Review Return To Ruin, Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia

Saleh, Zainab, Return To Ruin, Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia, Stanford University Press: 2021

 

Return To Ruin, Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia by Zainab Saleh is the story of Iraqi expatriates living in London. Saleh interviewed five Iraqi exiles from different backgrounds and experiences about their families, life in Iraq and how they ended up in England. She included her own story about exile as well. Their stories are by far the best part as Iraqi voices are rarely heard in Western books about Iraq. On the other hand this was based upon a thesis. That meant Saleh’s college advisor told her to link her interviews to a larger theory. She chose one about British and American imperialism that didn’t stand up.

 

The introduction goes through the author’s theory on UK and US imperialism in Iraq as her overarching explanation for the experiences of the Iraqis she interviewed. Her research led her to writers that argued that British and American policies in the Middle East were driven by a desire to control oil. She argues that the two powers were involved in Iraq since its inception. That’s an easy claim to be made about the UK as it created Iraq, was the major foreign influence in the country until the 1950s and controlled the country’s petroleum industry. It doesn’t work as well for the U.S. Washington did support the 1963 coup and backed the Kurdish rebellion in the mid-1970s as a favor to the Shah of Iran, but Iraq was not of real interest again until the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War when the U.S. wanted to stop the spread of the Iranian Revolution. Petroleum was not always the driving force of American policy either.

 

There’s another problem with trying to use foreign imperialism as the macro theory. It ignores the fact that few of the book’s subjects ever talked about the Americans and many supported the 2003 invasion because they wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein. It thus obscures their own agency. In the end this part of Return To Ruin comes off as a writer attempting to fit her examples into a thesis that doesn’t quite work rather than the field work leading to the bigger picture. 

 

With that out of the way the majority of the book is a very good read. The five interviewees along with the author’s own story are very engaging.

 

Hanan and Khalil were two old communists. Hanan had a nostalgic view of the monarchy as a period of anti-colonial struggle against the British and change. Khalil was always critical of the party however. They were both disheartened by the ethnosectarian politics that were established after 2003. That clashed with Hanan’s secular views while Khalil attempted to mediate between the parties before and after 2003 but failed and came to disparage them as corrupt and self-serving.

 

Ali and Hadja were devout Shiites and from a younger generation. When Ali’s family came to London he felt alienated. He saw an isolated and inward focused Iraqi exile community split by competing parties, sectarian views, and a feeling of victimhood. He also believed few of them were truly religious and just followed practices out of tradition. He rejected these beliefs which led to a secular outlook that religion and politics should be separated. Hadja was a Fayli Kurd whose family was expelled from Iraq in the early 1980s. She had an identity crisis when she came to the UK and found herself through her visits to the holy sites in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Her pilgrimages also led her away from sectarian politics that dominated the Iraqi community. Both thought Islam should be understanding and accept all.

 

Rasha was different from the others because she was a Mandean and left Iraq in 2004. She was considered an “authentic” Iraqi by the community in London because she had lived through Saddam and the U.S. invasion and suffered recent hardships compared to the others who were living comfortably in London for years. She grew up feeling that the 1970s were the best period for her family because Iraq was rich with oil revenue and the government invested in services and education which she benefited from. Having lived through the Iran-Iraq and the sanctions she finally left after three of her friends were killed in 9 months after the fall of Saddam. Her family remained in Iraq however and eventually fled to Syria in 2006. She also had difficulties with the sectarian politics of London and tried to be a mediator between the different groups.

 

Saleh’s ideas on how Iraqi visions of their homeland changed over time are much more interesting than her flawed attempt to connect these people to imperialism. All of them had a middle income view which saw their class as being the movers and shakers in Iraq. Many of them looked down on the poor blaming them for problems like sectarianism. The older generation memorialized the monarchy as the best period in Iraqi history due to the actions of the Communist Party who had an inclusive and secular vision of the future. Ali and Hadja in comparison who were younger saw Iraq through their religion with Ali’s life shaped by his father’s religious studies and Hadja by her trips to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Finally, Rasha was a third view that came as a new wave of Iraqis arrived in England after the 2003 invasion. People like her were seen as survivors having gone through many more struggles than the previous waves of immigration. What united them was they all didn’t like the sectarian politics of London and Iraq which was a minority view at first but gained wider acceptance as the years went by and the new Iraqi elite proved incapable of ruling the country competently.

 

Return To Ruin starts off with some problems but then recovers with its firsthand accounts of life in Iraq from the monarchy to the U.S. occupation. The stories of the Iraqi community in London are just as interesting. Her own story fits right in with them. Unfortunately she had to follow university conventions and attach a macro level theory to explain her interviewees which wasn’t successful. If that part is skipped this is a wonderfully written book about the Iraqi experience from multiple generations and outlooks.

 

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