The Ottoman Empire underwent a process of centralization as a part of its modernization endeavors throughout the nineteenth century. From the perspective of the Ottoman center in Istanbul and provincial capitals, like Baghdad, the reforms of the Tanzimat Era were a way to bring the periphery closer to the center. The rise to power of the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) in 1908 continued this centralizing trend. The discourse of centralization, which politicized its medium, Ottoman Turkish, mirrored the asymmetrical power dynamic emanating from Istanbul toward the Arab provinces. During the same time, the Ottoman state embraced the ideology of Ottomanism as a patriotic and pragmatic project. Though Ottomanism could not prevent the empire’s collapse at the end of WWI, Ottoman patriotism was inculcated successfully among intellectuals across the empire, including the Iraqi provinces. The intellectuals who feature in this paper were caught between the centralization impulse from the Ottoman state and fidelity to the localist sentiments of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra. By writing political Arabic poetry, participating in the Ottoman parliament in Istanbul in 1908 and 1912, and operating the bilingual private press, one can see how these Ottoman Arabic-speaking intellectuals carved discursive spaces that assented to the Ottomanist project, while defending a distinct cultural localism. Unable to conceive of a future without the Ottoman Empire, these Ottoman-Iraqi intellectuals imagined a better empire. The defeat in WWI eclipsed the possible Ottoman-Arab future, and the new day broke with the British Mandate and the Iraqi Hashimite Monarchy. In this paper, I address these imperial imaginings. One focus of this project is the collected works (diwans) of Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi and Ma‘ruf al-Rusafi as their poetic voices engage with and critique the Ottoman state policies. I explore what it meant for Iraqis, like Zahawi, Rusafi, and also Sulayman Faydi, to serve as Ottoman parliamentarians. I also look at the bilingual private press in Iraq, Faydi’s own Basrawi reformist journal al-Iqaz (“Reveille”), and their contributions to Iraqi regionalism. Finally, I assess the role of language itself as a factor in the relationship of these intellectuals to Istanbul, and vice-versa. I propose the concept of an Arab Iraqi lingua-regionalist identity within the larger Ottoman political space. Accommodating centralization was more than just a push-pull. There were many voices, many actions and reactions, and many tongues.

This paper is a study of the British conceptualization of Iraq as a geographic and socio-political territory upon the foundation of the British Mandate for Mesopotamia in 1920-1. The purpose is to trace the development of institutional knowledge about Iraqi geography, history, and ethnic and religious distribution back from the moment of inception. This paper asks two questions: what did officials in the Colonial Office, Foreign Office, and military think Iraq was, or should be, at the moment Britain took responsibility for turning Iraq into a sovereign nation-state, and what effect did this have on Iraq's geography and border formation? I show that the British imagined Iraq as a nation-state based around the rural and urban centers within the irrigated zone of the Shatt al-Arab, Tigris River, and lower Euphrates River, or “Mesopotamia.” This relatively densely populated riparian zone of agricultural and trade-based economies (also the site of the region’s Ottoman administrative centers, and the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala) was documented on maps and in travel narratives as the home to the biblical Eden and the ruins of Islam’s Abbasid golden age, and which was now divided between a desert “wilderness” and settled “civilization.” This exoticized, text-based land of Mesopotamia was assimilated into the texts, maps, and institutional knowledge of British military planners and civil administrators engaged in the invasion and occupation of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul provinces during World War I, and thence to the blueprints for the future Iraqi state. The source materials are travel guides, geographies and maps by independent scholars, surveying contractors hired by the Ottoman government like William Willcocks, and of course, British colonial and military officials such as Gertrude Bell and A. T. Wilson. All were involved in the invasion and occupation of the Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul between 1914 and 1918, and all were frequent contributors to my other important source for this project, The Geographical Journal (London, 1893-). As the official record of The Royal Geographical Society, the Journal acted as a government-backed scientific journal and a forum for debate and inquiry into the geo-political issues facing the British Empire. My paper thus provides the first study of the Journal as a literary space for the overlapping, reciprocal relationship between knowledge of the “Orient” and imperial rule.

As part of an extensive modernization during the Hashemite period that left few areas untouched, Iraq experienced an unprecedented growth of the state, the formulation of new modes of politics as well as normative political and cultural values that defined the rules of conduct of the nation. Simultaneously, novel state-sponsored disciplinary discourses sought to implement efficiency and productivity by favoring a strict and clear-cut division between work leisure, and by demanding loyalty to the nation from its citizens. In this context, the notion of a potentially dangerous and non-national idleness emerged as a function of a new and modern temporality and became associated with a particular space, namely the coffee shop, which had previously represented a less rigid boundary between work and leisure. Through an examination of a number of autobiographical and fictional works produced by Iraqi writers and intellectuals who frequented Baghdad’s many coffee shops in the early and mid 20th century, this paper sheds light on the politics of leisure and urban space in Baghdad during this period and explores how the coffee shop, as an important social space, came to represent a problematic site of idleness and indolence. More importantly, this paper argues that the notion of idleness must be historicized and placed in a temporal context. When the office became the fixed workplace and the classroom the primary site for education, a number of places outside of these institutions became increasingly ambiguous. The Iraqi state and normative society rallied around vilifying the vices and dangers of the coffee shop, among other places. In fact, the more time became measured, controlled, and organized, the more unsupervised intellectual and political activity raised suspicion among the former colonial masters and Iraqi intellectuals close to the state. By favoring literary over colonial and state archives, this paper also offers an alternative perspective on Iraq’s political history and culture. By including the voices of its clientele, this paper offers a view of the coffee shop from within and demonstrates how some of Baghdad’s avant-garde intellectuals did not always accept the disciplinary discourses of the state but rather they were able to subvert them with a good amount of playful defiance and challenge.

Constituent power of the people is fundamental to modern constitutionalism. Yet in the constitution making process in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, constituent power was appropriated away from the people and placed, by the American-led occupation of the country, in the hands of the political elites. The antagonistic political maneuvering that ensued between elites, often times along ethno-sectarian lines, led to a constitution making process defined by an absence of popular engagement. The result has been a constitution devoid of democratic value for the people, and a Schmittian political dynamic between elites in which the Iraqi Constitution is essentialised for political gain at the expense of the Iraqi people, their rights, and stability in the country. After exploring the concept of constituent power – or popular sovereignty – I discuss the practical challenges constituent power faces within a modern constitutional democracy. While the people are the ultimate sovereign, constitutional democracy constrains that sovereignty through constitutional and legal practices. This constraint is one element of ‘the paradox of constitutionalism.’ Political and legal theorists including Carl Schmitt have attempted to reconcile the paradox by locating an ongoing role for ‘the people’ within constitutionalism. In Iraq, key constitution making moments in 2004 and 2005 highlight the absence of constituent power of the people, and the appropriation of constituent power by elites. These moments described are supplemented with first-hand interviews I conducted with Iraqi political figures in Baghdad in June and July of 2012. These elites were involved at various points in the most recent constitution making process in Iraq, and will contextualise my critical analysis of current constitutional politics. Juxtaposed against the earlier theoretical discussion and Schmitt’s description of the people’s integral, ongoing role and relationship in and with the constitution, this paper argues that the political will expressed by the elites during the constitution making process has been followed by a constant Schmittian political state, which has prevented serious constitutional legality and order to be established, and has denied a true relationship between the people and the constitution to develop.