ABSTRACT
Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the Ba‘th regime’s cultural policies, not least of all because the regime itself consciously turned culture into an instrument for moulding Iraqi society in its own image.1 The state sponsored cultural activities in the fields of painting/sculpture, theatre/cinema, literature/poetry, monumental architecture, etc. Although prior to 1991 the Ba‘thist state thoroughly penetrated Iraqi society and turned even the arts into an instrument of state power, questions remain as to how successful and all-encompassing these efforts actually were and in which ways society responded to them. It is beyond the scope of this study to write a comprehensive history of culture or the arts in Ba‘thist Iraq. Neither is this author qualified to evaluate the artistic quality of individual works. The following chapter will merely portray the main developments in the above mentioned fields with an eye towards the degree to which the arts were absorbed into the expanding state and reduced to an instrument of the regime. It will point to ambiguities, controversies and autonomous spaces that might serve to illustrate the perseverance of a rudimentary political sphere expressed through art, even in the heydays of the regime.