About Al-Thaqafa al-Ajnabiyya

Al-Thaqafa al-Ajnabiyya

Al-Thaqafa al-Ajnabiyya, meaning Foreign Culture, was a Baghdad quarterly journal devoted to foreign literature and culture in Arabic translation, published under Iraq's Ministry of Culture. It was described at the height of its life as the only journal of its kind in Iraq: a magazine whose entire purpose was to bring world literature and culture to Arabic readers. Its last editor-in-chief, the novelist and translator Ibtisam Abdallah, took charge in 2001, and the magazine ceased publishing in the aftermath of the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is written about in the past tense, as a closed title of Iraq's state cultural era.

A Journal Devoted to Foreign Culture

The journal's identity was contained in its title. Al-Thaqafa al-Ajnabiyya means foreign culture, and the magazine existed to mediate between Iraqi readers and the literatures of the wider world. Biographical records of its editor describe it precisely: a quarterly journal devoted to foreign literature and culture, the only one of its kind in Iraq. That singularity matters. Iraq's ministry system maintained journals for creative writing, heritage and general ideas, but the work of translation, of systematically presenting foreign literatures to Arabic readers, was concentrated in this single title.

Translation held an honoured place in Iraqi cultural life. Baghdad's House of Wisdom had made translation the engine of the Abbasid golden age, and modern Iraq institutionalised the craft through bodies such as Dar al-Ma'mun, the Ministry of Culture's translation house. Publishing histories record that translations into Arabic in Iraq were primarily from English, French, Russian, Chinese and Japanese, undertaken by state translation institutions. Al-Thaqafa al-Ajnabiyya was the periodical face of that national translation effort.

Under the Ministry of Culture

The journal belonged to the state cultural system built by Iraq's Ministry of Culture, which under Ba'thist governance largely centralised publishing through the ministry and its network of publishing houses producing books, magazines and newspapers. Within that system, journals had specialised briefs: al-Aqlam for literature, al-Mawrid for heritage, Afaq Arabiyya for ideas. Al-Thaqafa al-Ajnabiyya's brief was the outside world.

That position gave the journal a distinctive editorial latitude. A magazine whose contents were translations of foreign work could introduce Iraqi readers to international literary movements, debates and authors that a purely domestic journal could not carry, and its translators worked at the meeting point of Arabic and world literature. The poet and critic Ali Jaafar Al Allaq, one of Iraq's most prominent literary figures, is recorded in biographical sources from Smith College and the Al Owais records as having served as chief editor of Al-Thaqafa al-Ajnabiyya alongside his editorship of al-Aqlam, a pairing that placed the country's foreign-culture journal in the hands of a poet-critic deeply engaged with both the Arabic tradition and its modern transformations.

Ali Jaafar Al Allaq and the Translator-Editors

Al Allaq's association with the journal fits his career. Born in Kut in 1945, he took his degree in Arabic literature at Al-Mustansiriya University in 1973 and his doctorate in criticism and modern literature at the University of Exeter in 1984, and he worked in literary journalism from 1970, rising to editorship of al-Aqlam between 1984 and 1990. He also served the Ministry of Culture as Director of Theatres and Folklore in the late 1970s. An editor formed by both Baghdad and British universities was a natural custodian for a journal of foreign culture.

The journal's editors were, by the nature of the work, translators and critics as much as administrators. To edit foreign culture for Arabic readers is to choose what the nation reads of the world: which literatures, which movements, which individual books would be excerpted, translated and discussed. The quality of such a journal depends on the literary judgement of its editors, and the documented editors of Al-Thaqafa al-Ajnabiyya were figures of recognised standing in Iraqi letters.

