Hello. Good evening or good afternoon or good morning wherever you might be joining us from. My name is Nargis Farzad and I look after matters person at SOAS but tonight I'm here in my capacity as the chair of the Center for Iranian Studies and my partner in crime for organizing the modern Middle East lecture series on Tuesdays is Dr Dina Matar the chair of Center for Palestine Studies who you would have seen taking turns in chairing this evening. We're delighted to have you here and we are doubly delighted to have one of our own very special illustrious alumni joining us to give the talk this evening. It's an absolute pleasure on many fronts to have Dr Hurra Al-Hasan join us because Hurra if I may call you Hurra John rather than Dr Al-Hasan. She completed her postgraduate taught in a master's studies at SOAS and abandoned us in favor of the University of Cambridge where she completed her PhD there and she's a research associate of the Center for Islamic Studies at Cambridge. But the reason we are here tonight is to see the depth and the passion with which Hurra approaches study of literature in many guises just before you joined us online. Hurra and I were talking and I'm delighted to discover that her passion her research is now veering closer to my homeland and she is going to look comparatively at some Persian poetry. But the topic of tonight is Hurra's book which is entitled I'm sure you looked at the title of the talk Women Writing and the Iraqi Bathest States. It all seems from such a long ago but a period whose approach and effects on the literary production I feel is not really thoroughly researched or earned so much to these days it's rather overshadowed by more discussions of politics and so on. In her book Hurra looks at several topics she explores the status that looks at the marginalised voices in Arabic literary scholarship and also looks at the religious writings by the female population. She looks at the canonical challenges of Arabic literature and she brings to it an interdisciplinary approach and many other I'm sure obviously they want to speak for Hurra but I sense that the status of women in Arab societies their literary voices will also be a focus so you're not here to hear me this evening and I need to warn you that my internet connection has been playing up so you might be delighted if I just completely disappear from the scene but and usually when the landline rings you remember telephones with landlines somehow the entire internet collapses so if I disappear you know that's what's happened. So can I ask you to very warmly and digitally welcome Dr Hurra al-Hasan to start their talk for us this evening. Hurra John please. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for that introduction now I guess and a huge thank you to Aki for being such a diligent organiser and of course a huge thank you to Dr Deena Mazal for inviting me to share my research. So I'm going to start by sharing little presentation hopefully just to make things a bit more interesting given that you we can't you know be together so this is the next best thing usually I don't do power points it's not my thing but I think we'll have to we'll have to do a power point for tonight. So I started my research by asking why authoritarian states in the modern Arab world are why they're preoccupied with culture and what can the Arab novel tell us about the history of those states and I wanted to challenge the grantedness with which we often deal with literature so the idea that literature is always there in the background of the stage of world history sitting innocently on bookshelves and so I want to begin with the idea that it's more important that books exist than that they are read and so here are some of the questions that my book poses in relation to the novel in Iraq under the bath and some might be interesting interesting to to you if you're at psoas so my my first question is why is it that one can find Iraqi propaganda texts gifted to psoas library at the height of the Iran-Iraq war often with handwritten dedications by their authors and what does this tell us about the role of international players in that war the second question I have is how is it that a religious romance novel written by the sister of an Ayatollah how is it that it was reprinted eight times in 10 years during the 1970s what does this tell us about female literacy in Iraq and does it challenge the idea that the 70s were by and large a secular time for the Arab and Muslim world generally and is it really useful to use phrases or words such as secular and religious in such an oppositional way does this apply to the Arab and Muslim world and lastly why did Saddam Hussein author four novels in the last three years of his rule reportedly right up until the last days before the American invasion of Iraq I'd like to argue that culture is not just a state strengthening activity so it's not just a mere tool for gaining political legitimacy and nor is it a mere extension of political discourse instead I think that cultural discourses are essential in the formation of political ideologies and are a space through which authority reflects on itself and where opponents can challenge it so coming back to the idea that it's more important that books exist than that they are read what do I mean by that I mean that books can be propagators of ideological messages before they're even opened by a target reader this is because they're packaged in what Jirajanet calls a paratex that function as thresholds of interpretation so paratex are any information that's around the main text and and present it to us so the title the name of the author illustrations introduction prologues so let's have a look at how this works in practice this is a book cover of one of the novels that I discuss in my book and there are some obvious paratex here the writer uses the pseudonym and the writer is a woman so the pseudonym is Bint al-Huda so daughter of righteous guidance and we have the covers illustration that where a woman is addressed in conservative attire and the title al-Fadila tantasar virtue prevails so all of which mark the the book as kind of a girl's reading with a religious message however there are less obvious paratex which emphasize the material presence of the text and are even more crucial to my mind we know from the inside jacket of the book and I actually have the the book here that the novel was originally published in 1969 but this is a 1980 reprint and this is the eighth edition so in 11 years it was reprinted eight times the place of publication is Beirut as you can see on the cover and I was actually given this novel by a Saudi shia woman from her private library so we're going to look at the text a bit more detail in a bit but suffice it to say that it's a text that was written by an Iraqi woman was republished eight times by the time she was executed and we'll talk about her life in a bit mostly in Lebanon and it found its way to the private libraries of shia women in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia so the transnationalism of this text its appeal to Arab shia women is a direct reflection of the text's Islamic message which challenged the Arab nationalism propagated by the state so the text's content is reflected in the cut in the text's material presence and so paratex are not all equal so in fact the identity of the author is so central to understanding the social and political function of this text that in one edition it dominates the entire book cover and this is the the picture that I've just shared now so the author's real name is stated Amina As-Sadr sister of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir As-Sadr it marks her her status as a martyr quite clearly because she was arrested in 1978 and was executed by the bath and the text is accompanied by a prologue written by a religious scholar from the Sadr family so no illustrations emphasis on the author's identity and the use of religious authority to elevate the text from a girl's reading to resistance literature and now in the context of resistance a copy of the author's other book was until at least 1979 still kept in Baghdad's national library so I'd like to argue that perceived threat to the state by a particular text it's not inherent to a text but it's rather determined by external factors so who wrote it when the language and where the text stands in relation to other texts in the author's own corpus of works so perhaps if this text were written in the 1980s or the 90s it might not have been perceived as such a threat and I'll talk about why so this is how most historians have divided the time span covered by my book so 1968 to 1978 we usually talk about a secular nationalism that is ascendant from 1979 to 89 the rise of a conservative nationalism obviously framed by two important events