About Al-Turath al-Sha'bi

Al-Turath al-Sha'bi

Al-Turath al-Sha'bi, meaning Popular Heritage or Folk Heritage, is a Baghdad magazine devoted to Iraqi folk heritage, folklore, popular customs and oral tradition, published under Iraq's cultural authorities. First published in 1969, it gave Iraq's spoken, sung, crafted and customary culture a scholarly journal of its own, at a time when the state was systematically collecting the folklore of the Iraqi people. Cited among the notable scholarly and cultural periodicals that gave Iraq a leading place in Arab intellectual life before 1990, it later resumed publication in the era of digitisation and open access.

First Published in 1969

The journal's founding date is documented in academic scholarship on Ba'thist Iraq. Amatzia Baram's study Culture, History and Ideology in the Formation of Ba'thist Iraq records that the academic journal al-Turath al-Sha'bi was first published in 1969 and is dedicated to Iraqi folklore, and that it continued to appear regularly into the 1980s. That testimony anchors the magazine in the first years of Ba'thist rule, when the new regime was building cultural institutions and defining the place of folklore within its vision of Iraqi identity.

Its appearance was not universally read as innocent scholarship. Baram notes that some observers saw the journal's launch as a symptom of separatism, a reminder that folklore, the culture of regions, villages and communities, could pull against central narratives even as the state sponsored its collection. The journal thus began inside a debate about what Iraqi folklore meant politically, a debate its own contributors continued in its pages.

Folklore as the Art of the Everyday

In its first decade, most of the journal's articles dealt with folklore in a defined sense. Baram summarises the working definition its contributors used: folklore as the art of the everyday, excluding extinct verbal traditions and material examples no longer in use. The emphasis fell on living practice: the customs, tales, proverbs, songs, crafts and rituals that Iraqis still performed, rather than on antiquarian remains.

That definition shaped a distinctive editorial character. Al-Turath al-Sha'bi documented the culture of markets, villages, weddings, mourning gatherings and workshops across Iraq's regions, treating ordinary people's creativity as a subject worthy of the same scholarly care given to classical texts. In a country of deep regional variety, from the marshes of the south to the mountains of Kurdistan and the desert west, the material was inexhaustible.

Folklore and Ancient Mesopotamia

The journal's most striking editorial conviction was its treatment of ancient Mesopotamian culture as part of Iraqi folklore. Despite its everyday definition, al-Turath al-Sha'bi published numerous articles on the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia: it printed a new translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the original translation having earlier appeared in the archaeology journal Sumer; translations of the second-millennium BC Hymn of Ishtar and of an Akkadian tale discovered in the library of Ashurbanipal; studies of Sumerian apparel from the third millennium BC; and studies of folk festivals in ancient Iraq, principally Babylon.

Baram explains why such material appeared in a folklore journal rather than only in Sumer: the editors wished to exhibit their conviction that these subjects appertain to Iraqi folklore. One leading contributor stated the rationale directly, explaining that Iraqis collect their heritage because it enriches their literature and customs and contains psychological indicators of the collective character of the Iraqi individual throughout the centuries, apparently reaching back to the Sumerian or Babylonian period. The journal sporadically developed that theme of continuity, of an Iraqi culture persisting since the dawn of history, into a signature argument.

Within Iraq's Cultural Institutions

Al-Turath al-Sha'bi was published under Iraq's cultural authorities, within the same state system that maintained the Ministry of Culture journals al-Aqlam and al-Mawrid. Folklore had its own institutional home in that system: the poet Abd al-Razzaq Abd al-Wahid, editor-in-chief of al-Aqlam, also served as director of the Centre for Iraqi Folklore, an indication of how seriously the ministry treated the field and how closely its journals and institutes were staffed by the same cultural figures.

The journal's work complemented the collecting activity of those institutes. Field collectors gathered tales, songs and customs; the journal analysed, compared and published them, and carried the results to scholars across the Arab world. Together with al-Mawrid, which covered the written heritage, it completed the ministry's documentation of Iraqi culture in both its learned and its popular forms.

