Iraqi Arab Nationalism

Authoritarian, Totalitarian and Pro-Fascist Inclinations, 1932–1941

Peter Wien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134204786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Peter Wien presents a provocative discussion on the history of Iraq and the growth of nationalism during the 1930s and early 1940s. He deconstructs the established view that a large proportion of the nationalist movement in Iraq during this period was heavily influenced by Nazi Germany, arguing that the admiration for Germany was highly nuanced, and only rarely translated into admiration for Nazism. National unity and patriotism were important, but models of leadership were overwhelmingly based on Iraqis and not Hitler.

Analyzing the activities of the Iraqi youth and Jewish Iraqis, Iraqi Arab Nationalism gives an understanding of Iraqis from diverse backgrounds. It incorporates source material not previously used in discussions of Iraq and nationalism and contains autobiographical and biographical material from officers, intellectuals and politicians, along with contemporary journalistic writings, which sheds new light on Iraqi nationalism.

1

INTRODUCTION

On March 16, 1941, the Baghdadi newspaper al-Bilād published a report about a rally of the Iraqi al-Futuwwa youth movement in the streets of the capital. Six thousand students from all districts of the town took part in the marches through the largest streets and squares of Baghdad to the music of marching bands. Most of them carried weapons. Their teachers, the “officers” of al-Futuwwa, accompanied them on their way. Later, they assembled under the command of the leaders of their movement, who were high-ranking officials from the ministry of education. Crowds flanked the streets to express their hope and trust in these youth. The author of the article emphasized that these youth were an awesome sight that caused joy and delight. The march lasted for two hours without interruption.¹

Events such as this youth rally in Baghdad are often taken as a sign of a specific rapprochement between Iraqi Arab nationalists of the time and Nazi Germany. Details as well as the uniform clothing of the Iraqi schoolboys and their military training support this impression, such as many other aspects of the Iraqi history of these years and especially the months of April and May 1941, when a “Government of National Defense” ruled the country. Prime Minister Rashīd ʿAlī al-Kailānī was under the influence of an infamous group of four army officers, the so-called Golden Square. They aligned with Hājj Amīn al-Ḥusainī, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in exile in Baghdad, and adopted his idée fixe that an alliance with Nazi Germany would help the Arabs and the Iraqis in particular, in their defense against British imperialism. War-torn London decided to put an end to the Iraqi insurgence. When the Iraqi army had to face superior British military power in May 1941, the German Wehrmacht and its Italian ally sent a very limited number of warplanes. Within a month, British troops restored control in Iraq and occupied Baghdad. The very limited support of Axis airplanes was futile.²

The British–Iraqi war became an important chapter in the narrative of the Arab nationalist struggle against colonialism. Both Anwār al-Ṣadāt and Saddām Ḥusain referred to the 1941 war as a sign post in the story of Arab nationalism.³ In a very different way, this war is a landmark in a post-1945 Zionist narrative of Arab–Nazi collaboration. According to this narrative, the tenuous alliance between Germany and Iraq in 1941 rested on ideological parallels, an assumption that gained support from the “Farhūd,”⁴ a pogrom that took place in Baghdad’s Jewish quarters at the end of the war. It resulted in numerous Jewish deaths and casualties. Much of the scholarly research on interwar Iraq subscribed to this narrative as well. Authors simply assign ideological affinities of Arab nationalism with the National Socialist regime in Germany.⁵ They do not differentiate between several strains of pro-German sentiments as if all of them were only a prelude to the short-lived German–Iraqi alliance during a month of war between Britain and Iraq in May 1941.⁶

This study shall give evidence that Germany was only one reference for nationalists among others. It challenges the previous assumption that there was a more or less coherent story of the pro-Nazi and pro-fascist inclination of Arab, and in particular Iraqi, intellectuals and politicians. In fact, most of the existing scholarly research on the topic does not go further than the pro-Nazi narrative used by the official report of an Iraqi Commission, which inquired into the background of the events of the Farhūd of 1941. The report was written shortly after the events.⁷

The focus is on the contents of pro-authoritarian, pro-totalitarian, or pro-fascist⁸ tendencies among Iraqi intellectuals of the first Iraqi independence period, 1932–1941. Instead of giving the various ideas of the debate a concrete name, such as Arab–Nazi sympathy, this threefold field of reference is more useful to characterize the specific structures of Iraqi Arab nationalist discourse and to put them into their proper context. The inquiry of the first part is based on memoirs of Iraqi intellectuals and politicians. A close analysis of contents and narrative structures shall point out how and why people referred to totalitarian or fascist models both positively and negatively. Rising political radicalism of a group of younger Iraqi intellectuals and further members of the so-called Young Effendiyya was due to generational conflict. The specific “Germanophilia” of the generation of founding fathers of the state, however, resulted from their background as former Ottoman officers.