the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war and then from 1990 to 2003 the full towing of the Islamic line so full kind of a full embrace of kind of Islamic iconography and discourses by the state and my texts really complexify this categorization especially the middle period which has been treated as a kind of transitional period from secularism to fully being fully towing the Islamic line the war novels of the Iran-Iraq war do assert a strong national identity but they also reveal anxiety as well and sheer religious novels appear in the first section which is the secular nationalist section supposedly and in the last section in 1990 to 2003 as for the novels of Saddam Hussein they engage with all the discourses in a kind of mishmash of discourses so I don't think that I think what the texts that I look at do is that they complexify the way we see Iraqi history so let's have a look at the text then so Bin Tel Huda or Amina Sada signals the text as a resistance literature right from the get-go and this is her prologue to virtue prevails this my dear reader is not a story for I am not a novelist or a story writer in fact I have never tried to write a story until now instead what I present to you today is simply one of many pictures of the society we live in where the forces of good and evil collide and where Aqidah or religious creed battles against the culture and behaviors of imperialism and imperialists so she describes her novel as an attempt to revive a silent media apparatus and those are her words so acutely aware of the ideological potential of the novel very early on when not many people were aware of this but that a religious woman should be aware of the novel as a didactic tool rather than a religious man is is no coincidence I think as novel reading was construed as a female activity and by the time this book was first published in 1969 translations of popular European novels flooded the market of the most literate female population in the Arab world thanks mainly to an effective literacy campaign Iraqi women were now the target audience of an array of state-funded publications I'm going to show you some of them in a bit so first just to look at the cover of my book this is actually a photo taken of a woman in an illiteracy class in a factory actually I'm taken by a French journalist and literacy thanks to literacy campaigns rates literacy rates went up by around 300 percent compared to the turn of the century and this represented 98 percent of the female population and maybe a few people would know that Saddam was actually given a prize from the UN for his efforts to eradicate illiteracy and what you see here are some publications published by the ministry of information and culture and these detail the achievements of Iraqi women in all fields and express those achievements in terms of dress and gender mixing so if you look at to the picture on the right the caption says the site of an Iraqi woman in an aba or an abaya is becoming something of the past and on the left hand side a group of young women in their regular western attire to public event in there are other pictures in this book that specifically use the word gender mixed so they so there is a need you feel that to specify that this is a mixed gathering as opposed to a segregated gathering um also members of the female arm of the back party the general federation of Iraqi women were sent out to religious gatherings to share religious gatherings to discourage women from wearing the aba or the abaya so this politicized the issue of women's dress and and kind of made a transformed dress into an ideological marker and a site of contention so i'm going to go back to if i can yes back to the novel and to talk a bit about its plot so the context of the novel is the sphere of westernization spearheaded by the state and perceived as an aggressive and deliberate attempt to marginalize religious sensibilities a bint al-huda saw women as the country's first line of moral defense and the most fickle and vulnerable to the onslaught of foreign ideas and the characterization of the antagonist in the novel reflects this view of women as kind of easily um duped so the novel tells the story of two cousins naqa and suaad and naqa means purity in arabic and actually many girls many Iraqi girls are called naqa because of this novel um and so um at the beginning of the novel naqa is engaged she's very young she's 16 she's engaged to a religious man whom she later discovers was pursued by her undevout cousin suaad and out of jealousy and spite suaad then concocts a plan to ruin naqa's reputation and by convincing her own wayward husband to tempt her into sin and of course the plan fails and we know this because virtue prevails and suaad is threatened with divorce by her husband at the end of the novel at one point in the novel suaad tries to convince naqa that she is a recluse that encourages her to integrate into one society um suaad is said to spend her days in beauty salons and her nights in nightclubs and parties um but when naqa challenges suaad about her idea of what society is suaad responds with this quote um that you see here so what is this society why can't we see them publicly these millions who share your views so virtue prevails paints a picture of religious circles as forming a society in the shadows outside the norms of the kind of collective identity envisioned and projected by the state but although it is under threat its author predicts the ultimate triumph of virtue represented by naqa over vice represented by suaad but should we take these uh conservative views of women at face value for all her emphasis on young marriage traditional dress and the home um i'm in a suaad of herself never married until her death and she was 40 when she died when she was executed she also wrote and set up programs to allow working-class women to develop financial independence so like sewing uh kind of skills programs and things and she also was um instrumental in convincing um the hausa the religious seminaries in um in nejav to uh send to allow um them to allow their daughters or to to convince them that it was okay to send um uh women to uh study or girls to study uh public schools so despite claims of realism characters are symbols through which to resist the moral corruption of political authority and should not be taken at face value um a southerner's aim seems to be the preservation of a traditional way of life but using a modern form and in so doing she anticipates the efficacy of the novel as a genre um political texts that i look at use women as proxies almost all of them do the war novels the religious romances and saddam's novels um so they use women as a proxy to represent the nation and this is not exceptional to iraq we know that nationalist literature does this quite a lot um to use women as uh symbols while sometimes um simultaneously eradicating um their rights um and we're going to look at that kind of contradiction in a bit so we're going to come to the war now so one of the most futile and disastrous wars in modern history um the iran iraq war led to massive economic and social upheavals for both countries its effects on iraqi culture were unprecedented though the production of novels under state patronage led to the serialization and publication of around 75 novels and short story collections in eight years which is a remarkable number on the other hand um the iran raq war represented a major setback in the gains made by iraqi women in the 1970s in terms of employment and other areas and and showed that the politics of progress adopted by the state was a strategy rather than a genuine commitment the existence of this quantity of novels is just as important in my opinion as their content so in my book i use the term over language or language in excess uh to characterize the novels they're unsurprisingly long dense repetitive sloganistic and use kind of tired tropes and repeat rep root you know repetitive um story lines and they use sheer bulk to swamp to swamp uh voices of alterity the plot lines usually involve some sort of love interest or potential marriage between an arab man and a Kurdish girl which never happens anyway because one or both are killed um um in the war and usually with a smile on their face naji al ali notes that the state actively encouraged arab men to marry Kurdish girls in order to better integrate them so there were policies that were um actively encouraging arab men to marry Kurdish girls are not the opposite of course um and we see this reflected half-heartedly in the text so there are unsettling references to the rape of Kurdish iraqi rather than Arab women rape is an effective tool of course in war so very effective in galvanizing men into action but also threatens the masculinity potentially of of iraqi men due to their inability to protect their women folks so um Kurdish women are kind