Int. J. Middle East Stud. 34 (2002), 205215.

Printed in the United States of America

Sami Zubaida

T H E F R A G M E N T S I M A G I N E T H E N AT I O N : T H E C A S E O F I R AQ

Iraq was formed as a modern state under a British Mandate in 1920. Its constituents were the Ottoman vilayets of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. As such, it was the product of two colonial administrations: first of the modernizing Ottoman state of the Tanzimat and the Young Turks Constitution of 1908, then of the British Mandate. The population that constituted these territories, like most pre-modern populations, was organized as more or less self-sufficient communities ruled by their own forces, authorities, and hierarchies, with the Ottoman state as a remote imposition with a predominantly fiscal concern. Many of these entities, especially the tribes and some religious authorities, endeavoured to evade the states fiscal exactions and to impose their own on dependent populations. The centralizing thrust of the Tanzimat, deepened by the Young Turks regime, gave rise to many conflicts and rebellions. Conscription was a particularly detested and resisted practice. These fragments were, at least in imagination, inscribed into various theoretical communities. Benedict Anderson named these communities as the sacred religious community of, for instance, Christendom or the umma of Islam, and the dynastic realm (Anderson 1991, 1222). In fact, for the different Iraqi groups at the turn of the 20th century there were a number of overlapping theoretical and actual entities in terms of which they could imagine their inclusion. The caliphate of Islam was claimed and proclaimed by the Hamidian regime, which set out to rally the Arab provinces in its name. Abdulhamid, however, was particularly worried by the Shi a of Iraq, whom he regarded as an unreliable entity prone to Iranian sympathies, and whom he tried to convert to the orthodox faith (Deringil 1990). We shall see presently that the Shi a were not one entity. Certainly, for the ulama and notables of the holy shrines of Iraq, who wielded enormous influence, Iran and its state was an important but not overriding point of reference. It was another dynastic state and a vital component of their imagined sacred community. Then there was the new idea of the Arab peoples and homelandan idea that was much more vague and uncertain to Iraqis at this point than either the Ottoman world or Iran. The Arab Revolt, instigated by the British against the Ottomans at the start of World War I, was proclaimed by the sharif of Mecca also in the name of Islam, but against the ostensible caliphate of the Ottomans.

Sami Zubaida is a Reader in Sociology, School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, United Kingdom; e-mail: s.zubaida@bbk.ac.uk. 2002 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/02 $9.50

206 Sami Zubaida This claim had a tangible effect for some influential Iraqis: Ottoman officers who defected to the Sharifan cause and whose careers became bound up with the dynastic ambitions of the Hashemites. The establishment of the Arab Kingdom in Syria after the war under Faysal, the son of the sharif, made this theoretical claim ever more tangible. Faysal was to become king of Iraq after the French overran his Arab kingdom in Syria. The Islamic umma was fractured between the Ottomans and the Arab claimants. We shall see how these overlapping worlds played their part in the imagination of Iraq as a nation-state. (This paper does not include a discussion of the Kurdish aspects of modern Iraq. This is a subject of crucial importance that requires a much lengthier treatment than I can provide in the present context.) We shall see in what follows that a fractured Iraqi nation was formed as a consequence of the formation of the state by external colonial maneuvers: as elsewhere in the colonial world (and indeed in many parts of Europe), it is the state that makes the nation. I have argued elsewhere (Zubaida 1993, 14652) that there is a material basis to this formation of the nation-state in the economicfiscal functions of the state, its allocation of resources and employment in its swelling ranks, supplemented by a national educational system that produces qualifications for employment, and a cultural field of media operating in a standardized national language. Many of these points are elaborated in modern theories of nationalismnotably, in Anderson (1991) and Gellner (1983). Part of Gellners argument, however, is that nationalism as an ideology and practice is a product of the transition from agrarian to industrial society. It fulfills a function for the process of industrialization in that industrial society requires a culturally homogenized population with common literacy skills in a standardized language. Iraq, alongside many other nation-states founded by colonial arrangements, was far from industrialization or homogeneity when the process started. It also had a very low level of literacy, which continued long after the inauguration of the national state. The effects highlighted by Gellner were the products, not the conditions, of nation-state formation. A common educational system, limited literacy, and state employment did lead to the formation of an intelligentsia and a political class with common components of cultural outlook and an imagination of the nation. However, the political field thus created was one of contestation among different conceptions of the nation that, in turn, were related to communal, regional, and class interests (Zubaida 1991). Andersons notion of imagined communities, and the transition from imagining the religious communitydynastic realm to imagining the nation, provide much useful conceptual vocabulary for our purposes. We shall note that in the case of Iraq (and many other places), mutations of concepts of the religious community are articulated onto that of the nation and enter the field of nationalist contestations.
T H E I R AQ I R E VO L U T I O N O F 1 9 2 0

