Manufactured memory for a manufactured Iraq

The debate over reforming history curricula in Britain has ignited a question that appears simple on the surface yet is profound at its core: who has the right to narrate the past? Stephen Bush wrote in the Financial Times that the new proposals reveal “the appeal of right‑-;-wing populism, which seeks a comforting history rather than a true one.”
That single sentence is enough to unlock what happened in Iraq after 2003, only in a harsher, more brutal form. Iraq did not enter a debate about curricula-;- it entered a process of reinventing memory itself, crafting a sectarian substitute for its real memory. The project began in the very preamble of the disfigured constitution drafted under the supervision of the American civil administrator Paul Bremer during the occupation, with the unmistakable finger-print-s of his adviser Noah Feldman.
In Britain, no matter how heated the debate becomes, academic institutions and an independent press remain capable of dissecting political discourse. In Iraq, memory was treated as raw material, malleable, meltable, ready to be reshaped according to the needs of the new ruling order. The goal was not to review the past´-or-understand it, but to produce an alternative past, one aligned with rising sectarian narratives and granting them symbolic legitimacy.
Stephen Bush notes that the dispute over the history curriculum is not an academic quarrel so much as a political battle over British identity. The new proposals pushed by right‑-;-wing forces aim to present a “simplified” and “comforting” history, one that highlights the glories of the British Empire while avoiding its darker´-or-more contentious chapters. This tendency reflects, as the article argues, the allure of right‑-;-wing populism, which offers an easy narrative of identity in a time when many feel unsettled by social and economic change.
This is precisely what happened in Iraq, but in a far cruder fashion. Instead of offering a unified national narrative, memory was fragmented into competing stories, each claiming absolute truth. This fragmentation was not the result of academic research´-or-critical review, but of selective invocation of religious and historical texts, some fabricated, some obscure, repackaged as “sacred references.” Their -function- was not knowledge, but incitement, turning the past into a daily battleground.
In Iraq, history became a film screened every day in streets, squares, and on television, as if its events had occurred only yesterday. Scenes from the first Islamic century are presented as though they belong in the evening news, used to re‑-;-divide society against itself. No one asks: Why are we reenacting these scenes now? No one examines what we are doing to ourselves when we live inside a memory that is not ours, walking in our ---sleep--- toward a historical myth.
“Real history is built on analysing evidence and understanding complexity.” But the manufactured Iraq that emerged after 2003 chose the opposite path: history without evidence, without complexity, without critique. A history reproduced in sermons, in media, in rituals, and in the unofficial curricula absorbed by society every day. A history that does not aim to enlighten, but to entrench division.
The examples are many. They begin with Nouri al‑-;-Maliki dividing Iraqis into the “Army of Hussein” and the “Army of Yazid,” and extend to councils that summon events more than a thousand years old to justify contemporary political positions. Sermons turn historical figures into icons of loyalty and enmity. Informal curricula teach children that the past has not ended, that they are heirs to a conflict they cannot escape. Media presents history as an open battlefield, not as a lesson in understanding.
At its core, the issue is not merely falsifying certain events´-or-inflating others, as happens with Iraq’s very recent political history, but altering the -function- of memory itself. In healthy societies, memory acts as a bridge between what was and what could be. In manufactured Iraq, memory has become a wall, blocking any passage toward the future. When memory is engineered to serve a sectarian identity, it ceases to be the memory of a nation and becomes an archive of postponed vengeance. The past becomes not what we learn from, but what we are summoned to fight for every day.
And if populism in Britain seeks a “comforting history” to soothe present anxieties, sectarian populism in Iraq seeks an inflamed history that keeps the present in a state of permanent emergency. Comforting history produces a voter afraid of change-;- inflamed history produces a society afraid of itself. In both cases, politics is hijacked through the gateway of curricula and memory, but the difference is that democracy there imposes-limit-s on the manipulation, while its absence here leaves the door wide open to turning the entire country into a laboratory for endless replicas of the past.
In Britain, the curriculum debate passes through committees, universities, and a press capable of exposing manipulation. In Iraq, the picture is far bleaker: no institutions protect memory from distortion, no political environment allows a free discussion of the past. The struggle over history is not a struggle over knowledge, but over ownership of memory.
The result is that Iraq today lives with a manufactured memory, one that resembles neither its real history nor even its recent past. A memory that reproduces the wound instead of healing it, turning the past into a weapon rather than a lesson. The British debate, with all its political maneuvering, appears almost like a democratic luxury compared to what unfolded in Iraq. There, history is debated within institutions-;- here, history is remade outside any institution.
The real lesson lies not in the content of the curricula, but in the way curricula are used as political instruments in Iraq today. The struggle over history exposes the fragility of contemporary national identity and the ability of sectarianism to turn even schoolbooks into symbolic battlegrounds.
And unless Iraq regains its true memory, one that unites rather than divides, understands rather than condemns, it will continue living inside an endless film, a film that does not recount the past but devours it.

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