of an ideal solution because they are both outside and inside the nation and that's why it's always Kurdish women um that are victims of rape so this is an example of how discourse on women becomes a proxy for racial for for discourses on racial difference and loyalty anxieties about loyalty to the state so the texts um were accompanied by state literary criticism and supported by state literary festivals and an annual prize was allocated to the best novel of the year and i have some pictures of the covers of these novels so the one on the right won the um prize for best novel in 1983 and i analyze it in some depth um in my book um the one in the middle dancing on the shoulders of death a raks ala akta bil moat claims to be the first novel of the war and then this is another um uh novel from about 1984 um didn't win the prize though um women of course are notably absent as authors and and and protagonists in part because the genres favored by the state were warm memoirs and with no real experience of the battlefront women's voices were sidelined economic variables were a driving factor for state-sponsored literature and for this reason the 1990s did not see the production of much state-sponsored fiction due to the imposition of crippling sanctions on iraq but with the absence of this deluge of state-sponsored texts we begin to see the emergence of political texts by women both inside and outside um iraq and i would like to now look at some personal accounts that play with the conventions of um novel writing and blur the boundaries of autobiography poetry and fiction these texts also function as um double resistance so they critique both the bath and western imperialism um which is why they're published published in both um Arabic and English so the texts that i'm going to look at are the only texts that are not propagandistic and the reason why i wanted to include real literature alongside ideological and propagandistic literature is because i wanted to explore what artists real artists or real writers and talk about this idea of what is real literature and um but what do they do with propaganda do they engage in dialogue with it do they parody it do they ignore it do they use some of it and um we're going to look at some examples here and i'm going to start with um Nuhar Aradi and she's the author of um Baghdad Diaries um which she wrote in 1998 and then published in English in 2003 she's a ceramic she was um she died in 2004 she was a ceramicist and a diarist and she looks at um the effects of sanctions on her affluent family in Baghdad um and she this particular quote is um after she she had an exhibition called Embargo Art quite a famous exhibition and um she writes about um western journalist's reaction to her exhibition so i'm just going to read it um the cnn correspondent was totally uninterested in my art she just wanted to know whether all Iraqis were rallying around Hussain Kamin what for i said but i will explain some of my sculptures to you if you don't censor what i say these particular sculptures are made of large coiled springs from lorries that i've painted to look like snakes inside these coiled springs are a few stones painted to look like animals the snake symbolized dictatorship i told her they swallow people whole not just our sort of dictatorship but all of them yours included in fact i added yours is the biggest of all because it has swallowed up the whole world so very clearly there's a kind of a play on both dictatorships here and clear anti anti-imperialist and anti-american sentiment here and um actually um i rather died in 2004 um from cancer which she blamed on the use of the ptd uranium in in iraq uh and she was a it was a great loss to iraqi culture um i want to look at another um text and this text is by Haifa Zangana who is a regular contributor to the guardian and she's a political activist and and Haifa was um uh imprisoned in the 1970s for joining the communist party um however due to certain um factors she was released and and i'm going to talk about her release and and what that means in terms of uh what we're talking about today so um this is an excerpt from Dreaming of Baghdad which was originally public published as through the vast halls of memory in 1990 and then Dreaming of Baghdad in 2009 so she says i was released after six months during which time i was moved again to a prostitute's prison i had become ill my face covered in sores i cried for any tender word or gesture my hair began falling out for a whole year afterwards i was reduced to an entity closed in upon itself absorbed in remembering that howling remembering the dead so um Zangana was the only female in that communist cell she was arrested um at the age of 20 for giving out brochures communist leaflets and pamphlets and she was um tortured um but she knew um her family were well not that well connected but uh you know how it is in the middle of this if you know someone um she was able um through uh people that she knew to to be released um from prison but only after she had signed um a document that where she basically says that she was not political and that she was in the cell um because she was a prostitute and that's why they moved her to the prostitute's prison so um kind of i think it's an important text to look at um because it shows how how state deep i don't call it skin do you house state deep um discourses of of of progressive discourses on women were under the bath um because again we see the weaponizing of female sexuality here and and the fear of of losing honor in this particular text um the last artistic text that i really enjoyed looking at before i come back to the novels of sardar just checking the time yeah okay um i'm looking at here dunya michael's diary of a wave outside the sea a fantastic um book that is both poetry and and fiction and um i want to read the poem first because the author left iraq because of this poem it was published in 1995 as you know the book as part of a collection of poetry and then and another half was added once she'd left iraq and this edition is both in arabic and in english so it's a bilingual um edition that you see here so let's look at this poem then um in his spare time zoos kept himself busy cutting the stars from the sky and sticking them onto chests and shoulders he busied himself for this hobby so much that eventually the sky lost all its stars his tigers paced in their cages they perded in the night as they devoured the spoils and in the morning when zoos passed they newed these tigers gave lessons on the art of domestication before a portrait of zoos holding a whip in one hand and gold in the other so the poem i mean the text is poetic but there are this is one of the more like poetic parts of the text but in other parts it reads more like prose it's actually kind of a melange between poetry and and fiction so the poem is obviously a parody of authoritarian rule in iraq but it was approved for publication in 1995 possibly this is my interpretation possibly because it contains some scathing critiques of u.s sanctions and their devastating effects in the iraqi people some really poignant poems and the state saw that this could be used to their advantage but it could also have been published as an indictment against the author so basically a trap which allows something to be published and then to hold an author responsible for his publication in fact the author was questioned about this poem and left the country almost immediately because she feared for her life i'm going to look at the novels of saddam hussein that were written at the lowest point in iraqi state production so the cruelest sanctions perhaps in human history had done more than destroy iraq's cultural production of course but for saddam this was a final attempt to revitalize culture and to ensure that there was a record of his legacy what is immediately evident is the humility motif that we saw as well with bint al-huda but saddam here does not claim the novels as explicitly his so the novels are like so it's the title of the novel and then by its author rather than saddam hussein you won't see his name on any of the book covers here i don't have time to go into all of them in a lot of detail but taken as a whole these novels are a culmination of all the contradictory discourses on women propagated by the bath so you will see supposedly progressive discourses undercut by conservative tribal and religious views there's a tension in the novels between women as a woman as a symbol and real women and for this reason you'll find the most conservative views on women appearing sometimes or to biographical work men in the city whereas more liberal views of women as potential political agents can be found in the novels that are set in ancient mesopotamia so the first and fourth novels are set in ancient mesopotamia and then the ones in the middle