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Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS)

This article addresses the prevalent notion of divide or split in late Ottoman society purportedly created by the Western influence and identifies some of the pitfalls that such a problematic notion entails. It demonstrates that even among the groups and institutions most often cited as symptomatic of such a putatively bifurcated society, namely, among the most Westernized élites and the organi- zations most influenced by the West, where we would expect such a reading to be most clearly reflected, we find deep contradictions which render the entire notion practically untenable. The article juxtaposes the expectations raised by the notion of divide against examples of late Ottoman experience drawn from three different areas: the political opposition movements; the new schools frequently assumed to have reoriented an entire generation of Ottoman subjects towards the West; and the lived experience of the Istanbul élite. The conclusion is that late Ottoman society was far more able to assimilate political, social and cultural difference than their observers have given it credit. ‬

In the Middle East, a dynamic region of multi-layered histories and geographies, and the crossing point for multiple cultures, identities and traditions, tourism is rapidly becoming a major economic phenomenon with complex and socio-cultural implications. For as well as the obvious movement of people, largely for leisure purposes, tourism is one of the foremost mechanisms for the transmission of knowledge, the circulation of ideas and imaginaries and material objects. International tourism in the Middle East does not work in a vacuum but is shaped by historically conceived binaries stretching beyond mere geographies to polarities around culture, language and religion. Formal and institutionalised narratives of tourism, exemplified by travel brochures, work on these binaries and fit within the much discussed notion of ‘orientalism’. This paper examines the ‘east-west’ binary framework in the context of tourism in the Mid- dle East and the ways in which tourism can contribute to the process of inter- cultural dialogue. It distinguishes between tourism as a structural development format on the meta level, and the intimacies of ‘being’ a tourist at the micro- level. It is argued that it is at the level of individual encounter between tourist and host, that moments are created, born out of angst in the face of difference, which allow, temporally at least, peoples to bypass the binary legacies of history and the contemporary visions of global politics, and engage instead in shared notions of humanity. In this way the act of tourism, or rather of ‘being a tourist’, is a vital transformative experience. The paper suggests that in the Middle East in particular, tourists require greater opportunities and spaces to interact with host communities. ‬

(First §) The Growth of Foreign Trade and its Connection to the Global Market WHEN THE GEOGRAPHICAL AREA we know today as Iraq came under Ottoman rule in 1534, Iraq became an Ottoman border state. The search into the history of this state in the late Ottoman era, therefore, is in fact a search into part of the history of the Ottoman state itself. That historical period was not, under any circumstances, void of economic and social deterioration. There was little or no movement, especially social life in the cities of the three Iraqi provinces, Basra, Baghdad and Mosul. The various Ottoman concepts, ideas, traditions and customs were not entrenched, not just in individuals’ minds, but also among the civilian social groups and units. In addition, historical events, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, confirm the receding role of the Iraqi city, as it isolated itself and Bedouin values and customs became prevalent among its residents. ‬

Although In modern times, Jews were nowhere as open to participation in the wider Arabic-Muslim culture, and at home in literary standard Arabic, as from the 1920s in Iraq. Writing in literary standard Arabic, Iraqi Jews produced works that quickly became part of the mainstream of modern Arabic literature. Following the war in Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel, many Iraqi Jewish intellectuals, poets and writers emigrated to the new state. On their arrival in Israel they faced a new linguistic situation in which the Hebrew language was limited to a single religion, a single nation, and a single ethnic entity. While in Iraq, Arab cultural and national identity encompassed Jews together with Muslims and Christians—in Israel, Jewish identity became enmeshed with cultural and national identity. Such immigrants thus faced a fierce clash between their original Iraqi-Arab narrative and the Jewish Zionist Western-oriented dominant master narrative. The natural Iraqi hybrid of a Jewish-Arab identity became contradistinct and even diametrically opposed identities—Arab versus Jew. As a result, the literature twentieth century Iraqi Jews produced in Arabic has been gradually disappearing; there is no Jewish writer on record born in Israel after 1948 who writes belles-lettres in Arabic. The demise of Arabic literature among Jews has precipitated a controversy regarding the cultural preferences of Israeli society. The dilemma is whether Arab culture can be considered a ‘correct’ source of inspiration for the Israeli Hebrew culture. ‬

The respective phases of Baghdad’s development between 1921 (the Iraqi Kingdom and British Mandate) and 1958 (the Iraqi National Revolution) remain visible today. Up until the 1940s, the aesthetics of its residential architecture was eclectic—the result of a specific process of invention linked to traditional local brickwork know-how. This eclecticism overlapped with the persistence of a habitat still characterized by a central inner space. Then the revolution played the symbolic role of vector of a paradoxical identity, as it was experienced simultaneously as a break with the Western world and the integration of international modernism. Therefore the Hashemite Bagh-dad, with all its particularities, constitutes a brilliant case of elaboration of a modern capital; it was born of a successful hybridization of cultural traditions and the exchange of professional know-how, in which the figures of adaptation and appropriation were determining factors in the enrichment and renewal not only of urban forms, but also of urban practices. This urban context constitutes a heritage for the Iraqis, since it is not only result of a composite history but also the producer of a composite identity—a fruitful basis of a project for the future. The reconstruction of Baghdad should avoid new surgical operations stemming from radical political agendas, most importantly the temptation of the tabula rasa.

