There is a stock argument on whether Iraq is an “artificial” creation of colonial power or a “real” entity with historical and psychological depth and identity. It is a futile question because all nation–states, in one form or another, are historical creations. The processes of their creation are diverse and lead to different outcomes in the degree of coherence and permanence. Our thinking on the subject has been highly influenced by the seminal concepts advanced by Benedict Anderson on the “imagining” of the nation, which is, in turn, underlined by the socioeconomic processes of modernity.Footnote ¹ The state, often superimposed from above, is a principal actor in this process. Educational systems, tied to qualifications and employment, for instance, are powerful means of enforcing a unified national language and, in turn, the medium of literacy, the press and media, and the means of imagining the nation. The state makes the nation, more or less successfully. The intelligentsia are the cadres of these processes. They and the state class, with which they overlap, are subject to the vagaries of political conflicts and struggles and, in the case of Middle Eastern states, to the repression and violence of the state and militant sectors of the population. In the case of Iraq these troublesome manifestations are particularly evident. The books under review are concerned with these processes and in particular with the role of the ideological cadres and institutions in their unfolding.

Eric Davis' book is the most ambitious in its historical scope and its discursive endeavors. The title, Memories of State: Politics, History and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq, is a good indication of the content. It follows the history from the inception of the state under the British Mandate in 1921, through the monarchy, the Qasim regime of 1958 to 1963, and the successive Baʿth and Arab nationalist regimes of the 1960s, with extensive treatment of the phases of the Baʿthist regime, mostly under Saddam Husayn, from 1968 to the American invasion of 2003. The connecting theme throughout this history is the memory of state: the contests over historical memory and the attempts to command those memories to political ends and hegemonic controls. The different sectors and factions of the intelligentsia, in interaction with state institutions and the political classes, are the agents of this contentious sphere of memory. So, what is this memory? Is it the state that remembers or is the state being remembered? Who is remembering? The theme of memory has been popular in the literature on the history and politics of nations. But it contains certain ambiguities and complexes that should be unraveled. Davis uses “memory” in different contexts. He refers to the uses of history for ideological support by Pan-Arab nationalists, for instance, as “memory.” Yet, this is not in any subject's actual memory nor in that of her direct ancestors: it is the common nationalist practice of historical mythology. A more genuine kind of memory considered by Davis is of episodes in 20th-century history pertinent to current situations, such as the memory of Bakir Sidqi's 1936 military coup to the political actors of the regime installed by the 1958 coup. This is more justifiably “memory.” Is this mere nitpicking, or does it have theoretical import? Let us consider the question in a historical sketch.

What is remarkable about Iraq under the nation–state is the feeble part played by the state in the ideological and cultural construction of the nation, a weakness only reversed under the Saddamist Baʿth in the 1970s. The Ottoman 19th-century reforms touched Iraq lightly, with some impact on land-tenure arrangements. In terms of culture and politics, the main impact was the incorporation of sectors of the Iraqi intelligentsia into modern media and institutions of the state, both in Iraq and in Istanbul. The pertinent period was that of the brief rule of the reformist governor Midhat Pasha (1869–71), followed by the impact of the Young Turk Revolution and its constitution and parliament. This formative episode (to which I shall return) did not constitute elements of subsequent “memory”: it is especially significant that it was part of systematic “forgetting.”

The British Mandate regime did not last very long, and its effects were curtailed by inadequate resources of finance and manpower, bogged down by urgent political and military contingencies, a theme admirably elaborated in Toby Dodge's book. It ruled by a hodgepodge of Ottoman arrangements and ad-hoc legislation, including the innovation of tribal law (assumed to be “traditional”). As Dodge demonstrates, the leading functionaries of the regime disliked and mistrusted the urban intelligentsia, dismissing them as clever, self-interested lawyers and agitators; the rural-tribal shaykh and fallah were the genuine and noble Iraqis, being engulfed by modernity. The monarchy, under the Mandate and after, attempted to stamp its ideologies (not always coherent) on the Iraqi public but with little success. The Arabism promoted by the Hashimites and their supporters, in the name of the Arab Revolt, was thin and widely challenged, if not ridiculed, on all sides, including for its subservience to British machinations and interests. The public sphere and discursive fields of culture and politics under the monarchy were dominated by intellectuals and institutions outside the government, highly critical of it, and subject to sporadic repression.

