And now we move to the Kingdom of Iraq. The Kingdom of Iraq, established in historical Mesopotamia, that area between the two great rivers of the Euphrates and the Tigris. But these great rivers do not serve, as the Nile does in Egypt As an artery, a very effective centralized government. Egypt, where everybody almost lives along the Nile, that is not true in Iraq of the Euphrates and the Tigris. And there are mountains in the north populated very much by the Kurds. A swampy region in the south populated predominantly by the Shi'ites. So this is a country which was much more difficult to rule in a unified form than Egypt ever was. The Shi'i's in Iraq, under the Ottomans, were suspected of loyalty to Shiite Persia, and were never really regarded as loyal Ottoman subjects, never integrated into the state and the Shi'is themselves wanted no part of the Ottoman system. They didn't send their children to Ottoman schools. They didn't serve in the military or in the bureaucracy, and the Shi'is essentially lagged behind the Sunnis to the north, who were more exposed and more involved in the 19th century reforms and modernization. The Shi'is were discriminated and underprivileged, an underclass that remained uneducated, less economically developed, and living in the underdeveloped south, the very far distant perimeter of the Ottoman empire. But Iraq was the birthplace of Shi'a. And the most holy places of Shi'a are there in Iraq, in Najif, in Karbala, and in Kadhimayn, which is in Baghdad. The influence of Shi'i men of religion is especially powerful in the Shi'i tradition. More so than in Sunni Islam. And the Hashemite arrangement in Iraq, which eventually failed, as opposed to the Hashemite arrangement in Jordan which succeeded. The Hashemite arrangement in Iraq, which failed, was seemingly the most promising when it began. Actually the Hashemite arrangement in Transjordan looked much more difficult to implement, but Abdullah in Jordan created Jordan from scratch. It was much easier to create Jordan in the image that Abdullah and the British desired than was possible in Iraq, with all the problems they'd had had, from the moment it was created as we will see. In the case of Iraq, it was very much the opposite to the case in Transjordan. From the very beginning, the Hashemites had to deal with a most unwieldy existing situation. The existing reality in Iraq eventually destroyed the Hashemites, who were overthrown in 1958. Iraq was made up of three Ottoman Vilayets, three Ottoman provinces. The provinces of Basra, Bagdad, and Mosul. And it is these three that will lump together to form the kingdom of Iraq. Mosul originally was supposed to be part of the French mandate in Syria. But in order to obtain British agreement for the French occupation of Lebanon and Syria, the French, as we have seen, compromised in Palestine, they compromised in Iraq too, and gave Mosul over from Syria to Iraq. The population of Iraq, approximately 3 million in the early 1920s was made up 90% of Muslims with small minorities of Jews and Christians. That looks, on the face of it, rather promising, but it wasn't really. The Muslims were made up of Sunnis and Shi'is and it is the Shi'is who were actually the majority, with a ratio of some seven to five more or less. But of the Sunnis, half were Kurds and not Arabs. So you have a very complicated reality in Iraq. A Shiite majority with a Sunni minority and the Sunni minority divided into two, partly Arab, partly Kurdish. While the Shiite's were part of the Arab majority, but not Sunni. Baghdad was the main city, the capital with a population of 200,000, but with a very large Jewish minority. In fact, the Jews in Baghdad, 80,000 of them, were the largest ethnic group in Baghdad because the other 120,000 who were the majority were divided between Sunna and Shia. But people in Iraq in the early 1920s didn't define themselves or identify themselves as Iraqi. Most people did not identify themselves as Iraqis, but rather by their sect, by their ethnicity, or by their tribe. Very few people thought of themselves as Iraqis. But the British created Arab Iraq in the name of Arabism, which was not a shared value for a very many of the people who became part of this Arab state. The Sunni Arabs, who were only about a quarter of the population, did identify quite strongly with Arab nationalism. But the Shiite Arabs did not. The Shiite Arabs generally saw Arab nationalism as a Sunni device for supremacy. And the Kurds who were Sunnis were not Arabs and certainly didn't share in the idea of an Arab state.
