Inactive Askari Street -- Hala Fattah
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Meet Me Around the Corner at Cliopatria
Dear All,
I will be leaving for Baghdad in a week and staying there awhile. I have not been keeping up my blog lately because of time constraints. Because of this, and other reasons, I have accepted Dr. Luker’s gracious offer of folding Askari Street into his, and his colleagues’ valuable group blog, Cliopatria. Obviously I shall post as often as I can, but not perhaps as much as before.
I want to thank you all for your faithful readership of Askari Street, and your really wonderful comments and questions. I’m constantly amazed by the comparative nature of our field, and how much the history of one region and epoch feeds into another. I’ve learned a lot from our online conversations, and I hope to continue learning as the days and months go by.
So, for all of you whose passion is history, just remember its really all about context, context, context…
Best wishes,
Hala
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
A Day at the Races
In the 1950’s, a huge stretch of land in the Mansur area was turned into a turf club and stables. The patron of the Turf Club was Prince Abdulillah, the Regent, the young King Faisal II’s uncle. He was also made one of nine Stewards of the Club, along with currently serving Prime Ministers, Ministers of Finance and other notability of Baghdad; in 1951, these included a huge racing enthusiast, Dr. Abdul Hadi al-Pachachi and the British Air Vice Marshall, G.R Beamish (This was 1951; Iraq had been technically independent for 21 years but the British still thought that the country could not run its own Air Force). A large racecourse in the Mansur district was opened to the public on the occasion when races were run. A company whose patron was yet again the Regent managed it. Among its many Stewards were the famous General Ghazi Al-Daghistani, descendant of a Caucasian noble who had fled Russia for Iraq in search of pure-bred horses; Mr. Sa’doun Al-Shawi, a scion of the Ubayd tribe (famed for their Arabian mares); Mr. Jazmi Suleiman, whose father, the noted Turkish-speaking historian, Suleiman Faiq, himself was the son of Georgian officials, as well as one British Brigadier and Squadron Leader. The stream of visitors to the Mansur race course (Arabicized by Iraqis as al-rayssis) included jockeys, racehorse owners, stable boys and race fans as well as some of the notables of Baghdad. Until today, members of the exiled Iraqi elite in Britain and Jordan remember with particular passion the ravishing Mrs. Levi (the Iraqis referred to her as Mrs. Lawi), the Austrian wife of a British Jewish diplomat stationed in Baghdad. She created a sensation when she attended the races in Mansur; some worldly Iraqis even compared her to Hedy Lamarr (who, I believe, was also Austrian-born or was she of Hungarian ancestry?).
The Times Press of Baghdad published a booklet called “Races Past” in 1951 (in my possession) which details every single race run or horse registered during the year. I believe it was written by Major Chadwick, then the Secretary of the Iraq Turf Club. Among other racing trivia, it notes jockeys’ licenses, their names, license number and lowest riding weight. But perhaps the singular achievement of this unprepossessing book is the great attention paid to the history of the sport. Lists of horses and ponies are appended, as well as lists of their owners. Monetary prizes in the form of Plates and Handicaps are recorded (some as high as 225 Iraqi Dinars, a fortune in those days). The book is peppered with the names of the major tribal sections and their leaders, many of whom invested in stables in which their fleet Arabian mares went head to head with those of the urban Baghdadi gentry. I remember the rayssis as a child; even though the book is written in a dry and official style, it brings back the fun and excitement of those days and reminds me of a typical Baghdadi pursuit now shrouded in memory.
In the late 1990’s, Saddam Hussein resolved to build the largest mosque in the Arab world in Mansur, right there on the fabled racetrack. My explanation is that he thought he could banish sin by erecting a mosque on it. Although he destroyed the rayssis, he sure got his comeuppance. After his fall, the mosque was taken over by the Al-Sadr organization, Saddam’s erstwhile victims. They now hold sway in the largest incomplete mosque in Baghdad. Justice did prevail. All the same, a race track it sure a’int.
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Iraq and the Notion of Geographical Determinism
Once, not so long ago, Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire were deemed to be static, unimaginative societies forever constrained by circumstances beyond their control. The idea of geographical determinism was particularly potent with regard to largely land-locked countries such as Iraq. Even though Ottoman Iraq was linked intimately to the Gulf, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, it was Iraq’s landmass that caught historians’ attentions. Iraq was considered, more often than not, a victim of its geographical circumstances because, down to the present, it has been bounded by neighbors that did not always wish it well, and with whom past Iraqi governments have not always been on good terms .
But this so-called geographical determinism can be seen in a different form. Earlier Orientalist scholars had seen it as a limiting factor, a heavy weight on Iraq's development. I think, on the contrary, it has often been a boon to countries such as Iraq. From the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, Iraqis freely traded within their own region and beyond, much to the consternation of Ottoman authorities who were supposed to be laying down the Imperial law. Even as the Ottoman Empire began to centralize its far-flung domains in the nineteenth century, causing it to write new tariffs in commercial law and erect new customs posts on Imperial frontiers, Iraqis were busy rediscovering new routes and new markets from which to exchange and ship their goods. Eventually this would be called smuggling and contraband, and be viewed as anti-state activity deletrious to the law of the land. By the early twentieth century, with new agreements on borders having been forged by British-influenced monarchies such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, as well as with French-controlled Syria and Lebanon, the idea of a bounded nation-state, a sovereign nation-state was born.
But how bound was Iraq to its own sovereignty? In the late twentieth century, the Iraq-Iran war showed that regional influences were paramount. Even though the war was globalized, with the US entering surreptitiously on the side of Iraq, the real incentives sprung from the region. Again, smuggling and contraband came to the fore, this time arms smuggling carried out by dhows (traditional sailing ships, now outfitted with outboard motors) carrying enormous loads of arms, and sailing from the Gulf to Iran or Iraq. And we all know how the Baathist regime skirted international sanctions in the 1990’s by heavily smuggling in goods and arms across both its land and sea borders.
In Iraq today, smuggling and contraband are rife. Gasoline, copper wires, electricity pylons and food are being trucked out of Iraq at an alarming rate. If this continues, the shadow economy, more vibrant and more dynamic than the official economy, will soon denude Iraq of its very infrastructure, most of it obsolete and probably valuable only as scrap. My question is this : even supposing that Iraq will once again be a safe place to live, where laws will be obeyed and the official economy will become a self-sustaining economy ( ‘though largely based on one source, oil), how long will this last before regional incentives will again appear to tear its “sovereign” status apart? I am pessimistic. I think the region is stronger than the nation-state. The region provides incentives that the state, as now constructed, cannot provide. The region supplies the conditions for a free-for-all entrepreneurial activity that the big, hulking state will need to tamp down, if only to assert its own authority. In the next ten years, when Iraq’s security threat will have diminished ( please say inshallah), will the new state be able to offer as great an amount of opportunities for its citizens through legal channels as the region is willing to provide for the reckless, devil-may care sector of brash entrepreneurs in Iraq?