These elements came to the fore under Qasim after 1958 and assumed prominent positions in some ministries, the school system, the professions, the media, and the general political fields. Qasim and his military clique acquiesced at first, enjoying the support of these elements, but lashed out against some of them, sporadically, when they felt threatened. The relative openness of this cultural regime not only promoted an effervescence but also heightened ideological contests, breaking into violence on occasion. The 1963 Baʿthist coup put an end to these openings in a bloodbath against the intelligentsia. It was soon followed by the stagnant rule of the ʿArif brothers: conservative Arab nationalists, Sunni sectarians, and culturally moribund. Cultural life outside the state, however, renewed some of its vigor, with innovations in art, literature, and political thought.

So far, “the state” was not a central actor in cultural production or ideological hegemony, except insofar as it managed the educational system. Government agencies played an enhanced role in the 1950s, buoyed by oil revenues and the developmental projects of Majlis al-ʿIʾmar, the Development Board, which included modern architectural projects. Some state educational policies, however, were effective in fostering the intelligentsia—in particular, the policy of scholarships for study abroad, in the United Kingdom and the United States under the monarchy and, after 1958, also in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. The selection of candidates for these scholarships was, to a significant extent, meritocratic and provided a regular stream of diploma-bearing cadres for education, the professions, and the cultural/ideological fields. History, memory, ideology, and culture were, over these earlier periods, made by the intelligentsia, with the state playing, at best, a facilitating role and, at worst, a repressive one.

It was under the Baʿth regime after 1968 that the state took charge of culture, by fiercely repressing alternative sources and instituting its own cultural centers, media, and institutions, all supported by generous allocation of resources, made possible after 1973 by the gushing of oil revenues. The 1970s were the high point of Baʿthist rule: a government well supplied by oil revenues engaging in an accelerated developmental drive and instituting a welfare state and an elaborate cultural apparatus. This was accompanied by a highly authoritarian and violent security regime. “Hegemony” in Gramsci's sense (much used by Davis) seems slightly inappropriate in this context: while the Baʿth regime certainly sought to impose its cultural hegemony and ideological reading of history, the accompanying coercion employed would contradict the Gramscian concept, resting, as it does, on the management of consent. The uneasy co-option of the Iraqi Communist Party as a subordinate partner in a common front from 1972 to 1978 went some way toward engineering a semblance of consensus, however precarious. But that came to an end in another bloodbath in 1978. The rise of Saddam to sole power in 1979, and the ensuing war with Iran from 1980, marked the weakening of these cultural preoccupations, which by the 1990s, following the disaster of the Kuwait war and then the sanctions regime, degenerated into mere repression. Eric Davis' accounts and analyses are particularly incisive on these episodes under the Baʿth. Let us now fill out some of the episodes in the foregoing sketch of Iraq's history.

THE OTTOMAN BACKGROUND

The question of the Ottoman background is treated in a chapter in Dodge's book, tellingly entitled “Corruption, Fragmentation and Despotism: British Visions of Ottoman Iraq” (pp. 43–62). British colonial administrators viewed Ottoman rule within the orientalist paradigm of “oriental despotism”: negative, backward, corrupt, with no redeeming features. We should add that, though rejecting British imperial ideology in other respects, many Arab nationalists readily adopted this view of Ottoman rule. Dodge points out the important elements of Ottoman reforms in the 19th century and the genuinely modernizing thrust of much Ottoman policy. Aspects of Ottoman traces in Iraq under the monarchy are interestingly related by Bashkin (pp. 177–85). Many of the public figures in the nascent Iraqi state—politicians, soldiers, and intellectuals—were of Ottoman background and formation. Their transformation into Arab-Iraqi identity and culture involved some active forgetting of these Ottoman constituents. Let us consider examples of leading public figures of the period.

The two poets who characterized that period of Iraqi thought, Maʿruf al-Rusafi (1875–1945) and Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi (1863–1936), were both deputies in the Young Turk parliament in Istanbul from 1912. So was Hesqail Sasson (1860–1932), later the (Jewish) minister of finance in successive Iraqi cabinets in the 1920s. So was Faysal I, later king of Iraq. These, and many others, were part of a generation of intellectuals and notables nurtured in the emerging public sphere of tentative common Ottoman citizenship.