British forces occupied Baghdad in 1917 and replaced Ottoman rule. Reactions among the different groups were varied and shifting. Many people, especially merchants and traders, rather liked British rule and found it a great improvement on the Turks. Strikingly, the British paid in cash for all the goods they required instead of requisitioning them for the war effort, as Ottoman officials did, appropriating the goods mostly for

Iraq: The Fragments and the Nation 207 their private benefit. Administration and taxation were strict and impersonal, and officials were not susceptible to bribery. The high level of demand, however, led to a boom. Merchants and landowners (including tribal chiefs) made quick fortunes, while prices soared, to the detriment of the poor. Much more important, modern administration did not appeal to many people who were used to lax government that allowed considerable local autonomy and to corrupt officials with whom deals could be made. Then there were groups with particular interests and grievances, to whom we shall turn presently. Vociferous demands emanated from these quarters for the British to honor their wartime promises and install an independent Arab state. These culminated in 1920 in an armed uprising against the British, the epicenter of which was the middle Euphrates region, which included the Shi i holy cities. The main fighting force was from some of the tribes, and the leadership came from a sector of the senior religious leadership in the shrine cities and from secular nationalists. This uprising was put down within a few months, and the British Mandate was proclaimed, but with an Arab government under Faysal. This uprising occupies a place of honor in nationalist histories as thawrat al- ishrn the revolution of 1920, an example of national awakening of Arab and Islamic forces united against the imperialist conqueror. British commentators of the time, however, dismissed it as yet another example of tribal resistance to any kind of government, of which there are many examples over the centuries. Indeed, in 1915, the same region of the middle Euphrates and the holy cities rebelled against the Turks and established self-government, with the tribes in the ascendancy. Ali al-Wardi, a notable Iraqi sociologist and historian, has argued against both these views (which roused the ire of nationalist historians against him). Wardi argued that the uprising represented a coalition of different interests and motives in an uneasy and brittle alliance, in which tribal ambitions did play a central part. Yet, as against British comments, Wardi argued that there was a crucial difference in this instance in that the tribes fought with nationalist slogans and with the concepts of Iraq, Arabism, and patriotism.1 Even though these entities did not mean very much to most of them, they nevertheless constituted a new kind of language and concept that were to develop. In Andersons terms, we can say that this was the beginning of imagining the nation. The tribes, however, were remote from this process. It is to the leading urban elements that we should turn to look at the discourses and imagined entities that constituted their nationalism. Wardi specifies two elements who were the instigators and leaders of the uprising: the Efendiyya (the officials), and the mala iyya (Wardi 1992, V1:3640), the religious classes, predominantly Shi i (most Sunni ulama kept a low profile). Let us examine the different universes of these two groups, then turn to the other actors.
T H E E F E N D I YA A N D A R M Y O F F I C E R S

The Efendiyya were the officials of the Ottoman state who were put out of their jobs after the British occupation. Literate, educated in Union and Progress (Young Turk regime) schools, they knew the language of nations, patriotism, and constitutions. They were a key group in the process of imagining the nation, but which nation? The Ottoman nation of the Young Turks? The Iraqi nation of the nascent colonial state? The Arab nation of the Sharif and his dynasty? In fact, most people shifted

