History Writing and Canon-making: the Place of Women in Narratives of the Iran–Iraq War

This chapter explores why women were by and large excluded as producers of cultural products during the Iran Iraq war, despite the state’s ‘progressive’ discourses and the immense and unprecedented growth of the novel during this period under state patronage. It argues that due to a combination of ideological and pragmatic reasons, female perspectives and voices were marginalized in state sponsored texts, be they from the earlier periods of the war when memoirs from the frontline-style texts were favoured, or in the civilian accounts of the later period. The chapter ultimately points to a shift towards conservative discourses and practices which led to setbacks in the gains made by Iraqi women before the war.

Introduction: Women, Wars and Weapons: Mapping the Cultural Battlefield of Ba‘thist Iraq

W hen Saddam Hussein infamously proclaimed that the word and the bullet came from the same barrel, he created an embattled cultural space which would persist because of, and in spite of, his dominance of Iraqi politics for almost twenty-five years. This book is not an analysis of the status of women in Iraq under Saddam Hussein; nor is it exclusively about Iraqi women writers inside or outside the country, or about constructions of gender and gender identity. Instead the focus of the book is, to use the words of Abir Hamdar, on the ‘ongoing struggle for symbolic power in the Arab world’....

The Infamous Iraqi Majidat: Chastity, Chivalry and Collective Identity in the Novels of Saddam Hussein

This chapter argues that taken as a whole, the four novels of Saddam Hussein, written in as many years, epitomize the Ba‘thist state’s contradictory discourses on women. The chapter distinguishes between texts set in ancient Mesopotamia, with their emphasis on ‘liberal’ views on issues such as adultery and female political leadership, and more conservative texts set in modern Iraq, with their emphasis on traditional tribal and religious values. Ultimately, the tension in Saddam’s oeuvre seems to be between woman as symbol and woman as real person, whereby the former represents the Ba‘th’s supposedly progressive agendas, whereas the latter reflects the Party’s adoption of conservative discourses and policies vis a vis women.

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 ...

The National Gets Personal: Autobiographical Writings by Iraqi Women

This chapter examines the political memoirs of three Iraqi women and argues that the life writing genre is in itself resistive as it challenges the homogeneity trumpeted by Ba‘thist literary propaganda. Moreover, the chapter explores how the autobiographical subgenres adopted by the authors, such as diary entries, letters and poetry can resist authoritarianism by shaping our perceptions through the use of form and paratext. It looks in particular, at the formation of bonds beyond state imperatives and the relationship between personal and collective identities. Whereas Iraqi and Arab nationalism were propagated by the state as the most important means of communal self-identification, the writers in this chapter consider alternative means of bonding as they situate themselves as global citizens in their places of exile.

Fighting Fire with Fire: the Islamic Novel in Iraq and the Battle for Hearts and Minds

This chapter examines for the first time the phenomena of religious novel writing by Iraqi women. It argues that the conservative, and often reactionary religious discourses expounded by devout female authors represented a proxy attack on the Ba‘th’s supposed godlessness. As such, the female body becomes a site of resistance, with modest clothing and limited gender mixing forming part of a wider discourse on purity and contamination. The chapter ultimately concludes that the extremely popular religious novels produced by writers inside and outside Iraq can be considered as a form of counter-propaganda, and their views on women should not be taken at face value.