Between Saddam and the American Occupation: Iraq's Academic Community Struggles for Autonomy

Academe, Sep/Oct 2004 by Watenpaugh, Keith

The old regime was no friend to academic values. But Iraqi academics discover that life after liberation and occupation poses new threats to these same values.

On a cheerless Friday afternoon in January 2003, shortly before the American-led invasion of Iraq, I strolled down Baghdad's al-Mutanabbi Street with the Iraqi architect Hussam al-Rawi al-Sayyad. The street, named for a tenth-century Arab poet, is home to the city's main used-book market. Al-Rawi took pride in pointing out the many titles published by Baghdad University and the Iraqi Academy of Sciences. Interspersed in and among the scholarly and popular books were state-produced tracts on Baathism, biographies of Saddam Hussein, standard anti-Israel screeds that often cross over into anti-Semitism, and a smattering of self-help books intended to aid one in overcoming wedding-night jitters. Many of the books and journals represented years of careful collecting by Iraqis, who had been forced to sell them for cash. Arranged carefully along the curb, they spoke of a time when Baghdad, flush with oil wealth, competed with Cairo as the intellectual center of the Arab world.

In June 2003, shortly after the fall of the Baathist regime, and after the United States declared an end to major combat, I returned to Baghdad and al-Mutanabbi Street as the leader of a group of historians of the contemporary Arab Middle East from Germany, France, Jordan, and the United States. We had come to catalog the extent of the damage inflicted on institutions of higher learning and cultural production by the paroxysm of looting and aggravated mayhem of the previous few months. (We published our findings in a report, Opening the Doors: Intellectual Life and Academic Conditions in Post-War Baghdad, copies of which can be downloaded from H-Net, a Web-based consortium of scholars and teachers in the humanities and social sciences: http://www.hnct.org/about/press/opening_doors/.)

We discovered that the dour mood of the prewar period had been replaced by genuine excitement. The street was filled with Iraqis and others, poring over titles and buying armloads of books. Many, especially those on Shiite Islam, had been written by banned authors. This time, however, the titles also included books looted from Baghdad's public and university libraries. While some dealers tried to conceal the provenance of the books, others brazenly sold volumes still bearing call numbers on the spines.

The old IJaathist tracts were gone, but book dealers had taken to selling artists' renderings of Imams AIi and Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law and grandson, who are the most revered figures in Shiite Islam. Next to them were photographs of bearded Islamic scholars like the Grand Ayatollah AIi Sistani and the murdered father of Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr. Even Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini could be seen.

The differences-and the stark continuities-between my two visits to al-Mutanabbi Street symbolize the larger problems facing Iraq's academic community in the aftermath of the war. Indeed, the troubles of Iraqi higher education in this hottest of all "hot spots" are the problems of Iraq as a whole. For higher education in Iraq, the fundamental challenge is to regain the intellectual integrity and professional autonomy lost during the brutish reign of Saddam Hussein and his IJaathist apparatus. Uut also, and more fundamentally, Iraqi higher education faces unremitting civil strife, the infection of campuses with partisan and religious politics, and a heavy-handed and clumsy quasi-colonial U.S. policy that plans to continue to Americanize and "manage" Iraqi academic and intellectual life for the foreseeable future.

Ultimately, to help create a viable national community and open society, Iraqi higher education will first need to be restored to a firm and independent footing. And the country's vast reservoir of academics must be reintegrated into international networks of professional exchange as colleagues, friends, and equals. How institutions outside of Iraq-colleges, universities, professional societies, and donors-respond to those needs will contribute to the warp and weft of Iraqi society and to its relations with the rest of the world for generations to come.

Before the War

While we were in Baghdad, the co-authors of Opening the Doors conversed with Iraqi academics about life under the Baathist regime. Most notable was our discussion with Alya Sousa, a historian trained at the American University in Beirut, whose father, Ahmad Sousa, was among the leading historians of a previous generation. Alya Sousa, who wrote on the period between the world wars, left the history department at Baghdad University in the early 199Os. A grandmother, she later perished along with twenty-one others, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations special envoy to Iraq, in an August 2003 car bombing of UN headquarters.

The architect Hussam al-Rawi contributed to our understanding as well. Trained in England, he is a champion of architectural regionalism and historic preservation, and he served in various administrative positions at Baghdad University. Because of his rank within the Baath Party structure, however, the urbane al-Rawi was expelled from the university in May 2003 by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the U.S. military entity that governed the country until the handover of power to a transitional Iraqi government this past June. (This article goes to press just after the handover of sovereignty.) He has since left Iraq for exile in the Caribbean. One of al-Rawi's most recent and celebrated commissions is the mosque-tomb complex of Michel Aflaq, one of the three founders of the Baath Party, who died in Baghdad in 1989. Ironically, that complex served as a storage depot for the largest intact collection of Baath Party documents found to date. It was saved from demolition by the noted Iraqi architect and Branclcis University professor, Kalian Makiya.