Al-Rusafi, from humble origins, rose to prominence through education and literature. After a brief episode as a scholarship boy in a modern military school in Baghdad, he transferred to a traditional Islamic education under the prominent Salafi intellectual Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi, who favored and promoted him as well as gave him the name “al-Rusafi,” in distinction from the other Maʿruf of Baghdad, al-Karkhi, the 9th-century Sufi saint (Karkh and Rusfa being the two sides of the Tigris in Baghdad). Al-Rusafi showed great promise in the study of the religious and literary classics and wrote his own poetry, which was much admired and published in what there was of the Baghdadi press. After the Young Turk coup in 1908, al-Rusafi was invited to Istanbul to edit an Arabic magazine, a project that failed, but he remained in the city. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Young Turks and the constitution and had personal connections with Ahmad Shawkat Pasha, commander of the Salonika forces and later prime minister, through friendship with Shawkat's family in Baghdad. Al-Rusafi was an enthusiastic supporter of the Young Turk constitution and became a deputy in its 1912 parliament.Footnote ² At one point, sponsored by other Arab intellectuals, al-Rusafi joined the Ottoman Fraternity Masonic Lodge. Freemasonry was a regular location for intellectual pursuits and political plotting at that time and a venue of Young Turk politics. Al-Rusafi, in this respect, was integrated into the world of Ottoman elite modernism. Subsequently, when freemasonry began to be demonized in the nationalist ethos, al-Rusafi distanced himself from his past, blaming it on bad influences on a naive poet. Al-Rusafi was by then, and until his death, a publicly proclaimed bohemian. He not only drank arak in profusion, like many others, but he also proclaimed it. He also publicly proclaimed his homosexuality and in later life introduced his young lovers to the public and literary milieus. His last years were spent in poverty in the brothel district of Baghdad, where he was cared for by some of the neighborhood women.

Al-Zahawi was a different person, from a prosperous family of religious notables of Kurdish ethnicity but not affiliation. He had a classical religious education, worked in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian, and knew Kurdish, but he never succeeded in learning English. After an early career in education and journalism in Ottoman Baghdad, al-Zahawi sought his fortune in Istanbul and, at one time, moved in the circles of Abu al-Huda al-Sayadi, Sultan ʿAbd al-Hamid's religious guru.Footnote ³ He wrote a poem celebrating the sultan's victories for Islam and was rewarded with minor posts, including an appointment to Yemen as a religious functionary. On his return to Istanbul, al-Zahawi became close to liberal and constitutional circles plotting against the sultan. He wrote poems denouncing ʿAbd al-Hamid's tyranny and was eventually arrested and returned to Baghdad. However, when he got into trouble with the wālī of Baghdad in 1905 for publishing articles championing the liberation of women, he tried to gain the sultan's favor by writing a book denouncing Wahhabis, the antagonists of Ottoman Islamism, and a poem in praise of the sultan. This political opportunism and intellectual bricolage was not peculiar to al-Zahawi but rather was common to the cultural milieu of the time (and subsequently!). He was to change again with the triumph of the constitution in 1908, when his earlier associates summoned him to Istanbul once more, and he became an ardent Unionist and, like al-Rusafi, a deputy in the 1912 parliament. An illness made him return to Baghdad, where he was to be found during the British occupation in 1917. He celebrated the new rulers and their fine deeds in a poem, in which he praised the English, denounced the Turks, and included the line: “Pay attention, O Arab, and end your allegiance to the Turks, an evil nation/support the English, men of justice and sincerity in action and in speech.” Throughout the war, however, al-Zahawi continued his support of the Ottomans and in 1916 eulogized Enver Pasha, the Ottoman war hero. He claimed subsequently that he had denounced Jamal Pasha, governor of Damascus, who hanged a large number of Arab nationalists. But commentators have asserted that al-Zahawi inserted those lines in his collections subsequently. The ardent Ottoman liberal then reinvented himself as an Iraqi patriot and an Arab nationalist.

In terms of their ideas and worldviews, including their ambiguities and inconsistencies, our two poets were very much of their generation of Ottoman modern intelligentsia. Niyazi Berkes, among others, has surveyed this ideational landscape.Footnote ⁴ Under Hamidian censorship little could be written or published directly on politics and religion. The discourses of science and modernity/“civilization,” however, found full scope in the publications and public debates of the day. News of scientific discoveries, biographies of famous men, and science fiction were all popular themes: the Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas romances, translated and serialized, had a large readership. Positivism, rationality, and the ideas of the European Enlightenment were prominent features in the discourses of the intelligentsia through the 19th century, boosted by the Young Ottomans in their publications and in the Masonic lodges that harbored them. Al-Rusafi and al-Zahawi partook in these ideational currents and their contradictions. Al-Rusafi was to reject religious orthodoxy in his poetry and social critiques as well as in his bohemian lifestyles of open drink (again echoes of the Ottoman intelligentsia celebration of drink as an aspect of medeniyet, civilization), homosexuality, and association with prostitutes. Al-Zahawi, more respectable and diplomatic, continued to pursue science and reform, dabbling in scientific theories and getting into trouble through his social advocacies against religious and patriarchal authority. They constituted ideational bridges between the ferment of Ottoman reform and the ideologies battling for the modern nation–state and society. Al-Zahawi's seeming political opportunism in switching allegiance from the Turks to the English may be interpreted as a continuation of his endeavor of rationality and progress: after the failure of the Ottomans, the English were the harbingers of this modernity.Footnote ⁵

