Managing Iraq’s Cultural Heritage in the 20th Century: Foreign Occupations, Wars and Dictatorships
Dr. Saad Eskander | Cultural Heritage Advisor, Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Antiquities, Iraq; Former Director, Iraq National Library
Throughout its history, Iraq has faced waves of foreign invasions, armed conflicts, regime changes, and natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes and epidemics. All these phenomena have affected the country’s architectonic, cultural and literary heritage. The collections of manuscripts held in different Iraqi institutions, alongside other objects, have been threatened, dislocated and often destroyed during such turbulent times.
Dr. Saad Eskander’s keynote lecture presents the fate of Iraq’s cultural heritage in the 20th and 21st centuries. By exploring continuities and changes in times of drastic political instability and turmoil, Dr. Eskander’s presentation serves as a pertinent blueprint for some of the questions raised by the workshop “The Mongols’ Baghdad: Knowledge Transmission through Manuscript Cultures Before and After the Conquest” about the 13th and 14th centuries.
Taking the Ottoman period as starting point, Dr. Eskander discusses cultural heritage policies throughout the British occupation and the Mandate eras before focusing on the fate of cultural heritage in the independent Republic of Iraq as it faced dictatorships, armed conflicts and both internal and external struggles for power.
Embedded within this political framework, Dr. Eskander discusses the challenges of managing cultural heritage in general, and Iraqi manuscript collections in particular, from legal and administrative viewpoints. The lecture will close with insights into the current situation in Iraq, and possible avenues towards safeguarding the country’s manuscript heritage kept in private and public collections.
Dr. Saad Eskander holds a PhD in international relations and history from the London School of Economics. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he was director of the Iraq National Library and Archive. He wrote a blog diary reporting from Baghdad about the subsequent civil war, later published on the British Library’s website and printed editions. Today, he serves as Cultural Heritage Advisor to the Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Antiquities in Iraq. He has received a number of awards for his commitment to preserving the cultural heritage of Iraq, and is Iraq’s representative at the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for promoting the Return of Cultural Property to the Countries of their Origins.
Inaugural lecture to the international workshop “The Mongols’ Baghdad” that is jointly organized by the projects Nomads’ Manuscripts Landscape (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and Bibliotheca Arabica (Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities).