Saturday, 7 March 2015

The Most Popular Saddam Hussein Books

By Leslie Ball


Saddam Hussein reigned as the president of Iraq between 1979 and 2003. His twenty four year rule was ended by US forces in an invasion that led to his capture, trial, sentence to hang and execution on 30th December, 2006. The known Saddam Hussein books are four and an additional collection of poems. He never used his name as the author and instead preferred He Who Wrote It.

CIA recons that Zabibah and the King, released in 2000 was authored by Saddam with the assistance of ghost writers. The novel is set in medieval Iraq and features a commoner girl called Zabibah. She is caught in a love web between her and the king who is was a mighty ruler of old day Iraq.

In Zabibah and the King, Zabibah, the girl in this love story has a very cruel husband who even rapes her. The setting is in Tikrit around the 7th and 8th centuries. It is worth considering that Saddam came from Tikrit. There were rumors that it was adapted in a movie featuring Sacha Baron Cohen but it turned out to be false. The book was edited by Lawrence Robert in 2004.

The Fortified Castle is a 713 pages novel that was released in 2001. It is an allegory of a delayed wedding of a hero of the Iraq-Iran war. The hero is supposed to get married to a Kurdish girl. It features three main characters. Two of them are brothers named Mahmud and Sabah. They come from the rural western bank of Tigris River and are born of a farming family. The third character is Shatrin, a lady from Suleimaniya.

The three main actors in The Fortified Castle plot meet while attending University of Baghdad. Sabah has fought in the Iraq-Iran war, gotten wounded and captured as a war slave. His heroism lies in his escape and ability to take several of his friends during the dash to freedom.

The Fortified Castle rallies Iraqis into uniting as a nation to safeguard gains made during war. This call is captured in the assertion by the mother of Sabah who is fighting off pressure to share property. In her opinion, she cannot divide the property since it is too valuable to be assigned monetary value. The property should only go to individuals who gave their blood in war. He also wrote a book by the name Men and the City but it did not receive as much attention.

Begone Demons is loosely translated in English to mean Get Out You Cursed. CIA presumes that its completion was a day before US invasion into Iraq. The story is laden with Zionist-Christian propaganda against Arabs and Muslims. The plot features an attack on some twin towers, a mirror of what happened on September 11th in US. The author shows a clear Muslim-Christian conflict through selective and deliberate naming of characters within the plot.

Toluma Shoten Publishing released a version of Begone Demons in 2006 in Tokyo Japan under the title Devils Dance. The Turkish translation was the work of Humam Khalil. When Raghad wanted to print and release a hundred thousand copies of the book in Jordan, the government declined. This means that the title never got to be translated or released in any other language.




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