About Shurufat

Shurufat

Shurufat is a literary and cultural magazine published in Mosul, the capital of Iraq's Nineveh Governorate, by a group of the governorate's own writers. The University of Mosul, whose Central Library holds its issues, describes it as a literary cultural bimonthly concerned with the modernity of literature, art and knowledge, and stresses the unusual way it is produced: the Nineveh writers who contribute to it also finance, publish and distribute it independently, with no publishing house, ministry or party apparatus behind them. That description was already current a decade before the university recorded it. In June 2012 the international newspaper Azzaman was describing the magazine, under the fuller styling Shurufat al-Mawsiliyya, the Mosuli Shurufat, in exactly the same terms, as a magazine concerned with the modernity of literature, art and knowledge. By October 2022 the magazine had reached its seventeenth issue, which its makers donated to the rebuilt Central Library of the University of Mosul. Around those few fixed points a fuller picture can be assembled, because the three men documented in its senior editorial roles, a professor of literary criticism, a leading modernist poet and a short-story writer, are among the most thoroughly documented literary figures in contemporary Mosul, and their biographies, books and mutual collaborations map the circle from which Shurufat is made.

A Magazine of Mosuli Modernity

The magazine's declared field is stated identically in sources ten years apart: the modernity of literature, art and knowledge. That is a programme, not a slogan. Modernity, hadatha, is the contested banner of post-war Arabic letters, the movement that remade Arabic poetry and prose in the second half of the twentieth century, and a provincial cultural magazine that adopts it as its defining concern is announcing that it does not intend to be a local newsletter or a heritage bulletin. Shurufat's Mosul is a city with a deep claim on that movement. Its documented editors are themselves modernists: a critic whose life's work is the theory of the modern Arabic poem, a poet described in the press of his own city as one of the most prominent poets of modernity not only in Mosul but in Iraq, and a storyteller whose fiction became the subject of university research into narrative technique. The magazine's name, an Arabic word for balconies or terraces overlooking a view, suits a publication conceived as a vantage point from which a city's writers look outward at contemporary literature, art and thought, and the editor-in-chief would himself play on exactly that image in verse, as a later section of this profile records.

Independent by Design: The Nineveh Writers' Model

The University of Mosul's notice of the seventeenth issue is precise about the magazine's structure. Shurufat is written by a group of Nineveh writers, and the same group finances it, publishes it and distributes it, independently. In Iraqi publishing, where cultural periodicals have historically issued from ministries, parties, unions or commercial houses, a self-financed writers' collective is a distinctive model, closer to a literary circle that prints its own organ than to a conventional magazine company. The model explains both the magazine's character and the thinness of its commercial footprint. It has no recorded official website, no ISSN is recorded in the sources consulted, and its issues travel by hand and by gift as much as by sale: the two appearances the magazine makes in the University of Mosul's record in 2022 are both donations, of books and journals in April and of the new issue in October, to the university's Central Library. What the model loses in reach it appears to gain in longevity of intent. A bimonthly that is documented in editorial appointments in 2012 and is still producing numbered issues, and being described in the present tense as an active concern of Nineveh's writers, in late 2022 has sustained itself across a decade that included the occupation of Mosul and the destruction of much of the city's cultural infrastructure.

Editorial Leadership in the Record

Three editorial figures are named for Shurufat in independent sources, and their titles should be reported as the sources give them, since the record spans a decade and the sources do not all use the same terminology. The publisher biography of Professor Muhammad Saber Obeid, issued by his Amman publisher Alaan Publishers and Distributors, lists him as editor-in-chief of Shurufat, the cultural magazine issued in Mosul, Iraq. Azzaman, quoted in the Mosul cultural archive Bayt al-Mosul in June 2012, named the poet Raad Fadel as the magazine's managing editor at that date. A University of Mosul academic study received and accepted in 2013 records the storyteller Fares Saaduddin Alsardar as secretary of the magazine's editorial board in 2012. When Alsardar, by then retired, donated books and journals to the Central Library in April 2022, the university's English notice described him as editor-in-chief of Shurufat Magazine, while its Arabic text used his earlier title of editorial secretary. Read together, the sources show a small, stable editorial group of senior Mosuli men of letters rather than a single proprietor-editor, with the senior academic Obeid at its head in his publisher's account, the poet Fadel running the magazine as managing editor in 2012, and Alsardar, its editorial secretary from the same period, still acting as its representative and donor ten years later.