208 Sami Zubaida back and forth from one to the other, depending on where they were placed. But in 1920, all these allegiances were mobilized against the British occupation. Subsequently, when the British authorities realized their mistake in cutting the Efendiya adrift, they remedied the situation by giving them jobs, and many were converted to the British cause and, subsequently, to the Arab king under the British Mandate. Officers in the Ottoman army who defected to the Sharifan Arab cause were at first accommodated in the service of Faysal and his Arab kingdom in Syria (Batatu 1978, 31961). They soon came up against regional Syrian nationalism and were elbowed out by their Syrian colleagues, who used the slogan Syria for the Syrians. Arabism was clearly not enough to provide jobs and careers. They naturally looked to Iraq for their future. Some of them (Jamil al-Madfa i, Mawlud Mukhlis) played an important part in the uprising in the border areas between Iraq and Syria and around Mosul, supplying and leading tribal forces against British targets. In the battle of Talafar (near Mosul), one of their number pretended to be the Emir Zayd (one of the sharifs sons), which aroused great enthusiasm among the local population. The slogans they shouted in greeting the Arab prince were in Turkish: Paygambar kokusi koklayor, Meka kokusi koklayor (We can smell the scent of the Prophet; we smell the scent of Mecca). The inhabitants of this regiona mix of Arabs, Kurds, and Turcomanwere roused against British occupation by a prince calling for an Arab kingdom but whose significance for that population was in terms of religious charisma expressed in Turkish (Wardi 1992, V1:160). In any case, the revolt of Tala far lasted only until British reinforcements came within two days. Ultimately, these officers were to serve under Faysal in Iraq, some of them attaining high office in politics and administration (Batatu 1978, 31961).
THE SHI I ULAM A

The Shi a of Iraq at this point can be divided into the ulama class (Wardis malaiyya), urban merchants and artisans, and tribesmen. The tribesmen were Arab bedouins of the south, among whom Sayyids, descendants of the Prophet, enjoyed high esteem and revenues as wise men and conciliators and because of their link to the ulama of the shrines. The ulama were headed by the mujtahids and marjis, many of whom were of Iranian origin and nationality. The religious institutions and their heads were largely autonomous from any government, enjoying their own revenues from charities and the dues of the faithful (in contrast to their Sunni counterparts, who were mostly in government-controlled institutions and paid stipends). Within the shrine cities of Najaf, Kerbala, and al-Kadhim (a suburb of Baghdad), the mujtajids ruled and behaved like heads of state (Nakash 1994, 1825). The ulama, however, did not form a united body or a unitary institution. Each magnate had his own domain of schools, students, followers, and charities. At most times, one mujtahid was recognized by a degree of consensus as the highest authority, but there was no institutional or administrative hierarchy to enforce his authority on peers who had their own following and resources. In the period under consideration, this supremacy passed at his death from one Yazdi in Najaf, who was anti-Ottoman, anti-constitution, and ultimately pro-British, to Shirazi of Karbala, who was just the opposite and played an important part in the 1920 events. The shrine cities of Najaf

