Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-t5pn6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T18:43:02.159Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

HYBRID NATIONALISMS: WAṬANĪ AND QAWMĪ VISIONS IN IRAQ UNDER ʿABD AL-KARIM QASIM, 1958–61

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2011

Orit Bashkin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper analyzes Iraqi national narratives in the years from 1958 to 1961 to consider how innovative definitions of Arab nationalisms were affected by worldwide processes of decolonization. It demonstrates how Pan-Arabism was transformed in Qasimite Iraq because of its hybridization with Iraqi patriotism and, concurrently, how various elements of Arabist discourses were integrated into local and patriotic perceptions of Iraqi nationalism. Examining cultural idioms shared by Iraqi intellectuals belonging to different political groups, especially the communists and the Baʿthists, destabilizes a typology that assumes each ideological camp subscribed to a rigidly defined set of well-known historical narratives. The Pan-Arabists in this period often cultivated the notion that Arab nationalism did not entail an ethnic origin but rather the ability to adopt the Arabic language, as well as Arab history and culture, as a marker of one's national and cultural identity. The attempts to adapt Pan-Arab discourses to the specificities of the Iraqi milieu and to build coalitions with as many of the nation's groups as possible meant that the sectarian, anti-Shiʿi, and anti-Kurdish notions that colored Baʿthist discourses in later years were not as prominent in this period.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 43 , Special Issue 2: Relocating Arab Nationalism , May 2011 , pp. 293 - 312
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

Author's note: I thank Peter Wien, Israel Gershoni, and Sara Pursley for all of their help.

1 Hourani, Albert, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Hourani, Albert, “The Arab Awakening, Forty Years Later,” in Studies in Arab History, The Antonius Lectures 1978–1987, ed. Hopwood, Derek (London: Macmillan in association with St Anthony's College, Oxford, and the World of Islam Festival Trust, 1990), 21–40Google Scholar; and Gershoni, Israel and Jankowski, James, eds., Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. On overcoming grand narratives in the historiography of Arab nationalism, see Gelvin, James L., “Pensée 1: ‘Arab Nationalism’ Meets Social Theory,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 10–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On theorizing a new approach to Arab nationalism that takes into consideration the 1960s period while benefiting from the methodological understandings of the scholars of the interwar period, see Choueiri, Youssef M., “Pensée 2: Theorizing Arab Nationalism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 14–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Davis, Eric, Memories of State: Politics, History and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Zubaida, Sami, “The Fragments Imagine the Nation: The Case of Iraq,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 32 (2002): 205–15Google Scholar; and Baram, Amatzia “A Case of Imported Identity: The Modernizing Secular Ruling Elites of Iraq and the Conception of Mesopotamian-Inspired Territorial Nationalism 1922–1992,” Poetics Today 15 (1994): 279–319CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Baram, “A Case of Imported Identity,” 279–319; Dann, Uriel, Iraq under Qassem; A Political History, 1958–1963 (New York: Praeger, 1969)Google Scholar; and Davis, Memories; see also the excellent analysis in Farouk-Sluglett, Marion and Sluglett, Peter, Iraq since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 47–85Google Scholar.

4 Simon, Reeva, Iraq between Two World Wars: The Creation and Implementation of a Nationalist Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Haim, Sylvia, Arab Nationalism: An Anthology (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Marr, Phebe, “The Development of Nationalist Ideology in Iraq, 1921–1941,” The Muslim World 75 (1985): 95–97Google Scholar; Cleveland, William L., The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Satiʿ al-Husri (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; and Tibi, Bassam, Arab Nationalism—Between Islam and the Nation–State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 138–99Google Scholar.