are set in in modern iraq these two so this is zabiba and the king so this is the novel that has received most interest because it was saddam's first novel published in 2000 and the cover is actually plagiarized from a canadian artist's painting and and he came out and said that he had given permission for saddam to use it so but it's quite clearly marks the uh book as kind of a historical fantasy and then you have this one as well get out of here or be get out of here damned one some people have translated it as begon demons but i don't like that translation these two were published 2000 and then 2003 and these two are set in ancient mesopotamia and both have jonavark type female figures that lead revolts against foreign invaders some critics have even claimed that nakhwa nakhwa is a type of chivalry it doesn't exactly translate to chivalry the heroine of the last novel was meant to represent raghed hussein saddam's daughter and they claimed that saddam had lost all trust in men around him and that therefore men in the novels are not depicted in a positive light whereas women were but all these interpretations are projections of our own ideological backgrounds and and what we want to see in these novels i think i have a few excerpts from novels i have an excerpts actually from zarybun the king a very short one this is the first novel that was translated by the americans and they're very interested in it before the invasion of iraq set in ancient mesopotamia it's the story of king arab who is saddam and the peasant zabiba who represents the iraqi people and they have an adulterous affair and but she's depicted as a heroine who dies for her country and her king and these were her final words i died but long live king arab and in contrast in his autobiography which is here called men in a city even the the title is meant to kind of evoke a kind of false sense of humility so it's not about him it's about men in a city but it's actually more about him his autobiography he's keen to stress the importance of propriety and tribal traditions and and referring and in referring to how his mother was pregnant when his father died he says every woman must disclose her pregnancy even at the earliest stages so that if her husband were to die she would not be accused of fornication or adultery so these are the tribal ways um so quite a contrast between the two views of adultery for example so when it comes to real women we find more conservative views so dam second novel the 45 castle this is the one that's been the most neglected i think it's huge it's very very big it's dense and it reads like one of the war novels in that it's an Arab man who is engaged to a Kurdish girl um and of course they don't marry and interestingly they don't marry because um the Kurdish girl is not religious enough for the protagonist so we have a mishmash here of of different um discourses um but in the beginning of the novel the um Kurdish protagonist is actually a mouthpiece for the bath party in its liberal the liberal face of the bath party so let's have a look at what Shatrin who is the protagonist of the Kurdish protagonist of the fortified castle says in response to um one one of the um characters kind of detailing of achievements um by Iraqi men so she says but you did not mention the name of a single woman it is as if Iraqi women have not made sacrifices do you not remember who is martyred at the beginning of the conflict the monsters of Iran when their agents of iranian origin threw bombs at students while they were congregating in al-mustansariya university in the spring of 1980 that was very long-winded um but it shows you kind of how they read they read like that in arabic as well so do you not remember Mosul's martyr Hafsa al-Omeri who was hung on an electricity pole by communists during qasim's era what about the bride of mandeli who was martyred in her wedding gown and the martyr artist Leyla al-Adha so um a lot of these um characters are mouthpieces for um uh bathist ideology and it seems as if there's just uh someone just wanted to um kind of use as many um names and do a lot of name dropping and and use a lot of as many dates as you can kind of challenge um but it does uh show the kind of discourses that you had at the beginning of of the war and and towards the end of the 70s that are focusing on um female equality and the achievements of women in times of peace and in times of war especially here so uh i haven't i want to end with a kind of an overview and my final thoughts of how this project can be um useful in understanding um modern Arabic culture kind of generally in and the relationship between the novel and history so um the weaponization of progressive discourses is an ongoing state project in the Arab world so Iraq was not the last Arab state to patronage the novel as a sign of high culture and as the peak of national maturity we actually now see other states patronaging the novel but also being patrons of the museums the arts and universities and using all of that as a political tool and i think the Iraqi experience has shown us what can happen when progressive discourses on women or the arts are only state deep or also i think literary texts can reflect certain social and historical experiences that are neglected in traditional history historiographies and finally in the field of literary studies using the canon exclusively as the epitome of literary discourse belies the fact that popular and elite discourses are in dialogue and inform one another so propaganda and high art do inform one another and in the same way discourses of collaboration and resistive ones are reliant on one another it isn't that the state is the originator and other discourses are derivative and are mere responses because no discourse is fully original but um also state discourses often preempt and position themselves in opposition to previous discourses um and i think that's about it for me um uh thank you so much for listening to my presentation and i would love to hear if you have any questions fantastic thank you Hurajan um there are um uh uh yes i think Aki has just invited some calls that it's very interesting i remember that um you know at the beginning of the of sort of hostilities with Iraq obviously going to the post-islamic revolution in Iran before that there wasn't sort of much um discussion of apart from you know ambitions of Saddam Hussein to rebuild Babylon etc etc which is you know from the Iranian side but then there were references to these novels but obviously they would have perhaps you know picked and chosen whatever could be siphoned off to demonize obviously from sort of Iranian uh a point of view so it's very interesting to see this and the girls and i was looking um at you know the names that um i think it was Angene which again you know is because i should um recognizable surname across the region both in Iran to think that um how it is better it is worse to be accused of being a communist that you will you'll happily accept to be a prostitute and be there that has sort of in the eyes of the state or whatever that is more acceptable it is amazing i um wanted to know and so what has happened you're obviously focused on this period and what about the present time obviously literary production takes a while societies um are in shell shock when the uh invasion of Iraq in a post you know sort of control of Iraq in the post Saddam era and the uh interference of so many states in it and is that is that put on the back burner is the you know state still since 2003 which was i think you caught off point on that like this uh production of the female voice for political reasons is this an ongoing project i think you've touched upon it but not in details is that yeah thank you for your question yeah so my conclusion the conclusion to my book looks at how a little bit um about how um writers have responded to as you say the shell shock of war post 2003 and what i've noticed and what i was really interested in and that i felt that um women and men responded in a similar way to this uh the shell shock of of the American invasion i look at some uh male works that are quite similar so this idea of memory being unreliable this idea of writing very brief text completely opposite to these very confident lengthy texts just really brief texts that are just unsure of themselves and feel that they are the memories are unreliable and the very fragmented texts and actually the Arab world has witnessed an explosion in noble writing since 2003 in all parts of the Arab world but especially in Iraq so i am interested in kind of challenging the idea that women do things a bit differently you know there is something that you know that we can say that this is a female response to war so for example a response that focuses a lot on grief and mourning that that is necessarily a female um a female response but