Friday, September 10, 2004
At the Iraqi Embassy in Jordan
Three days ago, the new Iraqi Ambassador to Jordan made his official debut. Throwing open the doors of the Iraqi Embassy in Amman, he invited a number of us to meet the Foreign Minister of Iraq, H.E Mr. Hoshyar Zibari, in Amman for a short visit. The Foreign Minister walked into the large reception room, beaming. He shook hands with us as we mentally recorded the scene for posterity. Among the invitees were a number of staunch opponents of Saddam Hussein, almost giddy with relief at the transformation wrought in the Embassy itself. Some,who remembered the grimy walls hung with portraits of Saddam,were pleasantly surprised by the scrubbed interior and the oils and watercolors now gracing the walls, most of them painted by Iraqi artists. Dressed in fuschia, Tamara Daghistani(Al-Sadoun)laughed and said, "Who would have imagined that I'd ever be invited here!". The Foreign Minister and the Ambassador both spoke, saying that this was a new day for Iraqis, and that the new Embassy would never go back to the ugly traditions of the past.
The next day, I went to collect my new Iraqi passport; like most Iraqi identity papers, passports had been heavily subscribed by the former regime in the past. The consular officials ushered us in a room with chairs against the wall and an empty desk. He told us that we should line up in front of the desk and that another official would soon arrive to hand out our passports. Immediately the man next to me began to complain." Why should we stand in front of an empty desk when we can sit?" he asked loudly. Everyone around him nodded their heads vigorously. Smiling through grit teeth,the consular official reiterated that those were the rules. The complaining man began to complain again, "I don't see the point," he bellowed, "We'll go sit down and then form a row in front of the desk when the official comes". Eventually a number of us did sit down. The passports official took ten minutes to arrive; when he walked in, everyone clapped and whistled.
As I was exiting the Consular Section, passport in hand, I heard the defeated consular official say to his colleague, " You ask them to stand, they want to sit down. If only I'd given him the back of my hand!"
Thursday, September 2, 2004
In Memoriam: Dr. Khalid Al-Qassab (1924-2004)
On the fortieth day of mourning for the great Iraqi doctor and artist, Dr. Khalid Al-Qassab, his family and friends gathered together at the Orfali Center in Amman, Jordan to pay respects to his memory. Befittingly, Dr. Al-Qassab’s life was celebrated through a retrospective of his art; his watercolors and oil paintings were evocatively described as the slide show progressed, from the first tentative pastoral scenes to the brilliant colors of his last still life painting. Before the retrospective, Dr. Al-Qassab’s friends and colleagues in the medical profession had underlined his brilliance as an cancer surgeon; now was the time to celebrate his life as an artist. But both sides of his personality, the scientific and the artistic, were a vital part of the whole; indeed, for Dr. Al-Qassab that was how it should be. When asked what tied medicine to art, his answer was immediate. “They both benefit people”, he is reported to have said.
To understand Dr. Al-Qassab’s life work, and the many influences on his calling, one must read up on Iraqi art and never, never pass up the opportunity to see the fragments of Iraqi art – paintings, sculpture, ceramics – still left untouched in galleries in Iraq itself, and especially, in private homes the world over. The Iraqi art historian, Ms May Muzaffar, has left us with a vivid description of the Iraqi art scene from the 1940’s to the 1970’s. She emphasizes that from as early as the 1930’s, Iraqi artists were being sent abroad on government scholarships to learn from European masters. The first, and best known Iraqi artists of the period, Faiq Hassan (1914-92) and Jawad Selim (1921-61) blazed a path which was followed by several outstanding artists of their generation. After WWII, Hassan and Selim formed a group called La Societé Primitive, influenced by French Impressionism. Later on, the group came to be simply known as the Pioneers (al-ruwwad in Arabic). Among its fluctuating members was that ultimate Renaissance man, Dr. Khalid al-Qassab.
But what makes Iraqi art distinctively Iraqi is that, in the end, the education of Iraqi artists in Europe became yet another route to rediscovering their heritage. Europe became a distant mirror; the predisposition of Iraqi artists to reflect upon local themes gained ground as the decades wore on. As Ms Muzaffar puts it : “[Jawad Selim] was the first Iraqi artist to develop an Iraqi consciousness and therefore call for an equation between traditional heritage and modernity—recalling the artistic legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia and Islamic art while benefiting at the same time from Western art and artistic achievements” (Muzaffar in Inati, ed. Iraq: Its History, People and Politics, 2003). Mixing Islamic themes with Byzantine motifs, or reworking Assyrian bas-reliefs to produce monumental art, the Iraqi artist refocused his energies to create distinctive forms of painting or sculpture that his countrymen and women could learn from, be awed and impressed by, and ultimately, adapt to their own very specific reality. Dr. Khalid al-Qassab’s work reflects all those characteristics : it is inspired by the Iraqi earth and drenched with its colors.
Rest in peace, Aba Walid.
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
Poetry and the Women Question in Iraq
Among Iraqis of a certain generation, poetry was, and still is, considered the window to the soul. Poetry expressed the majestic and the sublime, along with the ridiculous and the ordinary. At one point, from the 1920’s to the 1940’s, it was the vehicle of anti-colonialism; many poets took on the British occupation in their verse and expressed feelings of nationalism that were still quiescent and unarticulated by the masses. After the colonial moment had passed (and Iraqis thought it would never come again!) and the era of the nation-state arrived, poetry either fell back on adulatory, pro-government verse (a strong component of pre-modern Arab poetry in general) or became the medium of expression of avant-garde poets, expressing bitter, violent and sexually charged themes. Such, for instance, was the poetry of Mudhaffar Al-Nawab, one of Iraq’s most important contemporary poets. He not only took on the Baathist regime in Iraq but also skewered all the Arab regimes in power in direct and uncompromising terms.
All good Iraqi poetry is characterized by a fierce individualism, and more often than not, a principled agenda. Even those alienated poets in the fifties and sixties that hated the city because it symbolized corruption, excess, aloofness and distance wanted to save it, and so save themselves in the process. What is astonishing, however, is how pervasive the reformist impulse was, even in the early years, and how poetry became the vehicle par excellence to establish an Iraqi social mandate based on social and economic equality as well as national independence. Such, for instance, was the progressive agenda espoused by the two leading Iraqi poets of the 1920’s and 1930’s, Jamil Sidqi Al-Zahawi(d.1936) and Ma’ruf Al-Rusafi (d.1945). The former was the scion of an established Kurdish family settled in Baghdad, and a poet and philosopher, the latter was a journalist and editor who retreated to Fallujah out of poverty and because it was less expensive than Baghdad. While their supposed rivalry has attracted a lot of attention in Iraqi literature, they had similar views on some of the most urgent matters of the day.
One of those matters concerned the unresolved status of Iraqi women in the early Iraqi state. The question of Iraq women’s emancipation joined two issues together: the lifting of the hijab, or veil, and women’s education. Both were resisted fiercely, especially in the rural areas. A friend of the family told me the story of how he forcibly desegregated his village school by enrolling his sister in it so that when the villagers saw that the village notable’s sister was going to school, they shed their prejudices and began to send theirs to school too. But the hijab, or veil issue was far more protracted and difficult a question; everything was involved, from modesty to family honor to religious principles. Typically, the charge to grant women the right to throw off the veil was carried out by men writing in newspaper columns, with Al-Zahawi and al-Rusafi leading the fight.
