About Al-Bilad

Al-Bilad

Al-Bilad was an Arabic-language political daily newspaper published in Baghdad, Iraq. Its first issue appeared on 25 October 1929, and it was founded by Raphael Butti, a lawyer and journalist who became one of the defining figures of Iraqi opinion journalism in the monarchy era. Iraqi press histories describe Al-Bilad as a political newspaper and count it among the most famous Iraqi newspapers published in Baghdad in its time. Butti kept the paper going for some twenty-seven years, until his death in 1956, and after his death his sons, led by Kamal Raphael Butti, continued to issue it until 1963. The paper's catalogue record in the Al-Hikmah catalogue of newspapers and magazines published in Baghdad between 1889 and 1971 gives the end of its run as 8 February 1963. Because the newspaper is closed, this profile is written about it in the past tense.

Founding in Baghdad in 1929

Al-Bilad was launched at the end of the 1920s, a formative decade for the Iraqi press in which Baghdad supported a growing number of political, literary and intellectual papers. An Iraqi academic survey of Baghdad journalism in the monarchy period records that Al-Bilad was issued on 25 October 1929 by Raphael Butti, that it belonged to the political press, and that it was, in that survey's judgement, close to being among the most famous Iraqi newspapers to appear in Baghdad for a long period. The Azzaman newspaper's series on Iraqi press history likewise records that in 1929 Butti settled on issuing his political daily Al-Bilad, after earlier ventures that included a monthly literary magazine. The paper's longevity set it apart from many contemporaries: whereas numerous Baghdad titles of the period appeared and vanished within a few years, Al-Bilad remained in the market continuously, apart from official suspensions, for more than three decades in total.

Raphael Butti, founder and editor

The newspaper cannot be separated from its founder. Raphael Butrus Issa Butti was born in Mosul in 1901 and was educated at the Dominican fathers' schools in Mosul during the First World War. He obtained a teachers' training certificate in 1921 and a law degree in 1929, the year Al-Bilad appeared, and the batch record for the paper likewise describes him as a lawyer and journalist. Ibrahim Salih Shukr recalled first meeting the young Butti in 1915 in a bookshop in Mosul, during Shukr's Ottoman-era exile, with their friendship later consolidating in Baghdad. Butti's journalistic apprenticeship was served on Razuq Ghannam's newspaper Al-Iraq, and at the same time he worked as a correspondent for newspapers in Jerusalem and Egypt. In 1923 he issued a monthly literary magazine, Al-Hurriyya, which ran for two years, before settling in 1929 on the political daily that became his life's work. His name stood at the head of Al-Bilad, in the paper's masthead, for as long as the paper existed.

A platform for the Hashimi circle

From the early 1930s Al-Bilad was closely associated with the political current around Yasin al-Hashimi, the influential minister and prime minister, who formed the National Brotherhood Party to campaign against the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930. Azzaman's press-history account records that Hashimi facilitated the publication of his views first in Al-Akhbar, which Butti issued in partnership with Jibran Malkun, and then in Al-Bilad, which Butti launched and which lived long. When Hashimi chose on 2 August 1931 to issue his party's own newspaper, Al-Ikha al-Watani, with Kamil al-Jadirji as its responsible manager, he continued to rely on Butti's newspapers whenever the government suspended the party paper. The same account observes that Al-Akhbar, Al-Bilad, Al-Shaab and Nida al-Shaab were effectively like a single newspaper in political approach and in the journalistic craft at which Butti excelled. An elite of the journalists, politicians and writers of those years published articles, comments and opinions in Butti's papers, among them Yasin al-Hashimi himself, Muhammad Baqir al-Shabibi, Fahmi al-Mudarris, Ibrahim Salih Shukr, Yunus al-Sabawi and Lutfi Bakr Sidqi, although some of them were not members of the National Brotherhood Party; even Kamil al-Jadirji, one of the party's leaders before he left it, contributed articles to Butti's newspapers. The account concludes that Hashimi and his party clearly relied on Butti's journalistic competence and experience, and that Butti was strongly loyal to Hashimi and his national ideas.

Suspensions and conflict with the authorities

Al-Bilad's political role repeatedly brought it into collision with the governments of the day. The batch record notes that it was suspended repeatedly by monarchy-era governments and that its licence was revoked in December 1954. British parliamentary records preserve an early example: in the House of Commons on 28 May 1930, the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies told members that the Iraqi government had in April of that year suspended Al-Rafidan and Fata al-Iraq for one month and Sadiq al-Iraq indefinitely, and that early in May the newspaper Al-Bilad had also been suspended. An Iraqi academic survey likewise records that Al-Bilad was subjected to suspension and then returned to publication on 21 July 1930. Suspension was the standard instrument by which monarchy-era governments disciplined an opposition-minded press, and Al-Bilad's history shows the paper absorbing such measures and reappearing, sustaining its run across successive ministries that were often hostile to it.

