Poets, writers and journalists were prominent actors and chroniclers of the transformations and contentions of political modernity and the establishment of associational life and the public sphere of 20th century Iraq. The quest for social and cultural modernity, however, preceded the founding of the nation-state, and was first sought in the Ottoman context, and to a lesser extent, in the Iranian sphere. The major poets of the early 20th century, Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi and Ma`ruf al-Rusafi, both served as deputies in the Young Turk parliament and, celebrating political and cultural modernity, denouncing the dead hand of tradition, ‘backwardness’ and religious authority. At the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, this quest for modernity and rationality was transferred to the nascent nation-state of Iraq and into Iraqi nationalism. Zahawi celebrated ‘English’ power in a welcoming ode, not just as an opportunistic gesture but also as an aspiration of the modernising potential of empire. He wrote treatises of ersatz ‘science’ and celebrated Darwinian evolutionism, adding his own interpretations. Rusafi wrote a lengthy treatise on the life of Muhammad, presenting him and early Islam as an Arab national genius, stripping that history of its sacred and theological themes, not daring to publish the book in his own lifetime. Rusafi was also fiercely anti-Shi`ite, not for strictly sectarian reasons, but considering their religion as particularly conducive to ‘backwardness’ and ‘superstition’. The Shi`ite milieu, equally, spawned a lively intellectual production with prominent poets, authors and journals: the religious centres, especially Najaf, were fertile sources of literary and intellectual ferment, mostly oriented to a unified national modernity and religious reform. Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, one of the most prominent from that milieu, chronicled in his poetry and journalism the turbulent history of the 20th century. Sectarian issues were never far away: his early confrontation with Sati` al-Husri, another Ottoman turned to a primary theoretician of Arab nationalism, was well chronicled. As director of education under Faysal I, Husri was concerned about what he considered Shi`ite subversion of the Arab project. The respective memoirs of Jawahiri and Husri provide an interesting picture of the sectarian issues in the perspectives of modern politics and culture. This paper will consider the cultural and political history of Iraq in the earlier 20th century as one of diverse tensions and contentions between the quest for common citizenship and the pull of sectarian identities, as expressed through some literary productions.