Iraq: The Fragments and the Nation 209 and Karbala were always bitter rivals in the quest for revenues, pilgrims, and trade. Najaf itself was divided by the rival solidarities of its four quarters, each with its own notable families and armed bands (Nakash 1994, 1825). The mujtahids and the ulama class at this point in time constituted an important source for the imagining of the nation, but between overlapping spheres of reference. The ulama were already familiar with the vocabulary of modern politicsof nations, patriotism, and constitutions. These resulted from two episodes: one, the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906, and the second, the Ottoman Constitution of 1908. The ulama of the Iraqi shrines were deeply involved in Iran. Each prominent mujtahid had a large network of support in Iran, and much revenue came from the Iranian bazaars (Nakash 1994, 20537). In the previous decades, Iran had been their main sphere of reference. The new political activism of the ulama against the Qajar state was centered in Ottoman Iraq. The fatwa against the consumption of tobacco in the tobacco episode of 189192 came from Muhamad Hasan Shirazi in Samarra (Keddie 1966). We should note that the telegraph, introduced between Iran and Iraq in the 1860s, played a crucial part in facilitating communications and coordination in this episode, as it did in the period of the Constitutional Revolution to follow. These were the beginnings of the technical innovations that made the imagination of the nation possible. The constitution divided the ulama in Iran and Iraq. Both sides, however, articulated their arguments with reference to the modern entities of nation, representation, constitution, sovereignty, and so on. Exponents had to elaborate (perhaps for the first time) political theories derived from fiqh, the most notable, for the constitution, being Nainis Tanbih al-Umma wa Tanzih al-Milla (Naini 1955). The years of struggle that followed the declaration of the constitution saw Russian and British interventions in Iran, with further politicization of the ulama and the students, many of whom abandoned traditional sectarian isolationism in favor of Muslim unity, Sunni and Shi i, against European imperialism. In the Ottoman sphere, the Young Turk regime initiated important cultural and political developments. Secular schools, liberalization of publications, and the new institutions of representation all contributed to the creation of a modern intelligentsia. The Ottoman authorities, keen on fostering Islamic solidarity against European powers and conscious of mujtahid power in Iraq, made special efforts toward them, with the opening of specifically Shi i secular schools, some partly funded by mujtahids. Seminary students in the holy shrines turned increasingly to a mixture of modern nationalist concepts and notions of Muslim unity. We see, so far, the overlapping spheres of the Sunni Ottoman Empire, Shi i Iran, and the illusive notion of Arabism. Here were the concepts and models of modern politics and attempts to reconcile them with Shi i fiqh. Yet the entity of the nation and the nation-state to which these should apply remained vague, and the entity of Iraq, present in historical and geographical terms, was yet to crystallize as a focus of the national idea. This crystallization was occurring in the processes of socio-political struggles dominated by all kinds of factionalism and particular interests, all of which began to speak the language of patriotism. Let us try to glimpse some of these particularities by looking at the ranging of forces for and against the British occupation in 1920. We have mentioned that merchants and business interests were for the most part

210 Sami Zubaida supporters of British rule: they saw in it an assurance of security, especially of property, and liberty of economic activity. Many of the ulama, Sunni and Shi i, took similar views. In the 1919 referendum by the British governor of the educated of each city, posing the alternatives of British rule or an Arab kingdom and the preferred Arab prince (referendum was a hard concept to grasp at the time, and the very idea that a conquering power should ask the people whether its rule should continue!), the notables of most towns opted for British rule (the way these results were achieved was controversial, and many subsequent petitions expressed dissent). Nevertheless, it was clear that a prominent section of the notables and ulama, including the seniormost mujtahid Yazdi of Najaf, for instance, were in favor of British rule. Another view in Najaf opted for Iranian rule (Nakash 1994, 6166; Wardi 1992, V1:6791). An interesting opinion was that of Naqib al-Ashraf of Baghdad, Abd al-Rahman al-Gaylani (soon to become prime minister in the first Iraqi national government), who told Gertrude Bell that the idea of the referendum was foolish and could only lead to trouble. The British were the conquerors, and they should rule by right of conquest. All those against the British, he asserted, were people of low standing and without honor. He reserved his worst invective for the Shi a: who could trust people who had killed Husayn, then proceeded to worship him? he asked (Wardi 1992, V1:9091). SunniShi i sectarianism, as shown, was in flux at this point. Intellectuals and nationalists were emphasizing Muslim unity against European powers, while traditional sentiments and antagonisms remained deeply ingrained, as attested by the proclamations of the Naqib. This was to remain a line of fissure in the imagination of the Iraqi nation and the politics of the state.
THE TRIBES

In the uprising of 1920, the main fighting forces were the tribes,2 who were instigated and coordinated by sectors of the Shi i clergy and Sada (s. Sayyid) or of the nationalist Efendiyya and army officers.3 Sections of tribal forces remained faithful to the British, however, and many changed sides in the flux of events. Which factors determined these allegiances? The British maintained contacts with selected tribal leaders before the war and paid many of them for services and allegiance. Under their rule, the British opted for a policy of recognizing one chief for each tribal group with whom they dealt and whom they favored in pay, arms, and tax concessions. This angered many other leaders who considered themselves senior to those chosen. The tribes were also highly resentful of strong government that threatened their autonomy and sources of revenue from protection of caravans and trade. The Sada, who enjoyed wealth and prestige from managing tribal affairs in the absence of government, were also worried by the installation of effective rule that would marginalize their position. These interests and sentiments converged with the political leadership of clergy, Efendiyya, and officers, and they all spoke the language of patriotism and religion. This veneer for the tribes was very thin, however. Each time the tribes helped to liberate a town, their minds soon turned to pillaging the British garrisons, then Jewish homesand, often, the inhabitants in general. Old feuds, such as that between the towns of Rawa and Ana, which lay on opposite sides of the Euphrates and each of which had its own tribal alliances,