Orit Bashkin reminds us of this Ottoman and Turkish background of large sections of the Iraqi elite under the monarchy. The whole generation of intellectuals, politicians, and military officers had been formed in a bilingual culture of Turkish and Arabic. Many had been to military schools in Istanbul and served in the Ottoman forces. Such were the Sharifian officers who assumed positions of political ascendancy, including Nuri al-Saʿid, Jaʿfar al-ʿAskari, and, most notably, Satiʿ al-Husri, the ideologue of Pan-Arab nationalism, as well as Faysal himself. Many men in this elite had Turkish mothers and wives, and it remained the practice of the Sunni elites into the first half of the 20th century to seek brides for their sons from Turkey. Nuri al-Saʿid was reputed to speak Turkish at home, which was, no doubt, not unique to him. Bashkin cites many examples from popular culture, colloquial poetry, and satirical cartoons of the liberal use of Turkish vocabulary, clearly under the assumption that the audience would understand. Turkish continued to be a language of literacy and culture in the Kirkuk region, where Turcoman culture remained dominant. Many Iraqi intellectuals came from that region, and they displayed patriotic Iraqi allegiance while remaining proud of their ethnicity and language, one of the many Iraqi hyphenated identities.

Turkish, Kurdish (various dialects), Persian, and Aramaic continue to be spoken by various ethnic communities in Iraq until the present time. These “minorities” constitute a sizable proportion of the population. Moreover, the colloquial Arabic speech of the different Iraqi regions is liberally enriched by Turkish and Persian words and expressions: the words khosh (“good” in Persian, becomes hosh in Turkish), as in the common Iraqi khosh walad (good boy), heech (“nothing” in both Persian and Turkish), and chara (remedy) are among the most frequently used words in Iraqi speech, and there are many others. The urban Shiʿa, while distinctly Arab, share many aspects of popular culture and religion, including cuisine, with their Iranian counterparts: not only the ʿAshuraʾ mourning for the martyrs but also the celebration of the Nowruz new year, which is not an Islamic festival. Turkish cultural traits among the urban Sunna seem to have mostly faded away after the early decades of the 20th century. The rural and tribal population, a majority in the early 20th century, have distinct regional cultures, notably, the unique lifeworld of the marsh Arabs in the south, with equally unique common speech and vocabulary. Iraq, at the inception of its nation–state, was as much part of the Turko-Iranian as of the Arab world. It was forcibly and awkwardly fitted into the Arab mold by an Arabizing state and a divided intelligentsia. This may explain the ferocity of its Pan-Arab nationalists and contributes to the contests over the identity of the new nation.

The major divide in the political and ideological fields under the monarchy and the Qasim regimes was that between Pan-Arab nationalists and “Iraqist” nationalists, mostly on the left. This is a central theme in both Davis and Bashkin and, indeed, in much writing on modern Iraqi history. As both authors realize, these two “camps” were by no means unitary or consistent and, naturally, they plotted different trajectories over time, depending on events and contingencies. On balance, the Iraqists were more coherent and ideologically sophisticated. They were divided into two main groups: the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) and its factions and the Ahali group of social-democratic liberals, crystallizing into the National Democratic Party (NDP) under Kamil al-Chadirchi. The Pan-Arabists were much more diverse. The first movers were the Hashimites, with the Arab Revolt of 1916 against the Ottomans providing their original legitimizing credentials, reinforced by the Pan-Arabist proclamations of Faysal's brief rule in Syria and the grievance against the French invaders, and then against both the British and French mandates. The British sponsorship of the revolt and the Hashimites detracted from their credibility. The other wave of Pan-Arabism was that of the nationalist intellectuals, which was much more ideological and showed influences of European nationalist theories, and later of European fascism and Nazism. Satiʿ al-Husri was the leading theoretician and, in the 1920s, the education and culture policymaker. More loosely, many conservative, mainly Sunni, groups and personalities, with an Islamic tinge, were attracted to Arabism partly from sectarian sentiments (against the Shiʿa and non-Muslims) and partly as a defense against the secular left and liberals. Such were the army officers from the “Sunni triangle,” including later leading figures such as the ʿArif brothers. The Independence (Istiqlal) Party in the middle decades represented a cross section of these groups.

