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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2009
This book has a story for me. As a young boy in February 1949, in my first year of grammar school, on a sunny morning in Baghdad, I passed by some bodies of communists who had been hanged. Later, my father and I had the following conversation:
“Hanged. They must be criminals.”
“Not quite.”
“They were hanged; they must have done something.”
“Well, they really didn't act, but they were contemplating.”
“They did something, then.”
“No, no, no, they didn't. They were thinking of, hoping for, an action.”
“But you told me the law does not punish you until you do something.”
“When you grow up, you will understand.”
I went home and clipped the newspapers that day, and have done so every day since. And since that day, I have been trying to understand.
Though I have never joined any political party, nor been actively involved in one, from my undergraduate years on I have felt driven to understand, and eventually as an academician to explain, but never as an apologist, the communist movement in Iraq. I wanted to write my first book on this topic but had to wait a quarter of a century to see the conclusion of the Cold War. I felt that to understand a movement, one had to have the writings of the participants and their official literature and be able to study their experiences from their own perspectives.
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