In Chapter 2, the analysis focuses on debates as intellectuals and politicians pursued them in the press of the time. A wide range of newspaper articles are presented to give examples of direct references to Germany and National Socialism, leading to an interpretation of certain recurring themes of the newspaper debate. This analysis put apparently pro-fascist statements of the press into a more differentiated context. The chapter on the newspapers closes with a specific analysis of the debate on youth. Finally, a reinterpretation of the events of the Farhūd leads us back to the issue of generational conflict.

The point of departure of this research was an inquiry into the Iraqi perception of Nazi Germany. Thus, the analysis borrows several concepts from research on German and in a wider sense European trends of authoritarianism and totalitarianism such as “generational conflict” and “masculinity.” In this way, it was possible to arrange the Iraqi phenomenon in a much wider framework of research on authoritarianism and totalitarianism. In fact, there were striking parallels between European developments and the contents of the Iraqi discourse. The comparability of the two is limited, however. In Iraq, we describe a debate, while in Europe, fascism and totalitarianism had a concrete impact. The application of concepts therefore does not suggest that there were direct similarities between European and Iraqi developments.

“Totalitarianism” as a concept emerged after the First World War rather to give a name to the shocking phenomenon of twentieth-century dictatorships than to provide an analytic category. Since then several aspects of a definition of totalitarianism have become widely accepted, for instance the aim of reshaping a society’s values on a large scale and abolishing the autonomy of politics, society, and the individual.⁹ Totalitarianism is different from authoritarianism in that in the former, a single ruling party promotes an exclusive ideology, embodied in a leader, and uses mass mobilization for a comprehensive control over society. In the latter, society has a significantly lower level of politicization and allows for a limited pluralism. Tradition plays a distinctive role in the authoritarian system. Instead of ideology, mentality shapes the system.¹⁰

The terms “authoritarianism” or “totalitarianism” do not come up as such in the Iraqi debate. Israel Gershoni has argued, however, that, in the contemporaneous Egyptian weekly al-Risāla, “totalitarianism” was the conceptual mode to describe the new phenomenon of fascism in Europe. Thus, Italy and Germany, and to a certain extent the Soviet Union, were considered as “a totally new type of modern authoritarian dictatorship.” The writers of al-Risāla weighed fascism in the light of preceding European authoritarian state forms and extreme nationalism. The fact that al-Risāla was widely read in the Arab world justifies the assumption that these thoughts had an impact in Iraq. Thus, publicists were able to distinguish between fascism, as extreme totalitarianism, and more moderate authoritarianism. Moreover, the sources indicate that the Iraqi debate did not refer to Nazism as an ideology separate from fascism.¹¹

This study is, however, no apology for Arab Iraq to whitewash allegations of pro-totalitarianism against the intellectual and political elite of the country. In fact, the allusions to authoritarian and totalitarian principles in the available sources weigh much heavier than liberal voices. Haggai Erlich remarks “that fascism [was] though indirectly very influential in the making of 1936–1939 Middle Eastern History.”¹² Yet, direct references to fascist models were rare. Furthermore, the discussion of authoritarian principles as a guideline for an Iraqi Arab revival was very shallow. Certain slogans and images were borrowed from Western sources without weighing their implications thoroughly. This way of referring will be called Fascist Imagery to distinguish it from fascist ideology.

In the eyes of a British beholder, the contents of many contemporary Iraqi articles must have looked quite fascist. I argue that this point of view shapes the records of, for instance, the Public Record Office of Great Britain or the US National Archives. Pierre-Jean Luizard calls the historiography based on this material “la vision britannique … écrite par les vainqueurs.” He adds that, only recently, researchers have started to criticize and confront the authoritative position of the British archives. The British officers, he writes, were deeply influenced by their “vision civilisationnelle.” The impact of this British point of view was so strong that Iraqis almost tended to apologize for the Rashīd ʿAlī movement and for considering the prime minister a nationalist hero. British propaganda, says Luizard, considered the coup pro-Nazi.¹³

