Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq by Sara Pursley (review)

Sara Pursley's excellent book is full of insights and in-depth reflections. It is a demanding read and difficult to do justice to within a short book review. However, the reader will not find sensational claims and shifts in the existing narrative of Iraqi history. In fact, the playing field of Pursley's investigations is familiar, as she addresses the foundations of British colonial politics, discourses about education and popular discipline, women's issues and family politics, as well as state designs of national development. All these are topics that Iraq researchers have dealt with before. Yet, Pursley's book is still a game changer as she reworks a number of established paradigms in Iraq scholarship with surprising results. Questions about development in state and society and its gendered consequences constitute the basic line of her inquiry. Her critique of a conventional modernization paradigm assigns agency and intellectual independence to actors who usually do not receive a great deal of positive coverage by Iraq historians. One section of the book presents, for example, what appears like a vindication of the Iraqi educator Sati' al-Husri, who usually features in the historiography as a forerunner of authoritarian nationalism and even fascist tendencies. Pursley paints a much more nuanced picture of his educational policy, questioning some basic assumptions about the paternalism of so-called British liberalism that Iraqis were said to have rejected in favor of totalitarian models. In this, Pursley's work is in line with recent scholarly criticism that many Middle East historians have not seriously engaged with the Arab thought of the 20th century on its own terms. Pursley, in contrast, is evidently among the few Western researchers who have actually thoroughly read some of the texts and documents that past historians have referred to without more than a cursory reading of the originals.

Pursley's critique of the Iraqi development narrative starts with its creation in the context of the British mandatory regime, which imposed a paternalistic Western chronological imaginary based on the image of the child as an embodiment of the colonized society. The child stood for future's potential, but the image also fixed Iraqi society in a childlike developmental position, continuously depraved of sovereignty. For colonial administrators, children needed to be disciplined and acted upon to release their potential, but as if in a circular movement, the goal of education, as propagated by British advisers and missionary pedagogues, was to raise better fathers and, in particular, mothers of future children. They would congregate to form the core of modern society in the nuclear family. When Iraq achieved independence, the new state authorities adopted the same argument and its gender binary, cementing the submission of women more rigorously than ever before and keeping all Iraqis in a permanently adolescent status.

Pursley shows that the conditioning of Iraqi educational and development policies initially met the resistance of Iraqi intellectuals and politicians. In the late 1920s, Iraqi educators were vehemently opposed to the corporal punishment that the British authorities prescribed for secondary school students who participated in political protests. Likewise, Pursley highlights the patronizing designs of the Monroe Commission, which was invited to Iraq in the early 1930s to review schooling in the nascent state. Its report is often used as evidence for the antiquated methods and nationalist biases of the national system of education that Husri had established in the 1920s. Pursley's close reading reveals the report's ideological underpinnings, which were meant to keep Iraq's students docile and segregated. It recommended that practical and vocational training as well as skills related to childrearing should be taught to women and, respectively, tribal people, whereas Husri demanded a uniform curriculum. The same obsession with binaries speaks out of the fear among Western observers and missionary teachers about homosexual practices among male high school students. The same American reformers who prepared the Monroe Report also educated a cohort of leading Iraqi officials studying abroad at institutions in...