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ABSTRACT
This article addresses the question of Iraq’s emergence as a state in the context of the First World War with a special focus on the interplay between British imperialism and Shiʿi activism. By the twentieth century, the majority of people who lived in the territory that would become the Iraqi state were Shiʿi Muslims. Largely ignoring the activism of Iraqis, there is a line of thinking in English-language scholarship which suggests that the process of state formation in Iraq was completely driven by British imperialists. Indeed, Britain established a military presence in the Ottoman vilayets of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul during and after the First World War, and the empire was awarded an internationally sanctioned mandate for this territory in 1920. In an effort to decolonize the history of Iraq, this paper argues that the inhabitants of Iraq, especially Shiʿi activists, played a significant role in the formation of the new state. Research for this paper is based on the writings of Shiʿi activists with a special focus on clerical leaders, as well as British government officials. Challenging historical accounts that reflect British imperialist narratives, this paper argues that Shiʿi activists (and British responses to them) significantly influenced the course of state formation in Iraq. This is not to say that Britain was not influential in the creation of Iraq; in fact, British imperialists clearly had the upper hand. However, they did not operate in a vacuum, unaffected by the inhabitants of the Iraqi state that they wished to create. Instead of assuming that British imperialists single-handedly created Iraq or that ethno-sectarian divisions are the natural order in Iraq, this paper suggests that the relationship between Britain and Shiʿism played a critical role in the formation of the Iraqi state. Although many scholars consider Islamic sectarianism and Britain’s colonial legacy in Iraq to be at the heart of the country’s socio-political system, the relationship between Britain and Shiʿism in Iraq has not received ample scholarly attention. The intersection of British imperialism and Shiʿi activism resulted in several foundational threads that were woven into the fabric of the Iraqi state. The 1920 Shiʿi revolt against the British mandate for Iraq and the British counter-revolt became the outward manifestation of the British-Shiʿi divide. British officials installed a Sunni-run government in Iraq for fear of Shiʿi dominance, which could have resulted from democratic institutions. Anti-British resistance led by Shiʿi clerics completely changed the calculus of Iraq’s emergence as an independent state and alienated much of the Shiʿi community from Iraq’s political establishment. This process radically altered the roles that Shiʿi and British leaders hoped to play in post-Ottoman Iraq. This state of affairs was not inevitable given that the continuation of British-Shiʿi alliances that began to emerge during the First World War would have produced a profoundly different state.
Acknowledgments
I thank my colleagues at Idaho State University for supporting my intellectual pursuits and for awarding me with a sabbatical, which allowed me to work on this research project.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Kinahan Cornwallis, “Sunni-Shiah Movement,” 1930, Records of the Royal Airforce, AIR 23/432, British National Archives.
2 Gareth Stansfield, Iraq (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 29–30.
3 Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), xi.
4 Charles Townsend, When God Made Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia and the Creation of Iraq, 1914–1921 (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), xxi.
5 Christopher Catherwood, Churchill’s Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2004).
6 Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 2.
7 See Abbas Kadhim, Reclaiming Iraq: The 1920 Revolution and the Founding of the Modern State (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 146–7.
8 Samira Haj, The Making of Iraq, 1900–1963: Capital, Power and Ideology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 80–1, 146.
9 Orit Bashkin, The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 5.
10 See, for example, Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq (Boulder: Westview Press, 2012); and Tripp, A History of Iraq.
11 Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
12 Yitzhak Nakash, The Shiʿis of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Kadhim, Reclaiming Iraq; and Elie Kedourie, “The Iraqi Shiʿis and their Fate,” in Shiʿism, Resistance, and Revolution, ed. Martin Kramer (London: Routledge, 1987).