Al-Zahawi wrote several poems under his own name, each one of them advising women to cast away the veil because it was a social ill. In one poem, he counseled “the daughters of Iraq” to tear off and burn their hijab because life required a revolution, and the hijab was a false guardian. Al-Rusafi, meanwhile was bluntly telling women that the hijab imprisoned them, and they needed their liberty. In the end, it was only after several years of trying that the veil came off women’s heads, but it was a slow process. That process has now been reversed, with thousands of Iraqi women going back to the veil from the 1990’s onwards, so that women whose mothers and grandmothers went out bareheaded in the forties, fifties and sixties have now re-adopted the head covering considered so restricting by poets of the Iraqi Enlightenment.
Friday, August 20, 2004
Remembering Mr. Hourani and Dr. Enayat.
During the 1980’s, as the Iraq-Iran war raged on, I lived in London for a couple of years. I was researching my dissertation and one of the important stopovers on my academic itinerary was Oxford University. One of Oxford’s colleges, St. Antony’s was known as the hub of Middle Eastern studies. In the 1980’s, that particular college had a roster of brilliant and learned professors. Among the kindest and most empathetic were Mr. Albert Hourani, who taught Arab and Islamic history, and Dr. Hamid Enayat, who was a Fellow of St. Antony’s and lectured on Modern Middle Eastern history. I stress kindness and empathy because it seems to me that those are the characteristics that graduate students are most in need of. As many of us who have passed through that stage may recall, graduate students live in a world of their own. After you read and read till you can read no more, you usually spend the rest of your time either haranguing your fellow students on theoretical consistency or trying to impress your professors. That last part is crucial; if you make a connection with a particularly accessible and attentive professor, you may ask him or her to read your first draft or suggest changes, listen to you on how you’re going to transform the world with your dissertation topic or just chat to him/her about your family problems. Your whole academic journey could be transformed if the right mentor were to appear to guide your hand through this isolating and sometimes quite difficult period. This is why Mr. Hourani and Dr. Enayat were so popular at St. Antony’s. They listened, for heaven’s sake, and they gave you of their heavily circumscribed time. They allowed you to blather on as if you were another Ibn Khaldun or Toynbee or even, Marx, and they imperceptibly and very patiently allowed you to formulate your thoughts in the vastness of their knowledge.
Sadly, both men are no longer with us but I remember their courtesy and charm until this day. The first time I met Mr. Hourani in his study, I conversed with him for about two hours on all kinds of subjects, large and small. I was invited to dinner shortly afterwards. As I recall, it was the first time that I had tasted beet soup. We watched Ronald Reagan’s inauguration on tv in utter silence. Even then, there were forebodings of American might. Some time later, he came to UCLA and gave a wide ranging and panoramic view of Middle Eastern studies that is still unsurpassed in its breadth and richness.
Dr. Enayat was just as considerate and attentive. I would like to think that my connection with him was more personal because I am of Iraqi origin and he was Iranian. I met him at the height of the Iraq-Iran war and he was very hospitable, quite unlike some of the Iranian graduate students at Oxford, who were wary and distant. I remembered him in Baghdad, where I had gone shortly afterwards to research my dissertation topic and I bought a photographic album depicting the Shi’a shrine cities in Iraq as a gift. After I returned from four months of study, I passed by St. Antony’s to see him. He was at dinner in St. Antony’s great dining hall, conversing, of course, with a graduate student. All I wanted to do was to give Dr. Enayat his gift and tell him first-hand about my impressions of Baathist Iraq after so many years outside the country but, wouldn’t you know it, the student kept droning on and on. Finally, he left and I was able to give Dr. Enayat the gift. I received a wonderful hand-written note thanking me several months before he passed away.
Both these men were humanists of the highest degree. They wrote books that are still in vogue, even thirty years later. In particular, I have used Dr. Enayat’s book, Modern Islamic political Thought (University of Texas Press, 1982) to great advantage, both in the classroom and in my own research. His book was the first, to my knowledge, that effectively and lucidly rewrote the tangled history of Sunni-Shi’a interaction (both in wartime and peacetime), in Iraq and Iran and elsewhere. He discussed in detail and with impeccable impartiality all the great controversies that divided, and still divide those two major Muslim camps. His conclusion is simple, elegant and reflective of the basic unities that tie both Sunnis and Shi’a together.
I think I’ll translate Dr. Enayat’s book in Arabic.
Friday, August 13, 2004
The Multiplicity of Iraqi Identities, and What It All Means.
Over the past week, I’ve been busy organizing a conference on Iraqi identity, to be held in Amman in early January. When I think of the subject these days, I often recall a cold winter’s day in Baghdad in 1981 where I had been for the past four months, doing research for my PhD dissertation. I was looking at the card catalogue in the Iraqi Academy of Sciences (majma’ al-ilmi al-Iraqi), a superb repository of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Kurdish and Semitic language books and manuscripts. I chanced to meet another visiting scholar at the card catalogue table that day, and we fell into a fascinating conversation on Iraqi history. Because he had provided me with a lot of information, some of which may have been considered controversial by the authorities (this was the second year of the Iraq-Iran war and the Baathist regime was persecuting anybody it thought had dissident ideas), I wanted to thank him for his substantial contribution. I thought the best thing would be to introduce myself, as a way to set the relationship on an even keel. After I had done so, I waited for him to reciprocate, but after a few moments of embarrassed silence, he finally said with a big smile, “ana ‘ubaydi” ( I am an ‘Ubaydi) and walked off.
For Iraqis, or anyone who knows Iraqi society well, this was a clue that put this particular scholar’s identity within a readily identifiable social, religious, economic and political context. However, that context was prone to interpretation.On one level, the statement, "ana 'ubaydi" unravelled the man’s identity as if it were a loosely knit sweater. On the other, it enveloped him with even more ambiguity. Let me start with the ascertainable facts. The ‘Ubayd were, and still are, a famous tribe that had settled in Iraq some time before the Islamic era (in other words, before the seventh century). Eventually, they carved out diras or territorial districts over which they held full sway, challenging any visitor or stranger to pay a khuwa or transit tax to traverse the district, or use the tribe’s wells. The Ubayd were split into several clans or families; some settled in Mosul (northern Iraq) but the more famous clans established themselves in Baghdad. The Al-Shawi family became the most important liason between the Iraqi tribes and the Mamluk government of Baghdad in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, until one of their leaders quarreled with a Mamluk governor and their star eventually waned. The Ubayd were, generally speaking, Sunni but as I have suggested in a previous post, this did not preclude Shi’a clans from associating with the parent tribe. Finally, it is worth noting that the ‘Ubayd tribe in Baghdad settled down to urban pursuits more successfully than other tribes in Iraq; in fact, their leaders became so urbane that the name itself became but a calling card. While it still recalled a glorious tribal past, the tribe’s historic exploits were not matched by its physical presence in twentieth century Baghdad. Partly because of the rapid development of the capital, the ‘Ubayd’s core constituency, the tribe lost its physical cohesion and became primarily a supra-identity that could be used to explain, or obscure a number of facets of a person’s corporate or individual personality.
