Davis 401also, nationalist poets read their verses to the crowd. Because the govern-
ment frequently sent informers to nationalistically oriented coffeehouses,
poets were forced to hide their thoughts in allusion and double-entendre,
thereby educating the audience in the processes of decoding the subtleties
of political critique inherent in the poetry being read. In this manner, the
coffeehouse became an institution that encouraged the development of
a sophisticated political discourse in which nuance and subtlety became
the watchwords of communication. A “traditional” institution came to
be transformed not just into an important instrument of the nationalist
movement, but as a space in which Iraqis were socialized into the impor-
tant political tendencies of the day. Through their transformation into an
institution with a national, rather than a local or urban district focus, cer-
tain coffeehouses became famous in nationalist circles and thus attracted
some of Iraq’s most prominent political activists and intellectuals.
With the maturation of a new generation of nationalist youth in the
late 1920s and 1930s, many existing coffeehouses acquired a more politi-
cally oriented clientele, and new politically oriented coffeehouses contin-
ued to open. During the early 1930s, the ‘Arif Agha coffeehouse became a
meeting place for teachers who had been purged from government service
and for opposition journalists. Other coffeehouses, such as the al-Rusafi
and al-Jawahiri coffeehouses, named after some of Iraq’s most famous
poets, also were noted meeting places for intellectuals and activists.^34
onsidering the growth in programmatic political parties, the C
rise of the press, the expansion of coffeehouses and their restructuring
along more explicitly political lines, and the development of a network of
social clubs [al-andiyya], which represented the interests of profession-
als, charitable and religious groups, and sports groups, we see that Iraqis
had developed an extensive network of communication by the end of the
1930s, indicating a national consciousness and a desire to communicate
across ethnic and regional barriers.
Artistic innovation
All of the aforementioned processes contributed to and were reinforced by
the artistic activity that was stimulated in large measure by the nationalist
movement. A fourth factor contributing to the growth of a public sphere