5 For newer approaches to Iraqi nationalism, see also Bashkin, Orit, The Other Iraq (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Wien, Peter, Iraqi Arab Nationalism: Authoritarian, Totalitarian and Pro-Fascist Inclinations, 1932–1941 (New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar; al-Musawi, Muhsin J., Reading Iraq (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006)Google Scholar; and Eppel, Michael, “The Elite, the Effendiyya, and the Growth of Nationalism and Pan-Arabism in Hashimite Iraq, 1921–1958,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 30 (1998): 227–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Iraqi nationalism and Arab nationalism, see Dawisha, Adeed, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

6 Mannheim, Karl, “The Problem of Generations,” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge by Karl Mannheim, ed. Kecskemeti, Paul (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952)Google Scholar.

7 Batatu, Hanna, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 465–764Google Scholar; Rossi, Pierre, “La Culture Nouvelle, mouvement révolutionnaire des intellectuels irakiens,” L'Orient 2 (1958): 61–65Google Scholar; Bashkin, The Other Iraq, chap. 3, 7. See also the essays by Yousif, Abdul-Salaam (“The Struggle for Cultural Hegemony during the Iraqi Revolution”) and Sami Zubaida (“Community, Class and Minorities in Iraqi Politics”) in The Iraqi Revolution of 1958—The Old Social Classes Revisited, ed. Fernea, Robert A. and Louis, William Roger (London: I. B. Tauris 1991)Google Scholar. For autobiographies of intellectuals see Jabra, Jabra Ibrahim, Princesses’ Street: Baghdad Memories (Fayetteville, Ark.: University of Arkansas Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; al-Bayati, ʿAbd al-Wahhab, Tajribati al-Shiʿriyya (Beirut: Manshurat Nizar Kabbani, 1968)Google Scholar; al-Hajj, ʿAziz, Dhakirat al-Nakhl: Safahat min Taʾrikh al-Haraka al-Shuyuʿiyya fi al-ʿIraq (Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashr, 1993)Google Scholar; and Nuri, Bahaʾ al-Din, Mudhakkirat Bahaʾ al-Din Nuri: Sikritir al-Lajna al-Markaziyya li-l-Hizb al-Shuyuʿi al-ʿIraqi (London: Dar al-Hikma, 2001)Google Scholar.

8 Malley, Robert, The Call from Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution, and the Turn to Islam (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Berger, Mark T., “After the Third World? History, Destiny and the Fate of Third Worldism,” Third World Quarterly 25 (2004): 9–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dirlik, Arif, “Spectres of the Third World: Global Modernity and the End of the Three Worlds,” Third World Quarterly 25 (2004): 131–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 For the term “secular religion,” see Mosse, George L., Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966)Google Scholar.

10 On leftist intellectuals working on behalf of the state, see ʿAjina, Rahim, al-Ikhtiyar al-Mutajaddad: Dhikrayat Shakhsiyya wa-Safahat min Masirat al-Hizb al-Shuyuʿi al-ʿIraqi (Beirut: Dar al-Kunuz al-Adabiyya, 1998), 57–65Google Scholar; al-Jawahiri, Muhammad Mahdi, Dhikrayati (Damascus: Dar al-Rafidayn, 1988), 2:211–296Google Scholar; Sharaf, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz and Ahmad, Hind Nuri, ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayati, Nubdha min Hayatihi wa-Muʾallafatihi (Madrid: Arines, 1986), 9–12Google Scholar; and Yousif, Salaam, “The People's Theater of Yusuf Al-‘Ani,” Arab Studies Quarterly 19 (1997): 65–93Google Scholar.

11 The New Iraq 1 (November 1959): 18; The New Iraq 3 (January 1960): 19, 48–49; The New Iraq (February 1962): 26–27.

12 The New Iraq 1 (November 1959): 35.

13 The New Iraq 3 (January 1960): 46–47.

14 The New Iraq 5 (March 1960): 26.

15 Al-Bilad, 22 August 1959, 6; al-Bilad, 13 September 1959, 7.

16 The New Iraq 4 (July 1960): 34.

17 Al-Bilad, 2 April 1959, 6; on Iraqi art in this period, see Fara, Maysaloun, Strokes of Genius—Contemporary Iraqi Art (London: Saqi, 2002)Google Scholar.

