A longstanding concern of Iraq scholars has been to ascertain how successive national governments variously sought to limit or otherwise contest Iraqis' freedoms of movement through such measures as land settlement, public education, and legal violence, among others. The focus on mobility, however, has meant that our knowledge of what discursive and material resources individuals drew on to develop their bodies and minds remains limited and fragmentary. What social, political, and ideological forces informed how Iraqis talked about the mind and body? How did these same forces mediate between citizens and the state? What was their impact on relationships between persons of different genders, across generational divides, and among different regional communities?
The papers of this panel approach these questions using new and overlooked archival material alongside fresh field research, covering the period from the end of the First World War up to the deposition of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Our first paper charts the rise of state-sponsored medicine against venereal disease in the 1920's, while our second examines what physical education can tell us about urban development during the Hashemite period. Picking up in the 1980's, our third paper looks at how communities in southern Iraq internalized, resisted, or transformed the Ba'th Party's Arabization campaigns during the Iraq-Iran war. The fourth paper addresses Iraq's largely ignored membership and participation in the Non-Aligned Movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By studying Ba'thist publications, it draws out important linkages between Iraqi foreign policy in the NAM and domestic discourses about development, women's rights, technology, and education. The panel concludes with a paper that looks at the provision of food, health care, and education during the sanctions period in the 1990's. Together, these papers contribute to new historiographical findings and theoretical discussions of body and mind in modern Iraq.
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Dr. Sara Farhan
As Mandated Iraq struggled with plague outbreaks spewing from numerous conflicts, rapid modernisation, and rural-urban migration, indigenous and foreign doctors alike demanded a localised medical school. Despite continuous outbreaks of the plague and cholera, Baghdadi doctors and British health advisors cited Venereal Disease as the leading cause for increased mortality rates. Venereal Disease eradication efforts acted as an impetus for establishing the Royal Medical College of Baghdad (RMCB). Venereal disease eradication campaigns are part of a larger formulaic colonial approach that is not necessarily particular for the Iraqi experience. Yet, the conditions that manifested before, during, and after these efforts are part of a larger narrative that is in fact specific for the Iraqi case. The road leading up to the construction of the RMCB provides a glimpse of this unique experience.
Drawing from Hashemitian canonical biographies, memoirs, and histories as well as preliminary archival research and interviews, this paper is a humble contribution to the study of the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq. This paper is interested in the conditions behind the establishment of RMCB, one of the biggest hegemonic projects in Iraq during the first half of the twentieth century. I examine how medicine in school and in practice approached the sex-worker throughout the early years of British occupation and until the inauguration of RMCB in 1927. I argue that despite numerous plague outbreaks and prevalent diseases, it was venereal diseases that occupied medical agendas. While venereal disease prevention campaigns justified British presence until the opening of a localised medical college, the RMCB necessitated the expertise of British advisors and instructors alike, thus further legitimising their presence in Iraq.
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Mr. Andrew Alger
“A Beehive of Activity”: Labor and Leisure in Hashemite Baghdad, 1921 - 1958
This paper seeks to explore how physical education and outdoor activities conditioned the social production of space in Hashemite Baghdad. It contends that playing sports, working outdoors, and enjoying the city’s natural beauty were important ways in which Baghdadis enabled and otherwise participated in the city’s transformation from a city still bounded by its medieval walls in 1921 to a sprawling web of diverse neighborhoods on both sides of the Tigris in 1958. It draws on Baghdadis’ memoirs alongside medical and pedagogical writings about physical fitness and acculturation (Ar. tathqif) to determine how labor and leisure figured into the construction and inhabiting of new neighborhoods.
The point in using physical education and outdoor activities to talk about urban development is to expose the limitations of the top-down, national development framework through which the city’s growth was understood by international experts and the Iraqi Development Board. The Board tended to adopt the experts’ plans for urban development, and with these plans went a conceptualization of labor that originated in large part outside of the Iraqi context. The Board only came into existence during the last decade of Hashemite rule, but repeatedly staked claims in its annual reports to the prior thirty years’ of urban growth for the Hashemite monarchy. Its language of rational design principles and modern construction techniques obscured the fact that Baghdadis had built their own city and would continue to do so as demographic changes necessitated. Reading physical education and outdoor activities as part of a separate genealogy of labor in Hashemite Baghdad challenges this narrative of top-down developmentalism, through which the Hashemite period is commonly read.
