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- Volume 3, Issue 2, 2009
International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2009
Volume 3, Issue 2, 2009
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Was there an Iraq before there was an Iraq?
More LessIt is frequently stated that Iraq did not exist until the British Empire created it in the wake of the Great War. In the sense of a discreet nation-state entity with its current borders, this statement is accurate. However, in the wider sense of the term Iraq, observers of, publicists for, and willing inheritors of British imperial legacies may have understated the long-standing ties which have characterized the overlapping geographic realms that currently make up the State of Iraq. Not only were the areas comprising the modern state of Iraq often united under various ancient empires prior to the advent of Islam, but also there are signs that the Ottomans who ruled the region prior to the British in some senses treated these same areas as a loose administrative unit.
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Proto-political conceptions of Iraq in late Ottoman times
More LessThis article criticizes the so-called artificiality paradigm concerning the emergence of the modern state on Iraq, according to which the kingdom of Iraq that came into being in 1921 was nothing but a random collection of Ottoman provinces that had little in common. On the basis of documents from the late Ottoman period, the article shows that the opposite appears to be the case: In many ways, the modern state of Iraq had regional antecedents that predated the British invasion in 1914. The article shows that for long periods before 1914 there existed a pattern of administrative centralization of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul under Baghdad as a paramount regional capital, that this regional entity was often described as Iraq in administrative and diplomatic correspondence, and that the local inhabitants often referred to Iraq in a patriotic sense.
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Unfulfilled promises: Ottomanism, the 1908 revolution and Baghdadi Jews
More LessThis article explores the ways in which the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 influenced Baghdadi-Jewish political identity in late Ottoman Iraq. The main argument put forth is that Baghdadi-Jews' positive attitudes towards the British conquerors in 1917, whose victory marked the end of Ottoman rule over Baghdad, can be attributed to unmet political expectations dating back to the 1908 revolution and not to the economic motives of the relatively tiny business elite. Jewish cooperation with the British caused resentment among non-Jews, especially Sunni Muslims, leading to an eventual deterioration of Muslim-Jewish relations in Iraq as the Arab-Zionist conflict played out in Palestine. Thus, the ideas and events that immediately followed the Young Turk Revolution profoundly affected the Jewish community well into the 1940s and, one could argue, continue to haunt the community's now displaced, aging members.
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Carrot or stick? Ottoman tribal policy in Baghdad, 18311876
More LessThis article analyzes Ottoman politics of tribe in the province of Baghdad during the nineteenth century, a period in which the tribal organizations began to be incorporated into the modern state mechanisms. It aims to explore the place of the state with particular emphasis on diverse forms of appropriation of political power and centreperiphery nexus with the context of tribal structure in Ottoman Iraq. The Ottoman centralization in Iraq aimed to de-construct the tribal structure of the country, because the strong tribal organization was considered as the most significant obstacle for the implementation of the reforms. The policies followed by Ottoman governors against the Iraqi tribes can be summarized as carrot or stick game and they varied considerably from granting favours to certain tribes, creating inter-tribal frictions, recognizing a rival chieftain within a given tribe, the use of military force, incorporation of the tribal structures into the provincial political mechanism, and settlement of the tribal confederations. The stick, in other words, the use of military force came usually when all other methods of politics of tribe failed.
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Arab nationalist pioneers in Mosul
More LessThis article explores the roots of the Arab Nationalist movement in Mosul at the beginning of twentieth century from the perspective of indigenous sources of change. It surveys the work of several Mosuli intellectuals using numerous primary sources including published and unpublished biographical material, chronicles, memories, old newspapers and documents. The article points to how the sense of localism and Ottomanism among the elite was transformed to one of Arab and then Iraqi nationalism.
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Identity and difference in the work of Sunni historians of eighteenth and nineteenth century Iraq
By Hala FattahThis article looks into how and why depictions of region, borders, identity and nation change in the writing of Iraqi scholars in the late Ottoman period. Another aim of this article is to critique the notion that divisions between Sunna and Shi'a, Turks and Persians, and Arabs and Kurds were rigidly set in stone. This article argues that as socioeconomic and political situations changed, feelings of resentment, antagonism and disenfranchisement rose correspondingly. However, these feelings also tended to subside or change when the situations that allowed them to emerge in the first place changed as well, so that, at the end of the day, those innate prejudices can be seen as nothing more than momentary lapses, dynamically introduced under SPECIFIC conditions that do NOT become universal over time.
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Mosul, the Ottoman legacy and the League of Nations
More LessThis article looks into the workings of the special Commission on Mosul sent by the League of Nations after World War I. The Commission was assigned to determine whether the province of Mosul should be part of the new Republic of Turkey or of British mandatory Iraq. Its chief guiding principal was the new notion of national self-determination. Yet the people of Mosul, like other Ottoman communities, had belonged to multiple groups simultaneously, identifying by family, location, occupation and faith. Such plural notions of identity were inconsistent with the nation-state model that had recently been reified by the League of Nations. The effort to define affiliations based on a European taxonomy that emphasized ethnicity and nation clashed with Mosulis' older Ottoman-style affiliations, proved initially confusing and then quite frustrating to the Commissioners.
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