The Politicization of Culture in Iraq
But on that morning, I sensed a real change in his personality. Was it my imagination, or was he speaking with more authority? In June, when our group first met him, he had seemed like the perennial outsider, the prototype of an Iraqi Cassandra who had all the evidence but to whom no one paid attention. Talking up a storm, he criticized those who had stolen books from the Iraqi National Library and were now selling them in the Maydan area, the historic quarter now referred to as “Old Baghdad” by Western tourists. He had even published articles denouncing them by name; all, it seemed to no avail. Months later, Zain was featured in a hugely violent documentary on Iraq called “Sixteen Hours”; characteristically, he was seen berating the passersby on Baghdad’s booksellers street for allowing an open drain to threaten the books laid out for sale on the pavement.
But on that day, Zain was in charge. He chortled that he had been approached by an aspiring politician to join a new party, formed around the Naqshbandi tariqa or mystic brotherhood, to which he owed his surname. In fact, the politico was intending to draft him to lead the new faction. We all roared with laughter. Originally based in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Naqshbandi “way” was a widespread, centuries-old religious and cultural movement which in the past had been instrumental, not only in disseminating a populist interpretation of Islam, but in areas where it came into contact with expanding Western influence, in formulating an anti-colonialist rhetoric of great power. The idea that this religiously-inspired mass movement, with all of its anti-Western and emotive baggage, could be turned into a platform for enterprising, secular politicians was too hilarious to countenance. What would they think of next? I remembered that a French colleague on the earlier trip to Baghdad had told me of a similar phenomenon in the last years of Baathist rule, where government apparatchiks had approached a venerable family of famous intellectuals, and demanded that they become a tribe!
In fact, the “new” Iraq is rapidly metamorphosing into the old. For Iraqi returnees, the most glaring feature of the year-old occupation is the realization that Iraqi society, not yet fully empowered or in control, is being forced to revert to traditional strategies to meet the demands of a confused present. This phenomenon is prevalent everywhere; in the way that people are inducted into political parties through the promise of jobs or a university scholarship; in the sponsorship of “pet” intellectuals ready to sing the praises of a particular warlord, and in the use, or abuse of great cultural movements for political gain. And as in the Iranian revolution twenty-five years before, when religion became the main field of contestation, the symbols of Iraqi heritage and culture are now being redefined to advance a welter of political agendas.