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Zainab Saleh, "Political Undesirables: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Reclamation in Iraq" (Stanford UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to New Books in Middle Eastern Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Turul Mende, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Professor Zainab Saleh about her new book, Political Citizenship, Denaturalization and Reclamation in Iraq, published by Stanford University Press in December. Thank you for joining us to the podcast, Zainab.
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C
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
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B
And maybe can you tell us a bit about yourself first and what your current research interests are?
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C
Yeah, thank you. So I'm an anthropologist by training, and my first book was about migration and displacement. And I worked with Iraqi exiles in London about issues related to subject formation and reimagination of the past. So I would say I'm a scholar of migration, displacement, colonialism, and the citizenship law.
- [02:15]
B
Thank you so much. And in your new book, you're looking at the legal aspects of citizenship particular. And there you are looking at two groups in particular, Iraqi Jews and Iraqi of Iranian origin. Can you tell me a bit about these two groups a little bit more? How, who they are and why did you focus on them especially?
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C
Yeah. Thank you so much. So, actually, my second book is, in a way, informed by my life experience. So I was in Iraq. I was born and raised in Iraq. And in 1980, when I was around seven years old, our neighbors suddenly disappeared. And my mother told me and my sister that the neighbors and their daugh who went to school with us were considered by Saddam Hussein's regime as Iraqis of Iranian origin, even though my mother was very quick to comment that actually our neighbors were Iraqis, not Iranians. And it was the citizenship system in Iraq that eventually led to this designation of Iraqis of Iranian origin. But also my mother talked a lot about Iraqi Jews who were part of, like, the political and literary and social landscape of Iraq until their mass expulsion in 1950. And actually, my parents were like the last generation of Iraqis to have Jewish friends, teachers, when they grew up in Iraq. So I was very much aware at a young age of the precarity, especially the expulsion of our neighbors made me aware, that citizenship is not really a guaranteed right, that it is something. It is a privilege that is kind of tied to the state. Even, like, of course, now I'm saying that, like, When I was 8 years old or 7 years old, I didn't have these thoughts, but kind of that what I understood, like, really, citizenship is something that can be taken away from people. So that kind of was the origin of this book. And I was supposed to go to Iran in 2005, 2006, to do field work with Iraqis of Iranian origin, but I couldn't get the visa. And then I ended up going to the UK and I did research with Iraqis about their displacement and fleeing Iraq after when Saddam Hussein came to power. And then after I finished this book, I decided to focus on the question of denatural. And I did archival research in the British Library and the National Archives and Library of Congress about the development of Iraqi citizenship laws and amendments. And what I realized was that the practice of denaturalization was an integral part of governmentality in Iraq, whether under the monarchy or under republican rule. So, and the reason. So for the history of Iraq, like at the beginning, like when the British came and when the British colonized Iraq. After. During World War II. World War I. Sorry, when the British invaded Iraq during World War I and after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the British had this practice of deporting people who opposed British colonial rule, and then that practice evol into denaturalization. Once we had citizenship laws in Iraq. So the first group of people to be deported were Iraqi Shia scholars who opposed the British colonial rule. And then it was a family of Assyrians who were also deported in the late 30s. And the first instance of Mass displacement or mass denaturalization was Iraqi Jews in 1950-1951. And then there were also instances of deportation and denaturalizations of Iraqi Communists in 1954 and 1963. And then another wave of mass expulsion under Saddam Hussein's regime. And this time it targeted Iraqis of Iranian origin. So the reason why I decided to focus on Iraqi Jews and the so called Iraqis of Iranian origin is because these two communities experienced mass expuls and their expulsion also was associated with like, was accompanied by other forms of violence. So for example, the confiscation of property of documents. And in the case of Iraqis of Iranian origin, young men between the age of 18 and 28 were detained and disappeared and the women were subject to sexual violence. So the loss of citizenship really entailed a comprehensive, comprehensive conditions of precarity, whether legal precarity, economic downward mobility, political disenfranchisement and complete social ruptures. Because Iraqis who were expelled lost contact with their friends and whatever families remained in Iraq and lost their careers and they had to start again if they were lucky enough. So that's why I decided to focus on these two communities because their expulsion was targeted a huge number and entailed massive punishment as well. While in the case of other instances of denaturalizations, it was certain individuals who were targeted and their families were left alone. So that's kind of the difference between these diverse instances of denaturalization.