And so to get back to the ‘Ubaydi scholar I met in the majma’ al-ilmi. The Ubayd’s long-standing affiliation with Baghdad was such that I could assume that he was from Baghdadi family, that he was most probably a Sunni, and that he no longer was strongly tied to the infrastructure of his tribal past (in other words, he was not likely to pay a visit to the tribal mudhif or assembly house, if one still existed, in Baghdad). But what did that mean, in the end? Did it get me any closer to the man's INDIVIDUAL identity, or was I only ascertaining his abstract, CORPORATE affiliation? In this case, the category of "Ubaydi" could be used either as an institutional marker (delineating origin, religious background and social status), or as a cloak in which all of these things were to be preceded with a question mark. By throwing out the term, "ubaydi", the scholar I met in the majma' al-ilmi knew full well that he was protecting himself by hiding behind the known facts, which would not give him away.
The points I want to make are two. On the one level, identity takes many forms, all of them susceptible to change. The supposed remission of tribal identity under the Baathist regime was interpreted by many as the strengthening of an urban, "modernized" affiliation that had forever wiped out the older, corporate, and in some ways, anti-state identity of a previous generation. Quite possibly this may have happened in many instances. People HAD shed their tribal identity to take on a more citified, perhaps more pro-government view. But the phenomenon has only grown in strength in post-war Iraq. In fact, the resurgence of Iraqi tribes in 2003-2004 is quite astonishing. Where did they spring from? It is true that Saddam Hussein had created tribes from scratch in the sanctions decade immediately preceding the war, but the "invention" of tribes notwithstanding, a huge number of the older tribes had come out in the open, and begun to reassert their tribal identity.Obviously, the call of the tribe was still potent enough to reassert itself in the post-Saddam era, which means that under the monarchy and the first Republican regimes, it had not died out all but been in remission. Leaving aside the fabrication of identities for political purposes, which probably had a lot to do with the rapid re-identification of Iraqis as tribesmen, I just want to reiterate that identities are constantly in free flow; they are fluctuating views of constantly changing situations on the ground.
The second point is, quite naturally, that identity formation grows within a CONTEXT. If you do not understand the social, economic, cultural and political underpinnings of a society, you cannot understand either its corporate or individual identities, affiliations or loyalties. Anyone who tries to pinpoint an Iraqi in terms of a static rubric (Sunni/Shi'i/Kurd/Assyrian/Sabean/Turcoman)will be forever lost in the wilderness. And he/she will probably deserve to be so.
Thursday, July 15, 2004
AU REVOIR
ON HIATUS TILL JULY 23rd. THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST.
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
The Decline of the Shoe Industry in Iraq.
Once, not so long ago, you could visit a skilled shoemaker in Baghdad who would take your foot measurements and design shoes to your liking. The shoes were always made from fine Iraqi leather, usually kid leather, and were every bit as supple and comfortable as Italian or Spanish shoes today. However I am told that those days are gone. In the wake of the American entry in Baghdad, tanners, who worked animal hides (usually that of sheep, goats or water buffalo)into leather, have been more or less ruined by the creation of a tax-free economy; they have watched foreign entrepreneurs move to Iraq and pay higher prices for the raw material necessary for making good shoes. Of course, skilled craftsmanship has been on the wane in Iraq for quite some time. Still, the Iraqi shoe industry struggled through thick and thin to preserve its traditions and continue production throughout the lean Baathist years, so it’s a loss for all of us that it has succumbed to the imperatives of globalization.
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a similar situation developed in the Iraqi provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The impact of the world market on Ottoman Iraq, as in all the Ottoman provinces, is well known. Take any important commodity and chart its course over time and the first thing that you’ll notice is that the commodity in question gets priced out of reach for the local merchant. But the wealthy export merchants, or those Iraqis or Syrians or Egyptians who tied themselves to the European market, end up comfortable in both worlds. For instance, Sarah Shields’s excellent book tackles the shoe industry’s transformation, from inexpensive slippers made for the local market to shoes and boots, using not Iraqi but French leather, and bought exclusively by the rich Mosulis. However, and this is a key argument, she contends that rather than this being a linear development, in which Iraqi foreign-affiliated merchants subverted the local economy by selling off local commodities to Europeans, thus making the same commodities too exorbitant for local taste, the European-allied merchant himself was so stitched in to the rich fabric of local/regional society that he basically buffered the “impact” of the world market. Because the Iraqi middleman was himself dependent on the local economy for supplies of both raw and finished goods, he had two clienteles that he was forced to attend to: the regional supplier in the villages of northern Iraq, and the European merchant and/or shipper. If he did not appease the regional supplier, he could not sell to the European merchant.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century. With Iraq’s economy just getting off the ground, it is worthwhile to ask: who are the local suppliers that could rein in the Iraqi middleman today? Where is the counterbalance to selling off the Iraqi economy, lock, stock and barrel? How can Iraq produce a relatively strong and independent tanners’ or leather producers’ association in a short enough time to forestall the sale of this particular commodity? I’m not an economist but I’d sure like to hear from those who are on what to do.
Thursday, July 8, 2004
Two Historians of Another Era: Abbas Al-Azzawi and Ya’qub Sarkis.
The Iraqi historians I met on my two trips to Baghdad are inheritors of a great tradition, that of Ya’qub Sarkis and ‘Abbas al-‘Azzawi, even though that tradition is now somewhat frayed, and Sarkis and ‘Azzawi are no longer the household names they once were. The first, Ya’qub Na’um Sarkis was an amateur historian, archivist, bibliographer and philologist who came from a wealthy family background and never had to work for his livelihood, the second, ‘Abbas al-‘Azzawi was a lawyer by profession. In Sarkis’s and ‘Azzawi’s period (roughly from the 1930’s to 1950’s), the historical profession went from being a universalistic field of knowledge, and a generalist’s discipline with deep roots in the tradition of Islamic learning (ta’rikh, or the term used for history was one of the subjects taught in madrasas or Islamic schools, along with other such subjects as grammar and religious exegesis) to a more rigorous, positivist “science” that drew heavily from Western traditions of scholarship from the Second World War onwards. Baghdad University, instituted in the 1950’s, taught that history must be “objective” and factual. Sarkis and ‘Azzawi wrote outside of those boundaries; even though their works were narratives and used documents to buttress their claims to historical authenticity, they were idiosyncratic in the sense that they followed earlier patterns of historiography, both Arab/Islamic and European, (‘Azzawi’s volumes are chronologies, not Western-type histories, even though they are enormously informative) and sometimes resembled encyclopedia treatises more than historical articles.
