The first lecture in the Hanna Batatu Lecture Series is entitled “The 1908 Constitutional Revolution as a Critical Point in the History of the Levant (Bilad al-Sham): A Reading of the Problematics of Local History”, and was given by the Palestinian sociologist, Professor Salim Tamari. Dr. Salim Tamari is professor of sociology at Birzeit University and an adjunct professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. His lecture addresses the Constitutional Revolution that overthrew the Ottoman Sultan Hamid’s tyranny and opened the door for a new socio-political system in the capitals of the Levant. He will present a new reading of the contributions by local historians, who had different positions concerning the Constitutional Revolution and the concept of Ottoman decentralization. The lecture particularly tackles the critical social changes that swept through the city of Nablus during the revolution and the counter-revolution (1909) through the works of the following local historians: Rafiq al-Tamimi and Mohamad Bahjat (ethnography of Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Balqa); Ihsan el-Nimir (defending the Sultanic Regime and Abdulhamid’s administration against the Young Turks) and Muhammad Izzat Darwaza (analyzing the Constitutional Revolution and the counter-revolution.) Dr. Salim Tamari’s reading builds on the legacy of Professor Hanna Batatu through analyzing the relationship between rural areas and the city, the relationship between peasants and the state, and the structural change in the composition of the local groups that dominated the central state.

Titled “The History of the Iraqi Communist Party: Between the Academic Hanna Batatu and the Political Activist Aziz Sibahi”, the third lecture in the Hanna Batatu Lecture Series was given by the Iraqi historian, Thabit A.J. Abdullah. Thabit A.J. Abdullah was born and raised in Baghdad Iraq. He received his PhD in history in 1992 from Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He currently holds the position of Professor and Chair of the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Canada. Thabet’s lecture focused on the different approaches adopted by Batatu and Sbahi in writing the history of the Iraqi Communist Party. In 2002, after decades of delays and postponements, the Iraqi Communist Party finally published a work outlining and analysing its history. The threev olume work written by one of the Party’s long-serving cadres, Aziz Sbahi, appeared as a direct response to Hanna Batatu’s monumental work on Iraq. Batatu had long hoped that the Party would respond to his work by publishing their own version of how their history unfolded and was delighted to hear that Sbahi had started to work on it. Unfortunately, he would not live long enough to read or comment upon it. While both, Batatu and Sbahi, adopted a Marxist approach to writing the history of the Communist Party, their respective backgrounds left its mark on their work. Batatu was an academic of Palestinian origin. He was educated at Georgetown and Harvard in the United States and had an uncanny ability to place his subject within the broader social and economic framework of modern Iraq. Batatu tended to emphasize the objective conditions in which the Party developed and the general social background of its members. Sbahi, on the other hand, was an Iraqi from a poor family background. With very little formal education he was, on the whole, a self-educated man who joined the Communist Party in his youth and spent his entire life struggling within its ranks. His history is written from the perspective of one who lived the struggle from within and emphasizes the subjective conditions and individual decisions taken at specific instances. After looking at examples of the two authors’ differing approaches to the writing of the history of the Iraqi Communist Party, attention was turned to the present. The question, which was asked at the end of the presentation, was whether the two approaches may help us shed light on the current condition of the Party after the American invasion of 2003?