Writing The Modern History Of Iraq: Historiographical And Political Challenges

Historiographical and Political Challenges

Jordi Tejel, Peter Sluglett, Riccardo Bocco, Hamit Bozarslan

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9789814390552
• eBook ISBN: 9789814390569
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

The modern history of Iraq is punctuated by a series of successive and radical ruptures ( coups d'etat, changes of regime, military adventures and foreign invasions) whose chronological markers are relatively easy to identify. Although researchers cannot ignore these ruptures, they should also be encouraged to establish links between the moments when the breaks occur and the longue durée, in order to gain a better understanding of the period.

Combining a variety of different disciplinary and methodological perspectives, this collection of essays seeks to establish some new markers which will open fresh perspectives on the history of Iraq in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and suggest a narrative that fits into new paradigms. The book covers the various different periods of the modern state (the British occupation and mandate, the monarchy, the first revolutions and the decades of Ba'thist rule) through the lens of significant groups in Iraq society, including artists, film-makers, political and opposition groups, members of ethnic and religious groups, and tribes.

Contents:

• Introduction (Riccardo Bocco and Jordi Tejel)
• Dealing with the Past: Methodological Issues (Peter Sluglett):
  • Advice from the Past: 'Ali al-Wardi on Literature and Society (Orit Bashkin)
  • Writing the History of Iraq: The Fallacy of “Objective” History (Johan Franzén)
  • The Sectarian Master Narrative in Iraqi Historiography (Reidar Visser)
  • Beyond Political Ruptures: Towards a Historiography of Social Continuity in Iraq (Peter Harling)
• The Monarchist Era Revisited (Jordi Tejel):
  • What Did It Mean to Be an Iraqi During the Monarchy? (Hala Fattah)
  • From Forty-One to Qadisiyyat Saddam: Remarks on an Iraqi Realm of Memory (Peter Wien)
  • Building the Nation Through the Production of Difference (Sara Pursley)
• Rethinking the Ba'thist Period (Hamit Bozarslan):
  • Digging the Past: The Historiography of Archeology in Modern Iraq (Magnus T Bernhardsson)
  • Totalitarianism Revisited: Framing the History of Ba'thist Iraq (Achim Rohde)
  • How to “Turn the Page” (Fanny Lafourcade)
• Dealing with Victimhood: Whose Memories of Mass Violence? Between Oral and Official History:
  • Fragmented Memory, Competing Narratives (Karin Mlodoch)
  • The Concept of Genocide as Part of Knowledge Production in Iraqi Kurdistan (Andrea Fischer-Tahir)
  • The 1991 Intifada in Three Keys: Writing the History of Violence (Dina Rizk Khoury)
  • ' Qadisiyat Saddam ' The Gamble That Did Not Pay Off (Chérine Chams El Dine)
• Shi'i Actors in Post-Saddam Iraq: Partisan Historiography (Peter Sluglett):
  • Partisan and Global Identity in the Historiography of Iraqi Religious Institutions (Robert J Riggs)
  • Najaf and the (Re)Birth of Arab Shi'i Political Thought (Michaelle Browers)
  • Between Action and Symbols (Elvire Corboz)
• The Politics of Population Movements in Contemporary Iraq: A Research Agenda (Géraldine Chatelard):
  • The Brain Drain in Iraq After the 2003 Invasion (Joseph Sassoon)
  • Cosmopolitanism and Iraqi Migration (Diane Duclos)
• Representing Iraq History Through the Arts (Hamit Bozarslan):
  • Literary Glimpses of Modern Iraqi History and Society (Sami Zubaida)
  • History and Fiction in the New Iraqi Cinema (Lucia Sorbera)
  • War, Crimes and Video Tapes: Conflicting Memories in Films on Iraq (Nicolas Masson)
  • Poetry in the Service of Nation Building? Political Commitment and Self-Assertion (Leslie Tramontini)
  • Not Just “For Art's Sake” Exhibiting Iraqi Art in the West After 2003 (Silvia Naef)
• Appendix: State of the Art on Iraqi Studies: A Bibliographical Survey of English and French Sources (Hamit Bozarslan and Jordi Tejel)

Readership: Professionals, students & scholars interested in historical, social & political issues in Iraq & the Middle East.

DEALING WITH THE PAST:
METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES

Peter Sluglett

In 1991, and again in 2004, I first co-authored, and then authored, two essays on the European language historiography of Iraq that focused principally on its modern history (Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, 1991; Sluglett, 2004). It has also been my good fortune to have written reviews of many of the leading works of modern Iraqi history over the past several years,¹ and I can say with confidence that the field has grown greatly in breadth, depth and stature, and has acquired many accomplished and distinguished practitioners since I entered it in 1976.