Muhammad Saber Obeid: The Critic at the Helm

The man Alaan Publishers lists as Shurufat's editor-in-chief is one of Iraq's most prolific literary critics. Muhammad Saber Obeid al-Jubouri was born in 1955 at Zammar in Nineveh, took his doctorate in modern Arabic literature and criticism at the University of Mosul in 1991, and received the rank of professor in 2000. He taught modern literary criticism to undergraduates and modern critical methods and applied criticism to postgraduates, at the University of Mosul, the University of Tikrit and a university in Turkey, supervised and examined large numbers of master's theses and doctoral dissertations at Iraqi and Arab universities, and was a founding member of the New Critical Project group in Iraq. His bibliography, as catalogued in reference sources, runs to more than sixty books, among them The Poetic Autobiography, The Poetic Imaginary, The Modern Arabic Poem Between Semantic Structure and Rhythmic Structure, The Aesthetics of the Literary Text's Adventure and Poetics studies of narrative and the prose poem. His standing was recognised early: first prize for literary criticism in the second Sharjah Prize for Arab Creativity in 1998, for The Poetic Autobiography; the prize of the General Union of Iraqi Writers and Authors for literary criticism in 2000, for The Poetic Imaginary; and, in the reference record, the state appreciation prize for creativity in 2002. In 2021 he edited the collective critical volume The Narrator and the Author Fath Abd al-Salam, published by Alaan in Amman, and donated a copy to the University of Mosul's Central Library, whose notice described him as professor of modern criticism in the Department of Arabic at the university's College of Basic Education, by then retired. A scholarly study of the sources of the poetic image in Obeid's own poetry, published by the University of Homs journal, quotes his verse playing on his magazine's name, counselling a friend to build himself a royal balcony, a shurfa, in the heart of Shurufat, and to take pride there in an excellent special issue, evidence that the magazine figured in its editor's imagination as well as in his curriculum vitae.

Raad Fadel: Managing Editor and Poet of Modernity

Shurufat's managing editor in 2012, Raad Fadel, is a poet and poetic dramatist of the generation that carried Arabic poetic modernity into Mosul. Born in 1957 in the Faisaliyah district, on the left, eastern bank of the Tigris at Mosul, he was introduced by the poet and actor Subhi Sabri, a friend of more than forty years, as one of the most prominent poets of modernity not in Mosul alone but in Iraq. The critical account of his work that Azzaman published in June 2012, written by the poet Baidaa Hikmat, describes poetry that works through living heritage figures, al-Jurjani, al-Qartajanni, al-Tawhidi, al-Hallaj, Imru al-Qays and Abu Tammam, to root the idea of Arab modernity, treats place not as geography but as poetic space, the Faisaliyah, al-Rashid Street and the Qushla clock of childhood and homeland, and draws its long narrative poems from the ancient civilisations of Iraq, Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian. His published poetry runs from the shared collections Anashid al-Muharib of 1984 and Al-Mawja al-Jadida of 1987, through the long poem Fal-Yataqaddam al-Daha ila al-Makida of 1994 and Shankaba Amoro of 1999, to Indama Ishtabaka al-Daw bi-l-Yaqut of 2002, Munamnamat of 2009, Makhtutat al-Mihna of 2010 and Raad Fadel wa-Ismi al-Shakhsi of 2012. He headed the Nineveh branch of the General Union of Iraqi Writers and Authors for three years, from 1992 to 1995, founded the magazine Nun in 1994 and edited it until it closed in 1996, an earlier experience of running an independent Mosuli literary magazine, and headed the cultural section of the weekly newspaper Ninawa from 2000 to 2002. His honours include the Necklace of Creativity of the Iraqi Ministry of Culture and Information in 1995 and creativity shields from the Iraqi writers' union in 2009, the University of Mosul's centre for studies and research in 2010, its College of Basic Education in 2011 and its Al-Hadba theatre festival in 2006. He also wrote three poetic plays, staged at national festivals in Baghdad in 1989 and 1993 and at the University of Mosul in 2007, all directed by the late Jalal Jamil.

Fares Saaduddin Alsardar: Secretary, Storyteller, Donor

The third documented member of the editorial group is its secretary, Fares Saaduddin Muhammad Ali Alsardar, the figure through whom the magazine appears in the University of Mosul's 2022 record. Born in Mosul in 1958 and educated at its schools, he took a bachelor's degree in physics from the university's College of Education in 1984, an unlikely formation for a man of letters that he balanced with work teaching the history of art at the Institute of Fine Arts and service as artistic supervisor in the literary and artistic affairs section of Nineveh's school activities directorate. He is a short-story writer. His first collection, What My Helmet Did Not Say, gathers twelve stories; his second, Light on the Edge of Darkness, gathers twelve more, among them The Damp Houses, The Boy Learns, The Night the Light Went Out and A Cart That Left a Cable Behind It; he also wrote a novel for young readers, The Wooden House and Masud's Birds, and published many articles in Arab newspapers and magazines on children's literature, the plastic arts, the short story and public affairs. His editorial apprenticeship long predates Shurufat: he sat on the editorial board of the quarterly Al-Murabbi in 1982, which reached a single issue, and was editor-in-chief of the newspaper Al-Fasil in 2003, which reached eight, before becoming secretary of Shurufat's editorial board in 2012. He is a member of the Union of Iraqi Writers, of the northern branch of the journalists' syndicate and of Nineveh's teachers' syndicate. It was as a retired man of letters that he carried a collection of books and journals to the Central Library in April 2022, an act the university recorded with gratitude as part of the effort to restore the library's scientific and cultural standing.

