1980: a Year in the Life of Iraq

In 1980, only one year after taking over the presidency of the country, Saddam Hussein launched a military attack on neighbouring Iran. The ensuing war lasted eight years, thus becoming one of the longest armed conflicts of the twentieth century.

In 1980, Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr retired from his job as personnel manager at the Marine Transportation Department and began writing full-time.

Largely thanks to the novels that he published from 1987 (the year before the war with Iran ended) until the end of his life (2006), Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr has emerged as one of the key writers of the Fifties generation. His novels, along with those of Ghāʾib Ṭuʿma Farmān and Fuʾād al-Takarlī (‘the golden trio’ of the Iraqi novel; Badr 2011: 6) have been loosely defined as realistic. As we have discussed above in Chapter 3 in our analysis of Farmān's al-Nakhla wa-’l-jīrān (‘he Palm Tree and the Neighbours’), this overly abstract definition needs further qualification. However, it is useful in so far as it points to the fact that all these writers were inspired by real events taking place in Iraq at specific historical junctures.