THE IRAQI IDENTITY: FAISAL'S UNSOLVED LEGACY.

• Author: Can, Serra
• Position: King Faisal I - Report

1. Introduction

   It seems as if in Iraq no any identity proposal has ever met the people's feeling of belonging, which has since created a great conflict potential. At any rate, Iraq's national identity problem is considered one of a persistent kind (Marr 2012 [1985]: vii; Al-Qarawee 2010:34). Pondering on the roots of this conflict, one notices that the roots of the identity problem and by what the Iraqi identity is informed intersect. Thus, (pan-)Arab nationalism, tribalism, religion and language offer a medal with a flip side hinting at both the conflict source and the substance of identity. A quick train of thought gives us an overview about the status of the ingredients making up for the conflict source and substance of identity. In this regard, Arab nationalism, (1) which was very prominent and dominant throughout the Arab-speaking world (2) did not work out in Iraq (Perthes 2015 [2015]:41) because Iraq was not a purely Arab state although the British planned it as such (Dodge 2003:10). Similarly, western secularism or Marxism could not maintain a sustainable and strong foothold in Iraqi identity because both were imported identity projects that in the end failed to unify Iraq's heterogeneous society. Although 98 percent of the Iraqis are Muslim, no any attempt to build a unifying Islamic identity has borne fruit so far. Rather, religious hardliners destroyed this common point of reference for identity, and political Islam has proved being another distinguishing element to alienate the political rival. This has not least been observable in the religious antagonistic mobilization of many Sunni Iraqis by ISIS.

   A national identity requires the internalization of the whole of a people. This was likely the thought King Faisal I was haunted with during his reign. After his death, his legacy of Iraq lacking a national identity for its people remained greatly unsolved. (3) For the most part of the twentieth century, creating a distinct Iraqi national identity stayed a fundamental challenge (Bernhardsson 2005:4). This challenge was inherent to the state's ontology because as Sherko Kirmanj writes "Iraq was an artificial creation of the British: its identity was manufactured during the process of state building" (Kirmanj 2010:54). Therefore, one cannot separate in Iraq's case the state-building process from the creation of a national identity. This and how the latter first took shape in British hands is best described by Toby Dodge: "Once British tutelage and supervision over the creation of Iraq gained international recognition through the League of Nations in 1920, it was perceptions of Iraqi society by its British rulers that had the major influence on how the state was built" (Dodge 2003:1).

   Dodge goes even further saying that the conception of an Iraqi society was primarily a British imagination that "sprang in large part from their own understandings of the evolution of British society" (ibid.: 2). It can be thus said that in Iraq, after World War I, the state as well as its identity were imposed on the people inhabiting Iraqi lands. This imposition was a top-down process managed by foreign hands in agreement with a friendly government, which reconstructed the past alongside the "reigning ideological stance" (Bernhardsson 2005:5). The latter basically involves colonial thinking and modern approaches of self-determination and nationalism. (4)

   Against this backdrop, this study aims at examining what has nourished the Iraqi national identity in a top-down process. Starting off with the problematique of a national identity framework in Iraq's case, this work elaborates on problems of defining the Iraqi identity, and sheds light on the major sources of which it is fed off; pan-Arab nationalism, tribalism, religion and language.

2. What is a national identity?

   A national identity is a sense of belonging to a people, which is "contingent and relational" (Bernhardsson 2005:7). The latter is decisive because a national identity subjectively defines 'the self' of a people, and correspondingly 'its other,' for "without the damned there cannot be the saved" (Agnew 2006:185). In this relationality, the "national identity is defined by the social and territorial boundaries drawn to distinguish the collective self and its implicit negation, the other" (Sahlins 1989:271 cited in Bernhardsson 2005:7). Therefore, national identity "implies the legitimation of social order," a people's subjectivity attended by "common solidarities" (Lukitz 2005 [1995]:2), and its boundary-producing and self-consolidating external references (the other). However, some argue that the phenomenon of collective identity has transformed over time. For example, according to Shak Hanish, the identity of ancient Mesopotamians was defined by the place they lived at, and not by their ethnic belonging (Hanish 2008:43). Thus, the making of a national identity through ethnicity is a modern phenomenon, whereas language, geography, history, tradition/religion are older identificatory categories but unlikely to correspond to understandings of modern national belonging. More precisely, nationality and national identity are traced back to the peace of Westphalia in 1648, which had set in motion a process of nation-state building. However, applied on Iraq, this process of nationalization invaded the people's subjectivity from the 20th century onwards. In Liora Lukitz' words, what was to be imagined under an Iraqi national identity was "the idea pervading the national experience and determining the nation's character" as a "result of collective cultural traits which imbue the nation with a particular meaning and provide the basis for a viable and stable polity," what "overrides all other forms of loyalty" (Lukitz 2005 [1995]:73).