Iraq: The Fragments and the Nation 211 were fought out in the events of the uprising (Wardi 1992, V2:13645). With few exceptions, tribal forces tended to vanish at the appearance of superior force and armor. Given that the tribes were the main fighting force of the revolution, it is not surprising that it collapsed within a short span of time. We see, then, that Iraq on the eve of nation-statehood, in transition from Ottoman rule to British, contained a multiplicity of shifting groupings and forces that had conflicting interests and sentiments, but that were speaking the language of patriotism, the nation, and representation and constitutions, albeit in the context of vague and shifting spheres of reference. A declining Ottoman world; a crisis-ridden Iran; a nascent and illusive Arab nation; an Islam fractured between the claims of Ottomanism and its caliphate, Arabism and the sharif of Mecca and Shi ism, itself fractured between Iran and Iraq and the claims of rival authorities. This uncertainty was resolved, at least formally, in 1921 with the declaration of a British-sponsored and -protected Iraqi Arab kingdom under Faysal. How did the fragments fit into this nation-state, and what were the terms of the imagination of the nation?
T H E I R AQ I N AT I O N - S TAT E

The most national of all strata in an incipient nation-state are the functionaries and politicians of that state. Their world outlook and life chances revolve around the national idea. This does not entail a blurring of other, particularistic identities, but these are now perceived and negotiated through the imagined nation and the institutions and resources of the state. Insofar as the new state becomes a determinant of resources and careers, other sectors of the population come into its arena and imagine their destinies within its orbit. The first ministries of the new state were composed mostly of representatives of the patrician Sunni families, with one Jew (Sasson Hesqail) in finance. Under Faysal, this was soon to change, with increasing representation of what Batatu called the exSharifan officersIraqi Ottoman officers who rallied to the Sharifan cause and were in Faysals entourage in Syria (Batatu 1978, 31961). These were to dominate Iraqi politics under the monarchy (until 1958), with Nuri al-Said the most frequent prime minister and the real power behind the throne. They, too, were entirely Sunni. Government jobs went to a mixture of members of the old families, Efendiyya from the Ottoman period, and more of the Iraqis from Syria, almost entirely Sunni, and a fair number of Jews, who were the most educated of the Baghdadi strata and were proficient in European languages (Batatu 1978, 244318; Wardi 1992, V1:42). Faysal was highly conscious of the need to integrate the Shi a into the state. He was hindered in this project by his own entourage of ministers and officials, who feared and distrusted the Shi a and were inclined to exclude them, and by the senior mujtahid, Mahdi al-Khalisi of Kadhim, who took a position of uncompromising antagonism to the British and the new state, which he saw as their puppet. He ruled that Turkish domination was better, though unjust, because it was Muslim. Faysal went to great lengths to conciliate al-Khalisi and achieved partial success after much pressure and negotiations, when the mujtahid agreed to grant Faysal a conditional Bay a. The condition was that Faysal and his government achieve total independence from the British. Khalisi continued, however, to work against the government and the British,