Eric Davis discusses “memories of state” in this context. The Pan-Arabists, he argues, appropriated historical memory by evoking the glories of the golden age of the Arabs, the Abbasids, with Baghdad as their center. Then, as now for the Pan-Arabists, the threat to Arab power and glory came from the shuʿubiyya, the Arabized foreigners (mostly Persian) who questioned the primacy of Arabs and conspired against them. The legend of the treachery of one such, Ibn al-ʿAlqami, the Shiʿi wazīr of al-Muʿtasim, the last Abbasid caliph, was to facilitate the entry of the Mongols into Baghdad and its destruction in 1258. The Iraqist nationalists, including the ICP with its orientation toward the Soviet and international spheres, constituted a similar threat to Arab unity, as, it was hinted, did the Shiʿa and their Iranian connections. Was this, however, “memory” or, to borrow Raymond Williams’ term (from another context), “myth functioning as a memory”? And was it a “memory of state”? Certainly, the state, such as it was, did participate in this myth, as we saw, in relation to the Hashimite Arabist claims. But this ideological strand was hardly “hegemony” in that the Hashimite claims were not much honored. The myth of Arab glory was much more successful in the hands of dissident intellectuals than in the proclamations of the monarchical state. And how far did this myth penetrate beyond their particular sectarian circles? Even within the circles of the intelligentsia, the boast of Arab glory waxed and waned, depending on time and context. It was only to become part of imposed state hegemony much later, under the Baʿthist dictatorship. But then, Baʿthist ideology was hardly coherent, more in the nature of a bricolage, drawing on various historical strands for the glorification of its leader, as the authors recognize.

The uses of history or myth as history, however, were not only confined to the Pan-Arabists but were also open to Iraqists and leftists, who drew on them depending on context. Those were, generally, also proud of their history, especially of the cultures and civilizations of the past, but with different selections and emphases. Being vaguely Marxist, they tended toward a sociological approach, highlighting “modes of production” and class struggles. As recounted by both Davis and Bashkin, the historian Faysal al-Samir wrote about the Zanj (black slave) revolt in the 9th century, and ʿAli al-Wardi wrote Wuʿaz al-Salatin (The Preachers to the Sultans) on Abbasid caliphs’ appreciation of fiery sermons on piety, sin, and hellfire, which drove them to tears and regret in between their oppressive violence and indulgent feasting. An essential component of the outlook of the liberals and the left remained the Enlightenment commitment, which we noted in the Ottoman age of reform, to science, progress, rationality, social justice through policy and planning, and a certain wariness about religion and tradition, not easily articulated as outright skepticism. Some of the Pan-Arabist intellectuals, notably al-Husri himself, springing from the same Ottoman milieu, shared this outlook but sought its fulfilment in a national/ethnic resurgence, hence the historical myth. History, however, was a resource on which many could draw for different objectives. The poet Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, for instance, modeled himself on the Abbasid poet al-Mutanabbi.Footnote ⁶ Like al-Mutanabbi, he moved between circles and persons of power, such as Faysal I himself, subsequent statesmen and chiefs, and finally Qasim, but always maintaining his independence and critical stance, a masterless man (or so he liked to think). To reiterate the point, history should be seen as a resource for ideologies and myths of various kinds, which are then shaped into “memory.”

A particularly interesting venture into history for current objectives is al-Rusafi's monumental book, Kitab al-Shakhsiyya al-Muhammadiyya: Hall al-Lughz al-Muqaddas (Book of the Personality of Muhammad: Solving the Sacred Riddle), which was written in 1933 but not published until 2000, in Germany. It was al-Rusafi's choice not to publish the book, entrusting the manuscript to his friend Kamil al-Chadirichi, the leader of the Ahali Group/NDP. Kamil's son Rifʿat, the distinguished architect and author, deposited the manuscript at Harvard University and offered it to the publisher Al-Jamal in Cologne. The book is not openly sold in the Arab world but obtainable “under the counter” in some bookshops in Beirut. So, why the mystery and the caution surrounding it? Is it a scandalous account of the Prophet's life? And what is “the sacred riddle”?