13 ʿAlī Wardī, Lamaḥāt ijtimāʿīyya min tārīkh al-ʿIrāq al-ḥadīth (Baghdad: Maṭbaʿat al-Irshād, 1978); Jawād al-Ẓāhir, Thawrat al-ʿishrīn: thawrat al-shaʿb al-ʿIrāqī al-kubrā (Baghdad: al-Ṭabʿa al-ūlā, 2010); ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Ḥasanī, al-Thawrat al-ʿIrāqīyya al-kubrā (Ṣaydā: Maṭbaʿat al-ʿUrfān, 1952); ʿAbd Allāh Fahd al-Nafīsī, Dawr al-Shiʿa fī taṭawwur al-ʿIrāq al-siyāsī al-ḥadīth (Kuwait: Maktaba Afāq, 2012); and ʿAbd al-Halīm al-Ruhaymī, Tārīkh al-ḥaraka al-Islāmīyya fī al-ʻIrāq (Beirut: al-Dār al-ʿAlimīyya, 1985).
14 Sarah Shields, “Mosul Questions: Economy, Identity, and Annexation,” in The Creation of Iraq, 1914–1921, ed. Reeva Spector Simon and Eleanor H. Tejirian (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 55.
15 Meir Litvak, “A Failed Manipulation: The British, the Oudh Bequest and the Shiʿi ʿUlamaʾ of Najaf and Karbala,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 27, no. 1 (2000): 69–89.
16 Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship (London: I.B.Tauris, 2003), 9.
17 Nakash, The Shiʿis of Iraq, 50.
18 Arnold Talbot Wilson, Mesopotamia, 1917–1920; A Clash of Loyalties; a Personal and Historical Record (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 34.
19 James Mann, An Administrator in the Making (London: Longmans, Green, 1921), 284.
20 Gertrude Bell, Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia (London, 1920), 28; Gertrude Bell to her father Sir Hugh Bell, 21 August 1920, Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University; Gertrude Bell to her stepmother Dame Florence Bell, 14 March 1920, Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University; and Gertrude Bell to her father Sir Hugh Bell, 29 November 1920, Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.
21 Yitzhak Nakash, “The Conversion of Iraq’s Tribes to Shiʿism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 26, no. 3 (Aug., 1994): 443–63; Meir Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars of Nineteenth Century Iraq: The ‘Ulama’ of Najaf and Karbalaʾ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Zackery M. Heern, The Emergence of Modern Shiʿism: Islamic Reform in Iraq and Iran (London: Oneworld Publications, 2015), 65–9.
22 Wardī, Lamaḥāt ijtimāʿīyya, 127.
23 Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 236–7; See also Wardī, Lamaḥāt ijtimāʿīyya, 233–4.
24 Wilson, Mesopotamia, 22.
25 Wardī, Lamaḥāt ijtimāʿīyya, 128.
26 Omid Ghaemmaghami and Mina Yazdani, “KHALESI, MAHDI,” Encyclopædia Iranica, 2016, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/khalesi-mahdi (accessed May 12, 2018).
27 Tripp, History of Iraq, 32–3.
28 Ghassan R. Atiyyah, Iraq: 1908–1921; A Socio-Political Study (Beirut: The Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, 1973), 80.
29 Wardī, Lamaḥāt ijtimāʿīyya, 189–91; and Bell, Civil Administration, 29–30.
30 Atiyyah, Iraq, 84–5; Wardī, Lamaḥāt ijtimāʿīyya, 192; and Bell, Civil Administration, 29–30.
31 Wardī, Lamaḥāt ijtimāʿīyya, 209, 254; and Bell, Civil Administration, 36–7.
32 Wardī, Lamaḥāt ijtimāʿīyya, 193–196; and Bell, Civil Administration, 29–30.
33 Wardī, Lamaḥāt ijtimāʿīyya, 289.
34 Nakash, Shiʿis of Iraq, 95; and Haj, The Making of Iraq.
35 Bell, Civil Administration, 36.
36 Atiyyah, Iraq, 80.
37 Wilson, Mesopotamia, 269.
38 Ibid., 71–2.
39 Bell, Civil Administration, 28.
40 Ibid., 32.
41 Wilson, Mesopotamia, 239.
42 Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, 32. According to Daniel Silverfarb, Britain spent £200 million in Iraq during the First World War. Britain’s Informal Empire in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 5.
