The Apostolic Delegation of Iraq and the Hashemite Monarchy: Church–State Relations in a Time of Contentious Politics. 1939-1958

Throughout the first four decades of its modern history, Iraq experienced repeated attempts to impose integration and unity on a fragmented territory and society, whether violently in the 1920s and 1930s through military campaigns against rebellious Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis, and Shia tribes, or coercively through political and economic measures, especially since the 1950s thanks to the growing oil economy. C. Tripp points out that as the Iraqi State-building process progressed, ‘any construction of an Iraqi identity became inherently ambiguous, since it would be largely determined by individuals who had an overdeveloped sense of Iraq as a power apparatus and an underdeveloped sense of Iraq as a community’. At the same time, since the end of the 1930s, Iraqi politics had been dominated by increasing competition within the ruling political oligarchy and by the mushrooming of various opposition fronts, both in the military and in party politics, to the point that by 1952 the overthrow of the monarchy and its system of power was increasingly seen as necessary and urgent.