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B
Thank you so much, Zainab. And at the beginning of your book you recount an experience that you had, as you previously stated, like since as a little child that neighbors were like suddenly missing or vanished from their homes. How did your parents or how did your family deal with these kind of issues? Or how did you remember looking at the terms like citizenships? Did their parents explain it to you, what happened? Or how did you had to deal with these kind of problems?
- [09:27]
C
Yeah, so this is really a very important question and for two reasons. So the first issue was that the expulsion of the so called Iraqis of Iranian origin took place just as Saddam Hussein came to power, became president. He was a prime minister before then, at the end of 1978, he became the president and he unleashed really a reign of terror. So the Iraqi Communist party was liquidated and most communists ended up in jail or had to flee the country. And also he turned his attention to the Kurdish movements and to the Shia underground movement. So kind of the expulsion of Iraqis of Iranian origin was the latest episode in a reign of terror. And that's was like, for my parents, it was just like, unbelievable that some Iraqis suddenly were designated by the regime as Iranian and then had to be, and then were expelled to Iran, even though they identified as Arabs, even though their, like, families have been living in Iraq for generations or just chose the Persian nationality. So actually, at the time, my mother explained to me that the Iraqi citizenship is divided into two types, Ottoman Iraqi citizenship and Persian Iraqi citizenship. So that actually the episode of the expulsion of Iraqis of Iranian origin ties back or ties back to the Ottoman rule in Iraq. So when Iraq, or what's called Ottoman Iraq was under Ottoman rule, people either had the option to have Ottoman citizenship, Persian citizenship, and some Shia Arabs and Shia Kurds opted for Persian citizenship in order to avoid serving in the Ottoman military, in the Ottoman army and paying taxes. So, like, really, citizenship was not connected to loyalty to the state or to the empire. It was more like an everyday tactic that people use to see what is the best options for them. Serving in the military and not paying taxes was a huge incentive for some people. So that's how a lot of Iraqis of Iranian origin, why they were considered Persian. It was because of that history. And of course, there is the other aspect, which is that there has always been so many regional networks between Iran or Iraq, whether through trade, through religious pilgrimage and religious exchange, because of Iraq and Iran both have holy cities or also intermarriages. So there was always hybridity. And it was very much what defined social relations. But under the nation state, all these hybrid identities, regional networks were demonized and reinterpreted to say that people like Iraqis who held a Persian nationality are actually a fifth column that is serving the interest of the Iranian state. And of course, that happened in 1980. So all of these state discourse and rhetoric was about constructing the other within. So that was kind of the strategy of the state. So that was one aspect of how my parents dealt or told us about citizenship. And definitely my mother was really careful to explain this distinction. But the other side of the story is that our neighbors were allowed to come back. But everybody understood in the neighborhood that the mother had to become a bath informant in order to be able to come back. The husband was living abroad in order to avoid serving in the Iraq Iran war. So that's again, like the other aspect of. About the loss of citizenship is like it entails, like statelessness is a very precarious condition. And people had to make difficult choices because there were already stories coming to Iraq from people who were deported to Iran. That the situation in Iran is very difficult. There is a lot of prejudice against Iraqis in Iran. Understandably. This was just like at the outbreak of the Iran Iraq war. And Iraqis didn't have any rights in Iran. And they were told that even the Kurds among them were told that they are Arabs whose country is at war with Iran. So they face a lot of discrimination from the very beginning and difficult living conditions. So some people who were given the option to become informants or make a deal with the government chose to make a deal and came back, back to their homes. So then that's kind of the other aspect that really caught my attention as a child, that if you lose your citizenship or if you want to keep your citizenship, then you have to really make awful compromises with the government. Because. And to my mother, what was like. What my mother wanted to emphasize is that rather than condemning our neighbors and saying they sold out, she always explained that they face an impossible choice, whether they had to go to Iran and really stay in camps with limited access to education or work, or even any possibility for a flourishing future, or coming back and resume their life. But working with the government, both choices are really. So that's what my mother was really trying to convey, is that they were faced with an impossible position, and people cannot judge them because no one knows what they would have done had they been in their shoes.
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B
I think so, too. And one of your aspects in the book is, of course, the legal aspect as well, of citizenship. And can you maybe explain how denaturalization and reclamation is in comparison to citizenship connected with each other? How did you trace the legal framework back to the three terms?