In the Iraqi debate, images of leadership, references to a mythical past, and subordination of the individual sounded quite fascist to British and US beholders in the wider framework of suspicions about a spread of fascism. For instance, the US Ambassador Knabenshue described a youth rally in January 1939 and reported home that the new Minister of Education, Sāliḥ Jabr, had given a speech “from a platform surrounded by microphones and with ‘other trappings so familiar to similar meetings in Germany and Italy’.” This quote in itself has no information value about Jabr’s intentions in the use of these signs or about the meaning that the audience attributed to the scenery. The quote only indicates that the event reminded Knabenshue of fascist practices. Nevertheless, quotes like this were used to prove that Iraqi Arab nationalism of the time was close to Nazism.¹⁴

Germany was only one point of reference among others in the nationalists’ discourse. Many studies take a simple and direct line of influence between Nazism and Iraqi Arab nationalism for granted.¹⁵ In fact, nationalists mentioned National Socialism in combination with other points of reference only. These, however, were, for the most part, much more prominent than the German example. While national leadership was a major theme in nationalist discourse, Atatürk’s example was most prominent. National Socialism was generally mentioned along with European fascist regimes.¹⁶ Hanna Batatu supports the idea that European, and particularly Nazi, influence on the Iraqi nationalists was marginal. Besides social motives, he states that the military coups between 1936 and 1941 in Iraq followed the models of neighboring countries such as Iran and Turkey.¹⁷ It is therefore useful to look at the actual place of Germany in the nationalist debate of the time. Furthermore, I try to define the contents of “Fascist Imagery” in this debate and find out more about their proper context.

The choice of sources and their interpretation follow the concept of a “New Narrative” in Arab nationalism. Since the early 1970s, the “New Narrative” has included “nonformal expressions” in its analysis. These include for example press articles or memoirs of protagonists who did not belong to the group of outstanding theoreticians, for instance “secondary intellectuals.”¹⁸ Thus, this study differs from an “Old Narrative” of Arab nationalism, which uncritically stated that European thought had had a common impact. According to the “Old Narrative,” the reception of German philosophy prominently shaped Arab nationalist feelings,¹⁹ which prepared the ground for sympathy with National Socialism.²⁰ Following the suggestions of the “New Narrative,” the Iraqi perception of Nazi Germany is presented in the complex socio-political framework of groups from diverse social origins. The results are much closer to an analysis of the contents of pro-authoritarian, pro-totalitarian, and pro-fascist tendencies than research on the contents of highly theoretical works.²¹

This approach contains two perspectives: first, an inward perspective of individual experience and inspection. Autobiographies and memoirs provide an insight into individual narratives and their lines of interpretation.²² The second is an outward perspective and follows lines of debate pursued in the public, mainly in the press.²³ One of the deficits of research on interwar Iraq is that most studies rely on records in Western, mainly British and American, and also a few German and Italian archives.²⁴

There have been doubts that Middle Eastern memoir literature has the same interpretative character as autobiographies in the West,²⁵ but this orientalist point of view has more recently come to be criticized.²⁶ It is self-evident that the information from personal memories cannot be taken at face value, which holds true for both Western and Middle Eastern memories. Literary studies teach readers to distinguish clearly between the author, the narrator, and the subject of narration. The author and the reader enter a pact in order to provide the illusion of confidence in the information given.²⁷ Hence, autobiographies and, less obviously, memoirs²⁸ remain a construct. They are essentially narratives with no direct claim to “truth.” Every statement by an autobiographer is made in a framework of contemporary discourse and has to be interpreted in the light of the social and political circumstances of the surroundings. Many factors such as age, new experiences, and the confrontation with new socio-political demands make the individual filter, reassemble, and adapt remembered images according to “modern” requirements. Memoirs serve to explain the course of events up to the “now”-time, in an apologetic or an affirmative manner. Shared memories create identities, and, vice versa, adopted identities shape, if not create, memories. As far as individual memories of incidents are concerned, they tell more about the quality of experience than about facts. The emphasis on specific topics, the narrative structure, as well as the occurrence of allusions and associations give hints at the perceived importance of the impression left by a certain experience at a certain time. Memoirs are written in the light of what happened afterward rather than of what happened before. Hence, the single account mirrors the whole. Furthermore, autobiographers can follow a didactical intention which is implicit in the process of singling out one’s own life to be worthwhile for public inspection: to set any sort of example.²⁹ In the light of these assessments, it is hard to classify which of the texts treated in this study would be a memoir and which would be a full-fledged autobiography with a high self-reflective value. In ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on transcription
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The historical framework
• 3 Generational conflict
• 4 The debate of the Iraqi press
• 5 Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index