Fear, imprisonment, torture, and assassination are the common means by which a totalitarian state controls its people. Another equally effective mean is language, which the state turns into an official domain where what gets said and how it is said requires state approval. The aim is of course to force people to consume and obey state ideology. A common slogan in most totalitarian states, like Assad’s Syria and Saddam’s Iraq, is that "We all speak one language"--a oneness which is militantly constructed, protected, and elevated into a paralyzing sacredness that no dictatorship can be without. As an aspect of language, grammar, too, becomes the subject of official intervention. In the case of Iraq before Saddam, speaking grammatically, however unnatural considering how different spoken and written Arabic are from one another, was considered patriotic. Because the dictator Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr had decided that grammar was a good thing, violating its rules came to be seen as a treacherous act, implying, disloyalty to the state and its leader, among other things. But when this dictator from the upper class was replaced with another from the lower class, grammar came to be seen as reactionary, repressive, and elitist, and thus the state paved the way for a war on grammar.

To understand the politics of grammar under Saddam Hussein and his predecessor al-Bakr, we first need to see how their dictatorship redefined the role and direction of education in Iraq. Before the Ba’athists came to power in Iraq in 1968, education was profession-oriented. There was a huge demand for doctors, engineers, scientists, and teachers; but as the country’s then four universities could not meet the demand, professionals were brought in from wherever they could be found: Egypt, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, the former Soviet Union, even Cuba. The state had no problem with that. It was simply a technical need. That was all. The country needed more teachers, more doctors, more engineers, and importing them was simply a business matter; there was nothing ideological about it. A profession was simply a profession; it did not entail anything else. One went to school to get a training in this or that field. Universities were not in any other business, and the assumption was that this was how systems of education worked the world over. Professionalism was the goal.

After 1968, however, education began to undergo a revolution in Iraq. Education came increasingly to be seen as an ideological, rather than a professional, enterprise, and as such, the state concluded, it could be made to serve a political purposes as well. But first the state had to make sure that it had a monopoly on education. Almost overnight, all schools, from kindergartens to universities, were nationalized. Now it was considered criminal to operate a school independently. But to make education serve a political purpose, the state had to do more; and it did. In the past, for example, if one chose to study medicine, then medicine, along with courses in related fields, were all that the person needed to study. Now the state required every university student, no matter what his/her field of study, to take courses in Arab history, sociology, and literature. But these were not courses that just about any professional with a graduate degree could teach. No, these were courses designed inside out by the state; the state had a particular version of history, of sociology, of literature; and it wanted to pass it on to students at every level, but especially at the university level, where students were considered more ripe for indoctrination. The ideological goal was clear: create a new generation of loyal consumers of state ideology: people who more or less thought alike and looked up to the state for direction.

To extend its ideological hold on education, the state also moved simultaneously in the areas of primary and secondary education. Here, too, private schools were abolished; here, too, a new curriculum for the humanities was developed; here, too, the aim was the same: to control and direct what went into students’ heads about history, sociology, and politics. These goals were clearly laid out in the ruling Arab Ba’ath Party’s Political Report for 1970. The educational system, said the report, had to be compatible with "the principles and aims of the Party and Revolution." New syllabi had to be prepared at once "for every Ievel from nursery school to university"; they had to be "inspired by the principles of the Party and Revolution." That meant rooting out "reactionary bourgeois and liberal ideas" from educational institutions, but above all creating a generation who would speak one language, the state’s official language of Pan-Arabism. 1

Briefly, Pan-Arabism is the belief that the Arabs of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Sudan are one people, divided into so many states only because Western imperialism, in an elaborate plot to plunder their wealth and extend its hegemony over them, had decided that it was in its best interest to keep the Arabs divided. This division has to end. Arab oil has to be shared by all. And Arabs should be able to live and work in whatever part of the Arab world they choose. To turn words into deeds, the Ba’ath Party (which controls Iraq since 1967) abolished all borders among Arab states in the maps it now put out; it also gave all Arabs the same rights the Iraqi people had; more important, it made Pan-Arabism its ultimate goal, which still is despite the fact that all the many efforts at unity by Iraq had gone nowhere.

But to make an entire nation speak the state’s language, think according to its Pan-Arab ideology, more effort was needed than just politicizing and nationalizing schools. More than half of the nation’s population could not read or write. These were mainly older people, scattered in hundreds of small villages all across the country, villages with no running water, electricity, or roads connecting them to the cities. Now the challenge was how to give these people some very, very basic education. Simultaneously the state embarked on an ambitious program to, on the one hand, extend roads, electricity, and running water to these villages, and, on the other, open up schools. Because these people were mainly farmers who needed their children to work in the fields during the day, the schools had to open in the evening. The aim, at least on the surface, was to teach these people basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic. But the real aim was entirely political. After all, the state wanted to bring about a revolution in the way people thought and dealt with the government. So while the farmers were learning how to write their names, how to multiply, add, divide, and subtract figures, they were also learning about Pan-Arabism, about imperialism, about loyalty to the state, about the leader. The exercises on the surface were about how to say this or that, how to write this or that, but on a deeper level they were about political indoctrination. All learning activities, for example, involved in one way or another making some very positive statements about the state’s ultimate texts, that is, the president of the county (then Ahamd Hassan al-Bakr) and his vice-president (then Saddam Hussein). Other texts included a barrage of proclamations, denunciations, adulations, among other things, written all over school walls, in support of the state and its twin leaders. There were also daily classes in which a party official would more directly tell these people about the party and its goals and why it was necessary for all to join. But this process of indoctrination through the guise of education did not stop when the students went home; the state had insured that it would go on there as well, thanks to all the free television sets that the government had distributed. When they went home, these people could hardly take their eyes off this novelty: they could see every night how generous, courageous, benevolent, and intelligent the twin leaders were; how strong the country’s army was; how artificial all the borders dividing Arab countries were; how patriotic it was to join the Arab Ba’ath Party. Whereas in the past most of these people had not had the slightest idea who their president was, let alone what their government was all about, now they felt they knew "the leader and his deputy" first hand. They would see them acting human: visiting with friends and families, barbecuing, shopping, showing compassion, or just enjoying a relaxing day in the country. They would also see them acting as leaders: receiving heads of state and foreign diplomats, though not hearing the words they would exchange; inspecting an industrial or agricultural project; viewing an army parade; or signing a decree.