18 Iraqi Ministry of Guidance, The Iraqi Revolution in Its Second Year (Baghdad: Ministry of Defense, 1960), 299–302; and Iraqi Ministry of Guidance, The Iraqi Revolution in Its Fourth Year (Baghdad: Times Press, 1962), 299–633, 641.

19 Iraqi Ministry of Guidance, Iraqi Revolution in Its Second Year, 300–303, 309, 361; and Baram, “A Case of Imported Identity,” 301–302.

20 Iraqi Ministry of Guidance, The Iraqi Revolution in Its Third Year (Baghdad: Rabita Press, 1961), 421–25, 440–42, 444–48; 14th July Celebrations Committee, The Iraqi Revolution: One Year of Progress and Achievement (Baghdad: 14th July Celebrations Committee, 1959), 95; al-Bilad, 2 January 1959, 7; al-Bilad, 27 February 1959, 7; al-Ahali, 24 July 1959, 3; al-Bilad, 26 December 1958, 7; al-Bilad, 2 January 1959, 7; al-Bilad, 30 January 1959, 7; al-Bilad, 6 February 1959, 7; al-Bilad, 13 February 1959, 7; al-Bilad, 29 May, 1959, 5; al-Bilad, 25 July 1959, 6.

21 Iraqi Ministry of Guidance, Revolution in Its Second Year, 411–12; Revolution in Its Third Year, 426–34; Revolution in Its Fourth Year, 640–50; al-Bilad, 23 January 1959, 7; al-Bilad, 2 April 1959, 6; al-Bilad, 25 July 1959, 6.

22 The colloquial poetry of Mulla ʿAbbud al-Karkhi appeared in an edited volume to which the renowned historian ʿAbbas al-‘Azzawi wrote an introduction explicating the importance of popular and local arts. al-Karkhi, ʿAbbud, Diwan al-Karkhi (Baghdad: Matbaʿat al-Maʿarif, 1955)Google Scholar; and al-ʿAni, Yusuf, Shakhsiyyat wa-Dhikrayat (Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashr, 1999), 97–99Google Scholar.

23 Abdul Karim Qassim, The Historical-Extempore Speech by our Sole Leader, Major General Abdel Karim Qasim at the Reserve-Officers’ College, 2 March 1959, 6–7 (located in the Center for Research Libraries, Chicago). On the perception of Iraq as a popular republic, see Dann, Iraq under Qassem 35–37; on Qasim's personality cult and the regime's undemocratic stance toward political parties, see Batatu, The Old Social Classes, 808–60.

24 Qassim, Abdul Karim, Objectives of the Iraqi Revolution (Baghdad: Ministry of Guidance, 1960), 18Google Scholar; and Qasim, ʿAbd al-Karim, Mabadiʾ Thawrat 14 Tammuz fi Khutub ʿAbd al-Karim Qasim (Baghdad: n.p., 1959), 44–45Google Scholar.

25 Al-Bilad, 6 March 1959, 1.

26 The New Iraq (May 1962): 19.

27 Al-Ahali, 12 May 1959, 3.

28 Husayn, Muhammad Tawfiq, Nihayat al-Iqtaʿ fi al-ʿIraq (Beirut: Dar al-ʿIlm li-l-Malayin, 1958), 14Google Scholar.

29 The New Iraq 3 (January 1960): 21–22.

30 al-Hajj, ʿAziz, Thawratuna fi al-ʿIraq wa-Qadiyat al-Wahda (Baghdad: Dar al-Fikr al-Jadid, 1959), 15, 68Google Scholar.

