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O Daughter of Babylon: Journey of an Iraqi Patriot
Dr Francis Clark-Lowes will introduce the story of Riad el-Taher, businessman-turned-campaigner, and discuss his work with Dr Ali Kassem. This will be followed by a Q&A session, where the attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions.
Book Synopsis:
Riad El-Taher arrived in England to study engineering just in time to hear Tony Benn railing against Anthony Eden’s 1956 Suez policy. He was rarely far from politics thereafter. When the UN imposed crippling sanctions on his native land, he took Tam Dalyell, George Galloway and ex-BBC reporter, Tim Llewellyn, to Iraq to see their effect. At Dalyell’s suggestion he formed a widely supported organisation to campaign for a reversal of this policy; after the Second Gulf War this redirected its fire at the occupation.
He made enemies too, and believed he landed in Wandsworth jail as a result. Dalyell, who considered Riad to be motivated by ‘an un-self-seeking desire to protect the well-being of people in Iraq,’ called his treatment ‘a process of nasty, political vengeance.’
Neither a Ba’athist, nor an emigre oppositionist, Riad’s patriotic voice is arguably unique and deserves to be heard. Though polemical, and posing uncomfortable questions, this is also the story of a remarkably varied life and the wide range of people encountered in it, not least among them Saddam Hussein.
Dr Francis Clark-Lowes:
Francis has had a varied career. Leaving school at 16, he started out as an engineering apprentice, and later gained a degree in Sociology. He was a civil servant for 6 years, during which time he studied Arabic. After that he walked (literally) to Cairo, where he worked as a teacher in a secondary school for a year. He travelled on round the world, working for a while in Japan, before returning to the UK. There he was recruited by the English Language Training department of Saudi Arabian Airlines, and spent 9 years in the kingdom. Returning again to the UK he obtained an MA in the Psychology of Therapy, and then a doctorate on an aspect of the history of psychoanalysis. For many years he worked as a psychotherapist, while continuing his interest in the Middle East, doing German translation work and running adult education classes on a range of subjects. He has published his doctoral thesis on the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel, and, as editor-cum-ghost-writer, the book which is the subject of today's presentation. He is currently working on a history of a church in Hastings.
Dr Ali Kassem:
Ali Kassem is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut through the support and funding of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Ali is also a school tutor at the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex, where he obtained his PhD in 2020, and a steering committee member at the Sussex Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies and a management committee member at the Middle East North Africa Centre at Sussex. Ali has previously held research and/or teaching positions at the Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, the Lebanese Centre for Policy Studies, the Lebanese American University, AUB, and others. His main interests are in Post-, anti-, and decolonial work, ethnic and racial studies, inequalities, Islam and Knowledge making on which Ali has published multiple peer-reviewed and non-academic articles and essays. His current research focuses on the lived experiences of discrimination and exclusion of visibly Muslim Lebanese citizens with a particular focus on the role of urbanity – as an institution of modernity/coloniality
Please join us via this Zoom link:
Topic: MENACS_BookTalk
Time: Apr 28, 2021 04:00 PM London
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https://universityofsussex.zoom.us/j/93920242026
Meeting ID: 939 2024 2026