394 Resisting Publics
expressed in classical genres and in apolitical terms, or had been used to
extol the virtues of the Ottoman viceroy [wālῑ] in Iraq, as European states
increasingly encroached on the Empire’s territory, many Arab inhabitants
began to criticize the Ottomans for their inefficacy in staving off European
colonialism. Poetic expression became one of the most visible examples of
the anger felt by the empire’s Arab subjects. However, this poetry was only
the explicit expression of a process that had begun much earlier among
Arab inhabitants of the decaying Ottoman Empire who were engaged in a
complex and extensive discussion over the future direction of their society.^18
second site for the rise of an Iraqi public sphere was the devel-A
opment of an Iraqi press. This development was especially evident after
the so-called Young Turk Revolt of 1908. The emphasis on the notions
of progress and reform advocated by the Committee of Union and
Progress (CUP), which led the revolt, had a salutary impact on the small
and largely secular Iraqi intelligentsia, which founded a large number
of newspapers after 1908. Beyond reporting the news of the day, these
newspapers also established a forum in which the emerging idea of Iraq
as a unified political and socio-cultural entity could be addressed.^19 Often,
newspapers were affiliated with political or reform-minded organizations
that were part of the growing Iraqi nationalist movement, indicating that
they reflected only the apex of a much larger infrastructure linked to the
emerging public sphere.
e third site for the development of the public sphere was the Th
emergence of physical spaces in which nationalist and oppositional dis-
course could occur. Coffeehouses, social clubs associated with newly
formed professional organizations, and literary and artists’ salons [majālis
al-adab] were the most prominent institutional components of the Iraqi
public sphere.^20 The most established and widespread of these spaces, dis-
cussed in greater detail below, was the coffeehouse [al-maqhā].^21
Conceptualizing the public sphere
What follows is a conceptual framework in which to situate, historically and
socio-politically, the concept of the public sphere in Iraq. This framework is
derived from four empirical characteristics of the pre-1963 Iraqi nationalist