It is actually a lengthy and turgid account of the life of the Prophet and of the events of early Islam, based on extensive historical knowledge of the sources, gained, no doubt, from al-Rusafi's early training in the religious sciences. It is highly laudatory of Muhammad, his genius, his personality, and his great deeds and of the spectacular achievements of the first Islamic generation under his leadership. Why, then, is the book considered dangerous and its publication and sale surrounded by caution? It is because the account devalues the supernatural element of prophethood in favor of a rational/rationalizing account of actions and events. It is ambiguous on waḥī, revelation, and treats the text of the Qurʾan in its historical and political contexts, in relation to contemporary events and strategies. This, as far as I can see, is the “solution to the sacred riddle”: it is not sacred but explicable in terms of events and strategies, of a political genius and a shrewd planner. This devaluation of the sacred in favor of the political can be seen as part of the commitment of that generation of Ottoman reforms and nationalist aspirations for progress through rationality. Religion, then, becomes important as a prelude, and an example, of national greatness of the Arabs. Implicitly, it is also a strategy for enlisting religion into political struggle, not as the sacred and the legalistic but as heritage and national genius. Yet, al-Rusafi was not enthusiastic for Arab nationalism in his own time; in fact, as an Ottoman during World War I he was antagonistic to the Arab Revolt by the Hashimites in 1916, seeing it as part of a British plot against the Ottoman world. He continued to be critical of the Hashimite monarchy in Iraq and wrote satirical poems against Faysal I and his entourage. His political commitment was not so much Pan-Arab or Islamic as anti-imperialist and anti-British. So, his foray into early Muslim history was not so much in favor of current Pan-Arabism as it was an attempt at a rational construction of religion as a national renaissance. This has echoes of the later explicit claims of Michel Aflaq, a founding ideologue of the Baʿth Party in Syria and subsequently a guru for Saddam Husayn. Aflaq, a secularist from a Christian background, proudly proclaimed Islam as the genius of the Arabs. As such, Islam as religion is sidelined, in favor of Islam as an Arab nationalist prop. Islamists, in the political and nationalist ascendancy in more recent times, do not like that role assigned to their religion and are often insistent on the very sacred verities and ritual and legal disciplines that are sidelined by al-Rusafi or Aflaq. Al-Rusafi, as we have seen, led an irreligious life, proudly proclaiming his love for arak and boys. Aflaq's Christian background, more than his secularism, is especially pertinent for Islamist vilifiers.

An interesting aspect of al-Rusafi's thought, in this book and more generally, was his anti-Shiʿism. Unlike the sectarian anti-Shiʿism of Sunni and Pan-Arabist elites and ideologues, al-Rusafi's was an extension of his rationalist secularism. He disliked Shiʿism because he saw it as more “fanatical,” ritualistic, and dissident against the unity of the Islamic community: it resisted his attempt at rationalizing religion. In this respect, al-Rusafi shared some of the British colonial assessments of Shiʿism.

TRIBES AND THE NATION

The idea of “tribe” plays such important and contrasting roles in the imaginaire of the various ideological positions and the imagination of the nation. Toby Dodge's book is primarily concerned with the perceptions and policies of the British colonial administrators under the Mandate and subsequently. They were divided on their evaluation of the nature and significance of tribes and their shaykhs. One side had a romantic conception of the tribes as the “noble savage,” the real Arab, with the virtues of solidarity, loyalty, and chivalry, the shaykhs their natural, “organic” leaders. This was contrasted to the corrupt urban functionaries (effendiyya), with little education and much ambition, engaged in nationalist plotting, aspiring to a modernity of which they knew little, “clever lawyers.” The second school was more inclined to the idea of the mission civilisatrice of the colonial power, guiding the country to modern nationhood, in which the tribes are a jarring element. The role of some of the southern, mainly Shiʿi, tribes in the 1920 revolt posed a challenge to the romantic view, but rationalizations saved it. By contrast, in the ideologies of all the national intellectuals, left and right, Iraqist and Pan-Arab, tribes were assigned a negative and “backward” role, as inimical to progress and national integration. The British enthusiasm for tribes reinforced the hostility of the nationalists.