31 Ittihad al-Shaʿb, 5 April 1959, 5.

32 Ittihad al-Shaʿb, 21 June 1959, 2.

33 Al-Raʾy al-ʿAmm, 22 September 1959, 3.

34 Jadua, Abduallah, A Leader is Born (Baghdad: The Trading and Printing Company, 1960)Google Scholar.

35 Ittihad al-Shaʿb, 21 June 1961, 2. Communist writer ʿAbd al-Qadir Ismaʿil similarly argued that the 1920 revolt was the first sign of a struggle that lasted throughout the Hashimite period. Al-Bilad, 1 July 1959, 1, 8. See also Ibrahim, ʿAbd al-Fattah, Maʿna al-Thawra: Adwaʾ ʿala Thawrat 14 Tammuz (Baghdad: Matbaʿat al-Rabita, 1959)Google Scholar.

36 Al-Raʾy al-ʿAmm, 23 June 1959, 6.

37 Al-Bilad, 24 November 1958, 1; al-Bilad, 24 November 1958, 1, 5; al-Bilad, 11 January 1959, 7; al-Bilad, 27 January 1959, 1; al-Bilad, 28 January 1959, 1.

38 Iraqi Ministry of Guidance, The Iraqi Revolution: One Year of Progress and Achievement, 100–101; al-Bilad, 1 March 1959, 3; al-Bilad, 17 January 1959, 1; Davis, Memories, 127–28; Dann, Iraq, 46–47. For the qawmī view, see al-Samarraʾi, Faʾiq, al-Rawi, ʿAdnan, and Naji, Hilal, Mahkamat al-Mahdawi: Masrah wa-Malha: Radd Ahrar al-ʿIraq (Cairo: al-Dar al-Qawmiyya li-l-Tibaʿa wa-l-Nashr, 1960)Google Scholar; Bahri, Yunus, Mahakamat al-Mahdawi, Harami Baghdad (Beirut: n.p., 1963)Google Scholar; al-Ahali, 1 March 1959, 1; al-Bilad, 1 March, 1959, 1.

39 Shaliba, Zuhayr, Ghaʾib Tuʿma Farman: Dirasa Muqarana fi al-Riwaya al-ʿIraqiyya (Beirut: Dar al-Kunuz al-Adabiyya, 1996), 305, 330Google Scholar.

40 The New Iraq (April 1962): 16; al-Jawahiri, Muhammad Mahdi, Diwan al-Jawahiri (Beirut: Dar al-ʿAwda, 1982), 2:279–84Google Scholar.

41 Qasim, Mabadiʾ Thawrat 14 Tammuz, 68–71.

42 Al-Raʾy al-ʿAmm, 15 April 1959, 2 (an essay by Khashiʿ al-Rawi; see also the story by ʿAbd al-Muttalib al-Mudarri, “From the Biography of Rusafi,” in the same issue, p. 3); al-Bilad, 27 April 1959, 6; al-Bilad, 8 May 1959, 6; al-Bilad, 20 August 1959, 6.

43 Jadua, A Leader, 18, 42–43.

44 Ibid., 54–55.

45 Majallat al-Majmaʿ al-ʿIlmi al-ʿIraqi 7 (1960): 366, 368; 8 (1961): 438, 349.

46 Kadhim, Hussein N., “ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayati's ‘Odes to Jaffa,’” Journal of Arabic Literature 32 (2001): 86–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 al-Bayati, ʿAbd al-Wahhab, “al-ʿArab al-Lajiʾun” (3 August 1961), Diwan al-Bayati (Beirut: Dar al-ʿAwda, 1971), 1:628–29Google Scholar.

48 Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, “al-Mustansiriyya” (recited on July 19 1960), al-Jawahiri, Diwan, 251–54.

49 The New Iraq 3 (January 1960): 49.

50 Ittihad al-Shaʿb, 11 March 1960, 7.

51 On Nasirism and culture, see Gordon, Joel, Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser's Egypt (Chicago: Chicago University Press/Center for Middle East Studies, 2002)Google Scholar; and Podeh, Elie and Winckler, Onn, eds., Rethinking Nasserism: Revolution and Historical Memory in Modern Egypt (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2004)Google Scholar; on the influence of the 1956 war in Iraq, see Batatu, The Old Social Classes, 749–58.

