This review was first presented at the 2025 Graduate Student Book Review Colloquium on Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies organized by the Maydan/ AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies at GMU on December 18, 2025.
In this book, the author makes a comparison between the literature of fiction novels and short stories written in Arabic and Persian that cover the narratives about the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s. The author argues that the literature produced during and after the war has changed over the years from a state-imposed narrative of heroism to a counternarrative of loss. As the author notes in the introduction, the book has three aims. One, to inform the English audience about the role the Iraq-Iran war played in their contemporary literature. The second aim of the book is “it highlights how contemporary fiction contributes to robust social and political debates about the recent past in Iran and Iraq” (3). The third aim is to contribute to comparative literature in South-South studies by focusing on war and its afterlives. In this book review, I argue that the book successfully fulfilled the first and third goals; however, it did not fulfill the second promise, for it did not mention how a certain fictional text led to a social-political event in real life in Iraq or Iran.
Mossavi’s approach focuses on Arabic and Persian fiction, novels, and short stories, written about the Iran–Iraq War between 1980 and 2018. The book comprises five chapters, with the introduction and a conclusion making it seven. The first chapter is titled “Mobilizing Literature”. It covers the wartime literature produced by the government-sponsored cultural institutions in Iran and Iraq. The author makes a comparison between the narratives of “Sacred Defense” (adabiyāt-e Defāʿ-e Moqaddas) in Iran with the narratives of “Saddam Hussein’s Qadisiyya” (adab Qādisiyyat Ṣaddām) in Iraq. This chapter begins with the term “war culture,” borrowed from Patrick Deer (2009), which refers to the state’s utilization of all its cultural production institutions to impose its narrative. Literature is one of these tools. Moosavi argues that during the war, the two states’ literature linked the war front with heroism, martyrdom, and the demonization of the enemy.
The second chapter is called “Representations of Survival and Loss”. It covers the literature produced at the beginning of the 1990s, where authors such as Muhammad Khu dayyir, Luʾay Hamza ʿAbbas, Shahriar Mandanipour, and Amir Hasan Cheheltan tried to propagate war narratives without criticizing them. They focused on the home front, where the civilians’ experiences in daily life during the war were filled with the loss of loved ones, doubt, and survival.
Subsequently, “War Front Apocrypha” covers the writings of Ahmad Dehqan, Hossein Mortezaeian Abkenar, Jinan Jassim Hillawi, and Muhsin al-Ramli in the 1990s and 2000s. These authors challenged the ‘truth’ of the official representation of the war front not by attacking the ideology but by giving a voice to the unwilling soldiers and deserters. In doing so, the analysis revealed previously obscured dimensions of the war, including “cowardice, cruel leaders, and soldierly disobedience”.
These authors challenged the ‘truth’ of the official representation of the war front not by attacking the ideology but by giving a voice to the unwilling soldiers and deserters. In doing so, the analysis revealed previously obscured dimensions of the war, including “cowardice, cruel leaders, and soldierly disobedience.”
The fourth chapter is called “Writers’ Home Front Wars”, which covers some writings from the late 1990s to 2015 of Betool Khedairi, Sinan Antoon, Hushang Golshiri, and Alireza Gholami. These authors offered a new perspective on the war by also focusing on the home front life. Their novels were about independent artists who tried to survive the war culture, despite failing – their experiences emphasize the struggle between the regime and individualistic artists.
The fifth chapter is titled “Ghosts of a Violent Past”. It covers the writings of Ahmed Saadawi, Hasan Blasim, Diaa Jubaili, and Nasim Marashi from 2008 to 2018. They demonstrate the war as an episode of a series of wars in the world, and for them, its afterlives are still influencing the two countries. ‘Afterlives’ means the postwar experiences of the civilians, and how they live with their traumas caused by the war. These writings explicitly criticize the war, mostly by Iraqi writers more than the Iranians, because the regime in Iran is still the same since the 1980s, meanwhile, the Ba’th rule in Iraq ended in 2003. They also criticize the environmental damage caused by the war, particularly in the border zone between Iran and Iraq.
The author’s methods of supporting his argument throughout the book are effective and coherent across the chapters. The outline of the book simplified the argument into points that set the basis for the following one in a smooth way. Also, the language of the book is clear, which makes the book easy to follow. The book fulfilled two of its aims, it claimed at the beginning. The first aim was to show how the Iraq-Iran War of the 1980s influenced contemporary literature in both countries. This point is achieved throughout the whole book excellently. The book, at the same time, fulfilled the third aim, which was contributing to contemporary comparative literature through the theme of war and its afterlives by the chosen texts on both sides, Iraq and Iran.
Yet, the book did not mention how a certain novel or a short story contributed to the social and political debate in Iraq or Iran.
The book kept on mentioning and discussing texts only, not what kind of discourse they created in the society, and whether or not they pushed the masses or part of them, in a social or political particular direction. In this way, the book did not fulfill its second aim.
Another point is that the book is descriptive. According to Munira Khayyat, war is a generative condition where ordinary people have adapted, and developed resistance mechanisms in daily life (2022). The novels and short stories that Moosavi discussed in this book convey the same meaning as Munira’s. However, Moosavi did not state what he meant by the ‘war’ theoretically, nor did he cite anyone’s theoretical definition of it. Additionally, the book lacks a comprehensive theory that explains the transformation of narratives in fictional literature, or even some of the contradictory observations Moosavi makes in the concluding chapter about how the masses reacted or interacted with these short stories and novels. For example, the nostalgia for the Bath rule in Iraq felt by the young generation, and the re-emergence of Saddam’s Qadissiya’s songs, such as: “Yā Gāʿ, Turābich Kāfūrī” (“Oh Homeland, Your Earth is my Camphor”) on social media (Moosavi 2025, 187). In fact, this point he raised contradicted his second aim of the book, where the author was supposed to show how the counternarrative of the Iraqi authors, especially after 2003, against the state’s agenda, contributed to the social and political debate.
Because if the young generation is now exposed to literature that opposes the causes and the state’s narrative of the war, then how come they are recycling some of its songs that glorify the war in the contemporary day?
To conclude, this book’s contribution remains significant since it directly deals with texts written in Arabic and Persian, and puts them in one frame of politics and its reflection in literature. I recommend the book to anyone interested in learning about contemporary history and the social and cultural dimensions of Iraq and Iran through literature. In addition to those who are interested in themes of war, the battlefield, and the civilians’ experience of war in the cities. The reader does not need to be specialized in social sciences to understand the book. It explains very well the socio-political context of the countries, the writers, and the works they published.
References
Deer, Patrick. 2009. Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature. Oxford University Press.
Moosavi, Amir. 2025. Dust That Never Settles Literary Afterlives Of The Iran-Iraq War. Stanford University Press.
Khayyat, Munira. 2022. A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon. Oakland: University of California Press.