The fact of the matter, as shown by Dodge amongst others, is that tribes a) are diverse in structure, function, and significance; and b) derive any power and effect they may have from state policies and the support of other centers of power. The Ottoman land and tax reforms, and the shift to private ownership of land, later reinforced by British policy and legislation, changed the relation of shaykhs to tribesmen, the latter eventually becoming dependent sharecroppers, dispossessed and drawn to urban migration into slums and shanties. The shaykh's power and significance were, in effect, functions of state policy and support, under the Mandate and the monarchy. One prominent aspect of British policy, bequeathed to the monarchy, was the Tribal Criminal and Civil Disputes Regulations, in effect a separate legal system for the tribal population, giving the shaykhs effective jurisdiction over their supposed members. Dodge (pp. 92–100) gives an interesting account of its inception, first at the hands of the British forces in 1918, then by royal decree in 1924. Civic law applied to town dwellers, and the rural areas were to be ruled by tribal law administered by the shaykh. According to A. T. Wilson, quoted by Dodge (p. 93), this law, which was more or less constant through the tribal world, was not exactly Islamic but older and more fundamental, based on human nature. This formed part of the image of the tribe and the shaykh as the noble savage, “natural,” eternal, and constant. It appears that the colonial administrators favoring this law, principally Henry Dobbs, were inspired by previous experience in the North West Frontier of India and Baluchistan, where similar tribal regulations prevailed. It would seem that “tribes” shared a general common formation, with custom and nature at its core, and an exclusion of corrupting modernity. What worked in tribal India should be equally good for Iraqi tribes. Tribal law was administered by the adjudication of an ad-hoc collection of tribal “elders,” primarily the shaykhs. Culpability was collective to the kinship unit of the offender, and the matter was settled by compensation. Thus, individuals committing serious offenses, including murder, were not personally punished. The thorny question of the boundary between tribal and civic populations, and where any particular case was to be considered, was decided by regional prefects (sing. mutaṣarrif). This arrangement gave shaykh and mutaṣarrif arbitrary powers, to the exclusion of lawyers and the judiciary.

This special privilege of tribal law was criticized and attacked both by British lawyers and by Iraqi intellectuals and politicians. They denounced the arbitrary powers it bestowed and the anomaly of collective liability, which posed no threat or deterrence to criminals. For Iraqis there was the added indignity of treating their society as outside modern civility and law, with sectors of it irredeemably “traditional” and tribal. Dobbs dismissed these criticisms and attributed the Iraqi objections to those of lawyers resentful of their exclusion from tribal cases and of the loss of business in an underemployed profession. It was the tricky urban lawyers again, resenting the noble shaykhs.

These tribal regulations were to survive in amended forms until the demise of the monarchy in 1958, underpinned by the dependence of the regime on the support of the shakhly constituency in parliament and the provinces. For nationalist and democratic forces, tribes and tribalism were anomalies and remnants of “feudalism,” with no place in the modern nation. The land reforms that followed the 1958 revolution repealed legal recognition of tribalism and the powers of the shaykhs. The Baʿth regime from 1968 was equally emphatic in the rejection of tribalism. Nationalist ideologies of modernity and unitary solidarity of the nation were central to Baʿthist ideology, reinforced by an agenda of eliminating alternative centers of power and “traditional” solidarities. However, this suppression of tribalism was to change in the 1990s. The Kuwait war, the intifada that followed, and then the sanctions regime diminished the power and wealth of the regime and the party's ability to control the provinces. Saddam then resorted to a reconstruction of the tribes, their shaykhs, and their judicial tribunals, supplying the nominated shaykhs with resources and arms, as a measure of social and political control in the provinces. This was not the first tribal manifestation of the Saddam regime. The process of Saddam's consolidation of personal power in the party and the state, and the purging of all possible opponents and rivals, led to the narrowing of the power base to what has been called “the family party” (Davis, p. 27).Footnote ⁷ The Takriti Baʿth of the earlier stages came to be more narrowly based on family and clan solidarities, with Saddam's immediate cognates in the key positions and the security apparatus manned by concentric circles determined by degrees of kinship. While this arrangement empowered segments of certain Sunni tribes of the northwest, it did not amount to the official endorsement of tribalism that came in the 1990s. Until then Baʿthist ideology conformed to the nationalist and modernist denunciation of tribalism. Yet again, we see that tribes only become politically significant when empowered by state policy.

SECTARIAN POLITICS

Orit Bashkin has a particularly interesting chapter entitled “Strangers in our Midst” (pp. 157–93). It charts the attempts by the different groups to forge an Iraqi identity, which is contested in each one's choice of its stranger/other and the contrasts thus drawn. There is a near consensus on the British colonial other as the intruder and the oppressor: first as the direct ruler under the Mandate, then as the power behind the monarchy. So much of the politics and culture of those periods are directed against this other. The spectacular episodes of popular opposition, the Wathba of 1948 and the Intifada of 1952, were directed against the colonial yoke and its agents. What was more contentious were the specifications of the internal other, which brought in sectarian, religious, and ethnic difference.

