The tricky business of rewriting history

Sitting in the teachers’ lounge in Al Huda High School in the wealthy Al Jadriya district of Baghdad, history teacher Abstam Jassom says she will tell her students: ‘Americans are occupiers. They only want our oil.”

Then, a few minutes later, she changes her mind. ‘We have seen what the old regime did – the mass graves, for example. The Americans have freed us.”

Since 1973, when Saddam Hussein ordered all school history to be rewritten from the Ba’ath Party perspective, children have been taught that the US was the evil invader, that Iraq was triumphant in all wars and that Saddam Hussein single-handedly defended the Arab world against greedy Zionism.

But now that Saddam has gone, school history texts are being rewritten, again.

Newly revised textbooks are being distributed to Iraq’s 5.5-million schoolchildren in 16 000 schools. Some 563 texts were heavily edited and revised last year by a team of US-appointed Iraqi educators.

When it comes to dealing with controversial subjects such as the 1991 Gulf war, the texts won’t be much help. Pressured to have the books reprinted in time for the new school year, the US-led ministry of education simply deleted all sections deemed ‘controversial”, including references to America, Shias and Sunnis, Kurds, Kuwaitis, Jews and Iranians. Iraqi history textbooks have, in a matter of months, gone from one-sided to

no-sided.

Revision of Iraqi textbooks is one example of the prickly partnership between the Iraqis and the consortium of mostly US groups rebuilding the schools. While US officials don’t want to be seen as meddling in what Iraqis learn, they don’t want the possible alternative: funding textbooks that are anti-semitic, anti-American or radically religious. ‘We considered anything anti-American to be propaganda,” says Fuad Hussein, head of textbook revision for the ministry of education. ‘When we couldn’t reach an agreement, we just took it out.” He says teachers will have to decide how to treat controversial issues like the rise of the Ba’ath party, the bloody crackdown on the Shias, and accusations that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

This most recent war is said to have damaged hundreds of schools, in addition to destroying the ministry of education building and all its files. While much US attention has focused on physical rebuilding, curriculum revision was a political hot potato that few groups wanted to grapple with. US officials recruited Fuad Hussein, a former Iraqi professor and Middle Eastern scholar who had been teaching in the Netherlands.

In May, Fuad Hussein visited Baghdad schools and hand-picked 67 teachers to make up a textbook revision team. They met twice weekly at the Unesco and Unicef offices. They were initially tasked with ‘de-Ba’athifiying” the textbooks. But they quickly saw that lessons were so intertwined with Saddam Hussein that in lifting out Ba’ath party ideology, most of history went with it.

In Saddam’s history books, Iraq won both the Iran-Iraq war and the 1991 Gulf war.

Fuad Hussein’s team grappled with revising history textbooks, including passages such as this, on 1991: ‘On the 16th and 17th of January, America and its alliance gathered armies from 30 states in its aggression against Iraq … The brave Iraqis faced the situation for 43 days despite its ugliness, until they finally forced the Americans to stop firing. At the beginning of the war Iraq achieved the hopes of the Arab masses when it fired missiles against the military installations of the Zionists. Then the Arab country regained its self-confidence through trusting the historical leadership of its Excellency Saddam Hussein (God protect Him), the symbol of dignity and heroism.”

In many cases, teachers want to take out Ba’ath party propaganda, but they don’t know what to replace it with. They know no other version of history. ‘We can change the text easily,” Fuad Hussein says. ‘But the

challenge will be to change the culture of the teachers.”

Fuad Hussein is planning on putting together a curriculum team that represents all ethnic groups, religions and sectors of Iraq to properly debate history and rewrite each text – a process, he says, that will take years.

Even within Iraqi academic society there is tremendous debate over past and present history. ‘The fall of Baghdad is very controversial,” says Sami Al Kaisi, history professor at the Baghdad University Women’s College of Education. ‘It’s hard to say who stood against America at that moment. Who will we say betrayed Saddam? We will need 20 to 30 years to reflect on this before we can teach it properly.”

Sheikh Abdul Settar Jabber, head of the Muslim Awareness Association, a leading Sunni group, feels the entire role of the schools should be changed to one that trains students in Islamic law and in how to be good Muslims.

He opposes any American involvement in the schools.

‘We are an Islamic society and this is part of the attempt by Americans to break Iraqi identity,” says Sheikh Jabber. The US officials say most curriculum decisions will be made after the civilian government leaves Iraq, and that they will play a limited role – unless things go in a direction they don’t approve of.

‘We will strongly recommend concepts of tolerance and be against anything that is anti-semitic or anti-west – content that would sow the seeds for future intolerance,” says Gregg Sullivan, spokesman for the

Near Eastern Affairs Bureau of the state department. ‘We’d hope it’s only an advisory role, but if something develops that’s disadvantageous to the Iraqi people, we’d weigh in on a stronger level.”

James Loewen, author of the 1995 book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, says American history textbooks are notorious for massaging events to make themselves look good. Since students receive information from a variety of sources, like parents, media and the Internet, they know when they’re being misled, Loewen says. Propaganda is not only wrong, but also ineffective.

‘Rather than trying to remove all ‘ideology and propaganda’, a better approach would be to leave some in, paired with the same events as written about by US historians, and perhaps by historians in, say, Turkey, Jordan or Kuwait,” Loewen suggests. ‘Then, supply additional information – accurate dates, facts and so on – and let students think about it for themselves.”

–