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C
Yeah. Thank you. So actually, the legal framework is really interesting. And people always think of laws or citizenship laws as just like these abstract, dry, boring rulings. But actually, when you look carefully at laws, you see how laws are to a great extent, define the parameter of citizenship, social norms, and, of course, commerce and everything. It really. Laws defines life, and then enduring moments of crisis. Then you like their. Their mobilization against certain citizens become extremely important. So that's when laws become really important. So the interesting thing about the question of denaturalization in Iraq is that the discourse has been consistent. So whether we are talking about instances of denaturalization under the monarchy, whether by Iraqi ruling elites or by British officials, and then under Saddam Hussein's regime, what we see is that there is a consistent discourse. And the discourse is usually that the citizens who are stripped of their citizenship are actually foreigners or newcomers to Iraq, and they represent A threat to national security and to the homeland or motherland or fatherland. And they are a fifth column that is working on behalf of a foreign government. And in this case it was Iran and Israel. So that kind of the discourse has been really consistent throughout. And what's interesting is that this discourse is not particular to Iraq. So if you look at different instances of citizenship. So for example, in Britain and France under World War I, denaturalization was used by the government to stripped people who oppose the war of their nationality and get them denaturalized. And it was always the language that was used by officials at the time. It's always these people represent a threat to national security. And you have the same rhetoric actually during the Soviet Union or in the United States. And even there are now more recent instances of denaturalizations, whether like in Bahrain or in Israel or Nicaragua. And all these different governments use the same language that the people who were stripped of their citizenship are foreigners or constitute a threat to the motherland, to the fatherland, and they are a threat also to national security. So that's kind of when I began to see how like really very much citizenship to loyalty to the state rather than a right, like a guaranteed right, it's actually never guaranteed. So that is one aspect about citizenship. However, like all instances of denaturalization have their own specific historical specificities. So for example with the, with the religious Shia scholars it was like really the anti colonial sentiments that their spearheaded, it made the British scared of them. And then with the case of Iraqi Assyrians, it was Iraqi Assyrians demands for some form of self autonomy was the trigger. And in the case of, of Iraqi Jews it was the fact that a lot of them joined leftist parties in Iraq, especially the Iraqi Communist party. A small percentage of them were Zionist, but the majority, especially of the younger generation was more leftist. And then of course the change in the geopolitical scene with the establishment of the state of Israel change the position of Iraqi Jews. And then in the case of Iraqi communists, the whole discourse became is that if you are a communist, then it means you are loyal to a foreign ideology, which means you are loyal to a foreign government and hence we can denaturalize you. And in this case of Iraqis of Iranian origin, of course it was the rise of Saddam Hussein to power or becoming the president and then have the Islamic revolution in Iran. And Iraq then attacked Iran and started a war. But also like Iraqis of Iranian origin began to be seen by the Iraqi government as the fifth column and part of the could be part of the Shia underground movement against the regime and that they are loyal to Iran. So then they were expelled. So each case has its own historical specificity, but the discourse has being consistent, actually. So for me, this book is about two things. One is about the weaponization of citizenship and how the fact that citizenship is a privilege tied to the state, rather than a guaranteed right produces conditions of precarity for people. But on the other hand, I really wanted also to show that citizenship or a sense of belonging and membership in the polity is not necessarily tied to the state in the sense that citizens can assert their own forms of belonging. And that's to me, where the idea of reclamation becomes important. Because for all Iraqis who've been denaturalized, whether as individuals or as a community, they always asserted belonging to Iraq through food, through the language, through the dialect they used, or through emotional belonging, through memories about a shared political and social aspirations. So even though the Iraqi government was saying that these people are not Iraqi, Iraqis who were expelled and denaturalized asserted belonging to Iraq. So in a way, they really undermined like official categories about belonging and about reimagination of the past. And also they emphasized their lived experience with other fellow Iraqis and that what made them really feel they belonged. So even like for instance, when you hear Iraqi Jews talking about 1941, when there was a pogrom, the farhoud in Baghdad, you always hear like, okay, there was a horror unleashed upon them, but their neighbors always protect, like, all the neighbors came and protected them. So they always emphasized how social relations and friendships and family connections and like love for Arabic, or like just love of being part of the Iraqi society kind of informed their own sense of identity that undermined the exclusionary category and narratives that the state promoted upon their denaturalization.
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B
Thank you so much. And looking at the sources that you used in your book, what kind of archival documents were helpful in order to retrace the steps in order to conclude your narrative? And you had interviews as well with people affected by these issues, issues. How personal were these interview for you? Or how did you detach your own personal experience while talking with your interculturators about your book?