52 al-Husri, Khaldun Satiʿ, Thawrat 14 Tammuz wa-Haqiqat al-Shuyuʿiyyin fi al-ʿIraq (Beirut: Manshurat al-Taliʿa, 1960), 8Google Scholar.

53 al-Rikabi, Fuʾad, ʿAla Tariq al-Thawra (Cairo: al-Dar al-Qawmiyya li-l-Tibaʿa wa-l-Nashr, 1963)Google Scholar.

54 Al-Hurriyya, 2 August 1959, 1; al-Rawi, ʿAdnan, Min al-Qahira ila Muʿtaqal Qasim (Beirut: Manshurat Dar al-Adab, 1963), 210Google Scholar; al-Bilad, 18 January 1959, 7; al-Raʾy al-ʿAmm, 13 August 1959, 3; and Davis, Memories, 124–29.

55 Letter to Adonis, 13 October 1962, Letter to ʿAbd al-Latif al-Shawwaf, 16 January 1963, Letter to Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, 30 January 1963, Letter to Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, 23 February 1963, reprinted in al-Sayyab, Badr Shakir, Rasaʾil al-Sayyab (Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya li-l-Dirasat, 1994), 192, 197, 199, 202–203Google Scholar. One of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab's poetry collections was not allowed to be sold in Iraq because of a poem, “Ibn al-Shahid,” that was seen as critiquing the regime. Al-Sayyab also wrote bitterly about the dominance of inept and incompetent communist intellectuals in the cultural arena.

56 Al-Adab 9, September 1961, 60.

57 For analysis of the events, see Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, Iraq since 1958, 65–72.

58 Al-Fajr al-Jadid, 29 August 1960, 1; al-Fajr al-Jadid, 16 February 1961, 1; Dawn, Ernest C, “The Formation of Pan-Arab Ideology in the Inter-war Years,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 20 (1988): 67–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Al-Fajr al-Jadid, 4 June 1960, 1.

60 Al-Hurriyya, 24 August 1959, 6; al-Fajr al-Jadid, 17 September 1959, 1; Davis, Memories, 121–22 (on shuʿubiyya). See also Mottahedeh, Roy, “The Shuʿubiyah Controversy and the Social History of Early Islamic Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 7 (1976): 161–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jawad, Ferida, “The Triumph of Arabism: The Shuʿubiyyah Controversy and the National Identity of Modern Iraq,” Jusur 13 (1997): 53–88Google Scholar.

61 Al-Hurriyya, 10 September 1959, 3.

62 al-Sayyab, Badr Shakir, Kuntu Shuyuʿiyan (Cologne, Germany: Matbaʿat al-Jamal, 2007)Google Scholar; Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Letter to Adonis, 18 December 1960, and Letter to Yusuf al-Khal, 15 February 1961, Rasaʾil al-Sayyab, 145, 150.

63 Al-Fajr al-Jadid, 27 July 1959, 1, 4.

64 Al-Fajr al-Jadid, 29 July 1959, 1.

65 Al-Huriyya, 12 August 1959, 1.

66 Al-Huriyya, 18 August 1959, 1.

67 Al-Adab, April 1962, 74.

68 Al-Adab, February 1960, 2, 6–8, 70.

69 Al-Adab, February 1960, 2, 17.

70 al-Malaʾika, Nazik, Diwan Nazik al-Malaʾika (Beirut: Dar al-ʿAwda, 1986), 475–76Google Scholar.

71 Rubin, Abshalom H., “Abd al-Karim Qasim and the Kurds of Iraq: Centralization, Resistance and Revolt, 1958–63,” Middle Eastern Studies 43 (2005): 353–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Al-Fajr al-Jadid, 31 July 1959, 1, 4.

73 Al-Fajr al-Jadid, 1 September 1960, 1.

74 Baram, “A Case of Imported Identity.”