British mandate in Iraq: Encounter among numerous political projects

The creation of the new Iraqi state under British mandate was not only a rupture with the past of the country. It also marked the establishment of a political system which, in the name of European modernly, wanted to impose a new concept of national identity by force. Arab ethnic identity was advanced at the expense of another, Islamic, identity, which prevailed at this time. The idea was to apply the concept of the European nation state in an Islamic country, partly at least because Islam had acted as a major obstacle to the colonial conquest of the Near and Middle East. It was thus in the name of Islam that the Ottoman state and the Shi'i marja'iyya acted as a spearhead in the battle against. colonial expansion. The situation in Iraq was thus the result of the convergence of several different political projects, particularly those of the mandatory power and those of some members of the Arab and Sunni elites. The Sunni concept of power would probably have led to a position where Islam would simply be one among many cultural categories of Arab nationalism. Considering the power of the state as theirs by right, the Sunni' Arab elites, who had controlled the local networks of power under the Ottomans, passed almost effortlessly into the service of the British almost from one day to the next. For a long time the confessional nature of the new political system was masked by the national and modern appearance of the new Iraqi citizenship. On the other hand the Arabism of the new state was never denied, even when the Kurds were incorporated into Iraq against their will in 1925. Islamic demands were symbolised in the fight of the Shi'i religious leaders against colonialism, but the Sunni elites' version of Arab nationalism failed to emancipate them from the European tutelage which enabled them to monopolise state power. ne minority communities paid the price of near extinction for their fight against the Arab nation-state-Assyrians, Jews, Fayli Kurds, and Iranians. But the confrontations with the Kurds and the Shi'is were to shape the future of the country.