Shams C. Inati, ed. Iraq: Its History, People, and Politics. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2003. 322 pp.$28.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-59102-096-7.

Reviewed by Nadia Al-Bagdadi (Department of History, Central European University)Published on H-Gender-MidEast (August, 2004)

Writing for Iraq: Another View of Iraq’s History and Society

The literature on the history and formation ofmodern Iraq is scarce. Apart from coverage in in-ternational newspapers triggered by the wars againstIraq and the ongoing occupation of the country andapart from some academic specialist studies, thereare few works that seek to provide as comprehensivea view on Iraq’s history, culture, and politics, as thevolume under review claims to present. This volumecomprises a diverse collection of sixteen chapters ona variety of subjects. It does not so much addressstudents or specialists of Iraq or the Arab World, butrather a wider, not necessarily academic, readership,combining a variety of styles from the popular scien-tific to more proper analysis. Written by an inter-national body of scholars and experts, and targetedmainly at an American audience whose perceptionand knowledge of Iraq and its history is shaped and,most often, misinformed by the U.S. media, this vol-ume intends to provide another view of and introduc-tion to Iraq. Thus, the authors who take an explicitstance against the previous 1991 and 2003 U.S.-ledwars and the sanction regime, bring to the forefrontnot only the history of a country, but also treat facetsof a society which is affected most tangibly by decadesof wars against Iran in the 1980s and the so-calledfirst Gulf War of 1991 and sanctions.

Based on a symposium held in 1999 at VillanovaUniversity, most of the articles are–in light of thethen immanent threat of a new war–updated versionsof papers presented at this meeting. As the editor,Shams C. Inati, professor for Islamic philosophy andtheology, claims in her introductory remarks, the aimof the book is to go beyond current academic andnon-academic discussions about Iraq’s political andeconomic situation and the devastating impact of thesanctions regime, to draw attention to other aspectsand dimensions of Iraq and its people, which seemto be unknown to or ignored by the wider public.

The editorial introduction serves as a political posi-tioning in which the U.S. government and its poli-tics is critically discussed, as its double standard inthe Middle East (to conceal its real interests, namelyto distract attention from the Israeli/Arab conflictand to assure unlimited access to Iraq’s oil revenues)sets the tone for the following chapters. It is mostlikely the unintended result of the effort to presentan alternative view that this collection of articlesdoes not provide an all-embracing systematic intro-duction to the history and present conditions of Iraq,nor its people and politics, but confines itself to onlysome, not necessarily central specific aspects. Thus,and somewhat in contradiction to the title’s promiseof a somewhat comprehensive overview, subjects aredealt with only selectively. For example, an analy-sis of twentieth-century, modern Iraq is missing, as isan analysis of Iraq under Saddam Husayn. Further-more, the length, scope, and quality of the sixteenchapters differ greatly. While some chapters resortto standardized formulaic evocations, such as Iraq’s“Golden Age,” others provide more complex analy-sis. In some sort of a loose chronological sequence,starting with Ancient Iraq, most of the articles dealwith the present day situation and portray a soci-ety and state in flux, if not altogether in dissolu-tion. The bleak situation of Iraq before the latestwar has become painfully worse since the occupationand the subsequent series of internal and externalevents; unfortunately, the present volume providesonly marginal keys for understanding this situation.

The book is divided into five parts, beginning withthe ancient civilization of Mesopotamia and Iraqiarcheology, and concluding with a summary evalu-ation of America’s wars against Iraq, 1990-2002. Thefive parts address the history of Iraq; culture; reli-gious and ethnic dimensions; politics, restricted tothe impact of war and sanction on Iraqi society; and

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regional and international questions. Part 1, enti-tled “History and Civilization,” deals, in three chap-ters, with particular questions of Iraq’s long history,from its ancient history to the Abbasid period to themodern era of the late-nineteenth and early-twentiethcentury. It should be said that these chapters donot attempt to provide a summary account of eachperiod but address these periods in light of currentpolitics. Hence in the first chapter (one of the mostinteresting), the American archeologist McGuire Gib-son combines his presentation of Iraq’s ancient his-tory with an account of the difficult conditions un-der which archeology and preservation occur sincethe sanctions were put in place. Gibson makes astrong statement regarding the devastating effects,caused by foreign policy in Iraq, on the remains ofancient history and the institutions of preservation.Years of sanctions and wars left Iraq’s excavation sitesand museums unprotected, and resulted in a per-manent threat to the physical survival of this worldheritage. Apart from these effects of the sanctionson the very material presence, the author establishesanother source for the dereliction, namely the braindrain, which is affecting Iraqi society at all levels.Far from seeing it as one of the “unwanted” effectsof sanction, McGuire Gibson inserts “draining awayof expertise in archeology, as in all other academicand scientific fields, seems to me to be the real, butunspoken, purpose for continuing the embargo” (p.34). Gibson’s stance, which considers the enormouseffect of this brain drainage as a political strategy ex-ercised against Iraq, is indeed a plausible, yet hithertoundocumented, argument.

