Abstract
In March 1933, a few months before his death, King Faysal I sent some of the more senior politicians in his court a confidential memorandum that described very succinctly how he saw the problems confronting the Iraqi political community more than a decade after the establishment of the Iraqi nation-state:
In Iraq, there are ideas and aspirations that are totally antagonistic. There are innovating youngsters, including the government officials; the zealots; the Sunna; the Shi‘a; the Kurds; the non-Muslim minorities; the tribes; the shaykhs, [and] the vast ignorant majority ready to adopt any harmful notion … Kurdish, Shi‘i and Sunni tribes who only want to shake off every form of [central] government. My heart is full of sadness and pain because, to my mind, there is no Iraqi nation in Iraq as yet. Rather, there are human masses devoid of any patriotic notion, full of traditions and religious nonsense and absurdities and there is nothing that is binding them together. They are quick to do mischief, inclined towards anarchy, ready to rise at any time against any government whatsoever, and we want … to mold a nation out of these masses … He who understands the difficulty of molding … a nation under such circumstances must recognize the effort necessary for such an achievement.1
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Notes
‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Hasani, Ta’rikh al-wizarat al-‘iraqiyya (Saida, 1953), part III, pp. 286–93.
E. B. Main, ‘Iraq: a Note’, Journal of the Royal Central Asiatic Society, vol. 20, July 1933, p. 343. The Colonial Office in London, too, felt that in case of unification Faysal would probably transfer his crown completely from Iraq to Syria, as Damascus is ‘an infinitely pleasanter town than Baghdad’ and for other reasons.
See Khaldun Sati‘ al-Husry, ‘King Faysal I and Arab Unity 1930–33’, Journal of Contemporary History Vol.10, No.2, April 1975, pp. 330–1. See also pp. 323–4.
And see Yehoshua Porath, ‘Nuri al-Sa‘id’s Arab Unity Programme’ MES vol. 20, no. 4, October 1984, p. 78.
See f.n. 3. And for ‘Abd al-Ilah’s designs on Syria in the late 1940s and early to mid-1950s see Reeva S. Simon, ‘The Hashemite “Conspiracy”: Hashemite Unity Attempts, 1921–1958’, IJMES, Vol.1 (1974), p. 318.
For example, ‘Aziz al-Sayyid Jasim, al-Muthaqqaf al-‘Arabi, July 1970, pp. 8–9; and Th, 10 June 1969;
Ilyas Farah, al-Tarbiya wal-siyasa (Beirut, 1975), p. 35, a speech in Mosul in June 1972;
Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, Maslrat al-thawra fi khutab wa tasrihat al-ra’is (Baghdad, 1971), pp. 58–9; also 63, 95, 134–5, 203–8, 242; ‘Abd al-khaliq al-Samarra’i, Jum, 29 August 1970.
See, for example, an interview with Saddam Husayn, Iraq Today, March 1–15, 1979; Wa‘i al-‘Ummal, February 17, 1979.
Bernard Lewis, History Remembered, Recovered, Invented (Princeton, 1975), p. 11.
Reports in the Iraqi press reproduced in FBIS-Daily Report, 21 June 1989; The Independent (London), 30 August 1989; The Independent Magazine 14 October 1989. For academic studies see, for example, Su‘ad Ra’uf Shir Muhammad, Nuri al-Sa‘id wa dawruhu fi al-siyasa al-‘iraqiyya 1932–1945 (Baghdad, 1988);
‘Abd al-Razzaq Ahmad al-Nasiri, Nuri al-Sa‘id … hatta ‘am 1932 (Baghdad, 1988).
Khaldun Sati‘ al-Husri, ‘King Faysal I and Arab Unity 1930–33’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 10, no. 2, April, 1975, p. 327; based on al-Ikha al-Watani, 14 July 1932.
Khaldun Sati‘ al-Husri (ed.), Mudhakkirat Taha al-Hashimi (Beirut, 1967), pp. 254–9.
For Leonard Wooley’s complaints and account of a decline in archeological digs see Brian M. Fagan, Return to Babylon (Boston, 1979), pp. 250, 276, 279; and see also pp. 248–9. And Sumer, no. 1, sixth year, 1950, p. 225.
Reeva S. Simon, ‘The teaching of History in Iraq Before the Rashid Ali Coup of 1941’, MES, Vol.22, No.1 (January 1986),p. 49
See for example Reeva Simon, ‘The Hashemite “Conspiracy”: Hashemite Unity Attempts, 1921–1958’, IJMES, vol. 5 (1974), pp. 318–21.
The Shahname was a mixture of myth and real history, leaving out altogether such major figures like Cyrus, Cambyses and Xerxes (Bernard Lewis, History, pp. 5, 40; Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet [London, 1986], p. 311). Yet, even the fictitious kings and heroes it introduced, like the noble hero Rustam and the ingenious, inventor-king and tyrant Jamshid, were regarded as true historical figures, and became the subject of great popular interest and admiration. Thus, even though many aspects of this history were described in less than enthusiastic terms, in its entirety Iranian pre-Islamic history gained in Iran an essentially positive connotation. For example, medieval Muslim kings in Iran used to visit sites like Persepolis (commonly believed to have been built by Jamshid), and leave there inscriptions testifying to their respect for their pre-Islamic predecessors (Mottahedeh, pp. 313–14).
See Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London, 1972), pp. 155–64; Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1988), especially pp. 35–8, 57ff.
For the Iraqi letter to the Secretary General of the League see Ha-Aretz, 25 July, 1990. For the ubiquitous claim that Iraq is defending all the Arabs in its war against Iran see, for example, Saddam Husayn to al-Hawadith, 17 April 1981; al-Thawra al-‘Arabiyya, 1980, pp. 7, 18–20, 34; Ilyas Farah, Afaq ‘Arabiyya, November–December 1980, pp. 69–70; Shafiq al-Kamali, a poem, ibid., September 1979, pp. 10–11;
Tariq Aziz, The Iran-Iraq Conflict (London, 1981).
In some cases, like Egypt and Tunisia,this process started a few decades ago. For Egypt during the 1920s and 1930s see Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski, Egypt, Islam and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930 (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986), especially p. 164ff. On the level of political practice, too, local interests are being placed higher than before on the national scale of priorities by the various Arab regimes. In the case of Syria the reference is to the emergence of pan-Syrian notions and later to the alignment with Iran.
For other countries and organizations see Fouad Ajami, ‘The End of Pan-Arabism’ in Tawfic E. Farah (ed.), Pan Arabism and Arab Nationalism (Boulder and London, Westview, 1987), pp. 96–114. See there also a report on a poll carried out in Kuwait University and showing that the pan-Arab ideal no longer enjoys wide support. Another poll reported by Hassan Nafaa (‘Arab Nationalism: a Response’, ibid., p. 145), conducted in ten Arab countries, however, shows opposite results. These polls demonstrate the grave difficulties of conducting field studies that touch upon sensitive political issues in the contemporary Arab world.
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© 1991 Amatzia Baram
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Baram, A. (1991). Conclusion. In: Culture, History and Ideology in the Formation of Ba‘thist Iraq, 1968–89. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21243-9_13
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