of articles in al-Hurriyya. Al-Sayyab attributed much importance to this collection and referred to it as his memoirs.Footnote ⁶² It explored what the author characterized as the hypocritical behavior of his comrades during the 1940s, when he was a member of the ICP. In a fashion similar to the stories in the al-Mahdawi trials, al-Sayyab produced a biography of a past intellectual (him) in order to illustrate to contemporary readers how they should behave in the present. Key events in Iraqi history were consequently stripped of their national meanings. Al-Sayyab reproduced the nonsensical claims that the wathba served to detract attention from events in Palestine and facilitated the victory of Israel in the 1948 war. He resorted to the anticommunist propaganda of the Hashimites, arguing that the communists’ slogans of brotherly love masked the activities of Zionist Jews in the party, and added that the ICP's pretensions to represent the pains of peasants, women, and workers were deceitful and hypocritical. Denying the ICP's contributions to the nation in its recent past, al-Sayyab (and many of his Pan-Arab colleagues) hoped to cast serious doubts on the activities of those communists who now assumed key positions in Iraq.

Publications affiliated with the Pan-Arab nationalists, however, also focused on themes that were specific to Iraq, such as the sanctity of the Iraqi land. Al-Fajr al-Jadid depicted the pure soil (turba) of Kirkuk as watered by the blood of martyrs for the sake of the motherland (waṭan) and of nationalism (qawmiyya).Footnote ⁶³ Qasim was praised for caring for the pure and holy land of the nation, upon which the nation's fathers and grandfathers had lived for thousands of years.Footnote ⁶⁴ Another example of the fusion of local and Arab symbols is found in cartoons published in al-Hurriyya. Most cartoons of communists represent them as flies trying to bite Qasim, as snakes, or as terrorists. One cartoon shows Qasim as a doctor looking at a peasant woman whose heart has been stabbed by a knife marked by the word “communism.” As “doctor Qasim” inspects the woman, the average Iraqi, ibn al-balad, is asking the doctor (in the Iraqi colloquial) to hasten in providing treatment for the dying Kirkuk.Footnote ⁶⁵ The cartoon remains loyal to the paper's anticommunist line, yet the representation of the Iraqi nation as a peasant woman, the usage of the Iraqi colloquial, and the employment of ibn al-balad as a national symbol were more current in the leftist, rather than the nationalist, print media.Footnote ⁶⁶ While the clashes in Kirkuk clearly motivated such pieces, they do reflect the notion that all Iraqis were united by their love of the same soil, which possessed particular features.

In literary and cultural essays, the theme of Iraqi nationalism became more pronounced. In “Contemporary Iraqi Literature,” published in the Lebanese Pan-Arab journal al-Adab, Mahdi al-ʿUbaydi noted that while he strongly denounced the desire to subscribe to localism (iqlīmiyya), the contribution to Arabic literature made by Iraqi poets, writers of prose fiction, and literary critics should be recognized by all Arabs. Iraqi artistic production was still defined in Pan-Arab terms, that is, in its contribution to the entire Arab cultural sphere, and yet the fact that the writer specified an Iraqi literature and wished that its place be recognized in a Pan-Arab journal is worthy of note.Footnote ⁶⁷

Nazik al-Malaʾika's reflections on the theme of thirst in Iraqi literature reveal similar tensions. In an essay published in al-Adab, al-Malaʾika studied Iraqi popular songs celebrating the relationship between man and his land. The Iraqi individual (al-fard al-ʿirāqī) producing these songs was an emotional being whose affectionate relationship to the land derived from the recognition of his dependency on the soil for his livelihood. Al-Malaʾika examined how peasants’ love songs employed metaphors related to the land, in particular the theme of thirst, in order to express their emotions and how this popular literature (adab shaʿbī) celebrated the nation's landscape and its scenery. These popular songs, she felt, said something about the Iraqi mentality (al-nafsiyya al-ʿirāqiyya), because they were uttered by peasants, who were not influenced by the counterfeit atmosphere of the city.Footnote ⁶⁸ Al-Malaʾika, no doubt, was a passionate Pan-Arabist. In the very same issue of al-Adab where her essay was published, a poem by the Pan-Arabist Muhi al-Din Ismaʿil, entitled “The New Tammuz,” called for a new Pan-Arab revolution in Iraq.Footnote ⁶⁹ Nonetheless, the effects of the discourse produced in Iraq regarding the specificities of Iraqi culture and the assumption that a particular landscape and a particular geography shaped Iraqi culture is evident in al-Malaʾika's literary analysis.

Upon hearing of ʿArif's arrest by Qasim, al-Malaʾika wrote a poem in which the speaker (in the first-person plural voice) fears answering the question of Arabism (ʿurūba) demanding to know where ʿAbd al-Salam (ʿArif) is, knowing full well the grim answer. The word “Arabism” appears in the poem as synonymous with the mother(land) who cares for ʿAbd al-Salam and with the cause on whose behalf he was jailed; it is a word personifying justice, unity, and battle against oppression. Yet it is not only Arabism that wonders about the injustice done to ʿAbd al-Salam: “Why have we jailed him, ask the Tigris and Euphrates, what crime has he committed? / Should we tell them, oh blessed shores, that it is because he is a speaker of Arabic?”Footnote ⁷⁰ Of significance, both Arabism and specific sites in Iraq—the Tigris and the Euphrates—bemoan ʿArif's misfortunes, indicating the importance of Arabism to Iraq itself. The poem suggests that it was in the best interest of Iraq (symbolized by its two rivers) to have ʿArif released from jail and lead the nation.

