MoreoverMar 6th 1999 edition


Saddam Hussein wants his place in history set in stone—and bronze and concrete. Our Middle East correspondent explains his monuments


Are both in Iraq's future?

IRAQ'S leader has given Baghdad its greatest facelift in living memory, laying out new ceremonial avenues and ordering large monuments to be raised at the city's major intersections. In the process, he is revealing a great deal about his own self-image, his idea of Islam and the vision he has for Iraq.

Before Mr Hussein's Baath party took control in 1968, there were just two public monuments in Baghdad. Islam has traditionally frowned upon figurative art on the grounds that no one can truly know the visage of the creator or rightly imitate his creation. Historically, its most impressive art and architecture, from Marrakesh to Samarkand, used formal ideas about space and light to create arches, squinches and domes that are as graceful as anything built in medieval Europe.

The use of the human form in Islamic countries, particularly a ruler's face or body, as a way of imposing on a people and their nation's history came to the fore in Iran with the Pahlevi dynasty and in Egypt under Gamal Abdul Nasser. Mr Hussein has long been keen to do the same in his own country, not least because his al-Tikriti clan comes, not from Baghdad, but from far up the River Tigris from Baghdad, nearly halfway to Mosul. The clan's takeover of the capital, and the nation, is of relatively recent date. To cement his presence there, Mr Hussein has imitated the late shah of Iran, and built himself a number of palaces. The walls of his latest construction follow the pattern of Iraq's frontiers, with gates at the points where border crossings would lie on a map. Mr Hussein is not just Iraq's leader; his hearth is its heart.

In addition, he has built not one but two victory arches in the capital, an unknown soldier's tomb, a martyrs' memorial and dozens of small statues and fountains that have his glory at the centre. Baghdad also now boasts what Iraqis claim is the Middle East's tallest tower (erected in competition with Kuwait), the region's only double-decker bridge and a complete reconstruction of the world's oldest palace at nearby Babylon. Another monument, to the “Mother of All Battles”, as Mr Hussein termed the 1991 Gulf war, is on the drawing board, as are plans for the world's biggest mosque.

In none of this is Mr Hussein crazy or alone. Giant monuments and hero cults have coexisted throughout history, and with all sorts of politics. Think of the Statue of Liberty, a French centenary gift to the young United States in 1886, or of the huge presidential heads carved by Gutzon Borglum on Mount Rushmore. Think of the giant statues of national leaders that went up this past half century across the third world from Mexico to Kenya or of Communist worthies that went up, and down, across the Soviet world. The difference here is not so much between expressions of despotism and celebrations of democracy—most statuary that inflates the human scale invites a deserving raspberry—but in what else occupies public space. In present-day Iraq, the answer is, not much, for where Mr Hussein stands out is in the scale and single-mindedness of his building campaign.

More and more are being planned all the time. Some refer directly to the past, others vaguely to what might be; most do both, invoking a proud national history as a model for an even more glorious future. According to Samir Al-Khalil in “The Monument: Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq” (1991), many of Iraq's war memorials were commissioned before the supposed victories they celebrate were even declared.

No monument captures Mr Hussein's idea of his own place in history better than Babel, the ruined capital of the eponymous Babylonians. During the 1980s, a pseudo-historical restoration of Nebuchadnezzar's palace was completed on Mr Hussein's orders. Next to the 2,500-year-old bricks that detail Nebuchadnezzar's role in the construction of the massive gates and courtyards are modern insertions that explain how the palace was restored to its former glory “in the age of Saddam Hussein”. Now Mr Hussein presides over plays staged in the neighbouring theatre that was built by Alexander the Great. One of Mr Hussein's many palaces sits atop a nearby hill, as if the wonders of ancient Babylon—palace, theatre, hanging garden and all—were follies in his grounds.

The monumental image of Mr Hussein is not at all, as adversaries would present him, a beleaguered dictator and defeated general. He casts himself as a latter-day Nebuchadnezzar, a reincarnation of Alexander the Great. So, too, with Iraq itself. Mr Hussein's giant commissions aim to present the country as a coherent and culturally-rooted nation of many millennia's standing, and not a colonial amalgam of Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs and Kurds. Even before the Gulf war, Mr Hussein hired Muhammad Ghani, Iraq's most prominent sculptor, to churn out a statuary sequence of the region's indigenous rulers from Hammurabi to himself. Only lack of money when war began obliged him to cancel the project.

In the monuments that commemorate the war with Iran, the conflict is usually called “Saddam's Qadisiyya”, a reference to a seventh-century battle where the Muslim Arab armies defeated the heathen Persians, thus ensuring the spread of Islam. (In the Iran-Iraq war, secular Baathists were trying to overthrow Ayatollah Khomeini's theocratic state, but never mind that.) In the museum below the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the sword of the commander of the Arab forces at Qadisiyya is displayed next to Mr Hussein's machine gun.

Similarly, when the Sunni Muslim Mr Hussein inaugurated his triumphal arches, he rode through them on a white horse in self-conscious reference to the steed of Hussein, the Shia Muslim hero martyred at nearby Kerbala, without any apparent embarrassment at Mr Hussein's ongoing repression of his own Shia citizens.

Other monuments make their point even more bluntly. After an American missile destroyed the Saddam Tower (a telecommunications mast with a revolving restaurant), Mr Hussein had the pieces of the missile gathered up, melted down and then cast into agonised portraits of the leaders of the anti-Iraq coalition. These grimacing Bushes and Thatchers now sit at the feet of a triumphant statue of Mr Hussein, erected in front of the tower which has itself been rebuilt at twice its former height. Similarly, the triumphal arches shaped as two pairs of crossed swords are made from the physical evidence of battle itself. The guns of dead Iraqi soldiers were melted and recast as the 24-tonne blades of the massive swords, while captured Iranian helmets—many of them peppered with bullet holes—lie scattered at the base of the arches. The fearsome fists that hold the swords aloft are replicas of Mr Hussein's own hands, made at an ironworks in Basingstoke, a peaceable suburban town west of London.

The symbolism of Mr Hussein's monumental architecture needs to be unambiguous to disguise the tenuous nature of his triumphs. In order to ensure the message of his monuments is clearly absorbed, the government encourages ordinary Iraqis to spend time among them, locating an amusement park at the martyr's memorial and a theatre within the complex of the triumphal arches. In Basra, the pleasant corniche along the Shatt Al-Arab waterway is lined with sculptures of the officers who died defending the city against Iran, each one pointing an accusing finger at the old enemy across the river. Thus, even on their family excursions and evening promenades, Iraqis inhabit the defiant, militant and self-aggrandising world of their president.

This article appeared in the Moreover section of the print edition under the headline "Monumental"

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