definitely um there's a lot of you can see a lot of reusing of language there are actually pro i look at a pro bath um text from 2006 so the same man that i looked at the same author who wrote novels for the iran-irak war and won a state prize um kind of left for the us and then he still wrote a pro bath writings in 2006 and and i had actually a quote but i thought it'd be too long but there was a quote where he says uh what have you done to us what have we done to you abode so the saddam so you do see that there is a kind of um that these novels created a language that is being reused um um challenged but reused and a lot of the language unfortunately is sectarian language as well so we have specific uh exactly yes specific kind of uh terms that didn't exist before but that we use now yes yeah and before i go to several questions are rolling up and the role of the censor the state censor is social freedom the literary censor is that prominent is this something that comes up in um your research are their uh voices that are absolutely cost or not allowed to come or um not so prominent at the moment but oh now in iran yeah yeah yeah a lot of uh texts are are published outside now that's right yeah that's also unfortunately as yeah well but there's a lot of self-censorship i like the idea of i don't like the idea of censorship but it's very interesting to look at um the kind of you know the give and take and and um and the fact that actually um some texts would be acceptable if they were only published a couple of years later yes it's really kind of a very delicate um balance and and and because uh censors were so temperamental people were very scared so they would err on the side of caution so you end up with these very just texts that have no nuance in them because they were scared of being miss miss red or miss red or that yeah so there are a couple of questions one very brief one which i sort with that um uh it was there a ghost writer for saddam was this really his own writing so this is from um acart words uh did saddam hussein really write these novels or did he have ghost writers do you think thank you so much for that question so as i said because i look at um the the fact that it's more important that books exist um so what i talk about in my book is that perhaps it's more important to ask why is it he wanted us to believe that he wrote these novels rather than if he actually did but actually i um i actually through my research i did a lot of research and i can't really give my source on this but um recently there's been a very recent um development um and we you know in my research of yes he did write them yes so some new documents have surfaced from iraq that have revealed that he was actually the author of these novels for that and then combining two questions so one is looking at the role of communist uh women the role that they played in challenging the um ideological propaganda of the state um and uh um that are there uh in your research did you come across in a more prominent communist women in your book and the other question was uh what about queer literature are there any research are there takes stories novels etc that are written by queer women was anything shared about being queer at the time the idea of homosexuality is that at all discussed so these questions and then i'll have there quite a few questions coming hard and fast thank you so much for your questions everyone so nothing queer at all so you're looking at a society where and i look at actually um how it's difficult to adopt kind of a gender theory approach to text like this we are looking at a kind of a literary and cultural landscape where there is absolutely kind of no chance of challenging the idea of of of of gender so nowadays in iraq you might find some more texts but during and this has done definitely not um definitely not so none there and as for the community so so the communist party unfortunately was one of the first um parties to be immediately kind of eliminated in iraq um i didn't find other than um hey vizenga and i didn't find any other actually um communist writers but i did find some communist literary uh critics um and actually one of the first uh literary critics that i used to start my phd on this topic was communist and he wrote from outside iraq so no again unfortunately not if anyone if there are any here and there please do let me know i would love to know yeah and um maria bobya forgive me uh audience if i mispronounce your names um something which i think is probably on all our minds is that i think it was a reference a mental hoda who was executed and so what was the public response so when the author of such a popular book um is um executed what was there what was and what form i mean i'm adding that bit to maria's book that i was thinking that for example the media's reaction to journals of the time or academia or whatever um and general public here how did that um what responses is that of course well i mean i mean definitely it sent shockwaves um remember i mean bintel huda was known actually she wasn't executed because of her novels she was executed mainly for her um political activism and social activism so one of the lasting legacies of that execution is that you find no no woman i mean there are no prominent women um uh i mean she are religious women um that did any kind of political activism because i mean the idea of kind of violation of the of the sacred kind of the sacred body of a of a religious woman i mean through torture and execution was was very shocking um but the the popularity kind of moved i think actually it made her even more popular but but i mean it kind of everything kind of took off but outside iraq um that you know we there is no way for us to kind of gorge public opinion um on the issue inside iraq because the dowel party by then was out lord and they all left and but um there are i actually um right about other religious writers in my book so i i write about four so three other writers after bintel huda and and she made it possible for other conservative women to write and to write using their own names so it became respectable to write because of her that's her lasting legacy in terms of novel writing and i look at in the book actually i look at how these women have dedicated their works to bintel huda so notifications how they then it comes to her yeah yeah well taking you on that uh uh uh moving to um uh another question here that um first of all how did you go about selecting your um novels your you know the corpus that you chose and did it did you think about expanding this to the you know arabic speaking world you know in syrian novelists or other writers who write in arabic this was a really good question that's what i wanted to do in the first place i wanted to do a comparative project and the comparative project was supposed to look at representations of um civil war and sectarian difference in the arab novel and then what i found was it was very difficult for me to do an interdisciplinary project and to do a comparative project at the same time it was just too sprawling right yeah i had to yeah i had to see the do an interdisciplinary kind of product or just do a comparative but um i hope i hope that there will be more um kind of studies that kind of not copy i've not i mean it's copying but i mean that that would do well have a look at the same kind of topics um in syria or in syria would be the easiest one to compare because of uh baptism um but i have an unfortunately because i had to limit my uh the the text to iraq but as for how i chose the text in iraq so 75 novels from the iran iraq or which ones do you choose they all read the same they all sound the same when you read them so what i thought i would do is take one author and look at how um look at the changes in political discourse and how they're reflected in the literary discourse so i found that the same author was very belligerent at the beginning and then when the state wanted to make peace with the iran um authors were encouraged to write about the suffering of the war and to look at to encourage people to vent their frustrations and to prepare them for peace so i thought it'd be better to take one author and kind of and show kind of the changes rather than you know take all of the authors together but i do look at for example the titles of novels because i think that the titles on their own can just you know there's an ideological message there in the title so the message that the the the titles are like the lowly ones and the great ones so we all know what already or or or for example night and day so all these oppositional metaphors to show kind of iraq's cultural and moral superiority yeah so i look at things like i try to be as comprehensive as possible but i think the most difficult thing was looking at artistic novels i felt kind of bad that i kind