212 Sami Zubaida eventually issuing a fatwa, endorsed by two other senior mujtahids, prohibiting participation in the elections for a constituent assembly in 1922 on pain of eternal damnation. These events coincided with Turkish military threats to northern Iraq after Ataturks armys victories in Anatolia, which rekindled pro-Turkish and Pan-Islamic sentiments among many Iraqis, including Khalisis entourage. Khalisi was acting increasingly like a rival head of state who was confident in popular support in his domain of Kadhmiyya as well as in the other holy shrines. In 1923, a new cabinet under the firm leadership of Muhsin al-Sa dun decided on a showdown with Khalisi. Pointing to their Iranian nationality, they declared that he and the other mujtahids in his camp were foreigners interfering in Iraqi affairs illegitimately.4 After various confrontations between the police and their followers, the government succeeded in arresting them and deporting them to Iran, where they received an enthusiastic welcome. Thus, a new field of contestation opened in which different forces played on overlapping themes of Islam, Iraqi nationalism, and Iranian and Turkish affiliations, and played games of inclusion and exclusion and the drawing of boundaries. Khalisi was, of course, much more Iraqi than Faysal. The play of these events was clearly a power game over the autonomy of mujtahids and the extension of their influence over the new national entity and over the nascent government, with British support, demonstrating its power and control over the mujtahids. The nation is imagined in terms of the rival discourses and contests between its fragments. At the same time, Faysal remained keen to integrate the Shi a within the national entity, and there were many Shi i ulama and notables who were friendly to Faysal and the new state, and many more who turned to him after it became clear that the new state was there to stay. It soon became a convention that the minister of education would be a Shi i. This created interesting situations with the director-general of education, who was none other than Sati al-Husry, the foremost theoretician of Arab nationalism and no lover of Iraqi Shi a whom he perceived as traitors to the Arab cause in favor of Iran and its particular communalist interests. A number of episodes illustrate these problems. Faysal sent instructions to Tawfiq al-Suwaydi, the head of the newly established College of Law (1921), to admit young Shi i men. Al-Suwaydi recounts in his memoirs (Suwaydi 1969) that he resisted this order on the grounds that the Shi i Jafariyya School from which they graduated did not qualify them to the required secondary level for college entry. The king insisted, and, according to Suwaydi, pressured Sati al-Husry, as director of education, to endorse their qualifications. In his memoirs, alHusry stated that it was Suwaydi who gave way and admitted not only Shi i but also Jewish and Armenian students simply on the testimony of the respective heads of their schools that their academic level constituted secondary qualifications (Wardi 1992, V1:12627). The different versions show clearly the reluctance of both these figures to follow the kings clear plan to integrate the Shi a into national life through government employment. The other episode, also recalled by Husry, was the Ashura ceremonies in Kadhimiyya in 1921. Faysal, as part of his courting of the Shi a, made cash and other gifts to Shi i institutions as a contribution to the cost of the ceremonies and sponsored and personally attended the Ashura ceremony in Kadhimiyya. In the theatrical representation of the martyrdom of Hussayn various banners are raised, and on this occasion

Iraq: The Fragments and the Nation 213 the new Iraqi flag made its appearance among the banners. This was clearly not to the liking of some leading figures in the organization, and Husry noticed that the national flag was carried next to the actor playing the villain of the piece, Umar ibn Saad, leader of the Umayyad forces that had killed Husayn, rather than with the heroes and martyrs. The curses and insults uttered by the audience whenever this actor appeared were thus directed against the flag. Husry drew Faysals attention to this, and instructions were sent to the carrier of the Iraqi flag to march next to the virtuous forces. But no sooner did the carrier approach the actors playing Husayn and Abbas than he was violently pushed away, at which time he was ordered to withdraw (Wardi 1992, V1:12829). The next episode is the confrontation, a few years later, between Husry and the famous poet Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri.5 Jawahiri was from a Najafi family of ulama and notables. By 1927, at age twenty-six, he had made a name for himself as a writer and poet. He was invited, through Najafi connections and in view of his literary promise, to take up a post as a teacher at a secondary school. By the time he got to Baghdad, the post had been scaled down to a primary school on the grounds that he did not possess the conventional school diplomas, which seemed to be the ministrys regular excuse for refusing Shi i applicants. Further, his nationality status was questioned by the ministry: only those inhabitants of Iraq who were previously Ottoman subjects were automatically entitled to the new Iraqi nationality, those who did not and had Persian protection (in Ottoman times a device to escape conscription) had to go through additional formalities. Jawahiri, in his memoirs, pours scorn on all these Turkish bureaucrats, such as Sati , who spoke Arabic with a Turkish accent and needed an interpreter, but who were questioning the Iraqi and Arab credentials of a descendant of many generations of Arab ulama and udaba , and one who was himself already a distinguished contributor to the Arabic language and literature. After surmounting these obstacles, al-Jawahiri took up his post at the primary school. After a few weeks of service, however, he was summoned to Sati s office to be questioned about a poem published in a newpaper, on the subject of a recent holiday he had enjoyed in the Iranian mountains (Shamranat), in which he praised the natural beauties of the country, at the same time expressing his longing for his homeland and friends. Sati and his clique interpreted this as favoring Iran over Iraq. Al-Jawahiri was officially sacked. Complex maneuvers then followed, with the Shi i minister reappointing Jawahiri, in spite Director-General Sati s showing his displeasure by confining himself to his house for a month, then Jawahiri resigning, but Sati attempting to sack him. In his memoirs, Sati claimed that Jawahiri, when asked in his first interview about his nationality, replied without hesitation that he was Iranian, and argued that if Syrians could be appointed as teachers and directors of education, then why not Iranians? In his own, more recent memoirs, Jawahiri denied this version explicitly. Whatever the truth of the matter, the episode illustrates the seriousness of the sectarian dimension and its special potency for the question of nationality and Arabism. This episode reveals how an emerging Shi i intelligentsia identified vigorously with Iraq as an Arab nation-state and defended this identification against the dominant Sunni officialdom that tried to exclude them on the grounds of Persian connections and insufficient loyalty to Iraq and Arabism. We see also that newspapers, journals, and the education system became the central arena of contestation regarding the na-

