Socio-Political Realities in Iraq and the Middle East

by Miaad A. Hassan
–Iraq/USA–

السياسة عاهرة, a good colleague of mine says, asking me not to waste my time in politics and to return to art and poetry, the disciplines for which he knew me before. His words are loosely translated as, “Politics is prostitution.” Art, he believes, is more clean and honorable.

I know I disappointed many of my teachers and colleagues when I chose to pursue my higher education in a field other than Art or Literature. However, I do not feel that I have actually retired from literature, simply because politics requires a sober literary base to keep it from becoming “prostitution,” as my friend describes it.

“Oh, my dear,” my poet friend addresses me. And, as I ponder his speech, I recall some past events hoping to see what he sees or show him what he cannot see. I want to show him that politics is art, and that art is politics.

In Iraq and everywhere, politics is part of our daily life; it is even the foundation of our life, whether we like it or not. So, how can we not get involved in determining our destiny? Was it not politics that put each of us in the place we are in today?

I find it interesting to examine the definition of the word “politics,” as it is defined by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a key cleric figure in the Islamic world – though I do not know what clerics have to do with politics. Sheikh al-Qaradawi defines the term “politics” linguistically as the action of regulating or administrating animals, as in supervising a cow or a horse, including feeding that animal, offering water, cleaning, and so on. According to the Sheikh, this is the original meaning from which the word that now relates to humans was taken. He suggests that after the man had experimented in “politicizing animals,” he gradually ascended to politicizing humans in leadership and the management of their own affairs.

While I do not judge him for his definition, a simpler definition found on Wikipedia is the science of managing civil society. According to political scientist Harold Lasswell, politics is “who gets what, when, and how.”

Does politics then decide who we are and who we can become?
Repression and obedience is all we know politically in Middle Eastern societies. And women talking about political issues is generally not accepted. How many of you, my Middle Eastern male friends, have repeatedly told your wife, sister, or daughter, to stop talking about politics and to find another topic more suited to her femininity? I cringe at the thought that even in the United States, Arab women whom I occasionally meet hardly have a political opinion. And what is worse, they tend to think of other women who hold political views as more masculine. One woman I know was a refugee for 20 years in a foreign country and still did not know how politics related to her life!

Talking politics in the Middle Eastern tradition is a matter of masculinity, as the man is in charge of the management of things and directing the “herds.” Perhaps they think that politics is exclusive to men, just like jeans are in our Eastern societies. And we must not be fooled by the quotas for women in the newly founded Iraqi and Afghani Parliaments – these are only numbers and mean very little for the majority of women at home dealing with illiteracy and underage marriage. According to the US Institute of Peace, 57 percent of Afghani girls are married before the age of sixteen.

But is it not our ignorance in the world of politics and our lack of knowledge of what is happening around us the reason why we have lived under the shadow of failed policies for so many centuries? Is the suffering we face today due to underdevelopment, hunger, and deteriorating health not the result of our surrender to abusive governments that have tried to “politicize” us the wrong way?

Are we not the ones who sacrificed our quality of life to serve politicians, instead of the other way around? Is it not our ignorance that brought to power, for instance, the current Iraqi governor of Saladin Province, Abu Mazin, a politician sitting in a big oval office with dozens of heavily armed security officers by his side, while ordinary Iraqi citizens beg for safety and security from him? Is it not our ignorance that also allowed the newly seated Iraqi parliamentarians of 2006, whose education does not exceed the primary level, to represent us and lead us? Is it not our confusion between ruling and administration that made the President of the Republic a Leader and Commander and not just Executive Director? Is it not it our ignorance about power and our roles as citizens?

Perhaps politics is “prostitution-like” because we have for so long muted our voices, while we have authorized politicians to compromise our money and livelihood however they see fit.

In politics, we see little more than bickering and name-calling. Perhaps sometimes we choose to escape from reality into poetry, art or literature, only to have politics resurface again, redefining our words and ideas of love and classic romance, in which love is mixed with blood and destruction, to tell us that we are in an era of political immorality. To take us from the era of Shakespeare and Andalusian stanzas to the era of Nizar Qabbani, who mourns Arab politics, saying:

I, after fifty years,
try to record what I have seen…
I saw peoples think that government officers are an order from God,
Just like a headache, or a common cold…
Or as leprosy, or as scabies…

Or the famous Iraqi poet Al-Jawahiri, who has mourned the politics of Iraq, saying:

Be Shiite, be Sunni, be Jew, be Christian,
Be Kurd, be Arab, wrangle with race,
Does it matter if people are nude and hungry?
And the two poets have employed their poetry to rescue the “prostitute” that is the politician.

About the author: Miaad A. Hassan is native of Iraq and recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship. Miaad earned her Master’s Degree at the Monterey Institute of International Policy Studies, California, USA, specializing in Conflict Resolution and International Negotiations. Maintaining special interest in the Middle East and North Africa, Hassan’s work focuses on various issues including post-conflict development, peace building, human rights, women’s rights, resource conflict, terrorism, democratic governing, Islamic movements, and gender conflict.