Archival Research
Friday, 8 October 2021, 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm EST / 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm AST
Moderator: Dr. Elizabeth Bishop
Dr. Elizabeth Bishop joined Texas State's History Department during 2008 with a PhD from the University of Chicago. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in her areas of her scholarly expertise--the history of the Middle East, postcolonial Arab history, and Hashemite Iraq. Bishop's 'A Wartime Schism in the Iraqi Communist Party: Mr. Masters in Moscow (1944)' is forthcoming In Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History, Margaret Litvin, Masha Kirasirova, and Eileen Kane, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Bishop published on Iraq in Historical Yearbook 8 ("Nicolae Iorga" Historical Institute, Romanian Academy of Science), Studia Historica Gedanensia, and the International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies.
After the Exodus: The History of Iraq's Last Jews
Speaker: Michael Brill, Princeton University
abstract
In Summer 2001, Saddam Hussein ordered the Ba’th regime’s security services to identify all Jews remaining in Iraq, along with those born Jewish who converted to Islam and Christianity. The subsequent investigation documented 39 Jews, 36 of whom lived in Baghdad. The final report also identified nearly 220 individuals who were born Jewish but converted to Islam, along with 3 converts to Christianity. Most concerning for the regime were the roughly 140 converts living in Northern Iraq, de facto independent since the end of the 1990-1991 Gulf War. The security services reported that converts were “apostatizing” from Islam and reverting to Judaism. Furthermore, some were traveling between Northern Iraq and Israel. The situation highlighted the regime’s loss of control over Northern Iraq, security concern with Iraq’s Kurdish rebel groups, along with longstanding Ba’thist suspicion toward Israeli intervention and Zionist influence in Iraq. This paper uses the aforementioned episode and the detailed documentation produced by it as the point of departure in studying the last members of Iraq’s Jewish community. Despite Iraqi Jews comprising a quarter of Baghdad’s population only half a century earlier, the Ba’th regime continued to be concerned with Iraq’s 39 remaining Jews and 220 converts from Judaism at the turn of the millennium. In addition to the Ba’th’s internal records captured as a result of the 2003 Iraq War, this paper draws on interviews, United States government documents – some officially declassified and other obtained by Wikileaks – and memoirs by Iraqi Jews.
about the speaker
Michael Brill is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, where his research focuses on Ba'thist and contemporary Iraq. He obtained a M.A. in Arab Studies from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, after graduating from Westfield State University with a B.A. in History and Political Science.
State Law and Tribal Justice in Iraq: the TCCDR files (1918-1958)
Speaker: Mélisande Genat, Stanford University
abstract
This paper examines interrelations between state justice and tribal customary law (Arabic ʻurf). It uses the 'tribal files' of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior – a part of the wathāʼiq dākhiliyya, previously undiscovered. They consist of over eight thousand files and cover the period from 1918 to 1958. They fall within the framework of the Tribal Criminal and Civil Disputes Regulation (TCCDR) introduced by the British administration in Iraq in 1916. These files show a high degree of cooperation and mutual understanding between the Iraqi central administration (under direct British control until 1932) and the various tribal subjects. It is at odds with the protracted political tensions usually described in the historiography. Revolts and coups might come out as salient episodes in the sources, but they should not obscure the more subdued and unexceptional character of daily bargains, compromises and negotiations.
Scholars of desert peripheries in the Middle East are often quick to announce that Bedouin, tribal or peasant voices cannot be retrieved, and that their worldviews are lost. These files contain thousands of hand-written petitions penned by the tribesmen themselves, by sharecroppers unhappy with their shaykh's taxation, by disgruntled exiled chieftains or by women. They also consist of proceedings of tribal councils held by both Bedouin and settled tribal elites. The TCCDR appears in a new light here. The minutes of all these cases invalidate the blanket criticism formulated against the TCCDR by scholars of the British Empire. Undue fixation on the denunciation of colonialism has had the perverse effect of obliterating the extraordinary adaptive capacity of the Iraqi social fabric, regardless of the colonial-derived nature of its state legislation.
about the speaker
Mélisande Genat is a doctoral student in History at Stanford University. Her dissertation is entitled "Tribes, State, and Ethno-religious Identities in Iraq (1918-2021). She has been living and conducting research in Iraq since 2010.