214 Sami Zubaida tion and its components. This is the fascinating center of imagining the nation, Andersons print capitalism, only it is not very capitalist in this context because it depended on government and notable patronage.6

CONCLUSION

The dividing line in Iraqi politics until recent times was between Pan-Arabism and Iraqismdifferent ways of imagining the nation. The Sunni Arabs, a numerical minority, continued (and continue) to dominate the government and the army. Arabism with an Islamic tinge was associated primarily with these groups. Many Shi i figures were also Arabists, and many Sunnis were communists, but the general pattern tended to be for Iraqism (mostly held by opposition parties and groups) to attract Shi i, Kurds, and the religious minorities insofar as they were political. Within the fractured Iraqi polity, the parties of the leftprimarily the communists, but also the National Democratic Partyseemed to be genuinely secular and anti-communitarian. It was in terms of leftist ideology that Iraq was imagined as a nation of all its communities. Yet this imagining was to be suppressed with all other parties and ideologies. I reiterate, in conclusion, that in Iraq (as in many other countries) it is the state that made the nation. This nation is a territorial, economic, and social reality, buttressed by a highly totalitarian and, for a while, very wealthy state. To say that the nation is a reality is not to imply that this reality is one of solidarity or loyalty. In fact, the situation is quite the contrary. Economic and fiscal administration, education, employment, military conscription, the media and social and cultural organizationall make the nation a fact or facticity compelling on the cognition and imagination of its members (much like Durkheims constraining social facts as things), yet not necessarily of their sentiments of solidarity or loyalty. Sectors of Kurds, Shi a, and Sunnis may detest the Iraqi state and may work for its demise in favor of Pan-Arabism, Islam, or separatist national entities, yet they do so within the parameters of this established facticity, within whose boundaries they imagine their action.

NOTES

The account of the events of this uprising draws extensively on the work of Ali al-Wardi (d. 1995). Wardi wrote a social history of Iraq, Lamahat ijtima yya min tarikh al-iraq al-hadith, in six volumes. Volume 5 (in two parts in the 1992 London edition used here) is devoted to thawrat al- ishrin, the 1920 uprising. In the text, the two parts of that volume are indicated as V1 and V2. 2 For an account of the tribes and their landholding system in Iraq in the 20th century, see Batatu 1978, 53152. For the conversion of the southern tribes to Shi ism, see Nakash 1994, 2548. 3 On the sayyids/sada, see Batatu 1978, 153210; Nakash 1994, 3743. 4 Iraqi nationality was granted to former Ottoman subjects. Many inhabitants of the shrine cities in Ottoman times, alongside many other Shi a and even some Jews, claimed Iranian nationality to avoid military conscription. Those people found it difficult subsequently to acquire Iraqi nationality, another aspect of discrimination against the Shi a. Saddam Husseins regime used the pretext of Iranian nationals to deport many Shi i communities from Iraq in the 1970s and 1980s. 5 This account is taken from Jawahiris memoirs, Dhikrayati, in two volumes (al-Jawahiri 198891, 14172). 6 This is an aspect I explore elsewhere: see Zubaida (n.d.).

Iraq: The Fragments and the Nation 215

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