Where Sarkis and ‘Azzawi stood out, however, was in their terrific facility in languages, both regional (Arabic, of course, but also Farsi, Ottoman, Kurdish, Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Assyrian etc.) and European. Sarkis, a Christian, used the diverse languages of the Bible as a matter of course; ‘Azzawi mastered Farsi and Ottoman for his reading pleasure as well as for his more practical pursuits as a lawyer. Their histories are peppered with footnotes in a multitude of languages, and they used the documents of the periods under study with an alacrity that is now long forgotten. Today, after decades of research in Arabic, English and French alone (except for those leftist historians that studied in the USSR and read Russian), there is an encouraging change towards doing history in ALL the languages of the region. The reasons are many. First, during the sanctions era of the 1990’s, very little books and articles in any language entered Iraq. This necessitated rediscovering the books and manuscripts that had been thought of as archaic in the past, but were now, under more sustained study, seen to be valuable adjuncts to Arabic sources (and, under Baathist rule, all languages in the world remained adjunct to Arabic). Also, a massive sweep of private libraries in Ancient and Semitic languages was undertaken by the supervisors of the state libraries and archival repositories; these new holdings were sometimes, but not always, made available to professional historians.
However late, the return to the languages and cultures of the region is an extremely welcome development.The histories of 'Imad Abdul-Salam Rauf blend primary Ottoman sources with Arabic to create a much deeper portrayal of Iraqi society from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, and Kamal Mudhhar Ahmad's book on Kirkuk draws on Kurdish sources to illuminate an important period in Iraqi history. However, there is a big difference between the language facilities of Sarkis and ‘Azzawi, and the more linguistically adept historians of the present. In Sarkis and ‘Azzawi’s time, Farsi, Ottoman, Kurdish, even Aramaic and Assyrian were a lived tradition, coexisting alongside Arabic as a matter of course. Today, it’s a tradition that has been curtailed for so long that the learning of languages has become a technique only; some historians (but not all)know enough regional languages to decipher the formulaic phrases in the court records of the Ottoman provinces but cannot speak the language properly. Having lost the cultural context of the early twentieth century, where minorities and majority lived cheek by jowl and learned the traditions of their neighbors, modern Iraqi historiography has become narrower and less assured, much to the detriment of us all.
Sunday, July 4, 2004
Wealthy Sarah, and the Other Misadventures of Nazim Pasha
About six or seven ago, I fell into a conversation with the wonderful Mrs. Nuzha Al-Akrawi, one of my late grandmother’s friends. Sadly, Mrs Akrawi has since passed away, but I remember that particular conversation as if it were yesterday. We began to discuss the case of Sara al-zingina (Wealthy Sarah), an Armenian woman who in her youth, managed to beguile the much older Ottoman governor of Baghdad, Nazim Pasha. The story was recorded for posterity by the Iraqi writer, Mr. Khayri Al-Din al-Umari but only after it had already made the rounds as gossip. Mrs Akrawi had actually met Sara and relayed vivid details of her later life when, unkempt and disheveled, the elderly Sara made her way across Baghdad, chasing down her lost fortune.
Sara was a seventeen-year-old beauty when she met the much older Nazim Pasha, then governor in Baghdad (for eleven months in 1910-1911). She had been invited to a party that the Governor had thrown for the foreign community on a riverboat anchored on the Tigris. Being the niece of the Nazim Pasha’s accountant, Sara was immediately introduced to him. From the moment he set eyes on her, Nazim Pasha wanted to marry her. But the more he pressed his suit, the more Sara and her family resisted his blandishments. Of course, there was the age factor (Nazim Pasha was 62), and perhaps also the religious issue. Most of all, Sara had inherited a considerable amount of property from her father, making her a very rich woman, so she was not in a hurry to settle down when there was still so much living to do.
Because of Nazim Pasha’s relentless pursuit, however, Sara’s brothers and mother decided to spirit her away to another city or even a different country. The ruse worked; I’m not sure whether Sara actually left Baghdad or she was sent to the Iraqi countryside to escape the Pasha’s attentions. Whatever the real story, the old Pasha felt rebuffed once too often and eventually gave up all hope of marrying Sara, retiring to his mansion in Baghdad to deliberate on much more substantial issues.
In his case, there were several, and they were all of considerable import. First, as I wrote in an earlier post, Nazim Pasha incurred the enmity of the British consul and merchants by planning to raze down their properties to enlarge Rasheed Street. Second, and even more worrisome to the British, was Nazim Pasha’s zeal in reforming the Sixth Army, which was stationed in Baghdad. No expense was to be spared in this attempt to turn the ramshackle army into a fighting force. The British Consul’s spies fed him alarming reports of huge guns being brought into revitalize Ottoman defenses, and the interminable training of troops taking place night and day. The British were worried because the more thoughtful already knew that heavy German influence on the Ottomans both in Istanbul and in the provinces were provoking anti-British sentiments. Five years away from the First World War, there must have been already some uneasy foreboding in the air. Finally, Nazim Pasha embarked on furious campaigns against the Iraqi tribes which created a lot of dissension in Baghdad, particularly since he attempted to defeat the tribes in one fell swoop, strongly testing his unprepared troops.
Nazim Pasha was recalled to Istanbul, undoubtedly because of British complaints (the Ottoman Sultan still heeded the British, even though the Germans were becoming the preponderant force at court). Eventually he became Minister of War, only to be shot dead at the door of his Ministry in 1913 by a rival Turkish group. And what became of Sara? The story is that she confined her father’s fortune to a disreputable lawyer and he spent it all.
Thursday, July 1, 2004
The Street that was Straight
The late Mr. Albert Hourani, longtime dean of Middle East studies at Oxford, once remarked that one of the differences between Baghdad and Cairo was that parts of the city of Cairo had been designed and built along European lines in the nineteenth century while Baghdad had to await the coming of the British in 1917 to enter the era of urban renewal. While his statement is, in essence, correct, because the massive redesign of the city was indeed given impetus to by the British occupation, the first street cut from north to south in Baghdad was the pet project of several Ottoman governors; but it was only under Khalil Pasha that the street was completed, and formally opened it in 1916. In 1925, the British paved the street and expanded it, and under its penultimate name, Rasheed Street, it developed into the first straight artery in Baghdad. Rasheed Street started from Bab al-Muazzam (or the old northern gate of Baghdad) and ended in the “east”, Bab al-Sharqi (which, despite its name, really was the site of the southern gate of the city).
The story of Rasheed Street is not just the story of the impact of European architectural standards on Iraqi/Ottoman/Arab form. It is also the story of a political contest between a belatedly resurgent Ottoman regime in Baghdad and the British merchants and consuls who were attempting to impose their will on a city that was still technically part of the Ottoman orbit. It is also the story of Baghdad’s landowners and merchants, its embryonic press establishment and the budding local politicians that were attempting to curry favor both with the Ottomans and the British in their bid for political position. In fact, the building of Rasheed street became the microcosm for the city’s pre-war tensions, which only exploded with the beginning of hostilities in 1914.
