When most people think of the name "Saddam Hussein", the connotations aren't positive. After all, there was a time, not that long ago, when Saddam was considered to be the prime threat to world peace; responsible for two wars fought against the United States in Iraq, and a key player in the war against terror. In the west, his impassive, moustached face inspired equal parts dread and caricature and in the States, his execution was widely celebrated after he was sentenced to death by hanging in 2006. The essayist, journalist and author Christopher Hitchens once stated "Saddam Hussein is a bad guy's bad guy. He's not just bad in himself but the cause of badness in others. While he survives not only are the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples compelled to live in misery and fear ... but their neighbours are compelled to live in fear as well."
Hussein was President of Iraq from 1979 to 2003. A leading member of the Ba'ath Party, a revolutionary Arab socialist-nationalist group, Saddam was determined to modernise Iraq and improve its ailing infrastructure. Yet due to the various divisions in the country - between Sunni and Shi'ite, and Arab and Kurd - Saddam felt justified in being as brutal as possible to pursue this industrialisation. Over the next 30 years, Hussein would improve the Iraqi economy and grant a few sparing women's rights. Yet he also brutally persecuted ethnic minorities, particularly Kurds and Jews, and murdered hundreds of thousands with chemical weapons during the Al-Anfal campaign.
This is the official history of the man - the side of him which made headlines and kept the western world afraid. But what you might not know is that the Iraqi dictator actually had literary ambitions. In fact, the mass murderer wrote several books, including a 160-page allegorical love story which you can even find on Amazon. The romance novel, which is entitled
Zabiba and the King ($29.95 hardcover, $13.95 paperback) tells the story of a powerful ruler of medieval Iraq who lives in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit. It follows his love affair with a beautiful peasant girl named Zabibah, who is trapped in an abusive and loveless marriage with a husband who rapes her - an act which apparently symbolises the United States' invasion of Iraq.
In one memorable passage, Hussein describes a bizarre sex act between a woman and a bear, writing: "Even an animal respects a man’s desire, if it wants to copulate with him ... Doesn’t a female bear try to please a herdsman when she drags him into the mountains as it happens in the North of Iraq? She drags him into her den so he, obeying her desire, would copulate with her."
When it was first published back in 2000, the CIA analysed the book closely. They determined that it was likely that most of the book was ghostwritten, with only a portion of the material actually provided by Hussein himself. The book was a bestseller in Iraq when it was originally published for 1,500 dinars ($0.50) and an estimated one million copies were sold. The book's royalties all went to "the poor, the orphans, the miserable, the needy, and [other] charities."
The Iraqi publishers used a number of images created by Canadian artist Jonathon Earl Bowser as illustrations the novel. Bowser did not authorise the use of his work for Hussein's novels and has pursued compensation for copyright infringement.
[[instagramwidget||https://www.instagram.com/p/q30dZ1lI6F/]]
The novel's blurb states: "While it is no secret that the release of this book in Arabic was an overnight best seller in Iraq and even became an on-stage musical production in Baghdad, the book promotes the establishment of a quasi-democratic form of government that the editor and others believe would not have been allowed to be published in Iraq unless Saddam were intimately involved in its creation. Many Iraqis firmly believe it was penned by Saddam Hussein."
Other novels written by Hussein include the 713-page text The Fortified Castle, which concerns the delayed wedding of a Kurdish girl to Iraqi hero Sabah, who fought in the Iran-Iraq war. This particular doorstopper uses the metaphor a "fortified castle" to discuss issues of nationalist martyrdom in Saddam's Iraq. Despite repeated requests to divide or sell the building, Sabah's mother refuses to let it go, stating that it cannot be purchased with money but: "Only those who give it their blood and defend it are its rightful owners." This is a clear reference to the militarisation and jingoism which characterised Saddam's regime.
Hussein's last book was entitled Begone, Demons and was allegedly finished the day before the US invasion. It involves a Zionist-Christian conspiracy against Arabs and Muslims. The Arab army manages to defeat the conspirators by invading their enemy's land and destroying two massive towers, in a disturbing reference to the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Although it's doubtful that Hussein's furtive scribblings will ever be taken seriously as a romance novel (I can't see readers swooning over the protagonist the same way they do with Mr Darcy for example) these texts are still valuable documents, giving us an intimate insight into the mind of one of the the great butchers of the modern age, and the ethos which motivated him to oppress and torture so many. Perhaps we can use these insights to guard against other despots in the future, or work towards ending extremism and terrorism around the world.
