Over the past week, I’ve been busy organizing a conference on Iraqi identity, to be held in Amman in early January. When I think of the subject these days, I often recall a cold winter’s day in Baghdad in 1981 where I had been for the past four months, doing research for my PhD dissertation. I was looking at the card catalogue in the Iraqi Academy of Sciences (majma’ al-ilmi al-Iraqi), a superb repository of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Kurdish and Semitic language books and manuscripts. I chanced to meet another visiting scholar at the card catalogue table that day, and we fell into a fascinating conversation on Iraqi history. Because he had provided me with a lot of information, some of which may have been considered controversial by the authorities (this was the second year of the Iraq-Iran war and the Baathist regime was persecuting anybody it thought had dissident ideas), I wanted to thank him for his substantial contribution. I thought the best thing would be to introduce myself, as a way to set the relationship on an even keel. After I had done so, I waited for him to reciprocate, but after a few moments of embarrassed silence, he finally said with a big smile, “ana ‘ubaydi” ( I am an ‘Ubaydi) and walked off.

For Iraqis, or anyone who knows Iraqi society well, this was a clue that put this particular scholar’s identity within a readily identifiable social, religious, economic and political context. However, that context was prone to interpretation.On one level, the statement,"ana 'ubaydi" unravelled the man’s identity as if it were a loosely knit sweater. On the other, it enveloped him with even more ambiguity. Let me start with the ascertainable facts. The ‘Ubayd were, and still are, a famous tribe that had settled in Iraq some time before the Islamic era (in other words, before the seventh century). Eventually, they carved out diras or territorial districts over which they held full sway, challenging any visitor or stranger to pay a khuwa or transit tax to traverse the district, or use the tribe’s wells. The Ubayd were split into several clans or families; some settled in Mosul (northern Iraq) but the more famous clans established themselves in Baghdad. The Al-Shawi family became the most important liason between the Iraqi tribes and the Mamluk government of Baghdad in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, until one of their leaders quarreled with a Mamluk governor and their star eventually waned. The Ubayd were, generally speaking, Sunni but as I have suggested in a previous post, this did not preclude Shi’a clans from associating with the parent tribe. Finally, it is worth noting that the ‘Ubayd tribe in Baghdad settled down to urban pursuits more successfully than other tribes in Iraq; in fact, their leaders became so urbane that the name itself became but a calling card. While it still recalled a glorious tribal past, the tribe’s historic exploits were not matched by its physical presence in twentieth century Baghdad. Partly because of the rapid development of the capital, the ‘Ubayd’s core constituency, the tribe lost its physical cohesion and became primarily a supra-identity that could be used to explain, or obscure a number of facets of a person’s corporate or individual personality.

And so to get back to the ‘Ubaydi scholar I met in the majma’ al-ilmi. The Ubayd’s long-standing affiliation with Baghdad was such that I could assume that he was from Baghdadi family, that he was most probably a Sunni, and that he no longer was strongly tied to the infrastructure of his tribal past (in other words, he was not likely to pay a visit to the tribal mudhif or assembly house, if one still existed, in Baghdad). But what did that mean, in the end? Did it get me any closer to the man's INDIVIDUAL identity, or was I only ascertaining his abstract, CORPORATE affiliation? In this case, the category of"Ubaydi" could be used either as an institutional marker (delineating origin, religious background and social status), or as a cloak in which all of these things were to be preceded with a question mark. By throwing out the term,"ubaydi", the scholar I met in the majma' al-ilmi knew full well that he was protecting himself by hiding behind the known facts, which would not give him away.

The points I want to make are two. On the one level, identity takes many forms, all of them susceptible to change. The supposed remission of tribal identity under the Baathist regime was interpreted by many as the strengthening of an urban,"modernized" affiliation that had forever wiped out the older, corporate, and in some ways, anti-state identity of a previous generation. Quite possibly this may have happened in many instances. People HAD shed their tribal identity to take on a more citified, perhaps more pro-government view. But the phenomenon has only grown in strength in post-war Iraq. In fact, the resurgence of Iraqi tribes in 2003-2004 is quite astonishing. Where did they spring from? It is true that Saddam Hussein had created tribes from scratch in the sanctions decade immediately preceding the war, but the"invention" of tribes notwithstanding, a huge number of the older tribes had come out in the open, and begun to reassert their tribal identity.Obviously, the call of the tribe was still potent enough to reassert itself in the post-Saddam era, which means that under the monarchy and the first Republican regimes, it had not died out all but been in remission. Leaving aside the fabrication of identities for political purposes, which probably had a lot to do with the rapid re-identification of Iraqis as tribesmen, I just want to reiterate that identities are constantly in free flow; they are fluctuating views of constantly changing situations on the ground.

The second point is, quite naturally, that identity formation grows within a CONTEXT. If you do not understand the social, economic, cultural and political underpinnings of a society, you cannot understand either its corporate or individual identities, affiliations or loyalties. Anyone who tries to pinpoint an Iraqi in terms of a static rubric (Sunni/Shi'i/Kurd/Assyrian/Sabean/Turcoman)will be forever lost in the wilderness. And he/she will probably deserve to be so.