Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World - Volume 15, Issue 3, 2021

With the British attack on Ottoman Iraq during the First World War, London and New Delhi focused on the country’s Shiites, imagining that they could incorporate the Shiite centres of authority into British India. The Iraqi Shiites were an object of competition between the Sunni Ottomans and the Christian British. During the war, 1914–18, British generals and administrators deployed a series of images of Iraqi Shiite Muslims, from pragmatic and likely willing to cooperate with a powerful and triumphant empire, to hopelessly irredentist. During the war I argue that officials deployed a set of images of Iraqi Shiites for purposes of their own and the metropolitan public’s morale as well as for propaganda among the colonized. Sometimes British Orientalist beliefs that the Shiites could be wooed from the Sunni Ottomans led them into disaster.

The oil-rich Muslim Core, the Arab World, is far removed from a just and humane world, totally at variance with the grand promise of Islam, a perfect social contract initiated by the Prophet himself. The present article is a synopsis of a forthcoming book to be published in 2022 by Routledge. It uses a neo-Ottomanist framework for critical analysis to explain today’s complex challenges facing the Islamic world. Not everyone may be happy with the neo-Ottomanist approach chosen. The author only wishes to state that his study is not anti-Arab or anti-Islam, only the work of a social realist, relying on the latest statistical and historical data as much as possible.

For almost two years, Lebanon has been suffering from a severe economic downturn, the worst since the end of the civil war (1975–90). This has led to a complete financial collapse, with significant material losses incurred by the Lebanese Central Bank (BDL). It has also fuelled protests against the rampant corruption plaguing the country. Since the beginning of the banking crisis in Lebanon characterized by a lack of liquidity and the cessation of banks from dealing in US dollars, the risks surrounding deposits belonging to residents and non-residents, as well to foreigners, have emerged. This exacerbated the absence of procedures to determine the fate of deposits and the applicable legislation that protects these deposits. This article examines the resulting imbalances in the financial paradigm and demonstrates the illegality of actions or restrictions taken by banks. Consequently, this article explores the means to protect depositors’ rights and the legal steps followed by depositors to retrieve their money or at least to save what is left of it.

Analysis is made of the circumstances that could have led to the demise of a unique Iraqi Government educational initiative in the 1940s established in Baghdad of an elite secondary school with the name of King Faisal College. It was intended to provide special educational programmes while catering exclusively to gifted high school boy students chosen from all over the country. The analysis serves to show an abject example of how an educational project planned to serve the long-term national interests could be irreversibly damaged by petty political squabbles among its young students. It shows how political, religious and sectarian juvenal dogma could have been nurtured also by external interests targeting young students who were largely destined otherwise to have a very bright future.

This a socio-historical article about the watch business in Iraq, the families that were involved in it and their contribution to the society. It discusses the introduction of clocks and watches to Iraq, as well as life and behaviour of an important segment of the Iraqi society. It also explains some of the habits, customs and traditions that characterized the Iraqi society during the end of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century, as well as some indicative political events that took place in that country.

Review of: Unfree: Migrant Domestic Work in Arab States, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (2022)

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 221 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-50362-965-3, p/bk, $24.00

Review of: What the West is Getting Wrong about the Middle East: Why Islam is Not the Problem, Ömer Taspinar (2021)

London: I.B. Tauris, 268 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78831-010-9, h/bk, $27.00

Review of: Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim, Richard Falk (2021)

Atlanta: Clarity Press, 464 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-94976-232-7, p/bk, $29.95