of the i didn't i don't want anyone to leave with the impression that this is what iraqi cultural production is this is one strand there were amazing novels written even inside iraq um for example this is my next one of my other projects is yeah is how come good literature was still written in iraq at the time very little but how did they escape censorship and they did it mainly by looking at iraq's um mythological kind of mythology and iraq's past and talking about the past rather than the present and and that's one of the ways they say escape censorship for that so while um you're still on the topic of selections um uh dr erica hunter says she would like to know that did you uh consider or wear their uh novels by um from the christian communities in iraq or other you know minority uh communities there that you'd um considered or were you more focused on the shiisunni perhaps the wall related iran iraq stuff actually the uh the text that i quoted the zeus poem from is actually by dunia michael who is a christian iraq i wonder because the name is the i was the name yeah marina absolutely um the thing is i'm very weary of of um so for example hayfus engana is is half Kurdish and half arab dunia michael is christian iraqi um the third author um radi is a uh shia iraqi but from an affluent family and her father was a diplomat actually so do we really want to say that um christian iraqi is right in a different way and i actually look at a christian author who is uh one of my favorite authors siren anton who is is not a woman but um and i feel like um when we when we do i mean obviously the way people write is influenced by their backgrounds we can't say that that's not the case but sometimes i think as scholars we like we we subconsciously over over estimate certain aspects of our research because we're so immersed in them so i could maybe someone would read the book and say it's all about the shia so i've tried to be aware of my own positionality um so um i i don't like to i wouldn't say that for example christian iraqi's wrote in a way that was different from shia iraqs and actually i wanted to say something about the um the kind of the text that i showed you that were produced by the uh government so um shia women were part of that process by and large they were secular it's not that all the shia were religious and all those and these weren't they were they were very much part of that process um as were all iraqists um but yeah dunia michael is great i mean everyone should read her she's a great she's christian iraqi very good and then two topics two questions that focus differently on um Kurdish women and their presentation and so a question from istanbul from asli karocha and it says thank you everybody thanks you for your presentation and um i was curious it says about the representation of Kurdish women in the iraqi literature i wonder whether there have been literary reactions from the Kurdish women and writers to this kind of state discourse of encouraging arab men to marry Kurdish women or discourses of rape of Kurdish women and under Kurdish again yasser ali says that if you consider iraq as a nation state do you consider Kurdish women writers as part of this nation definitely they are yeah and are you and do you look at you know the writings of Kurdish women uh will will you look at them or do you look at them uh in your project so actually i talk a lot about Kurdish women in my in my book i find it i found it very surprising the way Kurds are dealt with um more so with with the shia you don't see the word shia at all there's like a complete blackout on the word in the novel so you just know that this character is shia because you know they come from this particular part of iraq but with the Kurds it's very clear it's very clearly stated that this person from is from uh Kurdistan and it's a kind of um you want them to be included but you kind of you're really angry at them because they don't want to be included or you think they don't want to be included and at one point um there's a lot of national stereotyping in these novels so um so one of the arab men says to this girl why are you stubborn is it because all Kurdish people are stubborn so for example um so a lot of ethnic stereotyping um as i said Haifa Zenkana is half Kurdish um and actually her um her father is Kurdish and her mother is um an Iraqi from Nejha i think as well if i'm not mistaken um so she is if you're going to say that the father is Kurdish so she's Kurdish i mean it's so difficult to get into identity politics and i i don't like to get into it um i haven't other than um Haifa Zenkana looked at any Kurdish uh writings by women i'm sure there has to be and maybe in different languages but perhaps in Kurdish perhaps in Turkish or and yeah or in other languages because the Kurds left so early and they had their own you know they have you know the their own kind of self-autonomy enclave so so unfortunately i don't have so much on uh a question but i i'm very interested in race in general because if you look at the way um uh race is is represented in in in the propaganda novels and we're talking about the use of the word ajami for example to denote either Iranian or as non-arabian um the the use of women as a proxy for race is very interesting and i look at that in quite a lot of detail there's a such a you know there's such an obsession with racial purity and the and the fear of contamination that you see in some of these novels so you have kind of very progressive let's let's all intermarry and then you have this fear that you know by intermarrying you're you know polluting your stock or you're you're weakening this you know Arab chivalry that you have in your genes so there is that anxiety but no i haven't looked in a lot of detail that i put all these women in one um chapter because i felt like they all represented iraq i just felt that they were you know christian iraq you know and i felt like they all represented uh iraq and i i didn't feel like i could separate them there are aspects that you can pick up that you know this is the christian kind of reference but of course you know you know it you know they're all very authentic iraqi voices yeah all of them are authentic yes i think that or sometimes it's very annoying for the authors or writers i mean you're getting from iran that if there are certain issues that reflect on the society as a whole whether it's for example custody battles if that comes in the chair if it is the water if it's compulsory hijab or not and some of these it doesn't matter in iran whether you're a zoroastrian christian or she is certainly whatever you love the land is hijab so it sometimes when you hear authors being interviewed and they find it very annoying that this is not this is perhaps if you want to narrow it down is a feminist issue for example or if it is you know a female issue a maternal issue you don't need to then bring these angles you need to hush the voice of the humanity in that geographic bound it's not even male or female if you're talking about oppression or you know the um state apparatus to quash certain voices um there is a question about the rule of the publishing houses and it says that you know that were used as a platform for these texts that you see so um sarah farhan says i'm thinking along the inverse of the saying books are written in kairu published in beirut and read in back in your case the books are written in back not published in beirut and read abroad i'm also wondering if you can talk about just generally story arches narrative prose etc is there something political in the cultural structure of bentul hudas texts that might take us on to yet another uh full led lecture the latter part but certainly it would be very good to know about the publishing houses whether some were probably arms of the state some independent but just generally to oh very few independent publishers so a lot i look actually at the production in detail using like a statistical analysis and look at the kinds of books that were published so you look at for example philosophy nothing of philosophy so philosophy may be not amenable to propaganda a bit too nuanced a bit too of too quite difficult to to use as propaganda and then you look at the rise of the humanities no sciences in a war you need technological advancements for example you need all sorts of things scientific publications no scientific publications during the war but the rise of the humanities and and it's it really points to the fact that it was an ideological war really just really wasn't at war about ideology now so i look a lot actually at publishing houses interestingly a lot of women were managing these publisher houses during the war because the men were at war actually one of my iraq was in charge of the publishing house but very regulated even the names of the publishing houses i look