Ba‘thist Iraq at the End of History
Dr. Samual Helfont, Naval War College
abstract
This paper relies on research in Iraqi and American archives to investigate the role of the 1990-1 Gulf War, as well as the sanctions regime that ensued, in shaping global politics following the Cold War. George H. W. Bush announced a “New World Order” for the post- Cold War international system in a speech outlining the American policy to remove Iraq from Kuwait. Following the war, Iraq became a test-case for methods of coercion and containment short of conventional war. Yet, as this paper will argue, U.S. overreach and its callousness to Iraqi suffering created opportunities for the regime in Baghdad to transform Iraqi plight into a political tool. Baghdad used the dire humanitarian situation in Iraq to divide and undermine the American-led coalition at the United Nations. In doing so, the Ba‘thist regime not only challenged the United States, but also delegitimized American efforts to build a robust post-Cold War order. Placing Iraq within this global context destabilizes narratives that contrast the “bad war” in 2003 with the “good war” in 1991. In such narratives, the 1991 Gulf War quickly and neatly achieved American objectives. In fact, the damage and suffering that the Gulf War caused in Iraq became political tools to undermine the more strategically important American efforts to build a New World Order. As such, this paper will position 1990s Iraq, and particularly Iraqi suffering, within debates about the post-Cold War international order in a more forceful manner than has been done thus far.
about the speaker
Samuel Helfont is an Assistant Professor of Strategy and Policy in the Naval War College program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is also an Affiliate Scholar in the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. His research focuses on international history and politics in the Middle East, especially Iraq and the Iraq Wars. He is also interested in Israeli, the Eastern Mediterranean, and maritime history. He is the author of Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2018). His current book project examines Ba'thist Iraq's role in shaping international and global history in the post-Cold War period. His work has been published by journals such as The International History Review, The Middle East Journal, Texas National Security Review, and Orbis, as well as more popular venues such as Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The American Interest, and War on the Rocks, and various think tanks.
Helfont holds a PhD and MA in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. Prior to moving to Monterey, he completed a three year post-doctoral lectureship at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College, and has been a fellow at the Hoover Library and Archives at Stanford University.
Gender Norms, Sex Work, and the Law in Sanctions-Era Iraq
Dr. Alissa Walter, Seattle Pacific University
abstract
Drawing on the Iraqi Ba‘th Party archives and Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) laws, this paper examines the regime’s regulation of gender roles and the prosecution of commercial sex work in Baghdad from 1990-2003 to add nuance to established scholarly narratives about the legislation of morality during this era. The RCC passed new laws in the 1990s increasing punishments for pimping (samsara), prostitution (bigha'), managing brothels, and same-sex activity (al-luta), and ‘Uday Hussein infamously carried out a spate of public executions of alleged sex workers. These new laws were produced as part of the ‘Faith Campaign,’ but it was also intended as a response to the social upheaval that accompanied the return of veterans from the Iran-Iraq and Kuwait Wars.
While these RCC decrees appear to authorize a brutal crackdown on the underground sex industry, bureaucratic memos and citizen petitions from Ba‘th Party archives paint a more complicated picture about the actual prosecution and punishments of such crimes in practice. This apparent discrepancy raises questions about the political and social functions of these RCC decrees in the context of sanctions and other governance challenges of the 1990s. These documents also illuminate the gendered anxieties of the regime during this period and illustrate some of its top-down efforts to influence both male and female roles in society.
about the speaker
Alissa Walter is an Assistant Professor of History at Seattle Pacific University. She earned her PhD in Middle Eastern history at Georgetown University in 2018, and she also earned an M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University in 2011. Her dissertation, "The Ba‘th Party in Baghdad: State-Society Relations through Wars, Sanctions, and Authoritarian Rule, 1950-2003" received the TARII Dissertation Prize in 2019. She is currently revising her dissertation into a book.