Contributors and the Study of Iraqi Folk Culture

The journal's contributors included folklorists, historians, archaeologists and literary scholars, a mixture reflected in its contents, which moved from village custom to cuneiform epic. The Baghdad scholar Abd al-Hamid al-Aluji, whose contributions to heritage studies are the subject of university research, belongs to the milieu the journal represented: scholars who codified the social history of Baghdad and Iraq from inherited folklore, tales, proverbs, crafts and industries handed down through generations.

For later researchers, the journal is a primary source for Iraqi folk culture as it was recorded before the upheavals of the 1990s and 2000s. Customs documented in its pages have in many cases changed or disappeared under the pressure of war, displacement and urbanisation, which gives its fieldwork-based articles an archival value beyond their original scholarly purpose.

Recognition in Iraqi Cultural History

Surveys of Iraqi literature and publishing single out al-Turath al-Sha'bi by name. Histories of Iraqi literature record that, prior to 1990, Iraq developed a notable tradition of cultural and scholarly periodicals, including the journal of Sumer, the journal of the Iraqi Academy of Sciences, and Majallat al-Turath al-Sha'bi, which contributed significantly to Arab intellectual and cultural life. A folklore journal named in that company, alongside the archaeology and academy journals, had clearly established itself as one of the pillars of Iraqi scholarly publishing.

Baram's study likewise treats the journal as evidence in the cultural history of Ba'thist Iraq: testimony, in his phrase, to the intention of teaching the public to associate folklore with ancient Mesopotamian culture. Whether read as scholarship, as cultural policy or as both, the journal shaped how Iraqis were invited to understand their own past.

War, Disruption and the Vulnerability of Heritage

The heritage al-Turath al-Sha'bi documented proved tragically vulnerable. The sanctions era of the 1990s strained all Iraqi publishing, and the 2003 invasion brought looting to museums, libraries and archives, while subsequent conflicts displaced the very communities whose customs the journal had recorded. Folk heritage, carried in memory and practice rather than in objects, suffers a quieter kind of loss when villages empty and generations scatter.

Iraqi cultural memory work in recent years, including grassroots efforts such as the Iraqi Print Archive, which collects and digitises Iraq's surviving newspapers, magazines and printed ephemera, reflects the same recognition that animates the journal's revival: that printed records of Iraqi culture are a form of survival, and that archiving is a protective and reconstructive act in a country whose cultural memory has suffered decades of disruption.

Resumption, Digitisation and Open Access

Publishing histories of Iraq record that historical cultural journals such as al-Mawrid, al-Aqlam and al-Turath al-Sha'bi resumed publication in the later 2010s, aided by digitisation and open access. The resumption formed part of a broader rebuilding of Iraqi scholarly communication, in which the Iraqi Academic Scientific Journals platform gathered hundreds of periodicals into digital form and university publishing expanded.

For a folklore journal, digitisation carries a particular promise. Its back issues hold records of oral traditions and customs collected from informants across twentieth-century Iraq; open digital access makes that record available to the descendants of those communities, including the large Iraqi diaspora, and to folklorists worldwide comparing the popular heritage of the Arab world.

Legacy

Al-Turath al-Sha'bi's legacy is the scholarly dignity it conferred on the everyday culture of Iraq. Founded in 1969, published under the country's cultural authorities, and continued regularly into the 1980s, it defined folklore as the art of the everyday while insisting that Iraq's folk inheritance reached back unbroken to Sumer and Babylon. It published the Gilgamesh epic as folklore, documented the customs of living communities, and earned a named place in histories of Iraqi intellectual life.

Its resumption in the digital era confirms the durability of its founding wager: that the tales, proverbs, festivals and crafts of ordinary Iraqis are not decoration on the nation's culture but one of its deepest sources, worth collecting, studying and preserving in print.