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The Iraqi Novel and the Kurds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Ronen Zeidel
Ronen Zeidel*
Affiliation:
University of Haifa
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Extract

This article is a part of an attempt to show how the Iraqi novel depicts the main sectarian and ethnic groups in Iraq. Concentrating on Iraqi novels in Arabic, written mainly by Arab writers, I will examine the attitude of intellectuals to the Kurds as well as the role accorded to Kurds in the narratives of contemporary Iraqi novels.

Benedict Anderson was one of the first scholars to speak about the role of the novel in creating and spreading a national identity. This is done through a creation of an “imagined community” with shared notions of time and space. The Iraqi novel was and still is committed to this idea and most Iraqi (Arab) novelists were partisans of an Iraqi nationalism that strongly supports the integrity of the country within its current borders and envisions a nationalism that contains all of Iraq’s communities.

Type
Essays
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , Summer 2011 , pp. 19 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 2011

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References

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36 Ibid, p. 172.

37 Ibid, pp. 178–179.

38 Ibid, p. 194.

39 Ibid, p. 188.

40 For a good introduction to the Kurdish novel, read Hashem Ahmadzadeh, Nation and Novel: A Study of Persian and Kurdish Narrative Discourse (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Uppsaliensis, 2003). This book is more concerned with a comparison between the Kurdish novel and the Persian novel, but some of its conclusions are applicable to the Iraqi context. Such is the dissimilarity between a state-based and a state-oriented novel—the Arab novel in Iraq—and the stateless and nation-oriented Kurdish novel. According to Ahmadzadeh, the Kurdish novel is a recent phenomenon, dating from the last decades of the twentieth century. The most famous Kurdish writer who writes in Arabic is Salim Barakat from Syria. Since he is not an Iraqi, I will not discuss his novels here.

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44 Zeidel, Ronen, “The Iraqi Novel and the Shia,” Die Welt des Islams, forthcoming.Google Scholar

45 ‘Abud, Salam, Man Yasna’, pp. 32–33.Google Scholar