The Fascinating Saga of Dhannun Ayyub, an Early Literary Figure in Iraq

There have been some spectacular memoirs written in Iraq over the last forty years, but none perhaps as frank and as vivid as Dhannun Ayyub’s. Ayyub was a young man from Mosul who left for Baghdad in the late 1920’s to enter the Teacher Training College, and to join the ranks of a steadily growing cadre of teachers sent to educate young boys and girls in high schools across the country. Ayyub thought of himself as a freethinker, and a practicing libertine. He spent a good part of his youth living in common-law marriage with his uncle’s wife; and his later marriages were so unconventional that they shocked even his family and closest friends. An avowed believer in avant-garde literature, especially Russian and French authors, he translated many books into Arabic and joined a neophyte literary movement in the 1930’s that sought to overturn established canons of literary and cultural taste.

But it was only with his contribution to Al-Majalla, a periodical that saw itself as storming the reactionary ramparts of early Iraqi biography, literary criticism, politics and poetry, that Ayyub finally achieved fame as the iconoclast that he’d always wanted to be. However, as always in Iraqi society, literary currents could not exist outside of politics. According to Ayyub, al-Majalla initiated a lively debate between the many political factions in Iraq; between Communists, moderate Arab Nationalists, extreme Arab Nationalists and Iraqi firsters. Throughout the six years of its existence, which spanned the Second World War and its aftermath, Ayyub tried to keep the literary journal on an even keel, as well as to publish innovative material at the same time. Eventually, however, the cost of putting out the journal took its toll and it folded, but not before Ayyub had brought in a new editor, Fahd, who became the most famous Communist leader in Iraq, later on executed by the Iraqi government of the day.

It is those forgotten stories that makes Ayyub’s autobiography such riveting reading. For instance, he recounts the story of one member of the Iraqi Communist party that had actually joined the Socialist side in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 (I really had no idea that Spain was a cause to live and die for among the Iraqi intelligentsia of that period); he makes a case for pre-revolutionary Russian Romantic literature as being one of the essential stepping stones to Marxism in Iraq, and he narrates the fascinating story of how he was sent on a mission by the Communists to have lunch with the British Intelligence officer responsible for the country’s early democratization experiment. Besides his flirtation with Communist doctrine (which Ayyub explains beautifully), there is much to recommend Ayyub’s life story. Even though the first volume begins slowly, the rest of the books detail a most extraordinary time, and an even more extraordinary man, and should be essential reading for all those who are interested in the social, literary and political history of Iraq from 1920 to 1958.