Modern Iraqi art has been traditionally treated as a movement that was born after the British conquest of Iraq in 1917 and was based on the western European concept of modern visual art. Hence the early phase of this movement was characterized by strong adherence to the western tradition and transmission of that culture to Iraq. However, the cultural elements of indigenous Iraqi art—part of the wider culture of the region under European colonialism—subsisted and played an important role in shaping the identity of this art in due course. Decisive in this identity is the long tradition of image-making in Iraq, from the Mesopotamians through to the pre-Islamic period. The long heritage of Arabic culture and Islamic tradition was present in Iraq by the turn of the twentieth century. The ethnic diversity and religious pluralism of Iraqi society further defined that dynamic cultural heritage and its sources. This article discusses the different aspects of those indigenous cultural sources that—along with the importation of Western art-shaped the identity of modern Iraqi art. It also provides a brief introduction to the foundations of modern Iraqi art beyond the typical prevalent western-oriented definition found throughout major publications on the subject. It is an attempt to build a new approach to and a new reading of the subject.

Despite a wealth of recent research which has detailed the impact that new media outlets and technologies have had on the Middle East’s nascent public sphere and its role in promoting democracy, there has been little investigation into the re-emergence of the free press in Iraq following the toppling of Saddam in 2003 and the corresponding end to his tight control over the nation’s media sector. This paper begins by reviewing Iraq’s long relationship with the written word and its corresponding public sphere. It traces the introduction of the printing press to Iraq by the Ottomans and details those periods when the Iraqi press was truly free, fostering the emergence of civil society and democratic reforms (such as under the Young Turks, the early Hashemite era and following the Second World War). It also examines those periods when the Iraqi media was most restricted and did little else than praise the regime at hand (such as under Ottoman rule and most recently under the Baʿth regime, especially under Saddam Hussein). Following on, this article reviews the developments since the fall of Saddam Hussein and, despite the extensive interference in Iraq’s media sector from government entities both outside and inside Iraq, it concludes by arguing that these papers have been central to the re-emergence of an Iraqi public sphere which has openly debated and discussed the issues pertinent to post-Saddam Iraq.‬

In a short preface to a number of poems by contemporary Iragi poets, Salih J. Altoma states that the many Iraqi poets in exile “have much to offer in terms of their views about Iraq’s tribulations in recent years.” Confronted with the current human catastrophe in Iraq in addition to the experienced hardship of a life in exile, the Iraqi poet in ghurba (exile) is carrying a double burden, which often puts him in a desperate situation and creates a very particular dilemma for his poetic writing, torn between the political and the aesthetic. One of these writers of exile poetry is the great Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef (b. 1934), who has lived as an exile in more than ten European and Arab countries. Having presented some of Youssef’s recurrent notions of exile in his oeuvre and strategies of writing by means of intertextual reference, the article goes on to look more specifically at the concepts and notions of exile and hybridity in his post-colonial poetry of the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century.‬

(First §) BEFORE THE INVASION OF IRAQ, neoconservatives argued that the road to solving the Palestinian problem went through Baghdad; that is, unseating the Iraqi regime (and defeating Al Qaeda) (Doran 2003). For the uninitiated, the argument might have been cogent. It certainly was appealing. And some, such as Fuad Ajami (2003), connected the invasion of Iraq with the fight to bring democracy and freedom to the Arabs. Implicit in much of this is the orientalist (Said 1978) notion that the West is superior to the East. It is a twist on the saying, ‘East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet, except that in this case the magnanimous West is willing to help elevate the East to its own level. The notion of democracy received impetus from Natan Sharansky’s book (2004) which, we were told, created a lasting impression on President Bush. The book was publicized, in the US media at least, as advancing the thesis that peace can be only be made with democratic countries. In other words, peace with countries that are less than ‘democratic’ is a waste of time, or practically impossible! The way in which the media (the fourth estate) were complicit in promoting such a theme is interesting. It was as though critical thinking had been suspended in favour of ideology, stereotyping and anti-intellectualism.

This article discusses the authors’ experiences of researching the situation of women in Iraq since 2003. It highlights a number of methodological, theoretical and practical issues that arise as part of the research process and their implications for the production of knowledge about women in Iraq. These issues include examining the impact of the authors’ subject positions and the power of dominant discourses put forward by different political actors with regards to the conceptualization of ‘Tragi women,’ the politics of war and occupation and resistance to it, and the deployment of gender in the political post-invasion transition. The authors attempt to deconstruct the different discourses and, in so doing, to uncover the diversity of Iraqi women and the complexity of their experiences in Iraq and identify both the limitations of and possibilities for researching women in Iraq. The article uncovers the ways in which dominant discourses label issues and problems in ways that are counter-productive to finding just and lasting solutions for women in Iraq—particularly in the process of building a ” peaceful and stable Iraqi nation-state, which can guarantee rights for all of its citizens.