About Al-Hurriya

Al-Hurriya

Al-Hurriya was an Arabic-language journal of literature and politics published in Baghdad in 1924 and 1925. Its name means Freedom, and in its brief life it belonged to the first generation of periodicals produced in the newly formed Iraqi state. The journal was edited by Rafa'il Butti, a Christian Iraqi intellectual and journalist who would go on to become one of the defining press figures of Hashemite Iraq. One volume, comprising a total of ten issues, appeared before the journal closed. That is the whole of its publishing history, and it is short. Yet Al-Hurriya matters because of who made it, when he made it, and what he did next. It was the early work of a man whose later newspaper, al-Bilad, became one of the leading press institutions in the country, and it appeared at the very beginning of the Iraqi experiment in modern journalism under the monarchy. Written about today in the past tense as a historic title, Al-Hurriya is best understood as a founding document of a career, and as a small but genuine artefact of Baghdad's literary and political culture in the mid-1920s.

Baghdad in 1924

To place Al-Hurriya correctly it helps to recall what Baghdad was in 1924. Iraq had been assembled as a state only a few years earlier, under British mandate and a Hashemite king, and its capital was developing the institutions of a modern press: printing houses, party newspapers, literary journals and a reading public drawn from the city's officials, teachers, merchants and students. A journal devoted jointly to literature and politics, the two categories under which Al-Hurriya is catalogued, was a characteristic product of that moment. In the Arab world of the 1920s the literary journal and the political journal were rarely separate species. Poems, essays and criticism appeared alongside commentary on the questions of the day, and a single editor often stood behind both. Al-Hurriya's declared territory, the political and literary topics of the Arab world at that time, was therefore the normal territory of a serious Baghdad periodical of its decade. Its distinction lies not in its subject matter but in the youth and subsequent eminence of its editor, and in how completely its ten issues have come to stand, in reference works, for the beginning of his story.

Rafa'il Butti, the Editor

Rafa'il Butti, who lived from 1901 to 1956, was twenty-three years old when Al-Hurriya began. Reference works describe him as a Christian Iraqi intellectual and a well-known journalist, and the Historical Dictionary of Iraq, by Beth K. Dougherty and Edmund A. Ghareeb, is one of the sources through which his career, and with it Al-Hurriya's existence, is documented for English-language readers. Butti belonged to Iraq's Christian community, whose members played a notable part in the country's early press and intellectual life, and his trajectory from a small literary-political journal in 1924 to a major daily newspaper six years later maps the rapid professionalisation of Baghdad journalism in that period. He was not a dilettante who abandoned publishing. He was a pressman for life, and Al-Hurriya was his apprenticeship in print: a volume of ten issues in which a young editor learned to select, arrange and present political and literary material for an Arab readership in the Iraqi capital.

Ten Issues, One Volume

The bibliographic facts of Al-Hurriya are precise and limited. It was founded in 1924, published in Baghdad, written in Arabic, and it ended in 1925 with its tenth issue, the ten issues forming a single volume. No second volume followed. Short lives of this kind were common for journals of the period, which depended on small circles of subscribers, on the energy of one editor, and on political conditions that could shift quickly. A journal of literature and politics edited by one man was especially exposed: if the editor's circumstances or ambitions changed, the journal changed or ended with him. In Butti's case the end of Al-Hurriya was not the end of his publishing but a pause before a much larger undertaking. The record gives no circulation figures, no list of contributors and no account of individual issues, and a responsible profile should not invent them. What the ten issues represent, on the evidence available, is a complete, bounded editorial project of the mid-1920s, preserved in reference works because its editor later became too important for his first journal to be forgotten.

From Journal to Daily: Al-Bilad

In 1930 Butti founded al-Bilad, the publication that made his reputation. Sources describe al-Bilad as the first daily newspaper of its time in Iraq and as a paper that became one of the leading press mediums in the country. Where Al-Hurriya had been a journal appearing across two calendar years with ten issues in all, al-Bilad was a daily, a different order of enterprise requiring presses, staff, distribution and daily political judgement. The line from one to the other is the line of Butti's own development: the literary-political editor of 1924 became the newspaper proprietor of 1930. Al-Bilad supported the party of the National Brotherhood, which formed the opposition to British influence in Iraq. That alignment placed Butti's newspaper on the nationalist side of the central argument of Hashemite politics, the argument about Britain's continuing power in a formally independent kingdom. The young editor who had titled his first journal Freedom was, by 1930, publishing a daily committed to a party whose purpose was to loosen the British grip on Iraq.