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C
Thank you. That's really another amazing question. So I did archival research at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the British Library in the uk and then I also did the field did archival research at the Hoover Institute, looking at the Ba'ath archives that were smuggled out of Iraq after 2003. And for me, like the archives Especially the Archives, British Library, National Archives, and Library of Congress. I was looking at the Iraq Official Gazette to look at the. To try to find any communication about citizenship law. And of course, with the British Library, I was able to find the original law that was put by the British, but also kind of the documents that accompanied the law. So I will just be a little bit specific about the archives here. So, for instance, with the first Iraqi nationality law of 1924, I realized that kind of the law is one thing. And of course, the applications that people had to fill out kind of had in them certain clauses that paved the way or the path to denaturalization in the future. So, for instance, with the first Iraqi nationality, there were two ways to become Iraqi after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. One way is that the person had Ottoman citizenship and then they were resident of Iraq at a specific date. And actually, that clause that you had to be a resident of Iraq as of August 23, 1921, is very much tied to the fact that the first Iraqi king, King Faisal, came from Mecca, that he wasn't bo born or raised in Iraq. So then how can you. So the British had this problem. How are we going to consider somebody from Mecca as an Iraqi, but like King Faisal, had Ottoman citizenship and was a resident of Iraq as of August 23, 1921? And the path for people who held Persian citizenship was that they have to be born in Iraq and their fathers had to be born in Iraq. So it was like dual birth was necessary in order to get the citizenship. So all of that is fine. Okay, there are two different paths. But where things become extremely sinister is that in Iraq, we had the identity card and the certificate of citizenship. So in the certificate of citizenship, Iraqis, like the certificate of citizenship, Iraqis had to specify if they had Persian or Ottoman citizenship. And also the letter next to the number of the certificate, which show if you had Ottoman or Persian citizenship. So if you had the letter Jeem on your citizenship, it means you were Ottoman, where the letter B would mean you were. And the sinister part in this document is that children inherited their father's letter. And nobody thought of that at the time in 1924 and 1926, where the certificate of citizenship was introduced until the 80s. It's in the 80s, Saddam Hussein used this distinction to say, all Iraqis who had the letter B on their citizenship are of Iranian origin and will be expelled. So that kind of was the interesting thing about the archives, especially doing research in the British archives, because then I managed to have access to all these documents. The Iraqi Official Gazette gave me access to the laws, but definitely the British Library and the National Archives gave me access to documents about how these things came into being. The Hoover Institute, I was really interested in trying to find some details, more details about the case of Iraqis of Iranian origin, like, what type of statistics did the government keep, what type of documents did they have? And interestingly, I really barely found anything that is meaningful. I really thought, like, I will encounter very detailed archives and documentation about who was deported and who was spared. But there was nothing about that. So there is that element. The other element of it I discover. Like, I realized that in the case of the expulsion of Iraqis of Iranian origin that there were so many ministries involved, but also so many municipalities, like every province in Iraq had its own records, and the Ba'ath headquarters in each province had their own records. So kind of the archival research is just like, there is a need for other scholars to look into that. And that's actually. Then again, another thing I want to focus on with regard to this project is also the different historical experiences different groups had. So, for example, with Iraqi Jews. Iraqi Jews, since the late, like, since 1880 or 1870, they began to have access to education because of the Allianz school. And the Allianz school was started by a group of French Jews who wanted to educate Jews in the Middle East. So Iraqi Jews had access to education much earlier than any other group in Iraq. And of course, after the establishment of the state of Iraq, there were Jewish schools, they were state schools. So a significant number of the Jewish community was highly educated. So when they were expelled, they really produced a lot of literature about their experiences, whether memoir, novels, short stories, or even, like, academic research. So the experience of Iraqi Jews. Experiences of Iraqi Jews have been highly documented and researched from different aspects with the case of Iraqis of Iranian origin, unfortunately, because the majority of these people were Shia and like Shia were excluded from state positions and didn't have access to education till much later, when the younger generation began to have access to education and like, their parents experienced economic mobility and began to send their children to the UK for example, to get educated. Then the expulsion happened in 1980. So, like, really, in comparison to the experiences of Iraqi Jews, there is such a dearth in the literature with regard to the experience of Iraqis of Iranian origin. And that's why, like I said, like at one point, like. And also the documentation about their experience seems to have to be spread all over the place in Iraq. And of course, under Saddam Hussein's regime, nobody could do research. So this issue is really like the experiences of Iraqis of Iranian origin have been understudied to a great extent, unfortunately. So I use the archives and also like in the book, I also use.