In the years leading up to the establishment of Baghdad’s main commercial thoroughfare, the Ottoman governor that preceded Khalil Pasha, Nazim Pasha incurred the wrath both of the British merchant houses and the influential Iraqi families in Baghdad in his zeal to begin the Rasheed street project. In 1910-1911, he began to pull down the mansions of some of the greatest landowners in Baghdad, offering them, it was said, paltry compensation for their loss. His argument was the same to whoever dared to complain: Baghdad needed a main artery and it had to be broad. The municipality of Baghdad, composed of some of the best families in town, balked and set an enormous sum for compensation of lost property, and then tried to cut their own deals with the Pasha in secret. The British commercial houses, meanwhile, were equally horrified. The famous Lynch merchant shipping company stood to lose its main offices if the street was to be continued further, and the British Consul sent Nazim Pasha a stormy memorandum ordering him to cease and desist because his construction work was liable to cut right through the gardens of the British Legation.As a result of all of all of these attacks, Nazim Pasha was recalled to Istanbul. His successor was not as aggressive, and was able to work out agreements both with the British as well as Iraqis to continue the project, but with several detours to mollify Nazim Pasha’s aggrieved constituents.
In March 2004, I tried to pass by the street with the elegant colonnades but was told that it had been closed off by the American army because it housed the Central Bank, which was always prone to attack. And in fact, an attack did occur several weeks back in which a Bank guard was killed by unknown assailants. I saw the street last in June 2003; it had become a trash-strewn, scruffy area where forlorn children lived on dirty pavements. How different it was in 1916. I’ve seen old photographs that show it in its prime. I think that one of the first municipal improvements in the new Iraq must be to return Rasheed street to its historic grandeur, and in the process, house the disenfranchised population that have made it their home.
Saturday, June 26, 2004
The Fascinating Saga of Dhannun Ayyub, an Early Literary Figure in Iraq
There have been some spectacular memoirs written in Iraq over the last forty years, but none perhaps as frank and as vivid as Dhannun Ayyub’s. Ayyub was a young man from Mosul who left for Baghdad in the late 1920’s to enter the Teacher Training College, and to join the ranks of a steadily growing cadre of teachers sent to educate young boys and girls in high schools across the country. Ayyub thought of himself as a freethinker, and a practicing libertine. He spent a good part of his youth living in common-law marriage with his uncle’s wife; and his later marriages were so unconventional that they shocked even his family and closest friends. An avowed believer in avant-garde literature, especially Russian and French authors, he translated many books into Arabic and joined a neophyte literary movement in the 1930’s that sought to overturn established canons of literary and cultural taste.
But it was only with his contribution to Al-Majalla, a periodical that saw itself as storming the reactionary ramparts of early Iraqi biography, literary criticism, politics and poetry, that Ayyub finally achieved fame as the iconoclast that he’d always wanted to be. However, as always in Iraqi society, literary currents could not exist outside of politics. According to Ayyub, al-Majalla initiated a lively debate between the many political factions in Iraq; between Communists, moderate Arab Nationalists, extreme Arab Nationalists and Iraqi firsters. Throughout the six years of its existence, which spanned the Second World War and its aftermath, Ayyub tried to keep the literary journal on an even keel, as well as to publish innovative material at the same time. Eventually, however, the cost of putting out the journal took its toll and it folded, but not before Ayyub had brought in a new editor, Fahd, who became the most famous Communist leader in Iraq, later on executed by the Iraqi government of the day.
It is those forgotten stories that makes Ayyub’s autobiography such riveting reading. For instance, he recounts the story of one member of the Iraqi Communist party that had actually joined the Socialist side in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 (I really had no idea that Spain was a cause to live and die for among the Iraqi intelligentsia of that period); he makes a case for pre-revolutionary Russian Romantic literature as being one of the essential stepping stones to Marxism in Iraq, and he narrates the fascinating story of how he was sent on a mission by the Communists to have lunch with the British Intelligence officer responsible for the country’s early democratization experiment. Besides his flirtation with Communist doctrine (which Ayyub explains beautifully), there is much to recommend Ayyub’s life story. Even though the first volume begins slowly, the rest of the books detail a most extraordinary time, and an even more extraordinary man, and should be essential reading for all those who are interested in the social, literary and political history of Iraq from 1920 to 1958.
Saturday, June 19, 2004
The Iraqi Press in the Tens, Twenties and Thirties (PART ONE)
There are so many parallels between the British occupation of Iraq in 1917 and the American occupation in 2003 that the British journalist Robert Fisk is writing a book about them. But I’ll bet that there are similarities that will elude even him. One is the incredible outpouring of newspapers in both eras. While the development of the print media in Baghdad, Mosul and Suleymaniya has been commented upon at length in 2003-2004, little is known, at least in the West, of Iraq’s first newspaper rush, and the fledgling editorial talents that created the earliest commercial press in the country.
The first newspaper ever published in Baghdad was Al-Zawra’, which was started up by the reformist governor, Midhat Pasha (1869-1871). But this was a government paper that had little competition from private sources. Forty years later, under less stringent censorship rules(brought on by the Constitutional Revolution in Turkey in 1908), a number of Iraqi as well as foreign-owned papers made their appearance. About thirty-six papers and magazines were published in Iraq by Iraqis before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. For example, an outstanding weekly, Al-Riyadh, began publication in 1910. Owned by Suleiman Al-Dakhil, who is considered to be the first journalist/editor from Najd (Central Arabia) to own and publish a newspaper, it was put together in Baghdad, due in no small part to the fact that Arabia and Iraq had long been linked by longstanding cultural, economic and social ties. Although it only lasted for four years, Al-Riyadh published original and path-breaking reports on Central Arabian tribes and dynasties, and courted the Ottomans by openly appealing to them to intervene against British schemes in the Arabian peninsula.
Al-Riyadh was only one of the many newspapers published at the turn of the twentieth century, of course. Other, Iraqi-owned newspapers of note were Al-Raqib, published by the crusading journalist Abdul-Latif Thunayan and Sada Babil, owned and operated by the two Christian intellectuals, Dawud Sliwu and Yusif Ghanima. Echoes of those papers continue until today. For instance, Al-Nahda was established by Ibrahim Hilmi Umar and Muzahim Amin al-Pachachi in 1913. Al-Nahda lives on today because Al-Pachachi’s son, Dr. Adnan Al-Pachachi, established a paper under the same name in 2003. Having read many of its issues, I can honestly say that it is one of the most sober and well-researched papers currently published in Baghdad.
In 1917, General Maude entered Baghdad as a “liberator”. The fate of Iraq’s media establishment was to change radically under the British occupation. There are some theses that have been written both in foreign as well as in Iraqi Universities to show a connection between the establishment of an oppositional Iraqi press and the growth of nationalism in Iraq in the 1920’s and 1930’s. But, much as in the same vein as the touted connection between the Iraqi press today and the growth of Iraqi nationalism, was the link really so concrete and so immediate? Who was writing in the press in the 1920’s and 1930’s and who was reading? What sectors of society, if any, were moved to action because of certain newspaper editorials or articles? What was the relationship between the press and political parties in Iraq under the British occupation? This will be answered (I hope) in my next blog entry. TO BE CONTINUED.
