Saddam’s Swords of QādisÄ«yah

Despite the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, many monuments erected under deposed dictator Saddam Hussein remain.  The continued public display of these remnants of Iraqi Ba’athism is a testament to the continued debate within Iraq as to how Saddam’s legacy will be evaluated in a historical context.  The focal importance of the monument is remembrance; it seeks to answer the question as to how a leader can confront their eventual absence.  For a shrewd but malicious ruler like Saddam Hussein, the need to confront this absence was one that materialized particularly bluntly during and after Iraq’s sanguinary war with Iran in the 1980s.  Like ancient monument works of the Near East’s past, Saddam’s commissioned statues personify victory in the body of the leader.  This emphasis on a singular cause for a nation’s collective victory was made, possibly most curiously in the case of modern Iraq, in the triumphant arch called the Swords of Qādisīyah. In this monument, the physical body of the ruler is placed in tandem with the historical heritage of Iraq and implicitly takes responsibility for the achievements of the nation.

The Swords of Qādisīyah was opened to the public on August 8, 1989, though plans for the large construction began in 1985 when Iran and Iraq were still deeply embroiled in war. The monument was meant to be a victory arch for Saddam, in the tradition of ancient Roman arches, in spite of the reality that the war was, firstly, not over, and secondly, not exactly an Iraqi victory.  The monument consists of two large arms, emerging out of the earth, each holding a sword, crossing them in the center.  The archway marks an entrance into Baghdad’s parade-ground and was part of a much broader monument and urban planning project designed by Saddam in an attempt to mirror Haussmann’s renovation of Paris in the hopes of placing Baghdad in league with world centers like New York and London.  At the arms’ bases, nets filled with the helmets of killed Iranian soldiers place the monument in specific reference to the ongoing war.  However, the element of the Swords of Qādisīyah that places it in the realm of leader-centered propaganda is the fact that the arms are actual replicas of Saddam’s own, made from casts that preserved every detail, right down to his thumbprint and the small hairs on his forearms.

Saddam’s choice to only display his arms is unusual; it reveals a confidence in the cultural permeation of his image in Iraqi society.  Previous artistic commissions on Saddam’s part assure us that the absence of his very recognizable face is not due to any humility, or a humble attempt to distance himself from an Iraqi achievement; his Stalin-like visage was plastered nearly everywhere, from a giant plywood cutout of himself standing over the ancient Babylonian gate of Ishtar to everyday postage stamps.  So the question is, why would Saddam go to such detailed lengths to interject his presence into a monument like the Swords of Qādisīyah, yet leave his mark so ambiguously?  Though Saddam’s arms are bearing swords, they work to create a paradoxical duality that both implies action and violence, yet also places that action outside of the realm of reality.  While the swords act as a reminder of violence, particularly in conjunction with the Iranian helmets and the inseparable association of the monument with the Iran-Iraq War, they are still swords, an archaic form of weaponry that would probably not last long in modern warfare.  The choice to use swords over, say, machine guns, was meant to invoke the defeat of the Persian Sassanian Empire at the Battle of Qādisīyah in 637, effectively beginning the Islamicization of Iran.  From the very beginning of the Iran-Iraq War, it was constantly pitched by the Ba’athists as Saddam’s Qādisīyah, invoking another defeat of Iran while asserting Iraq’s religious heritage.

This religious aspect is puzzling on several accounts.  Firstly, the Iraqi Ba’athist regime was officially secular.  Saddam modeled his vision for Iraq, and himself, around previous authoritarian regimes, particularly the Soviet Union under Stalin.  The ideals of pan-Arab nationalism sought to eliminate the tribalism and sectarianism that divided Iraq, uniting Iraqis in a common identity instead of Kurd versus Arab, Sunni versus Shi’a.  The cult of personality surrounding Saddam replaced the right to diversified religion; Saddam was Sunni so this was the preferred sect, but it was merely another component of the personality cult.  In a sense, he was ipso facto being deified; Saddam’s religion took importance simply because it was his religion.  Similar to ancient beliefs, the state religion was dictated, and manipulated, by the ruler.  Similarly, Saddam’s juxtaposition of the very relevant, contemporary form of his arms with swords that allude to Medieval Iraq, doubly charged considering their holy status, act to breach the divide between the political implications of the present war and their predestined outcome.  Saddam, however, is actively utilizing symbols of Islam to draw a parallel between an ancient religious heritage and a modern political struggle.