The 1936 coup and the Arab tour

The military coup of 29 October 1936, led by Bakr Sidqi with Hikmat Sulayman, opened a distinctive chapter in the paper's history. Azzaman's account records that Butti continued issuing Al-Bilad after the coup and decided to confront the al-Ahali group while at the same time supporting the role of the army, writing frankly about his aims in the paper. The account describes how the Sulayman government, troubled by a campaign against the coup in the Syrian, Lebanese and Egyptian press, turned to Butti to contain it: the owner of Al-Bilad was sent on an open Arab tour covering Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt, travelling on 10 November 1936, two weeks after the coup, under the cover of opening an office for his newspaper in Cairo. The historian Abd al-Razzaq al-Hasani recorded that Butti was even authorised to invite Arab journalists and writers to visit Iraq at the Iraqi government's expense, and Arab journalists duly began arriving in Baghdad and interviewing Bakr Sidqi and Hikmat Sulayman. The episode underlines the standing Al-Bilad's proprietor had acquired: a newspaper owner trusted by the government of the day with a sensitive public-diplomacy mission, even though his paper remained an independent political voice rather than an official organ.

The Bakr Sidqi interview of March 1937

The best-documented single item in Al-Bilad's pages from this period is the interview Butti conducted with Bakr Sidqi, published in the paper on 18 March 1937. Azzaman's history, reproducing the text, notes that Butti used expressions and terminology that were new in Iraqi politics and journalism. In the interview Butti asked the coup leader about rumours of communism spreading among Iraqis, and Sidqi replied with the celebrated comparison that Iraq's soil was unsuited to communism, and that whoever tried to spread communist principles in Iraq was like someone planting Basra's palm trees in the mountains of Norway, since principles, like plants, have their own environments. Sidqi added that the army would resist to the last breath any movement harmful to the throne, whether communist or otherwise. The interview is treated in the press-history literature as a deliberate intervention: it drove a wedge between the coup leadership and the al-Ahali leaders, who the next day, 19 March 1937, published in their own paper a statement rejecting communism. For the historian of the Iraqi press, the episode is primary evidence of how Al-Bilad functioned not merely as a reporter of politics but as an arena in which political alignments were made and unmade.

The 1940s: detention, organisation and feuds

Al-Bilad and its owner remained in the thick of Iraqi public life in the following decade. Azzaman's account records that after the May 1941 movement and the British military restoration, the authorities detained the journalists who had supported the movement, among them Butti, in the Amara detention camp. In December 1944 Butti was one of the newspaper owners who met, on 12 December 1944 at the offices of Kamil al-Jadirji's Sawt al-Ahali, to discuss founding a journalists' syndicate; the Iraqi Journalists' Syndicate's own history of that meeting lists Raphael Butti, owner of Al-Bilad, among the owners who signed the agreement to press the government to issue the regulation for forming the syndicate in Baghdad and to protest that censorship had exceeded its legal powers. The paper was also a party to the era's public feuds: in December 1946 Jadirji answered a Butti article criticising his National Democratic Party's participation in Nuri al-Said's government with a long article in Sawt al-Ahali on 13 December 1946 reviewing Butti's journalistic past, a quarrel that Azzaman's series treats as the revival of an antagonism dating back to 1936. Through all of this, Al-Bilad continued to appear, one of the handful of Baghdad dailies whose proprietors were themselves national political actors.

Final years and closure

The paper's last decade was harder. Its licence was revoked in December 1954, one of the repeated official measures recorded against it. Butti himself died in 1956, having maintained Al-Bilad, in Azzaman's phrase, for twenty-seven years until his death. His heirs then continued it: Azzaman records that his sons, led by Kamal Raphael Butti, went on issuing the paper until 1963, and the Al-Hikmah catalogue gives the precise closing date of 8 February 1963. That date fell in the month of the February 1963 coup that overthrew Abd al-Karim Qasim, although the sources consulted for this profile do not themselves attribute the closure to a specific cause, and none is asserted here. With its closure, Baghdad lost one of the longest-lived privately owned political dailies of the monarchy era, a paper whose lifespan had spanned the treaty struggles of the early 1930s, the first military coup, the Second World War crisis of 1941, the syndicate movement of the 1940s and the final years of the Hashemite monarchy and the Qasim period that followed it.

Legacy in Iraqi press history

Al-Bilad's afterlife is unusually well documented because both its founder and his family became historians of the Iraqi press itself. Raphael Butti's book Sihafat al-Iraq, the Iraqi press, drawn from lectures he gave at the Institute of Arab Studies in Cairo, is a standard source repeatedly cited in later scholarship, and bibliographies of Iraqi newspapers list its 1985 Baghdad edition. His son Faiq Raphael Butti, born in Baghdad in 1935, grew up in his father's printing press and learned journalism under his guidance, took a bachelor's degree in journalism at the American University in Cairo, and on returning to Iraq in 1963 became editor-in-chief of Al-Bilad, the newspaper his father had founded, according to the University of Baghdad's College of Mass Communication. Faiq Butti went on to take a doctorate in journalism in Moscow in 1979, was a founding member of the Iraqi Journalists' Syndicate, and authored more than fifteen works, including the Encyclopedia of Iraqi Press and a biography of his father's journalistic career, earning the standing described by the university as Dean of Iraqi Journalism. Through those works, the documentary record of Al-Bilad — its founding, its suspensions, its proprietor's interviews and missions — was preserved by the family that had produced the paper, which is why a closed Baghdad daily of 1929 can still be profiled today from verifiable published sources rather than from memory alone.