Ibtisam Abdallah, Editor-in-Chief from 2001

In 2001, the novelist Ibtisam Abdallah became editor-in-chief of Al-Thaqafa al-Ajnabiyya. Abdallah, born in Kirkuk in 1942 or 1943 and long resident in Baghdad, had by then published four novels and a collection of short stories, of which the best known is her novel Mesopotamia, published in Baghdad in 2001. She was also one of Iraq's notable literary translators: she translated J. M. Coetzee's award-winning novel Waiting for the Barbarians into Arabic, as well as the memoirs of Mikis Theodorakis and Angela Davis. Her writing is known for juxtaposing feminist themes with contemporary social and political issues, and she was well known in Iraq as a journalist and television personality.

Her appointment united the journal's two functions in one person: a working novelist who also translated world literature into Arabic. Under her editorship, Al-Thaqafa al-Ajnabiyya was in the hands of an editor who personally practised the cultural transfer the magazine existed to perform. She remained associated with the journal until its end; she died on 7 March 2023, twenty years after the magazine's closure, remembered in part through her editorship of it.

Translation and the Iraqi Reader

To understand the journal's service, consider the Iraqi reader of the sanctions era. Through the 1990s, Iraq was cut off from much of the world's book trade; foreign books and journals were scarce, travel was restricted, and the country's once-extensive participation in international book fairs had collapsed. A state quarterly that translated foreign literature and surveyed foreign culture was, in that environment, a window kept deliberately open: one of the few regular channels through which world writing reached Baghdad in Arabic.

The journal's translations also fed Iraqi writing itself. Iraqi literature of the period, including the exile literature that developed from the late 1980s onward, was in constant dialogue with world forms, and translators inside Iraq helped sustain that dialogue for readers who could not leave. The presence among its translated authors of figures such as Coetzee, whose work Abdallah herself rendered, shows the journal's editors choosing internationally significant, formally and morally challenging literature for their readers.

Cessation After the 2003 Invasion

Al-Thaqafa al-Ajnabiyya ceased publishing in the aftermath of the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003. The biographical record states the fact plainly, and the context explains it: the invasion brought the collapse of the ministry system that published the journal, looting of cultural institutions, and the scattering of Iraq's state publishing infrastructure. Many ministry journals ended in that rupture; a translation quarterly, dependent on institutional funding, translators and printing, had no independent means of survival.

The magazine's closure is thus a marker of the end of an era in Iraqi cultural organisation: the centralised, ministry-led system that had maintained specialised journals for literature, heritage, ideas and foreign culture since the 1960s. Later Iraqi cultural life rebuilt itself on different foundations, through universities, independent publishers and digital platforms, but the specific instrument of a state foreign-culture quarterly was not recreated, and the journal's description as the only one of its kind in Iraq remains true of its era.

Place Among Iraq's Cultural Journals

Among the Iraqi Ministry of Culture journals, Al-Thaqafa al-Ajnabiyya played the outward-facing role. Al-Aqlam published what Iraqis wrote; al-Mawrid published what Iraq inherited; Al-Thaqafa al-Ajnabiyya published what the world wrote, carried into Arabic. Together the titles formed a complete cultural circuit for the Arabic reader in Iraq: creation, heritage and encounter.

Its loss after 2003 was correspondingly structural. Iraqi readers and writers continued to engage world literature, through exile publishing, Arab publishers abroad and eventually the internet, but the Baghdad-based, Arabic-language quarterly that had curated that engagement from inside Iraq's own cultural system was gone.

Legacy

The legacy of Al-Thaqafa al-Ajnabiyya is the record of a deliberate bridge. Published in Baghdad under the Ministry of Culture as a quarterly devoted to foreign literature and culture, the only journal of its kind in Iraq, edited among others by the poet-critic Ali Jaafar Al Allaq and finally by the novelist-translator Ibtisam Abdallah from 2001, it carried world literature into Arabic for Iraqi readers until the invasion of 2003 ended its run.

Its memory survives in the biographies of its editors, in the bibliographies of Iraqi translation, and in the history of how Iraq, heir to the House of Wisdom's translation movement, organised its encounter with world culture in the late twentieth century. For historians of Iraqi publishing, it remains the clearest example of translation treated not as an occasional activity but as a journal, an institution and a cultural policy in itself.