In 2006, Senator Joe Biden and Leslie H. Gelb, then president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, published an Op-Ed in The New York Times calling for the division of Iraq into three largely autonomous regions along ethno-religious lines: Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab. The “Biden Iraq Plan” won much support in the Senate. Advocates cited the British colonial administrators who, after World War I, cobbled together the “artificial nation” of modern Iraq from three Ottoman provinces, an act that seemed to give the partition plan historical validation.
Yet the majority of Iraqis rejected it. In “Land Between the Rivers,” a sweeping history of their country, Bartle Bull explains why. With Iraq’s independence in 1932 from rule by the British Mandate, “the territorial limits of the country had been settled. They followed almost perfectly the age-old Ottoman outer boundary for the three Mesopotamian provinces, which together were little different from the overlapping cores of the Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian empires before them.”
In other words, the geographic region of Iraq — a name in use since at least the sixth century A.D., even before the advent of Islam — has a shared history, one 5,000 years long. “There is no question that the place referred to has for millenniums been a distinct, if internally variegated, part of the world,” Bull writes.
Five thousand years is a very long time; it is frequently — and, as Bull makes clear, falsely — claimed that little connects Iraq’s antiquity to its present. Many observers of the Middle East invoke the Islamic term jahiliyyah, the notion that the time before Mohammed was one of ignorance and barbarism, to argue that people there do not care for their ancient past, regarding efforts to commemorate it as nationalistic propaganda. Saddam Hussein was rightly ridiculed for portraying himself as the reincarnation of Babylon’s sixth-century-B.C. king Nebuchadnezzar, though he is hardly the only modern leader about whom such claims have been made; some supporters of Donald Trump have called him the new Cyrus of Persia.
The separation of Iraq’s history into pre-Islamic and Islamic periods is still standard, however, and few scholars would dare attempt a history of both. Bull, a journalist who has reported extensively from the region, has the audacity to do so, and he shows that it is a constructive approach, allowing common motifs to emerge in the process. Some of these he enumerates in his preface — Iraq’s cities as sites of world-changing cultural events, including as centers of intellectual inquiry; its openness to outsiders — though he does not always systematically develop them in his book.
Iraq was a melting pot for the entirety of the 5,000 years Bull chronicles, and, at the risk of endorsing geographic determinism, I agree with his suggestion that this fact has much to do with the country’s location on the globe, where East and West meet. Despite episodes of conflict that at times were extremely violent, the coexistence of traditions, languages and religions yielded enormous diversity. It is often forgotten or hushed up, including by groups within Iraq, that, as Bull notes, quoting a midcentury history of Iraq, in the early 20th century Jews in Baghdad were “almost as numerous as the Sunnis and exceeded the Christian, Persian and Turkish minorities combined.”
This diversity, along with the vast time span Bull attempts to cover, makes his task almost impossible. Iraq’s history fills entire libraries; simply listing its political dynasties can be overwhelming. In order to lighten the narrative, in several chapters Bull focuses on individuals who can “illuminate the wider picture.” To evoke the earliest centuries, he essentially retells the ancient epic of the Sumerian king Gilgamesh, who sought immortality, interjecting information on topics such as the origins of cities and warfare. Describing Baghdad’s glorious centuries from A.D. 750 to the Mongol sack in 1258, he turns to a book about slave girl concubines by the prolific ninth-century author al-Jahiz for a window into the city’s elite culture. Debauchery involving sex and wine is a recurring theme.
Because Iraq’s history was radically affected by developments outside its borders, some chapters pay more attention to what happened elsewhere. Of course, the outsiders with the greatest impact in Iraq in modern times were the British and, later, the Americans. Bull ends his book in 1958, with the coup against the British-installed monarchy, and in the epilogue he comments briefly on the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, stressing how the government’s justification — Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction — proved false. He points out some of the other atrocities inflicted on the Iraqi people, such as Winston Churchill’s use of bombs to quell a rebellion against British control in 1920. (His proposal to use mustard gas on civilians was never enacted.)
Bull necessarily relies on earlier syntheses to convey his huge subject, but many of his sources date to the early and mid-20th century and have been superseded by more recent scholarship. These include people whose decisions led to disastrous outcomes, such as Sir Mark Sykes, co-author of the Sykes-Picot agreement dividing up the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France, for which Bull quotes the assessment by the British diplomat and archaeologist T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”): “fraud.” Bull also cites military officers and colonial administrators who spent time in the Middle East and wrote more colorful prose than today’s historians — including, in addition to Lawrence of Arabia, the archaeologist Gertrude Bell and the officer nicknamed Glubb Pasha, who commanded colonial forces in the British Mandate territories of the Middle East for most of the mid-20th century.
The surely unintended effect is that “Land Between the Rivers” reads in places like a work of orientalism. The book is inspired by firsthand experience of the region, yet its emphasis on concubines, political intrigues and other exoticizing tropes detracts from its conceptual originality and laudable ambition.
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