Iraqis who lived through the anti-colonial struggle in the 1940s and the 1950s envisioned these two decades as a time of hope and revolutionary thoughts. The anti-British sentiments that swept the Iraqi street in the first half of the twentieth-century produced Iraqis as revolutionary subjects who thought of themselves as agents of history bringing about political independence, social justice, and gender reforms, through their activism. Revolutionary Iraqis looked forward to the future and aimed to break with the past. They thought of time as unfolding in a progressive, linear way, whereby the traditional past would give in to the revolutionary present, and the present would give in to the utopian future. Rather than spaces of social control and disciplinary technologies as imagined by Iraqi educators, the school and families emerged as an important arena in fueling anti-British sentiments. While these sensibilities revolved around Iraqi political landscape, they also informed perceptions of gender equality. Iraqi revolutionaries linked the problems facing Iraqi women to Iraq’s lack of genuine independence under the monarchy. They believed that women’s liberation would follow the liberation of Iraq from the yoke of colonialism, and that women’s subordination would come to an end once the socioeconomic order associated with imperialism was overthrown. Based on interviews and participant observation among Iraqis in London over the past fourteen years, this talk will discuss how the British imperial presence in Iraq gave rise to nationalist feelings for independence and to gender advocacy linked to anti-colonialism.

The paper will explore British reforms of Ottoman family law in Iraq starting with the military occupation of Basra and Baghdad during World War I. Already in 1917, British occupation authorities issued ordinances prohibiting Shi`i, Christian, and Jewish communities from using the (recently Ottoman) Sunni shari`a courts and requiring members of these communities to follow the personal status laws of their own sectarian authorities, as adjudicated in civil courts overseen by the British military authorities and later the mandate state. While the British justified this reform in the name of protecting marginalized communities, in practice it shut down the option of forum shopping that had been available to members of non-Sunni communities in Ottoman times, who had the option of bringing personal status disputes to their own religious authorities or to the Sunni Hanafi courts. Thus, for example, Christians seeking divorce would no longer be able to go to a shari`a court but would be subject to the ban on divorce that had been adopted by most Christian sects by the start of the 20th century. The paper argues that this reform contributed to the hardening of sectarian boundaries in Iraqi society and constituted a radical reconfiguration of the relationship between family, religion, and the state.

It has become clear that the contemporary Iraqi novel has reached an unprecedented zenith in recent years. The sheer number speaks to this phenomenon: one estimate puts the number of novels published in the fifteen years following the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime and the US-led invasion of Iraq close to seven hundred, more than what had appeared over the entirety of the twentieth century. While the reasons for this rise are as complex as the experiences they fictionalize, this paper will explore one powerful theme that emerges from these literary narratives: the attempt to reckon with and counter the devastating effects of war and the systemic erasure of collective memory through the use of narrative. More specifically, it will examine writers, such as Dhiaa Jubail and Ahmed Saadawi, for their use of specific structuring tools and aesthetic protocols to produce a cartography of national space in all its historical and textual complexity. This layered narratives produced evoke an ethical posture inviting us to reconfigure our relationship with the present by resisting closure of the past and future."