So what is the task of the historian? In general, I believe that (s)he should engage as far as possible with primary sources, and is professionally obliged to be as honest and truthful as possible. In addition, (s)he should be very aware first, that no sources are ideologically neutral, and second, that (s)he comes to a particular topic with many assumptions, preconceived ideas and so on of which (s)he may not be fully aware. I very much like this passage from Hobsbawm’s introduction to Nations and Nationalism (1990), where he says:

Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so. As Renan said, “Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.” Historians are professionally obliged not to get it wrong, or at least to make an effort not to do so. To be Irish and proudly attached to Ireland — even to be proudly Catholic-Irish or Ulster Protestant-Irish — is not in itself incompatible with the serious study of Irish history. To be a Fenian or an Orangeman, I would judge, is not so compatible … unless the historian leaves his or her convictions behind when entering the library or the study (Hobsbawm, 1990, p. 12).²

My own sympathies have always been with the left, and particularly the Iraqi left, and I find the intolerance and historical questionableness of most nationalist writing or apologetics quite hard to stomach. I also think that originality is important, and lack of originality, or the retracing of steps along well worn paths without due acknowledgement, and poorly documented, unapologetic, or unacknowledged ideological bias, is one the main reasons for the impatient and irascible reviews I have written from time to time.

In the past, one of my main concerns was to highlight the kind of bias in Western history-writing on Iraq best illustrated by Majid Khadduri’s two later volumes, Republican Iraq … (1969) and Socialist Iraq … (1978), especially the latter,³ whose main aim was to portray all the Iraqi regimes after 1963 in as sympathetic a light as possible. Apart from the fact that neither contains a bibliography or footnotes, my main academic criticism of the two books was their heavy reliance on offcial publications and interviews. Since the interviews were invariably with members of the regime of the day rather than the opposition, the results were inevitably extremely biased. Furthermore, Khadduri described institutions such as the various provisional constitutions and the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) in such a manner as to suggest that they had some relationship to the way in which the country was actually run. In fact, all the constitutions were suspended after 1958, and while the RCC was nominally the country’s supreme executive body and its members ‘elected’ by the Ba‘th Party, all important decision-making and politics took place among a small circle of individuals already dominated by Saddam Hussein in the late 1970s, which also oversaw all appointments to the council’s ranks.

Again, although Khadduri might have claimed that his own craft, political science, precluded him from making forays into economic and social analysis, the virtual absence of this dimension renders much of the political conflict he describes incomprehensible. Even in his capacity as a political scientist, he does not attempt to explain what Ba‘thism actually was in practice or what ‘socialism’ meant to those who ruled Iraq, still less what it meant to those who bore the brunt of it. Two quotations from Socialist Iraq convey the general atmosphere:

The leadership has been able to maintain on the whole a high degree of stability and continuity by applying various measures of conformity, including disciplinary action.

More important perhaps are [Saddam Hussin’s] potentials in prudence, flexibility and resourcefulness … These qualities, combined with integrity and high moral courage, are his Party’s best promise for the country’s future leadership.

Although such naivety seems quite laughable today, and I very much doubt whether either Republican Iraq or Socialist Iraq are still widely read, this was the sort of thing that people, including, most damagingly, US policy-makers, wanted to hear, especially in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, when Saddam Hussein’s regime seemed to be all that stood between “us” and the mullahs in Teheran. At that stage, this sort of writing (and compare Christine Moss Helms, Iraq, Eastern Flank of the Arab World, 1984) was almost all there was; several years would pass before accessible “alternative” reading would appear, including Samir al-Khalil’s Republic of Fear (1989) and our own Iraq since 1958: from Revolution to Dictatorship (1987).⁴ Batatu’s masterpiece had appeared rather earlier, but apart from the fact that it is not aimed at the casual reader, the last hundred-odd pages of the book dealing with the period between 1963 and 1977, are its weakest part.⁵ At that time, one also had to contend with the curious notion, which died hard in the minds of many European leftist intellectuals, that Saddam Hussein actually was the doughty crusader against imperialism that he claimed to be. In their introduction to this volume, Riccardo Bocco and Jordi Tejel ask historians to refocus their attention on a fairly catholic range of themes, including subaltern studies, the longue durée, continuities and ruptures, and the “history of all Iraqis”. Of these, I wonder whether subaltern studies, the holy grail of much early modern and modern historiography over the last few decades, is really feasible in Iraq (and here I am not speaking of research based principally on oral history). In the Indian sub-continent, where such writing originated, the voice of the subaltern is filtered through a mountain of administrative, ethnographic, judicial and census data, collected by offcialdom over many generations.⁶ Much of that kind of archival material for Iraq perished in the aftermath of 2003, but in addition, access to the country, and perhaps more crucially, access to source materials within the country, was generally denied to foreign scholars after the Revolution of July 1958.⁷ Thus two of the three major anthropological studies of Iraq, Robert Fernea’s work on the al-Shabana, and Shakir Salim’s Marsh Dwellers of the Euphrates Delta, were based on fieldwork carried out in the 1950s, while the third, Edmund Leach’s short study of the economy and society of southern Kurdistan, is the fruit of research going back to the late 1930s.⁸ The only more recent study based on fieldwork that I know of, a doctoral thesis on Madinat al-Thawra (subsequently Madinat Saddam, now Madinat al-Sadr), submitted (presumably) by an Iraqi to the EHESS in Paris in 1979, does not seem to have been published, either in whole or in part, in any European language (al-Ansari, 1979).