Another aspect central to current debates aboutIraq is raised in chapter 3 by Hala Fattah, whotakes up critically some of the widespread assump-tions about the formative elements of modern Iraq.In this short chapter, “The Question of the ’Artifi-ciality’ of Iraq as a Nation State,” the author rightlytakes issue with those suppositions that uphold thethesis that a coherent Iraqi unit as a nation state isunsustainable. This view not only prevails in somescholarship but has recently been given prominencein the domain of policy-making (and, as the reviewerwould like to add, has already led to bloody results).Drawn from the argument that all nation-building isbased, to a certain degree, on artificial social and ge-ographical boundaries, Fattah develops her argumentfrom personal contemporary records of the formativeperiod of modern Iraq. She maintains that Iraq’s his-tory is not characterized and does not provide any

more evidence for the artificiality thesis than manyother modern nation-states that, if measured by thesame criteria, would equally not qualify for a cohe-sive and quasi-naturally given form. Moreover, Fat-tah states that, apart from being factually question-able, this view scarcely hides the self-serving inter-ests of those who promote the idea. In light of thepresent, after-war discussions about the future of Iraqas a nation and society, with frequent reference to itsso-called mosaic structure, this account of the forma-tive period of modern history of Iraq is well taken.It would, however, have been useful to the reader-ship had the author made reference to the fact thatArab nationalist politicians and scholars alike arguedpermanently against the “artificiality” thesis.

Unfortunately the point raised in this article didnot inform the structure of the book as a whole. Thuspart 3, which deals with the question of Iraq as amultiethnic and multiconfessional society, renderedprogrammatically as “Unity in Diversity,” would haveprofited from either a brief introduction to the over-all composition of Iraq’s society, past and present, orfrom a more nuanced presentation of this diversity.Thus part 3 lines up some of those sects, confessions,and ethnic groups without providing a review of theoverall configuration and interplay between the var-ious factions. For the uninformed reader, a strangepicture emerges of an Iraq where there are neitherArabs nor Sunnis, at least if one follows the structureof the book. Mysteriously, and without further ex-planation, the contributions presented in this volumedeal with some but not all major religious confessionsin Iraq (Christian, Shiites and Jews), leaving out Sun-nis and Sunni Islam, as well as dealing with one ofthe ethnic groups, the Kurds, but not the Arabs. Thiskind of representation, which in all likelihood followsnot only the attempt to give a human face to Iraqin the view of the uninformed, but also follows thelogic of multiculturalism, overemphasizes the role ofminorities and marginality, however problematic thisperspective is in the Iraqi case (after all, Shiites arequantatively in the majority). Similar to the verydivergent nature of the chapters united in this part,this leads to a distorted vision and representation ofthe social, religious, and ethnic composition of Iraqisociety and makes the book of little help as an intro-duction to the wider public. Whereas, for example,chapter 9, on the Jewish legacy, is based primarily onpersonal memory and on an explicit identitarian per-spective delivered in an anecdotal fashion, the shortchapter on the Christian Community intends to chal-

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lenge the ignorance about the existence of Christiansin the Arab World, “a major Western misconceptionabout the Arabs”(p. 131), as Inati puts it rightly, butprovides the reader with only some glimpses of thehighlights of Christian existence in Iraq in their con-tribution to the country’s culture and history. Moreconcerned with current issues, the contributions onthe Shia community (chapter 10 by Joyce Wiley) andon the Kurdish question (chapter 11 by Edmund Gha-reeb) present their themes in a more informative andsummary manner.

As a welcome departure of the conventional order,culture and art are not banished to the end of thebook but stand prominently as part 2 (“Cultural Di-mensions”), thus reflecting the outstanding positionthat Iraqi artists uphold internationally, especiallyin the domain of the arts and music. The chaptersunited under this heading include the visual arts, mu-sic, and literature. May Muzaffar’s contribution on“Iraqi Contemporary Art, Roots and Development,”offers a brief though informative inventory in whichshe lists various domains of Iraqi artistic excellenceand ends with a suggestive reflection on Iraqi art ingeneral. Taking up the observation of the Frencharcheologist George Roux, who claims a conspicuouscontinuation between the ancient and modern periodin many aspects of daily life, she raises the questionwhether it is possible to trace a link between ancientMesopotamian artistic skills and imagination, whichwere marked by “multiplicity and diversity” in styleand theme (p. 65), and in Iraq’s undoubted artisticstandard of today. While Muzaffar leaves this ques-tion of the longue duree open, the contribution onIraqi music by Sheherazade Qassim Hassan (chapter5) seeks to demonstrate how the tradition and artof music in Iraq, which is primarily vocal, accommo-dates the changes of modern society and new modesof communication, while trying to stay in tune withthe heritage. In this interesting presentation, mod-ern Iraqi music is set in its social context, by way ofsetting in relation new spaces for performance offeredby the state, which served official functions and ex-ercised influence on the artistic performance such astime constraint, with modern technology, such as theradio, which was consequential for shifting public andprivate spaces in this artistic realm.

