In April 2003, just weeks after the US-led invasion of Iraq, Alexandrian poet and painter Ahmed Morsi (b.1930) addresses a poem to a river, after losing all “living friends” in Baghdad with whom he can inquire about the state of the city. In “Risalah ila Nahr” (Poem to a River), the poet mourns the destruction of Iraqi capital and all that this represented, but also the city that had been his first home away from home and a hub in his intellectual trajectory. In 1955, Morsi moved to Baghdad for two years to teach English in a private high school in al-‘Aquliyya. This brief stint had a lasting impact on his intellectual and creative life. He quickly found his way to a café in Rashid Street, a popular meeting place for writers and artists, and began life-long friendships and collaborations with ‘Abd al-Wahab al-Bayyati, Yusuf al-‘Ani, and Fu’ad al-Takarli. It was on the pages of Iraqi al-Akhbar that Morsi first developed his skills as a critic and the Society of Iraqi Artists hosted his first international solo-show. This paper traces the various articulations of Morsi’s continued conversation with his Iraqi interlocutors—from Cairo and after 1974, New York—in subsequent decades, through translation and publication projects, on the pages (and covers) of the short-lived Gallery 68, and in exhibition spaces. In doing so, it addresses important moments of intra-Arab exchange, largely overlooked in literary and art histories. In what ways does Iraqi artists’ and writers’ engagement with Egypt’s cultural scene—via Morsi—highlight a different set of intellectual networks that may pass through, and yet are not beholden to Western capitals? Similarly, how can we trace the continued reverberations of Morsi’s Baghdad sojourn in his later works? And are the cities of Alexandria and Baghdad mourned and remembered in ways that continue to make connections possible where they have ceased to exist?

In December 1969 the Egyptian journal al-Tali'a published its special edition entitled “Hakadha yatakallamu al-udaba? al-shabab fi al-watan al-?arabi” (This is How the Young Writers in the Arab World Speak). It followed the original testimonials published in September of the same year that focused exclusively on artists from Egypt. Like its predecessor, the Arab-wide survey asked novelists, short story writers, poets, literary critics and visual artists to answer three questions regarding their position within the cultural field and the social, intellectual, and creative influences that contributed to their artistic production. It was accompanied by numerous articles by prominent critics reflecting on the content of the testimonials. Realizing that a new wave of artistic production was sweeping across Egypt, and the Arab world, the editorial team of al-Tali'a hoped to be one of the principle venues for presenting these artistic innovators to their audience. They understood that the creative phenomenon unfolding in the 1960s was not limited to a national context but crossed regional and international boundaries. This paper seeks to interrogate the formulation of the ‘Arab world’ as it appeared on the pages of al-Tali'a. In what ways do the artist testimonials help us understand the construction of the Arab cultural field during this time? How do they understand the intersection of the artistic, the political, and the social during this pivotal moment in the Arab world? In what ways did the artists seek to make connections across national boundaries? By engaging with the broader discussion unfolding in the literary and cultural periodicals of the time, I show the significance of al-Tali?a’s move to present the artistic innovation and experimentation of the time within the context of the Arab world.

The neo-classical Iraqi poet Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi (1863-1936) was deeply influenced by the writings of Egyptian and Lebanese intellectuals of the Nahda, which he read in the pages of the influential journals al-Muqtataf and al-Mu’ayyad. After reading several volumes of al-Muqtataf for the first time, Al-Zahawi declared that he felt as though he had “put his hands on the treasures of the world.” Al-Zahawi’s poetry and political essays stridently advocated for radical social and religious reform, particularly with regards to women’s rights. This liberal advocacy has caused him to be seen as extending to Iraq the ideals of liberal Egyptian reformers, in particular Qasim Amin. This paper examines al-Zahawi’s writings on women’s rights in both his poetry and prose in order to understand how his reformist message both echoed and departed from the writings of Egyptian and Lebanese intellectuals. Al-Zahawi’s 1910 essay “Al-Mar’a wa’l-Dafa’a ‘Anha (In Defense of Women), published in the Egyptian journal al-Mu’ayyad, and poems such as “Al-Mara’ wa’l Rajul” (Woman and Man), suggest that rather than simply mimic the positions of his peers, al-Zahawi engaged with, reproduced, and revised reformist discourses of the Nahda. This paper will engage these issues by addressing the following questions: How was al-Zahawi’s articulation of a specifically Iraqi “Nahda” mediated by both local factors and broader regional influences? How was his engagement with non-Iraqi interlocutors, from Iran to Egypt, formative of his thought? What might close readings of al-Zahawi’s politically engaged poetry suggest about the expression of political commitment and social reform in places long considered on the periphery of the Arab Nahda? How did this sense of cultural “belatedness” inform what some critics have identified as al-Zahawi’s radical positions?

Iraq in the 1980s offered no room for social or political critique, let alone protest. The ruling Ba’th party, under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, eliminated all opposition through censorship, coercion and cooptation. At the same time, the war with Iran, which would last for nearly the entire decade, gave Saddam Hussein’s government an even stronger weapon with which to order society, politics and culture into the image that it desired. Political discourse as well as intellectual and cultural production from Iraq at the time reflect this. In this context, Arabic language newspapers and journals operating outside Iraq rose to importance as spaces where exiled Iraqi intellectuals and artists were able to write more freely, although many were still fearful for their lives and tempered their criticism of the Iraqi state or avoided writing about Iraq altogether. The quarterly journal al-Badil (The Alternative), however, published in exile by the Association of Iraqi Democratic Writers, Journalists and Artists )Ra?bit?at al-Kutta?b wa-al-S?uh?ufi?yi?n wa-al-Fanna?ni?n al-Di?muqra?t?i?yi?n al-?Ira?qi?yi?n) emerged as an exception to this rule. Throughout the 1980s, the journal took a hard line against the Iraqi Ba’thist regime, protesting its political oppression, its mass abuse of human rights and opposing its cooption of the cultural sphere for “Saddam’s Qadisiyya” against Iran. Yet, the journal’s concerns also went beyond the borders of Iraq. Through its social and political critique, to its fiction, poetry, translations and featured artworks, al-Badil articulated political and aesthetic positions that were pan-Arab and, at times, even internationalist in perspective. From the very first issues, the journal’s articles were written by writers from a number of Arab countries and addressed the many crises that the political left in the Arab world were facing at the time, connecting war and dictatorship in Iraq with, among other issues, the Lebanese Civil War, Palestinian statelessness and Egypt’s political pivot after its peace treaty with Israel and the Camp David Accords. Today, the journal’s table of contents reads like a ‘who’s who’ of late twentieth and early twenty-first Arab intellectuals with articles from the likes of Fadil al-'Azzawi, Faysal Darraj, Youmna al-‘Eid, Sonallah Ibrahim, Elias Khoury and Saadi Youssef among others. In this way, the journal emerged as space for conversations and exchange between leftist writers, intellectuals and artists from across the Arab world at a time when they were facing unprecedented threats against their very existence in their home countries.