Kanan Makiya

In Baghdad, an enormous monument nearly twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe towers over the city. Two huge forearms emerge from the ground, clutching two swords that clash overhead. Those arms are enlarged casts of those of Saddam Hussein, showing every bump and follicle. The "Victory Arch" celebrates a victory over Iran (in their eight-year-long war) that never happened. This text is a study of the interplay between art and politics - of how culture, normally an unquestioned good, can play into the hands of a power with devastating effects. Kanan Makiya uses the culture invented by Saddam Hussein as a window into the nature of totalitarianism and shows how art can become the weapon of dictatorship. Under Saddam Hussein, culture connived in his evil - this text explains how. It should be useful reading for anyone concerned with the power of culture and the culture of power.

First published in 1989, just before the Gulf War broke out, Republic of Fear was the only book that explained the motives of the Saddam Hussein regime in invading and annexing Kuwait. This edition, updated in 1998, has a substantial introduction focusing on the changes in Hussein's regime since the Gulf War.In 1968 a coup d'état brought into power an extraordinary regime in Iraq, one that stood apart from other regimes in the Middle East. Between 1968 and 1980, this new regime, headed by the Arab Ba'th Socialist party, used ruthless repression and relentless organization to transform the way Iraqis think and react to political questions. In just twelve years, a party of a few thousand people grew to include nearly ten percent of the Iraqi population.This book describes the experience of Ba'thism from 1968 to 1980 and analyzes the kind of political authority it engendered, culminating in the personality cult around Saddam Hussein. Fear, the author argues, is at the heart of Ba'thi politics and has become the cement for a genuine authority, however bizarre.Examining Iraqi history in a search for clues to understanding contemporary political affairs, the author illustrates how the quality of Ba'thi pan-Arabism as an ideology, the centrality of the first experience of pan-Arabism in Iraq, and the interaction between the Ba'th and communist parties in Iraq from 1958 to 1968 were crucial in shaping the current regime.Saddam Hussein's decision to launch all-out war against Iran in September 1980 marks the end of the first phase of this re-shaping of modern Iraqi politics. The Iraq-Iran war is a momentous event in its own right, but for Iraq, the author argues, the war diverts dissent against the Ba'thi regime by focusing attention on the specter of an enemy beyond Iraq's borders, thus masking a hidden potential for even greater violence inside Iraq.

The first alarm about the brutality and totalitarian nature of Saddam Husain's regime was sounded eloquently in the widely praised international bestseller, Republic of Fear. Writing then under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil, Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi dissident in exile, exposed the premise and methodology of Saddam's Ba'ath Party and the power it wields over the state. Now - in Cruelty and Silence, writing for the first time under his own name, Makiya widens his scope to bravely - and certainly controversially - confront the rhetoric of Arab and pro-Arab intellectuals with the realities of political cruelty in the Middle East. Part One, a compelling example of the literature of witness, is a journey through cruelty told in the words of Khalil, Abu Haydar, Omar, Mustafa, and Taimour - the Arab and Kurdish heroes of this book. In a bid to place cruelty at the center of Arab discourse, the author fashions their testimony into stories, or metaphors for occupation, prejudice, revolution, and routinized violence. In 1991 Makiya entered Northern Iraq on a clandestine mission. He was the first person to bring the Ba'ath Party's campaign of mass murder known as the Anfal - a campaign comparable to those perpetrated by the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge - to the attention of the outside world. His account of the Anfal is contained in "Taimour" and it brings the journey through cruelty to a close. In Part Two, "Silence," Makiya links these tales of survival to an examination of the Arab intelligentsia's response to Saddam Husain and the Gulf War, showing that the flood of condemnation of the West for its handling of the crisis was barely matched by a trickle of protest over Saddam's brutal massacres of Arabs and Kurds. The words of intellectuals, he demonstrates, are separated by a gigantic chasm from those of the survivors. Makiya is sharply critical of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and also of the way the Gulf War was conducted and left unfinished by the Alli

From the best-selling author of Republic of Fear, here is a gritty and unflinching novel about Iraqi failure in the wake of the 2003 American invasion, as seen through the eyes of a Shi‘ite militiaman whose participation in the execution of Saddam Hussein changes his life in ways he could never have anticipated. When the nameless narrator stumbles upon a corpse on April 10, 2003, the day of the fall of Saddam Hussein, he finds himself swept up in the tumultuous politics of the American occupation and is taken on a journey that concludes with the discovery of what happened to his father, who disappeared into the Tyrant’s gulag in 1991. When he was a child, his questions about his father were ignored by his mother and his uncle, in whose house he was raised. Older now, he is fighting in his uncle’s Army of the Awaited One, which is leading an insurrection against the Occupier. He slowly begins to piece together clues about his father’s fate, which turns out to be intertwined with that of the mysterious corpse. But not until the last hour before the Tyrant’s execution is the narrator given the final piece of the puzzle—from Saddam Hussein himself. The Rope is both a powerful examination of the birth of sectarian politics out of a legacy of betrayal, victimhood, secrecy, and loss, and an enduring story about the haste with which identity is cobbled together and then undone. Told with fearless honesty and searing intensity, The Rope will haunt its readers long after they finish the final page.

The Rock of Jerusalem is one of the world’s most spiritually resonant and politically contentious where Adam first stepped upon leaving Paradise, Abraham attempted to sacrifice Isaac, Jesus preached, and Muhammad began his night journey to heaven,. Sorting through the rubble of the three competing faiths, Kanan Makiya has woven a vivid tapestry from centuries of legend and belief to imagine the origins of Islam’s first monument, the Dome of the Rock. A narrative of mythic power, The Rock offers a grand tour of seventh-century Jerusalem and–by reminding us of how much Jews and Muslims once shared–serves as a bracing talisman for our times.

Metamorphosing “dead” Abbasid forms into living modern architecture lies at the roots of Mohamed Makiya’s classicism as an architect. This essay charts the stages of this metamorphosis from the Khulafa Mosque (1963) and the Kuwait State Mosque (one of the largest in the world) through to the vast and visionary schemes for Iraq of the late 1980s. Makijy’s formally complex and nuanced architecture, the author argues, is continuous, harmonious, and celebratory of an Islamic past. It is there too innocent, too romantic to be post-modern in its sensibility, nor does it assume the revolution in values that modernism brought in its wake. None the less, many of modernism’s discoveries about materials and space-making are deployed in an original way. The uneven combination between what is acquired from the modern, and mythologized about the past, is what makes Makiya’s architectural vision unique, so unlike that of any of his contemporaries. In the final analysis, the architecture’s dogged consistency in this regard is the source of its beauty.

Arabic