at dar al-haria you know like freedom press kind of even these kinds of but of course it's not the freedom that we know it's the freedom yeah baptism yeah so you look at them and then afterwards what happened was because it's all to do with oil prices and that's why you get this expansion in the 1970s of the of the publishing sector and other cultural sectors and then suddenly publications flew in during the 80s and 90s suddenly they're not priority anymore for example and then kind of you know publications for the military are more important so i look at actually i do a statistical analysis of publications especially during the iran iraq war because it makes no sense logistically why certain books are more public public other than the fact that it's propaganda and ideology driving it all so thank you for that i'm glad everyone's interested in vintage wood there because yeah yeah i only look at one one novel and then look at other novelists yeah i mean i have her entire i have an i have her entire collection um it's been published several several times but i mean i have i have them all here yeah before i go to a question about the role of the you know exiled iraqi in the sense of the at that work party that were in iraq i want to ask you about translation industry i know that in iran the after i mean probably again there was a shell shock after the revolution and it was a very brief period before the war started and but the hunger for translation and the range of material and for the first time you know it's not just looking to europe it's all over the world from you know southeast asia last in america all those and you know the range of you know novels and that in a way does directly it opens up the eyes of the indigenous authors as well to perhaps same predicaments you know the atrocities in a state whether you're from you know chili or iraq or iran or you know um uh south africa or what the certain things it's it's at the heart of it the same brutality the same use of sexual violence as a weapon of war etc i mean we know that so what is that is there a support for it is it good are they good translations are they popular reading them yeah thank you for that question i actually look at translations from arabic into other languages and from english into um into arabic so you'll find that again during the iran iraq war when iraq wanted to gain international kind of support you get a lot of translations from arabic into english but then in the 1970s when i talked about the translation of popular romances because these women had just learned to read suddenly you've had just lots of people who know how to read so there were a lot of and not enough materials in arabic remember this is a poetry based black iran as well like a poetry based society and very late with the novel and so even as a genre it was so exciting to have these novels and that's why bint al-huda thought that she had to write kind of authentic arabic novels for her society rather than import them a novel that was very popular actually and i have was lemiz-e-ghabl actually to have you go and i think it's the same in iran as well i don't know why every it was such a everyone references it bint al-huda references it everyone references that novel and everyone obviously claims to be on the side of the of course the oppressed and the downtrodden so yes but during the 1990s unfortunately no cultural very little cultural production because of we all know but even about the lack of paper from sanctions the effect on of the sanctions so no translations and very little production but a lot of exiled literature because suddenly the state kind of quiets there's no bombarding from the state discursively and and that's why other voices were able to emerge even outside Europe but people were still scared to write even outside the rock there and sometimes it's not the priority so no to no to forget about our facebook audience there is a question there's a question will take us onto another lecture but you might like to point on it can you talk a bit about the rise of communism and communist era in iraq but perhaps i think that could be that obviously it had that era whether literary production and whether you know the communists are supposed to be egalitarian and really not distinguish between genders etc perhaps promote writing by women that if you could have a moment to answer that and there is another facebook question that is there a difference in the narratives of iraqi women before and after the campaign of faith is that am i doing it right yes yes during the 1990s so perhaps you know focusing on the era of the communist era of writing i think it's a lot of interest now in communist writing i think a lot of people are interested in the communist party even the history of the coincident in iran as well a lot of people are interested in the communist yeah i think what happens is that because i mean at the time when people ask me about the bath party and how the bath party you know just the word bath is enough to just you know this people have such a visceral reaction because of the historical experience but if you look back the intentions and the what was you know what the bath was supposed to stand for at the time you know i don't think anyone could have envisioned like the horror that could have come out of it and i think a lot of our interest in the communist party is a sense of nostalgia is a sense of possibly it would have been something else it would have been different and i love heifer zengana's book because she says we don't know we could have worn the faces of the oppressors we could have been that maybe if we had taken power we'd have been the same and this is this has been actually and i think this has been vindicated in the way that history has unfolded in iraq so you know the the oppressed become the oppressor and who is the oppressed and who is the oppressed and what happens when marginalized communities take power how would how do they deal with taking power after being that's the fear i think that we have a revolution in in the middle east generally is that we don't know we claim the moral high ground but we don't know what we could have done and that's why i think we're interested in the communists and we like to think that the communists would have done things differently but really do we want to look at some communist experiences in other countries and to look at how that that unfolded i think i don't i don't think that anyone has a claim to the moral high ground the communists the is the you know the islamists that no one has the the moral high ground unfortunately exactly and about the narratives that women before and after the faith campaign campaign well for for religious women i don't think the faith the religious shia woman the faith campaign had no no effect because it was this you know they had their own sub disc kind of like a sub discourse that had a religious discourse that was kind of detached from the state because they saw the state discourse on religion as being hypocritical so it didn't really affect them but um and as for um other women who weren't maybe religious shia women i felt like there was actually a kind of a reaction against so if you look at crocodile diaries it's all about she talks about um getting on a bike and driving down and then everyone looking at her in a way is in like why why is she on a bike and she flaunts that that she can ride a bike um for example so i feel like actually you get a resistance i don't feel i haven't read any religious novels written by non-shia women yeah if there are any please send them to me yeah exactly yeah it wouldn't dare to actually pass in the country maybe i think you have a lot of shia writers because it it was a it was a political tool used very early early on yes yeah to combat the kind of the secularism of the bath but generally i don't i don't see any kind of religious novels written by no being affected by the faith campaign no not at all yeah and then we have a question um uh from noam madloum who asks about the role of the al that work party and the fact that they settled in iran and for the other audience this is a supreme council for the islamic revolution in iraq which uh spent most of his time in exile in iran and obviously the support of the iranian supreme leader you know itola chomeini and thereafter and so did they i mean would they read uh imports back to the iraqi literary scene and this question particularly talks about poetry and novels and this was um uh because they were away from um the rule of saddam hussein in iran did they explore ideas or came things that then it had it it returned to iraq and had another had an influence on the domestic production i don't think that um it was their priority at all and remember literature is not a priority for most actually as i said literature especially the novel because