   As it can be understood from here, a national identity bears a hegemonic claim over a people and on behalf of the people it represents. Adeed Dawisha, for example, approves this when saying "the frequency of references to the Arab character of Iraq dwarfed all other identity representations" (Dawisha 2009:235). This hegemonic claim is what has troubled the Iraqi people because its inclusiveness has been far too restrictive meaning that it excluded what was Iraqi too. In other words, the fact that Iraq has held an overwhelmingly Arab population, which the British took as their main orientation in the establishment of their mandate over Iraq (Ali 1993:229) and their installation of an Arab king, the ethnic and cultural diversity of Iraq had been disregarded from the very beginning of its creation.

   The map above shows the ethnic concentration of Mesopotamian peoples of 1916 encompassing later drawn borders of Iraq, which provided a hardly favorable pregiven for an ethnically mixed Iraqi society and thus for an agreed on sense of national belonging. For, such concentration (brown: Arabs; yellow: Kurds; green: other minorities) suggests a fertile soil for territorially anchored ethnic identities, which are either challenged or consolidated by state power depending on domestic power relations. Consequently, Iraq's ethnic distribution in relation with its unrepresentative power distribution (Kirmanj 2013:86) produces an impasse against developing a nationally united but equally open heterogeneous society. The latter raises the question of the dimension of power politics underlying Iraq's contested identity.

   Accordingly, Harith Al-Qarawee writes that the Iraqi national identity has lacked consensus from the people over the question of what the Iraqi nation should have been (Al-Qarawee 2010:35). This has largely layed the ground for Iraq's identity still being contested and claimed by conflicting political actors. Therefore, one can say, Iraqi identity politics in any era reflect an episode of a power conflict (ibid.: 39). Bearing the power conflict of the 1920s in mind, the following sections explore on which rationalistic bases identity politics have unfolded, and why the era of King Faisal I was of special relevance in this regard.

   Iraq: An imposed state on a people with no national belonging

   Although some argue that in the 1920s, "a nascent Iraqi identity was in the early stages" (Bernhardsson 2005:164), there is little evidence for believing that the people of Iraq responded accordingly to the top-down fashioning of an artificial identity. Rather, they had been imposed a state identity, with which they were prompted to identify, as attests Ali A. Allawi's following remark:

   The key to consolidating Faisal's rule over the country and developing its national identity had been the development of the machinery of a central state and the establishment of a strong army. A large army was necessary to defend the unstable frontiers of the country, to introduce a measure of stability in a fragmented and often divided country, and to meet any domestic challenges to the state's authority (Allawi 2014, 476). In this vein, Iraqi identity was a firm part of the state-building project, and therefore not be read independently. As Charles Tripp notes, the change of the regime of power also "demanded new forms of identity" from the inhabitants of Iraq (Tripp 2007 [2000]:30). This new regime of power was occupied with seeking:

   (...) personal trust, the determination to preserve inequality, whether materially or status-based, and the prominence of the disciplinary impulse, expressed primarily through the use of coercion. These features made any construction of an Iraqi identity ambiguous, since it was obvious that any such identity would be determined largely by individuals who had an overdeveloped sense of Iraq as an apparatus of power and an underdeveloped sense of Iraq as a community. The emergence of army officers during the 1930s as the supreme arbiters merely made these features crudely apparent (ibid.: 104). Both Allawi's and Tripp's mentioned remarks indicate that the state elite--King Faisal with his military and bureaucratic personnel--as...