Also vexing about Saddam’s use of the Battle of Qādisīyah is the fact that it is inextricably connected with the martyrdom of Shi’a holy figure Husain, believed to be the grandson of Muhammad, in Karbala in 680.  Shi’a Islam is the official religion of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and has been since their revolution in 1979, one year prior to the onset of the Iran-Iraq War.  In addition to this seemingly obvious conflict, Saddam’s track record with the Shi’ite population within Iraq was not one that would encourage their support.  Catalyzed by the execution, or martyrdom to Shi’as, of Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr in 1980 (“If my little finger were Ba’athist, I would cut it off”), Saddam’s paranoid repression of Shi’as gained a new degree of cruelty. His infamous massacres of the Shi’ite regions, particularly in Basra, of Southern Iraq in 1991 were part of the rational for U.S. invasion. Yet, the monument, and most of all the ceremony that opened the Swords of Qādisīyah to the public, is expressly Shi’ite.  On August 8, 1989, Saddam Hussein inaugurated in the new monument with a televised ceremony, where he triumphantly rode through the archway on a white stallion.  To anyone an Iraq, a culture immersed in Islamic imagery similar to the permeation of Christian iconography in the West, the combination of the bared swords and the white horse would unmistakably be invoking the martyrdom of Husein, who was supposedly killed while riding a white stallion. This is a very popular image in Iraq, where Shi’ite pilgrimages to Karbala mark one of the most important rituals in Islam.  Once again, Saddam consolidated both the victory over the Persian Empire in the 7^th Century and what Saddam perceived to be a victory against Iran in the 1980s into his singular, corporeal form.

So why would Saddam, a figure so centered on the calculated persecution and dismemberment of the Shi’a sect, willingly and openly support a propaganda campaign that seemingly strengthens and mobilizes that sect?  The answer may lie in a strange form of unification, wherein the subtext of all religious imagery under Saddam was national unity over that sectarianism.  Kanan Makiya posits that, despite his repeated assurances of his religious sincerity, Saddam Hussein was merely a political actor manipulating a heritage to secure victory.  Makiya writes that “National unity prevailed in the face of foreign aggression; this is the Ba’athist line on the war.”  Saddam saw himself as a political theorist, one who successfully, and to the chagrin of Iran, avoided the Lebanon-like miasmic disintegration into sectarian violence that had been expected during the long war with Iran.  Saddam’s triumphal ceremony that opened the Swords of Qādisīyah was, inherently, a performance similar to those in the ancient Near East where a select group was chosen for inclusion, while others were excluded.  However, it must be looked at in the broader ‘performance’ of Saddam’s presidency.  Makiya contends that Saddam was a historical ‘actor’ in so far as he shifted ideology depending on audience; the performance of his presidency excluded the Shi’a population while his Swords of Qādisīyah ceremony integrated their religion to his own benefit.  On the divide between the public audience and the state-directed performer in ancient Egypt, art historian John Baines writes that there is an unmistakable dichotomy between the sacred space of the state and the passive audience.  According to Baines, “the iconography [of performance] constitutes both spectacle and exclusion.”  Saddam resides in the supernatural realm, defined by victory and religious heroes of Iraq’s past, and the audience is, for the most part, watching through a television screen, listening on a radio, etc. The audience takes no part in the ceremony, much like the underlying meaning that Iraqis took little to no part in the war.  An inclusion exists to the extent that elements of the audience are superficially integrated, but the overlying message is one of dominance and singularity.