Critical Synthesis Paper 1
Echoes of Edward Said’s Orientalism are everywhere in Toby Dodge’s Inventing Iraq. In very
tangible ways, Dodge illustrates Said’s framework of the relationship of knowledge to power as it
relates to the chaotic period of the British mandate in Iraq. Dodge’s work illuminates how the
British misunderstandings of Iraqi culture and society informed haphazard policy and in turn
radically shaped the modern Iraqi state. Dodge’s most compelling work is done in two arenas: first,
as he explores and unpacks the invented binaries set up by the British to explain and understand the
Iraqi people; and secondly, as he plays with the idea that the British effectively used the Iraqi stage to
play out the British’s societal anxieties.
Orientalism itself is a binary, and one that sets up relative positions of power. Said calls this
“an essential relationship between a strong and a weak partner.” (Said 1978: 40) No doubt the
British saw themselves in this position of power, and Dodge is able to take this binary a step further
by enumerating what Said might identify as “the almost infinite capacity for subdivision”(Said 1978:
50) as the British took on the burden of classifying, and therefore knowing and commanding power
over, the Iraqi people. The British applied rigidity to fluidity, both coining and cementing
distinctions that held no tangible meaning before the British began their mandatory enterprise.
Perhaps the most baseless distinction (and yet the distinction with the farthest reaching implications)
was the British’s imagined urban/rural divide. Dodge aptly calls this a “jaundiced construction” (71)
in which the British imagined no exchange between the two. Both rural and urban had an
accompanying caricature. The urban effendi- characterized as pathologically corrupt and lazy- was
accordingly denied agency due to his historically situated relationship to the Ottoman Empire. This
policy seems deeply rooted in what Said calls the “Western geographical, historical, and above all,
moral apprehension [of Islam].” (Said 1978: 69) The rural, pre-modern shaikh was considered
bestowed with preordained authority and wisdom, and the position of shaikh was taken to mean the
same thing in all tribal contexts. Both portrayals reflect Orientalist fantasies, and neither is situated in
any nuanced understanding of human relationships. I would argue that although the shaikh in literal
terms received a great deal of agency and power through the codification of his role, the implications
of such a binary hurt both the peoples in urban and rural settings profoundly. In effect both effendi
and shaikh never had the opportunity to actively defy such constructions (or couldn’t), and by the
time the British were out of the picture, this and other binaries were far too solidified. It is in this
way that British fiction seems to become Iraqi reality.
The delineation of such binaries as part of the assertion of British colonial power in Iraq can
be read against the political climate in England at the time, as well as against the British sense of
history and self. The dialectical logic of Orientalism requires a distinct self and other, and yet as a
body of scholarship Orientalism only seems to illuminate the self. To put it another way, Said
explains “that Orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient.” (Said
1978: 22) Dodge’s work illuminates this idea around key debates in Iraq, particularly over land use.
He argues that “the British sought to make society socially comprehensible and hence controllable
by regulating and reforming land tenure and revenue…but the conceptual structures that shaped the
terms in which these arguments unfolded that their roots in the evolution of European land-tenure
regimes and the divided discourse of modernity that underlay them.” (Dodge 2003: 103) The
relationship between knowledge and power surfaces yet again- the British cannot know the society
until it delineates a set of definitions and perimeters for the society, and then because it has set such
definitions and perimeters, the British can control the society in manageable portions. What is even
more interesting is the idea that the British could not understand a framework of societal
organization that was not their own. The British relied on a combination of general Orientalist
knowledge (acquired in other parts of the colonized Orient) and an understanding of their own
history to forge a completely incoherent land policy for Iraq. If the mandate had not left behind
such a legacy of violence and division, the entire project would have been a humorous study in the
British’s horrible misunderstandings about the country and its people. But in conceiving Iraq as
partially despotic, partially immature, and following the same modern trajectory as England, (in a
fraction of the time, without allowing for any of the same organic contestations a long history might
enjoy) the British transformed Iraqi society and left a shell of a state.
The reason that neither Said nor Dodge spend much time with perspectives from the Orient
is exactly because Orientalism is all about the West, although it has caused an unquantifiable amount
of damage in the Orient. Both Said and Dodge set out to expose the enterprise of power, not to tell
the story of those who have been marginalized by this power. As Dodge points out, “The essences
that supposedly divide the Orient and the Oriental from the Occidental reflect the hopes and fears
of western society. They provide little access to the historical or social truth of societies they are
meant so definitely to characterize.” (Dodge 2003: 45) And although Said speaks at great length
about his own perspective and background, he, too, has a very specific project in defining and
demonstrating this relationship of power to knowledge. Dodge’s work seems almost a specific piece
of the project Said bestowed upon his successors, and it in turn contextualizes and exemplifies Said’s
original undertaking.