43 Quoted in Wilson, Mesopotamia, 243.
44 Bell, Civil Administration, 32–3.
45 Wilson, Mesopotamia, 269.
46 Bell, Civil Administration, 36.
47 Ja‘far Delshad, “Religion, Politics and Poetry in Najaf in the Early 20th Century” (PhD Diss., University of London, 1993), 55.
48 Amal Vinogradov, “The 1920 Revolt in Iraq Reconsidered: The Role of Tribes in National Politics,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 3, no. 2 (1972): 123–39; Tripp, History of Iraq, 33, 40; and Thomas Eich, “Patterns of the 1920 Rising in Iraq: The Rifāʿiyya ṭarīqa and Shiism,” Arabica 56, (2009): 112–9.
49 Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 11.
50 John Townsend, Proconsul to the Middle East: Sir Percy Cox and the End of Empire (London: I.B.Tauris, 2010), 126.
51 Townsend, Proconsul to the Middle East, 127.
52 Quoted in Wilson, Mesopotamia, 332.
53 Ẓāhir, Thawrat al-ʿishrīn, 21; Wardī, Lamaḥāt ijtimāʿīyya, 222.
54 War Cabinet Committee, Percy Cox, “Mesopotamia Administration Committee,” May 1917, Records of the Cabinet Office, CAB 24/12/61, British National Archives.
55 CAB 24/12/61; Percy Cox, “The Future Administration of Mesopotamia,” April 8, 1917, Records of the Cabinet Office, CAB 24/10/15, British National Archives; Secretary of State for India, “Further Administration and Political Control of Mesopotamia and Arabia,” March 29, 1917, CAB 24/9/76, British National Archives.
56 Haj, Making of Iraq, 1.
57 Marr, Modern History of Iraq, 29.
58 Gertrude Bell to her father Sir Hugh Bell, October 3, 1920, Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.
59 Wilson, Mesopotamia, 314; and A. T. Wilson, “Dispatch from Civil Commissioner, Mesopotamia, to Secretary of State for India,” November 15, 1919, Records of the Cabinet Office, CAB 24/96/4, British National Archives.
60 Bashkin, The Other Iraq, 4–5.
61 Bell, Civil Administration, 38.
62 Delshad, “Religion, Politics and Poetry,” 50.
63 Ẓāhir, Thawrat al-ʿishrīn, 20.
64 Ḥasanī, al-Thawrat al-ʻIrāqīyya, 42; and Delshad, “Religion, Politics and Poetry,” 57–8.
65 Ḥasanī, al-Thawrat al-ʻIrāqīyya, 46; Wardī, Lamaḥāt ijtimāʿīyya, 234; Delshad, “Religion, Politics and Poetry,” 59.
66 Ḥasanī, al-Thawrat al-ʻIrāqīyya, 48; and Delshad, “Religion, Politics and Poetry,” 60.
67 Wardī details the surrender in Najaf. See Lamaḥāt ijtimāʿīyya 240–59.
68 Wilson, Mesopotamia, 76.
69 Bell, Civil Administration, 39–40.
70 Sami Zubaida, “The Fragments Imagine the Nation: The Case of Iraq,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34, no. 2 (May, 2002), 210; See also Kedourie, “Iraqi Shiʿis,” 144–5; Nakash, Shiʿis of Iraq, 61–6; and Wardī, Lamaḥāt ijtimāʿīyya, 90–1.
71 Nafīsī, Dawr al-Shiʿa, 158.
72 Gertrude Bell to her father Sir Hugh Bell, August 23, 1920, Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.
73 Ruhaymī, Tārīkh al-ḥaraka, 299–300.
74 Nakash, Shiʿis of Iraq, 64–5; and Nafīsī, Dawr al-Shiʿa, 155–6.
75 Ruhaymī, Tārīkh al-ḥaraka, 303–5.
76 Ẓāhir, Thawrat al-ʿishrīn, 29, 36; Nakash, Shiʿis of Iraq, 65; and Ali A. Allawi, Faisal I of Iraq (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 348.