In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when the Iraqi government still had money to send students abroad, a number of Iraqis produced doctoral theses on humanities and social science topics at British universities.⁹ A large number of them remain confined (by their authors’ wish) to the shelves of the library of the British university from which their authors graduated, and they have generally not been published in book or article form in any European language. In addition, increasingly severe censorship, and a great measure of self-censorship, combined with the economic deprivations of the 1990s and early 2000s, meant that Iraqi academics living in Iraq were generally unable to publish academic studies of their country. Lack of access to economic and other data meant that much of the best scholarship on Iraq written in Arabic during that period by Iraqis living in exile (such as Hadi al-‘Alawi (d. 1998), Falih ‘Abd al-Jabbar and ‘Isam al-Khafaji), concentrated on analytical rather than empirical issues, such as the nature of the rentier state, the interpretation and significance of modern Islamic thought, and forms of cultural discourse, all concerns widely shared by their contemporaries in other Arab countries.¹⁰ Of course one of the major consequences of the persistence of the brutal and despotic regimes under which the population of Iraq had suffered for so long was that many of its most talented citizens were forced into exile, and that Iraqi scholars could only express themselves freely outside their country. Sadly, this situation seems to have changed little since 2003: many of the academics who returned to Iraq with high hopes after the US invasion have found it impossible to go on living there.

For most of us engaged in the kind of intellectual production exemplified by the contributions to this book and to others like it, the notion of a “history of all Iraqis” probably comes closest to what we would think it our business to be engaged in. While we might focus on the recent history of, say, the Kurds or the Shi‘is, we would probably not seek to privilege the suffering of one group over the other. By the same token, few of us would regard Saddam Hussein’s idiosyncratic “Project for the Rewriting of History”,¹¹ as a proper exercise of the historian’s craft. Unless we are forced to participate in the production of hagiography of various kinds, as must have been the case with so many of our Iraqi colleagues, we think it beneath us to write “offcial” or “partisan” history. Mercifully, most of us will never have to, or have had to.

There are four very different essays in this section, written by young historians who have already made major contributions to the historiography of Iraq. Orit Bashkin’s “Advice from the Past: ‘Ali al-Wardi on Literature and Society” looks at attitudes towards the role of intellectuals in Iraqi society, with special reference to the oeuvre of one of the most prominent of these, the sociologist ‘Ali al-Wardi (1913–1995). Bashkin examines the notion of the intellectual as professional, expert and technocrat, as purveyor, conveyor, and critic of cultural production, as pioneer and upholder of the “modern” activities of the state, and finally as a revolutionary, urging or seeking the overthrow of the colonial regime.

In the early days of the Iraqi state, the view of the intellectual-as-agent-of-modernity, essentially carried over from the post-1908 Ottoman Empire, seems to have been paramount. This gradually transitioned into the notion of the politically neutral intellectual-as-expert, with appropriate professional or technical training, who would be able to solve the state’s practical problems (infant mortality, illiteracy, eco-systems and so on). Here the intellectual is primarily in the service of, rather than critical of, the state. This seems to have been the view of authors like Fadil al-Jamali and Sami Shawkat, while Sati‘ al-Husri ascribed greater agency to intellectuals, whom he thought of both as vital “instigators of change” and “builders of the modern state”. Of course much of this discussion is rather vaguer than the reader might like, since “our own” definition of “intellectual” is probably much more restricted than that of the Iraqi writers being considered here, for whom the label seems to have applied to anyone with a university degree or professional qualification.¹²

