2025 Theses Doctoral

Anticolonial Thought in Iraq in the Journals al-‘Irfan, al-‘Ilm, and al-Yaqīn, 1909-1925

Almukhtar, Amnah

This dissertation is primarily a story of anticolonial thought, during a time when social cohesion was being threatened by foreign encroachment. It explores political and social thought from Iraq in the period from 1909-1925, during the period of transition from Ottoman rule over the three provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra to the formation of the Iraqi nation-state under the British Mandate.

The thinkers whose works I explore in the journals al-‘Irfan, al-‘Ilm, and al-Yaqin, many of whom situated themselves in the pan-Islamic reform tradition of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, posited Islamic unity as a bulwark against such intervention, and they believed fostering the values and practices necessary to achieve that unity was imperative. Nahda and reform, for them, was the project which sought to achieve those ends.

They were influenced by the developments of the Ottoman and Iranian Constitutional Revolutions, and believed constitutionalism could save Muslims from tyranny and autocratic rule. They saw their time as one in which morals had been corrupted, a reference to faltering political systems, unjust economic distribution, and a lack of communitarian social structures and social cohesion. Their proposed response, the notion of reform in the Islamic tradition as a process of the continuous enactment of virtue, reinstituting Islamic values, or correcting harmful innovations, was one and the same as the practice of nahda as instituting what is demanded by the public interest.

This notion of a public interest aimed at a quasi-socialist, Islamic welfare state in which the concept of freedom involved duties and obligations to one’s community. These thinkers were witnessing some of the failures of the modern state and critiqued attributes and actions of modern politicians. They developed different conceptions of the end goals of a polity, articulated primarily by thinking through the relationship between the individual and the community. It is those relationships that dictated the nature of moral and ethical life, manifested most clearly in the social, political, and economic realms, all of which were deeply intertwined and inextricable in their ideal form.

They believed that the growing assumptions amongst their contemporaries that these fields could be siloed, i.e. that a politician could achieve the true ends of politics while disregarding moral values and practices, played a significant role in the division of the umma and decline of Islamic civilization, a weakness which left the community vulnerable to foreign threats. Such forms of political rule were also described as a suppression of the truth, so part of the project of reform involved fostering a certain degree of shared understanding around what constitutes ‘ilm, or knowledge, and truth. Each of the chapters represents one aspect of how these thinkers jointly believed the project of nahda would be enacted: unity (chapter 1), enjoining good (chapter 2), establishing truth and ‘ilm (chapter 3), and preventing stagnation through ijtihad (chapter 4).