77 Kadhim, Reclaiming Iraq, 9–10.
78 Delshad, “Religion, Politics and Poetry,” 69.
79 Nafīsī, Dawr al-Shiʿa, 178.
80 Tripp, History of Iraq, 43.
81 Delshad, “Religion, Politics and Poetry,” 70.
82 Wardī, Lamaḥāt ijtimāʿīyya 4:128.
83 Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 23; and Wilson, Mesopotamia, 253.
84 Cited in Nakash, Shiʿis of Iraq, 70.
85 Delshad, “Religion, Politics and Poetry,” 68.
86 Batatu, Old Social Classes, 23.
87 Bashkin, The Other Iraq, 175.
88 Tripp, History of Iraq, 43.
89 Kadhim, Reclaiming Iraq, 85; Ḥasanī, al-Thawrat al-ʻIrāqīyya, 192–3; and Vinogradov, “1920 Revolt,” 138.
90 Wilson, Mesopotamia, 301.
91 Vinogradov, “1920 Revolt,” 137.
92 Quoted in Kadhim, Reclaiming Iraq, 24.
93 Philip Ireland, Iraq: A Study in Political Development (London: Cape, 1937), 274.
94 Kadhim, Reclaiming Iraq, 6–7.
95 Ibid., 18, 21.
96 Nafīsī, Dawr al-Shiʿa, 206; and Tripp, History of Iraq, 44.
97 Marr, Modern History of Iraq, 24.
98 Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, 34.
99 Vinogradov, “1920 Revolt,” 138; and Kadhim, Reclaiming Iraq, 1.
100 Quoted in Townsend, Proconsul to the Middle East, 159.
101 Tripp, History of Iraq, 44.
102 Allawi, Faisal, 359; and Vinogradov, “1920 Revolt,” 123.
103 Allawi, Faisal, 357.
104 Ibid., 401–4.
105 Ibid., 407.
106 Gertrude Bell to her father Sir Hugh Bell, September 18, 1923, Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University; Gertrude Bell to her father Sir Hugh Bell, April 12, 1923, Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University; and Gertrude Bell to her father Sir Hugh Bell, March 12, 1924, Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University
107 Wardī, Lamaḥāt ijtimāʿīyya, v. 6, 261; See also Kadhim, Reclaiming Iraq, 158; Mohammad R. Kalantari, “Protecting the Citadel of Islam in the Modern Era: A Case of Shiʿi Mujtahids and the Najaf Seminary in Early Twentieth-Century Iraq,” The Muslim World, v. 110: Spring 2020, 229; and Allawi, Faisal, 438.
108 Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, 219; and Nakash, Shiʿis of Iraq, 13.
109 Abbas Kelidar, “Shii Imami Community and Politics in the Arab East,” Middle Eastern Studies 19, no. 1 (Jan., 1983), 10.
110 Letter from C. J. Edmonds to Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, “Political Situation,” 2 September 1941, Records of the Foreign Office, FO 624/60, British National Archives; Quoted in Elie Kedourie, “The Shiite Issue in Iraqi Politics, 1941,” Middle Eastern Studies 24, no. 4 (Oct., 1988): 495–500.
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Zackery Mirza Heern
Zackery Mirza Heern is a specialist in Middle East and Islamic Studies, especially focusing on Shiʿism. Dr. Heern is a Professor in the Department of History at Idaho State University, where he currently serves as Associate Dean for the Social and Behavioral Sciences. He received a B.A. in History from UCLA and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Middle East Studies and World History from the University of Utah. Heern has published widely on Shiʿism in Iraq and Iran. His book, The Emergence of Modern Shiʿism: Islamic Reform in Iraq and Iran, was published by Oneworld Publications.