The Interlocking Circle Around the Magazine

What makes Shurufat's sparse record legible is that its three documented editors are bound together by each other's books. Obeid, the editor-in-chief, devoted a full critical monograph to his managing editor's poetry, The Poem That Sees: Questions of Poetic Value, a reading of the poetics of Raad Fadel, published by Dar al-Hiwar in Syria in 2011. The following year a collective volume on Fadel, Emerging from Astonishment, a selection of studies, testimonies and interviews by critics, writers and academics, was prepared and introduced jointly by Baidaa Hikmat and by Shurufat's own editorial secretary, Fares Saaduddin Alsardar, and published by Dar Tammuz in Damascus. Fadel's work has since sustained university research in its own right, including a master's thesis on narrative construction in his poetry at the University of Mosul and a doctoral thesis on the prose poem in Raad Fadel, defended at the university's College of Arts in June 2020, which analysed his short poems of question, paradox and flash, his long dramatic and narrative poems, his single and composite poetic images and his sound and visual rhythms. Alsardar's fiction received the same treatment earlier: in 2013 Dr Nabhan Hassoun Sadoun of the university's College of Basic Education published a study of the event in Alsardar's stories, analysing the second collection's narrative, descriptive, dialogic and scenic openings, its sequential, interwoven, parallel and circular constructions of event, and its informative, descriptive, summarising and dialogic endings. Shurufat, in other words, is the house magazine of a working Mosuli literary circle whose members criticise, edit, celebrate and examine one another in print, and whose collective authority in the city's letters is documented far beyond the magazine's own pages.

Issue Seventeen and the Central Library, 2022

The magazine's clearest dated appearance is also its most telling. On 30 October 2022 the University of Mosul announced that its Central Library had received the seventeenth issue of Shurufat, donated by the magazine, under the follow-up of the General Secretariat of the university's libraries. The notice repeats the magazine's identity in full: a literary cultural bimonthly, written and donated by a group of Nineveh writers who finance, publish and distribute it independently, concerned with the modernity of literature, art and knowledge. A numbered seventeenth issue establishes a real, if modest, publishing history; a bimonthly frequency establishes the ambition; and the donation establishes the magazine's chosen place of record. Six months earlier the same library had received Alsardar's gift of books and journals in his capacity at the magazine. Together the two gifts show Shurufat deliberately depositing itself, issue by issue and book by book, in the principal public collection of its own city and university, at the very moment that collection was being rebuilt from ashes.

The Library Shurufat Helped to Restock

To understand those gifts, the library's own history matters. The Central Library of the University of Mosul was founded with the university in 1967 and grew into one of the largest university libraries in Iraq, described by its secretary-general as among the most important in the Middle East. During the ISIS occupation of Mosul the library was destroyed, looted and burned, losing approximately one million sources, books, periodicals, rare books and manuscripts, together with its building and all its furniture. After the liberation it worked first from an alternative location, receiving donated books from international organisations, civil society bodies, universities and individuals, until the building, reconstructed by the United Nations Development Programme in cooperation with the Iraqi government and local and international supporters, was reopened on 19 February 2022 beneath a slogan written at its entrance: the word impossible does not exist in our dictionary. The reopened library reports receiving no fewer than a thousand visitors a day. Every donation notice the library published in that period, Shurufat's among them, is framed by this recovery: Iraqi academic and cultural elites restocking, gift by gift, a collection that had been deliberately annihilated. That a small independent magazine of Nineveh writers appears in that record twice in a single year places Shurufat, however modest its print run, inside the documented cultural reconstruction of Mosul.

Documentation, Survival and Significance

Shurufat's record must be stated with its limits. No complete run of the magazine is accessible in the sources consulted, no contents of any single issue are described in them, and no circulation, price or distribution figures exist in the record at all. What survives is a skeleton of verified fact: a title and a programme that remain identical across a decade, an independent collective model of production, three senior editorial names whose individual careers are documented in unusual depth, a seventeenth issue in 2022, and a standing relationship with the University of Mosul's Central Library expressed in donations. Even that skeleton is significant. Iraqi literary magazines are often known only by a masthead and a memory; Shurufat can be placed, dated and staffed. It stands in the directory of Iraqi magazines as Mosul's independent literary cultural bimonthly of the post-2003 period that is documented still publishing after the city's liberation: a magazine made by Nineveh's writers themselves, led by the governorate's senior critic of poetic modernity, its leading modernist poet and a physicist turned storyteller, and concerned, by its own decade-old definition, with nothing less than the modernity of literature, art and knowledge.