of vintage hooda was associated with women writing stories i haven't actually um encountered any writings by religious men um so i don't think it was seen as a priority i think that politic kind of direct would be a propaganda or direct kind of political works conflicts and other types of literature were the priority and not um not the writing of novel and i think that's that's what makes vintage hooda quite unique i think that um for her to recognize um that the novel could be used um and and it was then by the state adopted by the state during the iran iraq people she was aware of it but then i don't think that um yeah i don't think that the doubt and it wasn't so there wasn't that now that they didn't fear saddam hussein i suppose you know would they um write i am not way correct me absolutely that any novels by women by iraqi women living in um uh in iran style for want of a better word in iran being published necessarily in iran or or it had been it might actually be used for you know double propaganda because i think although they were in iran but perhaps considering that they would have freedom of expression is a little bit um unrealistic they were still on now under the uh the shiyi rule in iran i suppose it's not but are you aware of these other exiled writings now i would love to know if there were iraqi women writing in farsi for example or writing in arabic and iran i don't think so and then i don't and the way i try to find these texts is i don't just look at um obviously western libraries where i'll find these things but if you come from a certain background you know that if that if that book would have been popular i probably would have known about it i mean the books that i've actually had um books so there is an anthology of women of arab women's writing by radoa ashur and feryal ghazoul amazing it's just an anthology of arab women writers so um alphabetically and i searched through that because i wanted to know if i see if i could find some you know other writers um she only lists three uh religious uh writers and iraqi kuwaiti uh adquate of iraqi origin and i i discuss her and then a third novelist who is still live and i've searched high and low for you maida robert if you are there somewhere i need to read your work i can't find your novels i can't find anything but the ones that i found that were not written in that anthology i found in the private collections um in my hometown in saudi arabia so i just said okay guys do you remember those old novels that we use that that were really popular at the time in the 90s do you guys have any and i've discovered new authors uh through uh actually my connections here yeah so yeah so that's how i found them that's how you that's how you find popular literature you're not going to find popular literature easily in um in a normal library and i have people actually in iraq search for books for me i was like can you find these books in iraq because nowadays we have so many just just the level the literacy not the literacy level as in reading and writing we have discerning readers now in the arab world it's not like when when we first started reading like now people will not settle people really are good novel readers in a way that they weren't before so you either write something really good or it will not take over just yeah so i was thinking that that is actually okay you might have a page turner and you may have a something that you know because it's sort of a one week one month one year wonder but in terms of the uh power the literary power i mean are they beautifully written obviously i would the book said you recommended you know i'll read it in um uh in english translation but the power of the arabic discourse that use i mean are these books that will endure and there will be absolutely beautiful in terms of a literary piece of writing that's definitely those notes i think edward say that she talks about um uh the baghdad diaries and he said that this is the only text that i felt really reflected real life um it was either edward say that i'm very sorry i think it was edward say that he talked about um no haradi's book um as being like very authentic and and um it's the best text he could find about sanctions in iraq and how they affected real people and for me to name me hail's book is that that's interesting and it's destined to endure and um of course the the other texts i mean the religious texts will endure only because the author died in such a gruesome way and represented something but i think that even young shia girls now will not read them they work for a specific generation for a specific type of time um and that's why i wanted to include those you know i didn't want people to be left with the idea that this is what iraq produces yes no just yeah one of the richest literary traditions of the world so heavens absolutely that's why one sometimes seeing this lol okay it might be it's just a shell shock because the value as as literature and i think maybe we have one last question a old member of audience on the facebook who's joined us very late and wonders and i don't think you did this that um did you touch upon the graphic novel at all in iraq she so here she says i'm sorry i missed the beginning was the graphic graphic novel used at all i mean i know this is a new genre in iran today it's like them you know like Persepolis and that sort of idea of um but i do know that is that um i'm just sure what i'm sure not sure whether i understand by graphic novel do they mean that literally or whether graphic in its depiction of in its depiction yeah i know exactly yeah it's not clear but yeah you've you've got them it's happening i don't know in iraq specifically but um as you say like it's like graphic novels are becoming more um yeah more popular in in the arbor generally but they weren't it wasn't the case at the time in the in the historical period that i look at i think that we have become more visual with time because of technology and whatever and we we feel like we need these novels appeal to us but people who are much more um willing to sit down and read just a boring book with no pictures if that's what the if that's the graphic novel yeah all right which is talking about yeah i know because i know that i mean you know it's so hard in iran what was that published and it sure just shows the magic of the author's pen and the power of imagination that you forget sometimes is you know a very romantic novel or whether this could be talk about a passionate extramarital affair etc that you know obviously the settings which are a no-go area like iranian cinema but you forget that they are written in such a way that you very soon you forget that there are restrictions in what you can describe or detail and when there is no touch where it's nothing you know you cannot embrace a heartbroken member of the opposite sex but yet it's so much power yeah to restrict absolutely and you don't need to spell out things it's really i i'm actually no idea when we stop but maybe aki would probably be suddenly you know cut us both off if we go on and it's really it's been such a pleasure hurajan dr alhazan is so lovely to thank you thank you so much for having me and thank you to everyone who attended i'm so wonderful to hear about that this is just the beginning of the journey and the other projects that you have in mind and bringing a more you know comparative element to across the regions across languages of the region certain issues that you're interested in are not just confined to one linguistic family or one um tribe or country or nation so it's really wonderful we wish you absolutely all the best and delighted and grateful that you so much it was great it was great thank you so much really and our lovely audience again thank you so much for being with us and we look forward to seeing you next week so we obviously we crisscross the region we crisscross disciplines and ideas to talk so um i hope you'll be back with us next Tuesday where we are going to look again we are not far from iraq going across the border to iran and looking at china's engagement and relations with iran and professor annus shahmi from the base at dorham university will be talking about the um middle east west asia the asianizations and again this is very topical especially as we heard over the weekend about the chinese aggressive efforts in creating another trade blog so do please join us again we're a bit delighted to have you we always welcome your thoughts your please email us and um stay in touch and very much looking forward to having you and please stay safe and well and um we wish you happiness and uh of joy in the socially distant times and please join me in saying good night to hurrah john hurrah dr hurrah al-hasan and um look forward to having you back with uh greetings and farewell from sarah's university of london good night