Opposition and Its Consequences

Opposition publishing in mandate and early monarchical Iraq carried risks, and Butti's career illustrates them. His support of the opposition through his publications resulted, the record states, in closure: the fate recorded for his press activity after he aligned it with the National Brotherhood's challenge to British influence. The historian Mohammad A. Tarbush, in his study of the military and politics in Iraq to 1941, is among the sources cited for this part of the story. The pattern will be familiar to students of the interwar Arab press. A newspaper could be licensed, successful and widely read, and still be vulnerable to the political authorities whose power it questioned. Butti's experience placed him in the company of editors across the region for whom closure was an occupational hazard of independent journalism. For Al-Hurriya itself, published half a decade earlier, the significance is retrospective: the journal's editor was already, in embryo, the opposition publisher he would become, working in the same city, in the same language, on the same union of literary and political concerns.

The World of Hashemite Letters

Al-Hurriya is also cited in scholarship on the culture of Hashemite Iraq, including Orit Bashkin's The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq, published by Stanford University Press in 2010, which is referenced in accounts of Butti's first daily. Bashkin's subject, the pluralism of Iraqi cultural life under the monarchy, is the right frame for Al-Hurriya. The Baghdad in which it appeared was a city of competing ideas and communities, where a Christian editor could publish an Arabic journal of literature and politics addressed to the whole Arab world, and where literary production and political argument shared the same pages. The journal's two catalogued categories, literature and politics, were in that setting not a miscellany but a programme: the cultivation of Arabic letters and the discussion of Arab affairs belonged together. Reading Al-Hurriya as part of that plural Hashemite culture explains both its form and its survival in the scholarly record, where it appears in dictionaries and cultural histories rather than in histories of any single party or movement.

The Butti Family and Iraqi Press Memory

The memory of Rafa'il Butti's journalism was preserved, in part, within his own family. His son, Faiq Butti, born in Baghdad in 1935, studied journalism at the American University in Cairo, returned to Iraq in 1963 and became editor-in-chief of al-Bilad, the newspaper his father had founded. Faiq Butti later took a doctorate in journalism in Moscow in 1979, was a founding member of the Iraqi Journalists' Syndicate, and wrote extensively on the history of the Iraqi press, including works on his father's career, among them a biography of Rafael Butti presented as Iraqi memory. The University of Baghdad's College of Mass Communication counts Faiq Butti among Iraq's media pioneers and records his description of journalism, inherited from his father, not as a profession of trouble-seeking but as a profession of truth-seeking. Rafa'il Butti himself was also a historian of his own trade: his book on the press of Iraq, Sahafat al-Iraq, published in Baghdad, remains a point of reference for the field his son later chronicled in encyclopaedias of the Iraqi, Kurdish and Syriac press. Al-Hurriya's place in that family and scholarly memory is secure precisely because the Buttis, father and son, wrote the history of the world the journal came from.

What Survives and What Does Not

An honest account of Al-Hurriya must acknowledge how much is not known. The surviving reference record establishes its title, language, city, dates, editor, categories and extent: ten issues in one volume, in 1924 and 1925. It does not preserve, in the sources available to this profile, the names of its contributors, the titles of its articles, its price, its printer or its circulation. No famous text is recorded as having first appeared in it. Its importance is therefore of a specific kind. It is the earliest documented station in the career of a major Iraqi editor; it is evidence of the literary-political journal culture of Baghdad in the first decade of the Iraqi state; and it is a reminder that the grand institutions of the Hashemite press, the dailies that historians discuss at length, often began in ventures as small as a young man's ten-issue journal named Freedom.

Legacy

Al-Hurriya ceased publication in 1925, and Rafa'il Butti died in 1956, having reshaped Iraqi journalism through al-Bilad and through his writing on the Iraqi press. The journal he edited at twenty-three survives in dictionaries of Iraq, in cultural histories of the Hashemite period, and in the bibliographic record of Arabic periodicals, where its ten issues are still enumerated nearly a century later. For the history of magazines in Iraq it marks a beginning: a Baghdad journal, in Arabic, joining literature to politics, edited by a Christian intellectual who would become a central figure of the national press. Its brevity is not a reason to overlook it. In the press history of the Arab world, as the career of its editor shows, the distance from a small journal called Freedom to one of a country's leading newspapers could be travelled in six years, and the small journal is where the travelling started.