History bookshelf:
Next book on the shelf is <The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein
Like her book on Saudi Arabia, there’s probably nothing here that is new to any of us, especially now, when we are getting to know Iraq as well as our own country. But still: it’s worth a read. I like the sections about the ancient world, Mesopotamia, the Assyrians. But the book, as a whole, gives really good background to the conflicts we see there now.
I’m going to post a bit about the first modern king of Iraq – King Faisal. The monarchy only lasted four decades. I did a lot of research about King Faisal a couple of years back because I was in a play where I played Gertrude Bell, a really interesting woman – often called “the female Lawrence of Arabia” – who was really one of the ones responsible for setting up Iraq as we know it now. A “sand-mad Brit”, an unconventional woman, who was buried in Baghdad, so revered was she by the people at that time. She was considered one of them. She was a big supporter of Faisal, one of his greatest champions, so playing her was one of the reasons I did a boat-load of research about that guy.
So here’s an excerpt about Faisal.
From The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein
Born of impeccable stock, Faisal, third son of the Sharif of Mecca, claimed a place in the thirty-seventh generation directly descended from the prophet Muhammed. Sickly as a boy, he spent much of his childhood among the Bedouin of the Hejaz to be hardened by the demands of the merciless desert. He learned to shoot, to manage the cranky bellowing camel, and to ride the fine Arabian stallion. In the tents of the sheikhs, he listened to the cadence of classical Arabic poetry and learned the skills of tribal leadership. Strengthened and tuned, he went to Constantinople as a deputy to the Ottoman Parliament and fought for the Turks in Yemen. In 1917, he took his experiences and skills into the Arab Revolt. In the last days of World War I, he established in Damascus the Arab government obliquely promised by Britain in the Hussein-McMahon letters of 1915-16. Fine boned, with a long face set with large liquid eyes, Faisal looked every inch a great Arab sheikh.
During his two years in Damascus, Faisal filled his house with a throng of black Abyssinian eunuch slaves imported from Mecca and a select group of khaki-clad officers who had deserted the Ottoman army to join the revolt. Brimming with the passion of Arab nationalism, they had fought across the deserts from Mecca to Damascus. Now the group that would become known as the Sharifians gathered around Faisal to fulfill the dream of an Arab state. When Faisal lost his Arab government, they followed him to London and then to Baghdad, where they formed the core of the court and acted as the custodians of Sunni political influence.
When Faisal and the Sharifians arrived in Baghdad in 1921, Iraq bore the scars of Ottoman neglect. Mosul, across the Tigris from the ruins of ancient Nineveh, languished within decaying stone walls where Arabs and Kurds engaged in desultory trade. In once glorious Baghdad, the richly colored tiles decorating the mosques barely clung to structures seemingly untouched since the days of the Islamic Empire. Water still came to homes in leather skins filled from the Tigris and delivererd on the backs of donkeys. The city on the east side of the river was tied to the city on the west side by swaying pontoon bridges that floated on the round reed boats that Herodotus had described two thousand years earlier. There were only three of these bridges, for superstition held that when Baghdad possessed five, as in the days of the caliphs, the city would fall.
Since Baghdad had not been a true capital for nearly seven centuries, no palaces or buildings possessed even a modicum of grandeur. So after his coronation, Faisal went to the Citadel by the North Gate, driven in a car provided by the British. It traveled by the only real street in the city, a rutted unpaved road named for General Maude that cut a straight line through a maze of covered bazaars seemingly untouched by time. The sparse and antiquated infrastructure of Baghdad was symbolic of the new state of Iraq. It literally sagged under the accumulated weight of poverty, ignorance, and isolation that had reduced the land between the rivers to little more than an outpost of civilization.
The day Faisal picked up the reins of government, a simple street scene drew a complex sociological picture of his realm. Sunni bureaucrats and merchants proudly garbed in the newly popular Western clothes gathered around small tables outside the coffee shops strung along the Tigris. From there, they watched Jews hurry twoard their banks; Christians move their crafts to the souks, followed by Persian merchants toting fine carpets; Kurds in their baggy sharwals unload a barge of produce from the highlands; and Shia sheikhs in flowing robes pass by on their way back to their villages in the south. In real terms, the social structure mirrored Ottoman times. The monarchy, with British contrivance, soono superimposed on it the Sharifians, who from the court took all the key military and governmental positions. Products of Ottoman education, many were related by blood or marriage. Claiming neither a local following nor a power base within Iraq, they depended on the government for their position, and the government depended on them to be the loyal cadre of Hashemite rule. Below the Sharifians, grouped in an imprecise and often fluid order, were the old Sunni elite, the Christian elite of Mosul, the Sunni and Shia tribal notables, and at the bottom, the peasants, most of whom were Shia. Finally, there were the Kurdish clan chiefs, added in 1925 by the incorporation of Mosul province into Iraq. But before Faisal could even approach this internal tangle, he first had to secure his borders against his neighbords — Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Persia, all of them geographically larger than Iraq.
The British, protecting their own interests in the oil resources of the Mosul region, took care of Ataturk’s threat from Turkey. But in the south, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud and his Wahhabi zealots posed a serious challenge to Faisal’s claim to the tribes of southern Iraq.1 Beginning in March 1922, the Ikhwan, the fanatical Muslim brotherhood within the Wahhabi sect that often defied the authority of Abdul Aziz, periodically rode into Iraq to raid for faith and booty. In 1927 when Ikhwan raiders mutilated tribesmen in southern Iraq, it was Britain as the mandatory power the went into action. In a spate of low-tech warfare, single-enginge Royal Air Force planes swooped low to drop pint-sized bombs on the marauding tribes while Model T Fordsd mounted with machine guns chased the Ikhwan back into Arabia. By 1929, the immediate threat from the south was over.2
The threat from the east, from Persia, defied simple military tactics. The Persian government, claiming Najaf and Karbala as “holy places of Persia”, refused to recognize the infant state of Iraq. But Persia, like Turkey and Abdul Aziz, was in no position to threaten the British mandate of Iraq. Not only did Britain control Iran’s oil resources, but the Qajar dynasty sat in the dying embers of its own regime. In 1925 when Reza Shah Pahlavi ascended the Peacock Throne, Iran and Iraq, prodded by Britain, negotiated a boundary agreement that held until the 1980 Iran-Iraq War.3 Thus, with the borders calm on the east, south, and north and the British military umbrella spread over Iraq, Faisal turned his full attention to the challenges of consolidating his state.
1In the West, the legendary Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the father of modern Saudi Arabia, is most often known as Ibn Saud, ‘the son of Saud”. In the Arab world, he is more correctly known as Abdul Aziz.
2The border disputes between Iraq and Saudi Arabia have never really ceased, playing a role in the 1991 Gulf War.
3It was Reza Shah Pahlavi who would change the name of Persia to Iran in 1935.