It is surprising, perhaps, that some Arab nationalists responded to the call to integrate Kurds and Turkmen into the nation. As noted by Avshalom Rubin, some Kurds supported al-Nasir, even prior to 1958, and responded positively to certain Pan-Arab ideas.Footnote ⁷¹ A story by Muhammad ʿAli al-Hanuti titled “The Future of Palestine and the Nationality [qawmiyya] of Salah al-Din,” refers to Salah al-Din as a Kurd. Al-Hanuti argued that the Muslims drew power from his nationality precisely because this leader did not privilege the people of his linguistic group. Had he chosen the path of ethnicity (jins), Palestine would have still been under the Crusaders’ rule. Salah al-Din's nationalism, however, motivated him to move beyond the realm of blood and language. The Arabs and their Kurdish and Turkmen brethren thus form one people and one nation, working together for the general good. The Kurdish Salah al-Din, continued al-Hanuti, served Arab nationalism through his loyalty to the eternal mission that united all Muslims. The writer affirmed that he was a nationalist (qawmī), and his prose indeed included Baʿthist elements in which religious beliefs were understood to echo the national commitments of their articulators. Nonetheless, in a very Arab nationalist newspaper, a position that argued that nationalism was beyond language and ethnicity suggests a far more open approach toward the meanings of Arab nationalism than the one adopted by the Baʿthists of the 1970s and reflects the integration of patriotic waṭanī sentiments into the journal's perception of the nation.

Due to the 1959 events in Kirkuk, certain Turkmen writers sided with the Pan-Arabists. Their stories, moreover, merged territorial and national components in a way that facilitated the integration of the Turkmen into both Arab and Iraqi nationalisms. Al-Fajr al-Jadid featured the views of Hasan al-Lami, writing from Kirkuk, who argued that Turkmen citizens had always been a part of Iraq and had lived on its good soil for thousands of years.Footnote ⁷² Another story, by “Ibn Kirkuk,” asserted that the Turkmen had never separated their history from that of Iraq or the Arab nation. They were a people (qawm) who had lived in Iraq for a long time. Medieval Turkik states had been established in Iraq, while current Turkmen in northern Iraqi cities were very loyal to the Arab nation (al-waṭan al-ʿarabī) and served the causes of Algeria and Palestine. Turkmen nationalism should therefore be viewed as the younger brother of Arab nationalism, since both were tied to Islam, history, and a common fate. The Turkmen peasant, merchant, and worker were devoted to the Iraqi republic and could not possibly think of any other homeland than the pure, sacred Iraqi land in which they were born, lived, and would eventually die.Footnote ⁷³ These articles expose the differences between the Pan-Arab discourses of Qasim's era and those of the later 1960s. Both articles indicate that the pluralistic nationalism promoted by the state (in which Arabs, Kurds, and Turkmen took part) was accepted, to a certain degree, by the Pan-Arab camp. In their search for allies that might support an anticommunist agenda, Pan-Arab nationalists were willing to address new groups and therefore promoted a hybrid image of nonsectarian Arab nationalism in which a secularized version of Islam (befitting Sunnis, Shiʿa, and the nation's ethnic minorities) played a major role.

These are only a few examples taken from the qawmī print media, but they do point to the fact that waṭanī elements have shaped Iraqi Pan-Arab discourses. The Pan-Arab camp adopted certain territorial motifs and often cultivated the notion that Arab nationalism did not entail an ethnic origin but rather the ability to adopt Arabic, as well as Arab history and culture, as a marker of one's national and cultural identity. The Pan-Arab nationalists, in other words, resituated existing Pan-Arab discourses into the specificities and necessities of a local Iraqi milieu. Baram has shown that the fusion between a waṭanī nationalism and an Iraqi Pan-Arabism occurred under the Baʿthist regime after 1968.⁷⁴ However, such a fusion began to take shape in Pan-Arab circles already under Qasim, because of the prominence of waṭanī themes in the cultural arena. This fusion was promoted by Pan-Arab, pro-Nasirite, and anticommunist writers who feared the political changes in Iraq. But their Pan-Arabism itself was hybridized with various forms of Iraqi nationalisms current in the public sphere. They needed to build anti-Qasimi coalitions with as many of the nation's groups as possible, and therefore the sectarian, anti-Shiʿi, and anti-Kurdish notions that colored Baʿthist discourses in later years were not as prominent in this period. At this time, the exiled leader of the Iraqi Baʿth, Fuʾad al-Rikabi, was a Shiʿi, as were some of the party's supporters. The marginality of the Pan-Arabists dictated an openness to the nation's minorities and ethnic groups, an openness that did not survive beyond 1963.