JISCMail - CULTURAL-DIVERSITY Archives

Intellect is pleased to announce that the International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 12.2 is now available! For more information about the issue, click here >> https://bit.ly/2O1rPpp

Content:

Special Issue in honour of the Iraqi journalist and author Aziz Sbahi

Authors: Thabit A. J. Abdullah
Page Start: 95

The Iraqi Communist Party 1934–79

Authors: Peter Sluglett
Page Start: 101

A survey of the history of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), from it
formation to the rise of Saddam Hussein, is presented. The heydays of
the party were in the two decades following the end of World War II
when communist activities played a central role in the political,
economic and cultural transformations of Iraq. The ICP’s influence has
declined sharply in recent times and today it appears on the verge
ceasing to exist as an effective political force.

The Communist Party’s activities among the peasantry

Authors: Aziz Sbahi
Page Start: 111

Although the activities of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) were
primarily centred in the major cities, the party did not neglect the
countryside. During the 1940s and 1950s, the ICP’s cadres played a
central role in forming peasant associations in several regions of the
country particularly in Kurdistan and the Middle Euphrates.
Communist-led peasant movements tended to focus on legal rights and
economic demands, scoring some impressive gains for Iraq’s most
destitute classes. These activities also helped spread general notions
of social and political justice, democracy, citizenship,
class-consciousness and socialism. This form of activist education
would play a significant role in the success of the anti-Monarchic
revolution of 1958 and the subsequent agrarian reform programmes.

The 1948 Wathba revisited: Comrade Fahd and the mass appeal of Iraqi communism

Authors: Elizabeth F. Thompson
Page Start: 127

The 1948 Wathba protests in Iraq crystallized the communist party’s
success in mobilizing ordinary citizens around democratic ideals,
against the neo-feudal politics of the British-controlled monarchy.
This mobilization bore fruit in the 1958 revolution, but is often
overlooked by historians who focus on the failure of a communist
revolution. The inclusive, cross-sectarian democratic movement is
remembered, but not revived in post-Ba`thist Iraq today.

From regional politics to street demonstrations: Changes in the Iraqi
Communist Party’s political strategies in the post-war era

Authors: Dai Yamao
Page Start: 147

This article analyses how the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) altered its
political strategies in post-war Iraq. After the decline of the
political presence, the ICP formed large alliances with small parties
in the third round of local and national elections, opting to support
candidates on a national scale; in doing so, the ICP achieved
significant breakthrough. The party’s election strategy not only led
to the ICP’s success but also to the overall stabilization of Iraqi
party politics. After the rise of ISIS, the ICP overcame its
ideological differences with Sadrist factions that similarly stood
alongside the masses; pursuing large-scale demonstrations, the ICP
found further opportunities to carry out its political activities. The
ICP has thus been adroit in adapting its political strategies
according to political and social circumstances. As Islamist groups
have seized political power and religious sentiment has spread, the
ICP might be seen as pursuing the best of strategies that remain
available to it.

Theatres of blood: Performative violence in Iraq

Authors: Charles Tripp
Page Start: 167

This article examines much of the violence of the past two decades in
Iraq through the prism of performative politics. This draws attention
to its spectacular nature, its repertoires and aesthetics, where blood
becomes the common referent in a theatre of state power and
resistance. Beyond the spectacle, however, violence is performative in
that it possesses causal power. Violence has shaped the ways in which
conflicts have been understood and organized, reproducing and
reinforcing particular identities, institutions and attitudes in Iraq.
Performative violence became a spectacle of horror and, through that
horror a technology for the demarcation of whole categories of Iraqi
citizen whose blood Islamic State and others licensed themselves to
shed. Both nascent state forces and those resisting them, as well the
foreign powers active in the Iraqi theatre, had every interest in
making manifest their competence and their potential in the use of
violence. Regardless of the identity of the parties involved, or the
ends they were pursuing, violence has thus become a key technology of
power. To perform it has been to assert the right to power in the
political landscape of Iraq.

Diaries of Iraqi soldiers: Views from inside Saddam’s army

Authors: Joseph Sassoon And Alissa Walter
Page Start: 183

This article presents rarely seen glimpses into life in the barracks
of the Iraqi Army during the Gulf War (1990–91). We analyse fifteen
diaries of Iraqi soldiers found in the Kuwait Dataset of the Iraqi
Ba’th Party Archives, which was first opened to researchers in July
2015. These diaries shed new light on the mind-sets, ideological
frameworks, morale and daily lives of Iraqi rank-and-file soldiers. We
ask the following questions: did Iraqi soldiers support the invasion
and occupation of Kuwait and accept Saddam Hussein’s rationales for
the war? How did Iraqi soldiers view the United States and its
coalition partners? These diaries also provide clues about why so many
retreating soldiers rose up against Saddam in country-wide protests
one week after Iraq’s defeat in the war. Although diaries from the US
Civil War and the First and Second World Wars have been thoroughly
examined by historians and literary scholars, few diaries of soldiers
from the modern Arab world have been studied. This article fills an
important gap in knowledge about the experiences of soldiers in modern
authoritarian regimes and about the Gulf War.

Difficult variations: Saadi Youssef’s impossible returns

Authors: Sinan Antoon
Page Start: 199

This article traces the dialectics of exile and return in some of the
late poems Saadi Youssef, the most important Iraqi poet in the last
half century and one of the pioneers of modern Arabic poetry. It pays
particular attention to the effects the Anglo-American invasion of
2003 and the disintegration and dismemberment of Iraq on Youssef’s
poetic discourse and the ways in which he attempts to reconstruct and
represent a vanishing homeland and articulate his relationship to its
landscape. It addresses Youssef’s poetic conversations with Muḥammad
Mahdīal-Jawāhirī (1899–1997), another great Iraqi poet who, like
Youssef, lived much of his life exiled from Iraq.

Book Reviews

Authors: Alissa Walter And Samer Abboud And Sara Farhan And Paolo
Maggiolini And Mehdi Noorbaksh
Page Start: 213

The Ba‘thification of Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s Totalitarianism, Aaron M.
Faust (2015)
Islamic Traditions of Refuge in the Crises of Iraq and Syria, Tahir Zaman (2016)
Iraq: A History, John Robertson (2016)
The Glubb Reports: Glubb Pasha and Britain’s Empire Project in the
Middle East. 1920–1956, Tancred Bradshaw (2016)
The Emergence of Modern Shi’ism: Islamic Reform in Iraq and Iran,
Zackery M. Heern (2015)