Change and Continuity in Arab Iraqi Education: Sunni and Shi’i Discourses in Iraqi Textbooks Before and After 2003

Abstract

This article investigates Iraqi schooling during the 1990s under Ba’thist rule and after the regime’s fall in 2003 and compares the treatment of Islam in the curriculum. I focus on the degree to which Iraqi textbooks under Saddam Hussein contained a Sunni bias and the changes introduced immediately after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq in 2003. To what degree did international actors effect curricular reforms during the years that followed the invasion? What educational policies did the Iraqi central government follow since then? I find that, as part of its religious policies during the 1990s, the regime symbolically acknowledged a Shi’i perspective in textbook narratives. However, emergency revisions carried out on behalf of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) by international agencies in 2003–4 strengthened the Sunni bias in Iraqi textbooks, rather than erased signs of sectarianism from the textbooks. Since the CPA was dissolved in 2004, the government has gradually introduced more references to the Shi’i tradition into textbook narratives.