LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

yasir suleimansituation because of the rich associations Jerusalem has with Islam. It is,however, at odds with mainstream expressions of Arab nationalism which tendto be secular in character, or, at least, pay no more than lip service to religion. 20This fusion of the national with the religious finds rich expression in many ofÆAtika al-Khazraji’s poems. To take one example, in Surakh al-Zulm (‘Cries ofOppression’) the two currents are lexically woven to create a double force formobilisation purposes. Religious terms – such as Qur’an, Islam, iman (faith),haqq (truth), shahada (proclamation of belief in Islam), shariÆa (religiousdoctrine, law) baÆth (resurrection), rushd (right-guidance), khulud (eternal life),huda (right-guidance), Zalal (error), kufr (unbelief) and fasad (corruption) – areplaced in nationalist frameworks which give their meanings a new identity thatis neither exclusively religious nor exclusively national but one that stands atthe intersection of both.The second poet to influence Nazik is Umm Nizar, Nazik’s mother who diedin London, where she was buried, in 1953. Umm Nizar had one collection ofpoetry to her name, Unshudat al-majd (‘The Song of Glory’), which was publishedposthumously in Baghdad in 1965. This collection is dominated by threenationalist themes. The first focuses on the major crises that faced Iraq in thefirst half of the twentieth century. One example is the revolt Rashid ÆAli al-Kailani led in 1940/1 against the Iraqi authorities and their British backers. 21Umm Nizar wrote poems in which she urged the Iraqis to continue theirstruggle against these two parties and against those Iraqis who sided with themfor opportunistic reasons. The second theme focuses on the dismemberment ofthe Arab nation at the hands of the colonial powers, Britain and France, intoseparate political entities. Umm Nizar calls on the Arabs to fight the forces ofpolitical fragmentation in their societies and to wage a struggle for regainingtheir unity. Like ÆAtika al-Khazraji before her, Umm Nizar believes that liberationand unity are dependent on the interweaving of the national and the religiousin political activism.The mixing of these two political currents dominates her third theme: theliberation of Palestine, to which she devoted the bulk of her collection Unshudatal-majd. Thus, Umm Nizar reminds her readers of the doctrinally elevatedposition of Palestine in Islam as the land of isra’ and miÆraj (the Prophet’snocturnal journey to Jerusalem and his Ascension therefrom to Heaven), and,also, of its historical significance as the land of martyrdom and peace in anobvious reference to the Crusades. 22 In addition, Umm Nizar engages, in a spiritof political activism, with the events of her time in Palestine. Thus, shelampoons Lord Balfour, British Secretary of State, whose Declaration in 1917laid the cornerstone for a British colonial policy that ‘stabbed’ the Arabs in the‘heart’. She also attacks the United Nations for sponsoring the Partition Planfor Palestine in 1947. In a similar vein, she attacks the UN for the armistice— 214 —www.taq.ir