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Wisam Alshaibi
Throughout the 1980s the Iraqi Ba’th Party led several “Arabization” (ta’rib) campaigns to manufacture, institutionalize, and activate a particular, state-sanctioned conception of Iraqi ethnic and religious identity. During the Iran-Iraq War, the Ba’th Party deployed one such campaign on the communities inhabiting southern Iraq in order to combat Iranian propaganda and to recruit more soldiers into the war effort. The Party rendered and institutionalized a uniquely Arab conception of Shi’a Islam which they argued was more authentic and distinctive than Iranian Shi’ism. This was accomplished through both material and symbolic forms of coercion and violence. Using the Iraq Memory Foundation’s collection of testimonies of Iraqis who lived under Ba’th suppression in the 1980s, this paper investigates how Iraqis internalized, interpreted, resisted, transformed, or otherwise, responded to these Arabization campaigns.
I analyzed 106 testimonies of Iraqis who lived in southern Iraq during the war with Iran. I coded the interviews with themes related to how Arabization affected individuals’ political affiliations, institutional trajectories through Iraqi society, experiences (if any) with Ba’thist violence, and, importantly, the meanings individuals attached to ethnic and religious identities. I find that the qualities of coercion and violence (material versus symbolic) employed by the state led to variation in how communities in the south of Iraq responded to Arabization projects. Secondly, my research suggests that ethnic and religious identities were not deeply held by individuals who were subject to Arabization. Rather, the experience of Ba’th suppression became a salient political and social identity among those living in the south during the war with Iran.
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Michael Degerald
Iraq was one of 114 nations in the Non-Aligned Movement. It was far from the only member from the Arab World; indeed in the beginning Nasser’s Egypt overshadowed Iraq not only in the Arab Middle East but in the NAM as well. In most of the major literature on Iraq, Iraq’s membership hardly merits mention. There was so much turmoil and change from 1955 on, most histories of Iraq focus on the rise of the Ba’th, the 1958 Revolution that overthrew the monarchy, the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait (another NAM member) that Iraq’s participation in the NAM gets ignored. Similarly, in studies of the NAM, Iraq is not granted a central place. And yet, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Iraqi Ba’th deliberately start to play up their membership in the NAM publishing multiple articles, books, and hosting NAM summits in 1979 and 1982. My analysis of a broad range of Iraqi publications from this period shows Iraqi participation and sponsorship of the NAM was not merely part of Iraqi foreign policy, but was intimately tied to important discursive facets in domestic discourse about development, technology, women’s rights, and education. By exploring this third-worldism, a more nuanced understanding of Ba’thist discourse emerges that places it squarely alongside other postcolonial nations, dealing with similar structural issues, rather than an exceptional totalitarian state. It therefore speaks to literatures of nation-building, development, women’s and gender studies, modern Iraqi history, and the study of authoritarian regimes while making explicit connections between domestic and international dimensions.
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Dr. Alissa Walter
International sanctions, imposed on Iraq from 1990-2003, severely constricted the state’s capacity to provide basic health and educational services at the very time when public need for a ‘safety net’ of financial and nutritional assistance increased dramatically due to worsening economic conditions. Both the state and ordinary Iraqi citizens had interests in seeing the state welfare system maintained, and even expanded, yet practical limitations on state finances and capacity resulted in decreasing literacy and school enrollment rates, food and medicine shortages, and an overall worsening in health and education indicators. This paper draws on the Iraqi Ba‘th Party archives, archives from Saddam Hussein’s presidential office, and fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan to illustrate how ordinary citizens in Baghdad improvised a variety of strategies through legal channels, informal markets and networks, and illegal actions to acquire needed health, financial, and educational resources in this constricted environment. Likewise, I delineate the limits and continued strengths of state capacity in the midst of sanctions, arguing that the state relied increasingly on local governance structures to maintain an image (and, at times, a reality) of centralized political control. Though citizens and the state had similar goals for maintaining a basic safety net of public services, the legal, informal, and illegal strategies pursued by citizens to acquire needed resources was a source of tension between state and society during the sanctions years.