Monday, June 14, 2004
“She is Iraq’s Um Kulthoum”
Many years ago, a Jordanian visitor to Iraq was invited to a women’s only party at a lavish Baghdad estate. This was in the late fifties, when the monarchy was still in existence, and the rumblings of revolution had yet to be heard. A graceful young woman in a cream dress got up and began to sing. Surprised that she had been invited to an afternoon of entertainment for which she had been unprepared, the Jordanian looked around at her hosts and asked who the young woman was. The Iraqi matriarch sitting next to her sniffed, then said icily, “My dear, this is Iraq’s Um Kulthoum, Afifa Iskander”.
Um Kulthoum, for those who don’t know of her, was an Egyptian phenomenon, a singer with an amazing voice and an even more amazing following. Every Thursday night, Arabs from the Nile to the Euphrates would tune into Egypt’s state radio to listen to her newest song, which would go on for several enthralling hours. It is said that her funeral brought out so many thousands of weeping Egyptians in 1975 that it upstaged that of Jamal Abdul-Nasser’s, the deceased President of Egypt.
To compare any singer to Um Kulthoum was the biggest compliment a singer could receive, especially in the fifties (this is before Arab rock had been invented). Afifa Iskander deserved it, not because of her overpowering voice nor her magnetic presence (factors which had made Um Kulthoum a star) but because of the warmth of her personality and the astonishing way she sang Iraqi ballads and made them her own. She was Iraq’s Um Kulthoum because she sang Iraqi songs that spoke to Iraqis everywhere in the same way that Um Kulthoum, despite her great Arab following, sang primarily to Egyptians; and she became a national icon precisely because she was able to sing songs that did not imitate the style of Egyptian or Lebanese chanteuses, but were profoundly, natively Iraqi.
In March 2004, I accompanied two elderly men on a visit to Afifa Iskander’s apartment, overlooking the Tigris river. The woman who received us at the door was getting on in years and obviously not well, but she was warm and amiable and quickly made us comfortable. Of course, the past came alive again under our questioning. She told us that she had taken early retirement after Saddam Hussein had come to power because she sensed she never wanted to sing for this man, as she had sung for all of Iraq’s past monarchs and Prime Ministers. He had tried to entice her with money and presents but she refused them all. And so for thirty-five years, she had kept a low profile, seeing friends and paying private visits to people whom she had kept up a close relationship with over the years, but she never undertook any public recitals.
While we were there, a neighbor came in and read our fortunes in our coffee cups; Afifa sang a medley of her old songs, and the river, spread out before us like glass, turned grayer and darker as the evening wore on. I thought about the visit later. Here was a woman whose livelihood was singing, and yet she had willingly circumscribed her own source of revenue so as not to sing for a dictator. How many of Iraq’s Baathist-connected oligarchs, the new rich in Iraq, could have said the same thing?
Sunday, June 13, 2004
A Tribe of the Mid-Euphrates, and the Vagaries of Change
While much attention has been spent on the Shammar tribe recently, because of shaikh Ghazi Al-Yawar’s elevation to the Presidency of Iraq, little has been written on another, equally large and complex tribal confederation, the Muntafiq. The latter inhabited the fertile lands of the classical sawad (the black earth of Mesopotamia), now known as the mid- to lower Euphrates districts. Perhaps to a greater extent than the Shammar in the north of the country, the Muntafiq were a composite of many tribes and sections made up of occupationally diverse, religiously mixed members. The leadership of the Muntafiq was, and still is, vested in the Sadoun family, which is Sunni while the majority of the clan heads and membership are Shi’a. In Iraq, this is par for the course; most of the tribes in the country have similar histories. Moreover, this is also far from being only a tribal feature; in Iraq, for instance, there are some Shi’a shrines that are administered by Sunni superintendents, the one at Samarra being a notable example.
The point here is that, like most social forces, tribes in Iraq are a microcosm of society at large. They are not immune from social pressures nor are they isolated from the changes that restructure the social order. The fact that the tribesmen “belonging” to the Muntafiq tribe are Shiite is not a novelty in Iraq, except to the Americans. And the fact that they converted from Sunnism to Shiism in the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries is well known among historians of Iraq. So why this focus on the “oddity” of the arrangement, especially in Western press reports? This is not to claim that relations were always smooth between the tribesman and his shaikh; there are dozens of stories of Muntafiq sheikhs both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who grabbed tribal lands and recorded them under their own names. But I don’t think there was serious religious friction among the Muntafiq until, of course, Saddam Hussein’s regime began to play up to the Sunni leadership of the mixed tribes in the south, and to attempt to coopt them.
Even then, how Sunni was the Sunni leadership of the Muntafiq? Beyond the Sadoun family, how many clan leaders were Sunnis? As I mentioned in an earlier post, Suq al-Shuyukh, the name of which is translated as the market of the sheikhs, grew out of an encampment to which Muntafiq tribesmen used to repair to buy and sell their wares. Gradually, it became more permanent and grew even further; eventually, it became the “capital” of the Muntafiq tribe. More importantly, Suq al-Shuyukh became a cultural capital for the Shiite tribesmen of the region, ranked, by some accounts, as a close second to the holiest of holies, Najaf. In the early twentieth century, it evolved still further to become the administrative center of one of the large clans that made up the Muntafiq, the Ajwad. The Ajwad made up one of the three ruling tribes of the Muntafiq confederation, and its ruling house was Shiite.
Perhaps it is time for historians of the country, whether Arab or Western, to note an elementary rule, that the social, religious and political map of the Iraqi tribes is always changing. Tribal confederations are, by their very nature, always in flux. Tribal sections break off and join other confederations; the original parent tribe morphs into another; nomads become farmers, livestock traders become shipping magnates, and so on and so forth. For observers of Iraqi tribes to label them ONLY as Sunni or Shiite is to ignore the richness of their history in the country. In fact, its downright ridiculous, especially when identity is so complex, varied and fluctuating. That, after all, is what life is all about, and historians, more so than other professionals, should reflect that.
Friday, June 11, 2004
Desegregating a Baghdad Cafe
In Baghdad today, changes occur by the minute. It would be downright cynical to say that they frequently occur at the end of a gun, but I have to say I’ve become cynical with age. Still, positive changes can be rolled back simply by not standing firm. I’m reminded of that when I recollect my first entry into the Shahbander Café, an icon of the new Iraq. By the time my colleagues and I had arrived in the city last June, it had become a familiar Baghdadi haunt for journalists, photographers, ethnographers and cultural historians. Something about that cavernous interior, with its wooden benches and hookah-smoking clientèle had captured the attention both of the Western press and returning locals.
But to start at the top. One Friday morning, our group went to the famous al-Mutannabi street, the street of the booksellers, and, after browsing its dusty stalls and the scattered books displayed on the pavement, we accidentally bumped into Dr. Lamia al-Gailani, an Iraqi archaeologist, and Mrs. Amal al-Khudhairi. Amal had been the patron of Bait al-Iraqi, a celebrated cultural salon which once brought artists, writers and musicians together in a gracious setting on Baghdad’s most famous street, the Rasheed. The house was bombed during the war, one tragedy among many in a city whose whole history seemed to spread before us like a catalogue of abuses. A chance remark from me on whether a woman could now enter the Shahbander Café, traditionally a man’s preserve, set Lamia’s eyes ablaze. “I don’t see why not”, she said forcefully, “Wait, I’ll come with you”.