A strong feature of the volume is that it makes vis-ible the lethal effects of the sanctions regime. Manyof the articles trace, on more than the economic andsocial level, Iraq’s path from a rather prosperous na-tion to a Third-World-status with mass poverty; un-

precedented social and economic dislocation; and out-breaks of epidemics such as typhoid and cholera, asa result of raw sewage being dumped into waterways.That the sanctions function as a device to continuethe American (-Anglo) war by other means has foundsad illustration. The remaining two parts of the bookon the “Effect of War and Sanctions” (part 4) and“Regional and International Politics” (part 5) are ingeneral substantively argued and well sourced. Part5 takes up internal developments in Iraq, caused bymore than ten years of sanctions regime and the ef-fects of the wars, by addressing some of the most ur-gent issues that Iraq is currently facing, namely theenvironment, the economy and women. The chap-ter on “Women, Gender Relations, and Sanctions inIraq,” by Nadje El-Ali, provides a pessimistic accountof the situation of Iraqi women under the sanctionsregime whose lives have been dominated and deter-mined by the daily need to cope with the reality lefton the ground, including the impact on education,marriage, and gender relations. Rania Masri’s contri-bution (chapter 12), which draws largely on the vastliterature on the environmental crisis in Iraq, dealswith only one of those effects, the catastrophic con-sequences for the Iraqi people who are paying withtheir health and lives for the usage of Depleted Ura-nium. She remains within the general tenor of thebook in concluding that, whether this usage is basedon–criminal intent or criminal indifference–“the an-swer is clear, and the responsible parties are equallyknown” (p. 208).

Part 5 opens up the perspective of the Arab re-gion and of American policies against Iraq. Theregional dimension, however, focuses exclusively onthe impact of water scarcity and the problem of thecontrol over oil revenues in the region, leaving asideother political considerations that shape Iraq’s rela-tionship with neighboring countries. In chapter 15,Atif Kubursi places water scarcity and oil abundancewithin the wider context of the Middle East; this isthe only contribution that takes up a transregionaldimension. The water scarcity crisis in the MiddleEast is one of the most eminent problems the regionfaces today, and the article provides a useful and in-sightful introduction to a problem that has come closeto a political crisis in many parts of the region, forexample, the Turkish-Syria-Iraq conflict over the Eu-phrates, the Arab-Israeli conflict over water, and theNile Waters. Chapter 16, on “The U.S.’s UndeclaredWar against Iraq,” takes up the issue of sanctionsin the broader context of U.S. interests in the Mid-

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dle East and shares its basic assumptions with AtifKubursi that the main goal behind U.S. interventionsand interests in the Middle East is to maintain con-trol over the oil fields, not only those of Iraq butalso the Kuwaiti fields and, in light of a potentialthreat, Saudi oil fields. “Even though U.S. officialswent out of their way to conceal their real objectives,certain statements were made which belied their ef-forts” (p. 271). The book ends with a review of the“America’s War against Iraq, 1990-2002.” Thoughit is unfortunate that the last chapter could not in-clude, for reasons of publication, America’s invasionof Iraq in 2003, it provides a useful detailed summaryof the period between the two “Bush wars,” 1991 and2003, which was all-but-in-name a period of sanctionsonly. Using rich materials provided by the UnitedNations, whose advice was not taken into account,

Naseer Aruri (in chapter 17) calls attention to theambivalent role played by UNSCOM.

In sum, despite its title, the volume under reviewis, to a large extent, a reaction to a specific politicaland humanitarian situation of crisis and catastrophe.It is from this perspective that the book was pub-lished and it is from this perspective that the book iswelcome. For the readership the editor of this bookhas in mind, it is a useful alternative introduction tocertain features of Iraq. Herein lie both the meritsand weaknesses of the book. For those who will lookfor a systematic and exhaustive introduction to Iraqand its history, this book will not be advisable; forthose, however, who are drawn to an understandingof this history by the recent events, the book willprovide sufficient material for a first acquaintance.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at:http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Nadia Al-Bagdadi. Review of Inati, Shams C., ed., Iraq: Its History, People, and Politics.H-Gender-MidEast, H-Net Reviews. August, 2004.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9688

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