Conclusion: Binaries, Bonds and Moving beyond the Ba‘th

In her 2004 novel ‘Ali and ‘Aisha: an Iraqi Symphony of Love, Islamic novelist ‘Alyā’ al-Anṣārī depicts a fictive Sunni–Shia love story to represent the potential for peaceful religious coexistence in a unified Iraqi nation emerging from the trauma of authoritarianism and occupation. Inter-sect marriage is a well-established phenomenon in Iraq, and is hardly unprecedented. However, al-Ansārī’s text draws on a literary trope that bears the hallmark of didactic nationalist writings, which is that a Shia man and a Sunni woman are brought together, rather than the opposite. This specific gender configuration signals the unease with which ethnic and religious collectivities ‘give away’ their women to the ‘Other’, whereas the idea of subsuming a Sunni woman within a Shia family where the children of the union will remain Shia, seems less radical and thus more comfortable. Moreover, the narrative’s tragic, pessimistic ending and failed alliance almost seems to be an extension of unconsummated marriages in state-sponsored texts, where national harmony is desirable metaphorically but ultimately unrealistic. That being said, in the context of the Islamic novel this expansive nationalist perspective beyond pan-Shiism or the insularity of the Iraqi Shia community in ...