Before 1966, the date of publication of Ghāʾib Tuʿma Farmān's first novel, al-Nakhla wa-’l-jīrān (‘he Palm Tree and the Neighbours’), several Iraqi novels of note had already appeared, apart from the three works discussed in Chapter 1. Among these are ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Fāḍil's Majnūnān (‘Two Madmen’, 1939) and Dhū al-Nūn Ayyūb's al-Yad wa-’l-arḍ wa-’l-māʾ (‘Hand, Earth and Water’, 1948). However, none of these works is on the same artistic level as Farmān's al-Nakhla wa-’l-jīrān, which is unanimously considered to be the true beginning of the artistically mature Iraqi novel (see, for example, Aḥmad 1977a: 115).

The main subject of this chapter is the depiction of Baghdad in al-Nakhla wa-’l-jīrān, but we will begin by giving a brief outline of the author's life and work.

Farmān's Life: Baghdad to Moscow

Farmān was born in Baghdad in the old, poor quarter of al-Murabbaʿ in 1927 and grew up during the Second World War. As we have seen in Chapter 2, this was a period of great political instability, which nevertheless played a positive role in the literary formation of Farmān's generation, as it further opened up Baghdad to outside influences.