Now let me be clear about this: indoctrination through education was not offered as an option; it was a mandate. Everyone, male and female, not younger than six, not older than fifty, had to attend some type of school. To insure that, the army, the state’s massive secret police, and the Party’s numerous political and cultural organizations were brought in to keep a watch. Punishment for skipping school would start with an admonishment from a Party official. If it did not stop, then would come an interrogation by the secret police, which would be held in a basement full of tools of torture. Next would come the army to take the person away and possibly confiscate his/her property as a punishment and deterrence.

So this is the context within which the Iraqi state in the late 1960s set out to bring about a revolution in education or more precisely a revolution in the relationship between the state and the people. This was the mother of all invasions, for the state was not simply trying to occupy all private spaces; more important, as Kenan Makiya has meticulously documented, it was trying to eliminate them. Television brought the state inside the home. Together with school, they turned the home into a place where state ideology acquired a monopoly on discussion, where the fear of torture by the secret police insured that there was no dissent, and where family members lost trust in one another, as the state now decreed that it was a patriotic duty for one to spy on his/her family.

But to the outside world this systematic and at times ruthless campaign to control and silence a people was seen as a genuine effort by a government to educate its people. As far as the United Nations and others were concerned, it was just that, a commendable undertaking to eliminate illiteracy and backwardness--a point, incidentally, that was also made by the Egyptian feminist Nawal al-Saadawi. 2

Now, you might ask, how all this controlling affected the teaching of grammar? In two ways. During Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr’s presidency, which lasted from 1968 to 1973, the state embarked on a vigorous campaign to promote classical Arabic, that is, the Arabic of the Koran, which is very different from the dozen or so Arabic dialects spoken in the Arab world. Al-Bakr himself was a lover of classical Arabic; he, unlike Saddam Hussein, came from a prominent well-to-do tribe which had nothing but disdain for spoken Arabic. For him, classical Arabic was pure, beautiful, correct, and orderly; spoken Arabic, by contrast, was impure, ugly, incorrect, and disorderly. Classical Arabic represented a glorious past, the time when the Arabs were strong and united and when their empire stretched all the way to Spain. Spoken Arabic, by contrast, represented a present marked by defeat and paralysis, a time when the Arabs were in disarray and retreat. And so for al-Bakr there was no question which Arabic was superior and which was inferior. It was time to return to classical Arabic, and he pushed for that with such a fanfare that almost overnight a standard of correctness was developed; and because it was sanctioned by him, that is, by the man at the top, it carried with it an authority that no one would dare to challenge, at least not as long as he was in power. After all, he was constructed not just as an all powerful leader, but also as "The Great Father," one that knew it all, one who had to be obeyed. The end result was that "Say it this way; don’t say it that way" became the dictum of the day as schools, radios and television stations, and newspapers now gave daily lessons on the virtues and benefits of writing and speaking grammatically--or more precisely writing and speaking in ways demanded by the dictatorship.

But the change of guard in 1973 brought with it a dramatic change in attitude toward grammatical correctness. That year Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr in a bloodless coup was replaced by his deputy Saddam Hussein, the poor Bakr was even made to announce his "retirement for health reasons" on television. As life-size portraits of Saddam started replacing Bakr’s, change became inevitable. Right from the start, the new leader began using language very differently from his predecessor; it was unmistakably the language that the upper class Bakr had frowned upon as ungrammatical, provincial, and impure. But it was a language that the population at large, including the new dictator, felt native to; it was the language of their dreams, aspirations, and frustrations, containing and expressing the very essence of their being. By contrast, Bakr’s version came to be seen as artificial and restrictive, privileging the upper land-owning class which the new dictator was swiftly moving against. In no time all lessons about correctness that were the hallmark of the previous dictator started to disappear from radio and television, schools and newspapers. They were replaced with nightly poetry recitals, literary and political discussions, dramatic performances, and songs--all in the very language that only years before the state had considered bad, ugly, and ungrammatical.

Saddam’s purpose of course was not a whole lot different from Bakr’s. Both used grammar politically: Bakr promoting a standard of grammatical correctness based solely on Koranic Arabic and upper class usage of it, Saddam promoting a non-standard version that more or less did away with grammatical correctness.

1 Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear (Berkely: U of California P, 1989), 171-72.

2 See Flan Hazelton,ed., Iraq Since the Gulf War (London: Zed P, 1994). This book contains an excellent collection of essays that discuss the impact Saddam’s dictatorship has had on Iraq’s culture and society. What is so interesting about the collection is that all the contributors are Iraqis who know their subjects first hand.