I remember my trepidation when I entered the café: I was breaking a social convention of old Baghdad that women do not enter traditional coffee houses in the city. But heck, this was the new Iraq. I was not going to fraternize with the chess-playing, tea-swigging, cigarette smoking patrons of the cafe, I was just going to order a Pepsi. Well, as it turned out, this was then…. Two months ago, I again went to the Shahbander, this time to meet with a history Professor from Baghdad University. But lo and behold, he was standing outside on the pavement. When I naturally moved towards the door of the café, he looked at me in an embarrassed way and said almost too quickly, “Come and meet my friend Ahmad, who’s got the best-stocked bookstore in town”.
So there you have it. Something so simple as entering a coffee shop in Old Baghdad in 2004 became an indicator of gauche expatriate ethics. I could have forced the issue, of course. But would it have resulted in instant desegregation? I leave that for my feminist readers to respond.
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
In This Manner I Knew Them: The Writings of Jaafar Al-Khalili
Several weeks ago, I met Farida, the daughter of the famous Shiite reformist writer, Jaafar Al-Khalili. Al-Khalili was an institution in Iraq. He had written six or seven volumes on Iraq and the Arab world, all under the same title, Hakadha ‘Araftuhum (or In This Manner I Knew Them). His first two books traced the contours of his relationship with Shiite shaykhs and intellectuals in Najaf, Karbala, and the country in-between. He later on successfully replicated that model by examining his relationships with other personalities throughout the Arab world.
Farida Al-Khalili now lives in Amman, Jordan and works at a Jordanian Ministry. She told me the horrific story of how the Baathist authorities had destroyed her father’s library, and burned all its manuscripts. This had happened several years before the now infamous looting and burning of state libraries and archives after the American occupation of Iraq. The only difference seemed to be that the destruction of Jaafar Al-Khalili’s library collection went unheralded at the time, and now is all but forgotten. The tragedy is all the greater if one remembers that the National Library as well as the House of Archives in Baghdad relied, to a large extent, on the holdings of rare and historic private libraries for the mainstay of their collections, and that Jaafar Al-Khalili’s own collected works were reportedly among the best in the country.
The copy of Al-Khalili’s work that I have in my hand is the first in the Hakadha ‘Araftuhum series, and, perhaps for that reason, may be among the most ambitious. In it Al-Khalili describes his meetings with several different personalities over the early span of his career as a journalist, editor and literary personality. Most of the articles are taken from the journal, Al-Hatif, published in the 1940’s. Among the most fascinating portraits are those of shaykh Muhammad Hussein Haidar, the shaykh of Suq Al-Shuyukh, a declining tribal market town in southern Iraq that still managed to compete with Najaf as a cultural hub of Shiite society; the lawyer Abdul-Muhsin al-Qassab, an ambitious young man from Nassiriya (southern Iraq) who bent his principles to pursue a lawyer’s career to such a devastating degree that he lost his literary “soul”; and with different members of the Kashif Al-Ghita scholarly family in Najaf. Al-Khalili’s style was fluid and supple; he did not write hagiographies, but absorbing accounts of peoples’ lives, warts and all. Among his most animated recollections are those that describe the relationships between Shiite scholars and the rest of society, and the unexpected wit and humor that enlivened those exchanges. Iraqi society is known for its mordant sense of humor, but the sometimes hilarious anecdotes found in Al-Khalili’s book are as delightful as they are unpredictable.
Most of all, in describing a society that was in the throes of an uneven form of modernization, Al-Khalili’s book is almost unique in its examination of the different influences on the Shiite social order, and the underlying context for changes in the ideological, religious, literary and cultural movements in the greater region around Najaf and Karbala. Unlike today, where there is a desperate polarization between religion and secularism, Al-Khalili’s book details an age in which the heady currents of modernization mixed with the still pervasive influences of religion and ideology, to produce an entirely local dynamic corresponding to local needs.
Thursday, June 3, 2004
A Landholding Family with Merchant Roots
Dr. Adnan al-Pachachi is a highly respected Iraqi statesman who chose to return to Iraq to rebuild the country even though he could quite as effortlessly have lived the rest of his life in easy retirement in London. But the Pachachis go back a long way in Iraq; perhaps the spur to Dr. Adnan’s return was precisely the family’s compelling history in the country. In March, I was lucky enough to meet with him in Baghdad. To the rapt attention of the other guests at the table, including my father and sister, he chose to spend a major part of the evening detailing his family’s roots in Iraq.
The Pachachis were big merchants with enormous clout in the Ottoman era. One member of the family, Nu’man Al-Pachachi (who went by the honorific, “Chalabi” or big merchant) became the rais al-tujjar or chief of the merchants under the Mamluk administration in Baghdad in the early nineteenth century. As recounted in an earlier post, the Mamluks were Georgian slaves, originally of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and later on, of other provincial governors in the wider Ottoman realm. Disposing of Imperial favor, and inspired by a form of proto-nationalist feeling, the Mamluks quickly became the law of the land in the Iraqi provinces of Baghdad and Basra. When the Ottomans finally sent troops to overthrow the last Mamluk Pasha (or governor) of Baghdad, Dawud, in 1831, it was precisely the Mamluk’s ability to generate local solidarity with the large families of Baghdad – the Pachachis, Alusis and Jamils- that bought them time against the Ottoman offensive.
In the early twentieth century, the Pachachis lived in the Baghdad quarter of Ammar Sab’ Abkar, which was a large plot of land that was watered by kurud, or water channels. Next to them was the property of the British Resident, later Ambassador in Iraq. The family had used their financial acumen to buy property and become landowners. But they were landowners who also patronized learning, especially religious learning. One of the most important mosques in Baghdad was owned and administered by a Pachachi who also was a patron of reformist Islamist sheikhs such as those from the Alusi family
Finally, in the twentieth century, the Pachachis completed the transformation from merchants to landowners and then to politicians. They became a political family par excellence, producing Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers and Ministers of Petroleum. Dr. Adnan is therefore from a long and illustrious line of Iraqi power brokers. In an interesting twist, he confirmed that the Pachachis were originally from a section of the Shammar tribe, the same tribe from which shaikh Ghazi al-Yawar hails. The latter, of course, became President of Iraq after Dr. Adnan’s graceful exit. I am inclined to think that it is precisely because of this shared history that whatever disagreements exist between the two men will blow over. Just like everything else in Iraq, this is but a family quarrel that will subside in the manner of a summer squall.
Recent Entries
- Meet Me Around the Corner at Cliopatria
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- Iraq and the Notion of Geographical Determinism
- At the Iraqi Embassy in Jordan
- In Memoriam: Dr. Khalid Al-Qassab (1924-2004)
- Poetry and the Women Question in Iraq
- Remembering Mr. Hourani and Dr. Enayat.
- The Multiplicity of Iraqi Identities, and What It All Means.
- AU REVOIR
- The Decline of the Shoe Industry in Iraq.
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