Iraqi leftists in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s saw the role of the intellectual as being in the service of the people, a revolutionary vanguard, while believing that literature should either be in response to, or expressing, the needs of society. As elsewhere in the leftist third world at the time, the writer/intellectual in the colonial state should be concerned primarily with facilitating or explicating the process of national liberation, or with tradition and national history rather than with the rarified world of “high culture”. Of course, in the Iraqi (or Algerian, or Palestinian) context the (leftist) intellectual was spied upon and “hunted down” by the state; his commitment to the national struggle was his chief virtue, and his outspokenly critical attitude to the status quo his badge of courage. Prominent poets and writers of the medieval period were invoked as advocates of social justice, while almost all post-second world war writers were deeply critical of the Hashemite state, in this way fulfilling their “historic role”.

The rest of the article is devoted to al-Wardi’s oeuvre, and his influence on his contemporaries during his lifetime and on young Iraqis today. al-Wardi’s Usturat al-adab al-rafi‘ (1957) is about the position of the writer in society. The writer, al-Wardi says, is dependent either on political patronage or on those who buy his work; in order to become (at least relatively) prosperous he has to praise the actions of the regime, or at least mute his criticism. He is irritated by the common man, who either does not buy his work, or prefers trashier or less serious books or magazines. al-Wardi thinks that writing is only meaningful when addressed to people under specific historical circumstances, when it aims to change their attitudes. It is the duty of the writer to oppose and expose oppression, and to make sure that his words reach as wide an audience as possible in order to change hearts and minds. In a novel interpretation, al-Wardi takes the Qur’an as a prime example of a text with enormous social implications, both in its day and ever since; in addition, he tried to put forward a new vision of Iraqi society, part of his commitment to the notion that literature should have meaning. “The true intellectual [in alWardi’s work],” Bashkin says, “is a secular, democratic critic, conscious of issues relating to social justice and attentive to matters concerning language, history, sociology and culture.” Here, as in the work of other leftist writers of the period, the intellectual is a revolutionary social critic. Of course, this was written before 1958; after that, and especially after 1963, many intellectuals were co-opted or bought by successive regimes. On the other hand, many, as we know, could not be bought, although they were obliged to write their critiques from exile and many died there of old age or illness before they could return. By writing or blogging, their contemporary counterparts bravely continue the agenda of committed activism “charted out by al-Wardi half a century ago.”

Johan Franzén’s paper, “Writing the History of Iraq: the Fallacy of ‘Objective’ History” raises a number of interesting issues. As noted elsewhere in this volume, especially by Fanny Lafourcade and Peter Harling, the process of de-Ba‘thification after 2003 was both inadequately thought out and insensitively or subjectively applied. Clearly, it was important to disband the mukhabarat, and to put torturers and murderers on trial.¹³ However, the use of the process in a blanket and undifferentiated manner, under institutional arrangements controlled almost entirely by politicians returning from exile, meant that the dragnet was applied on a far broader basis that it need have been. Instead of promoting “truth and reconciliation”, de-Ba‘thification became politicized, a means of settling scores or neutralizing potential political rivals. In addition, some of those with useful connections to the current regime managed to escape punishment or removal from offce.

Drawing on telling examples from Northern Ireland and post-Dayton Bosnia, Franzén underscores the dangers of separate sectarian educational systems and the rewriting of post-conflict history by those who administer such systems. In Iraq, the failure to engage seriously in national reconciliation has created an atmosphere of “empowerment through suffering”, especially among the Shi‘is who dominate the government, and to some extent, at least in the minds of some Sunnis, creating a witch hunt. As the examples in Peter Harling’s paper show, some Shi‘is evidently supported the regime ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Dealing with the Past: Methodological Issues
• 2. The Monarchist Era Revisited
• 3. Rethinking the Ba‘thist Period
• 4. Dealing with Victimhood: Whose Memories of Mass Violence? Between Oral and Offcial History
• 5. Shi‘i Actors in Post-Saddam Iraq: Partisan Historiography
• 6. The Politics of Population Movements in Contemporary Iraq: A Research Agenda
• 7. Representing Iraq History through the Arts
• Appendix: State of the Art on Iraqi Studies: A Bibliographical Survey of English and French Sources
• Notes on Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index of Geographical Names, Commodities, and Themes
• Index of Individuals and Groups
• Map of Iraq