A central dimension of otherness was Sunni/Shiʿi sectarianism in politics. These two sects, as all agree, never represented coherent social, political, or cultural unities. Rural/tribal/urban, religious/secular, left/right, class, educational, and regional differences: all these were important dimensions that cut across and often erased the sectarian difference. Sectarianism, however, was never absent and was brought into play and politicized in various forms and guises. After the sectarian quagmire of the later Baʿth years, and then of the post-U.S. invasion period, you hear many Iraqis expressing horror and wonder. In our days, they proclaim, we never knew who was Sunni or Shiʿi, we were friends, lovers, and spouses, and sectarian identity was of no consequence. This is true for a particular sector of the urban, educated middle classes, mostly in good times, such as the 1970s. It is also true that political ideology and even religious sentiment were, in certain milieus and episodes, shared across the sectarian divide. Islamic reformism and the drive to Islamic unity, for instance, were often shared by Shiʿi modernist ʿulamaʾ and intellectuals from the late 19th century. Many wrote and even fought in support of the Ottoman Muslims against the Europeans. Shiʿi intellectuals, like al-Jawahiri, and politicians, such as Fadil al-Jamali and Salih Jabr, participated in the processes of the modern state and culture, and many were ardent Pan-Arab nationalists, serving in leading positions, for instance, in the Istiqlal Party and the Baʿth in its earlier days. At the same time, as we have seen, Shiʿism was presented by many Arab nationalists, such as Satiʿ al-Husri, as alien to Arabism and affiliated to Iran. In other contexts, Shiʿa were resentful of discrimination against their communities and regions in the allocation of resources, as well as of their disadvantage in government posts and careers. Sectarianism came to much greater significance under the Baʿth, especially after the Iranian Revolution and the war with Iran in the 1980s. There were, of course, many Shiʿa in the Baʿth Party and the government, including ministers, but never in sensitive posts. The dynastic nature of the regime, guarded by concentric circles of related tribes from the “Sunni triangle,” ensured the exclusion of the Shiʿa from these inner circles. What was particularly the target of regime repression and violence was centers of Shiʿi institutions and communal organization as well as the business community. The regime operated by the elimination of all possible centers of social and economic power outside its control, though it could never totally suppress the Shiʿi institutional, financial, and community support centers, much as it tried. The Iranian connection exacerbated this enmity. The dramatic confrontation came in 1991 with the anti-Baʿth intifada in the south, following the defeat of the Iraqi forces in Kuwait. While this revolt started from diverse quarters, first from the army itself, it soon acquired a sectarian character. The reaction of the regime when it was spared by the allied forces was predictably one of extreme violence and destruction against the Shiʿi cities and regions. The tanks that destroyed the shrine cities of Karbala and Najaf sported the slogan lā-shiʿa baʿda al-yawm, no more Shiʿa after today. It became commonplace to blame the sectarian violence that followed the 2003 invasion on the Americans. The invaders were certainly responsible for unbelievable blunders and mismanagement (and, many believe, deliberate mischief), and the “representative” bodies were appointed on sectarian bases. But these factors operated on a ripe field of existing sectarian antagonisms and communalist ambitions, fed by the blatant sectarian violence of the later Baʿth decades. I shall not enter the muddy field of the character of the post-invasion regimes.

Bashkin's narrative on “otherness” is confined to the period under the monarchy. During that time, elements from the diverse ethnicities and religions of Iraq came together in shared public spaces, with Arabic as the predominant medium of cultural production. Bashkin highlights the role of the Jews in these fields. Jewish intellectuals, writers, professionals, and functionaries were prominently represented in the formation of the modern Iraqi state and its economic and cultural fields. They did so as Arabophone Iraqi patriots. As we saw, Turcoman writers and journalists contributed to these formations, first with a hybrid mixture of Turkish and Arabic, then in the Arabic media. In the 1960s, after Bashkin's period, what was known as the Kirkuk Group of artists and writers, many from Turcoman background, were amongst the avant garde of the Baghdad cultural scene, much influenced by the then fashionable French existentialism. Many educated Kurds had an Arabic culture and participated with other Iraqis in the political and intellectual ferment of the time. The ICP was an important catalyst in this respect, articulating Kurdish national rights into its ideology, while its Kurdish cadres were fully committed to Iraq. It may be argued that an educated Iraqi Kurd then had more in common with her Iraqi colleagues than with equivalent Kurds from Turkey or Iran. The trajectory of the Baʿth regime curtailed much of this pluralism, and the invasion of 2003 has led to further ethnic and religious polarization and, in regard to non-Muslim groups, to progressive “ethnic cleansing.”

The histories narrated in these excellent books attest to the vitality and promise of Iraqi culture over the decades of the 20th century until the disasters of its closing years. So much of that vitality was spent in the efforts and contests to create an Iraqi identity. Dominant protagonists could not accept the basic hybridity of Iraqi culture, and many attempted to push it into the straitjacket of Arabism. This project became part of the oppressive power of successive regimes, most disastrously of the Baʿth, with tragic consequences.