- [34:49]
B
Use.
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C
An autobiographical novel written by an Iraqi of Iranian origin. And I rely on memoirs a lot. And of course, I did interviews as well with Iraqi Jews and Iraqis of Iranian origin in the United Kingdom. And that's where like the continuity between the first and the second book come in.
- [35:11]
B
Yes, thank you so much, Dana. And coming to the last question, you mentioned that the case of Iraqis of Iranian origins are understudied. Is it something that you would like to pursue in further projects or can you give us a glimpse into what you want to work on next?
- [35:31]
C
So actually I would love to do a project like that, but this type of project is not about project that one person can do. And actually I would have loved to go to Iran to talk to the Iraqis who were expelled in 1980. But as I said in 2005, that was no longer possible. And then I thought when Obama came to power and there was the nuclear deal that I might be able to go again. So right now I don't have any really plan to pursue this project anymore because I feel I'm exhausted. The places that I thought would be helpful, namely the archives especially. And so, for example, just to give you really about the scale of the task to do justice to the experiences of Iraqis of Iranian origin is that the statistics about the number of people who were expelled varies drastically. So the Statistics are between 40,000 Iraqis of Iranian origin to 400,000 Iraqis of Iranian origin were expelled. So that's like really a huge variation. And thus again, it's based on estimates on vague calculations. And that's why I'm saying there is a need to really do research in Iraq, in Iran. But also these topics can be sensitive and no one knows where the archives are kept or if there are any archives kept. So this, I'm saying this is really a mammoth task that many scholars need to take on rather than one person. So for now, I actually changed gears a little bit. Maybe in the future I will come back to this project, who knows. But currently I'm finishing an edited volume on Iraq with Haytham Bahura and Brigid Gurasi called Living Iraq, Political Imagination, Land and Law. And this edited volume is really trying to focus and center the experience of Iraqis over a hundred years because like in 2023, it was the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, but it was almost also the centennial anniversary of the establishment of the state of Iraq. So this volume kind of tries to look at the history of the modern state of Iraq, but through lived experiences. And by lived experiences, we just don't do the mundane or the everyday. We look at laws, for instance, and how laws, as I said at the beginning, shape or determine social norms, citizenship.
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A
Rights.
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C
What have you. And also we try to also show the impact of all the wars and the US Invasion on the environment and the lived realities of Iraq, who have to deal with contamination or reorganization of labor relations between Arabs and Kurds. And of course, there is the other aspect, which is the long history of protest and revolution in Iraq and how kind of revolutionary politics and literature have always gone hand in hand in Iraq. So that's one project like we are finishing now. My next really big project is more about how the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 has been commemorated in mainstream media in the United States. And in this book, I only just looks at the politics of commemoration. So I take four iconic anniversary, which is the first anniversary of the US invasion in 2004, the fifth anniversary of the invasion, 2008, then the 10th anniversary in 2010, and then the 20th anniversary in 2023. And one reason for me, like that book, was not on my radar at all. But when I attended many conferences in 2023 about the 20th anniversary, I realized how much kind of the military discour, the media rhetoric on Iraq just aligned together and how there was a rewriting of history and kind of erasure of the invasion in the sense that all the talking heads, whether in the media or in the military or even in the administration, U.S. administration, Canada, kind of sanitized the invasion. So the invasion, the 20th anniversary became an occasion to reflect on lessons learned and unlearned and how to conduct the next invasion better, rather than really dealing the fact this was an illegal invasion based on misinformation and led to. Horrific violence for Iraqis, whether violence in terms of wars and violence perpetrated by the US Military or militias, or like the environmental collapse and the collapse of social services. So that kind of this book is kind of is guided by this observations I've had of like how kind of the invasion was. The memory of the invasion was rewritten and the invasion was sanitized within 20 years. So that's the project and it will detail really just using mainstream media, whether like opinion pieces, talk shows to analyze discourses about different like discourses about the invasion at different during different anniversaries.
- [42:16]
B
Thank you so much. I always look forward to read what you publish next. And thank you so much, dear Professor Zainab Salih, for joining us today on the podcast. It was a really pleasure to talk to you about your your new book.
- [42:30]
C
Thank you so much again for having me. I really appreciate it.