The Man Who Chronicled Baghdad’s History from Prison

Once a diplomat and satirist, Musa al-Shabandar chronicled Iraq’s turbulent birth from behind bars. Decades later, his reflections remain one of the few intimate records of a nation in the making.

Perhaps few among the new generations of Iraqi journalists have ever heard of the royal-era writer who called himself “Alwan Abu Shararah.” It is almost certain they have never read his sharp and daring satirical writings from the roaring 1920s.

Behind that pseudonym stood Musa al-Shabandar—a diplomat, politician, and intellectual who lived through Iraq’s defining decades. He was one of the country’s most prominent foreign ministers during its turbulent struggle for independence from Britain, serving in several governments, including that of Rashid Ali al-Kaylani during the 1941 uprising against British domination.

When al-Shabandar died in 1967 at the age of seventy, his most enduring legacy was not his political career but his Baghdadi Memoirs, an extraordinary record of a city and a nation in transition. Written with candor and wit, these memoirs chronicle Baghdad’s transformation from Ottoman rule to British occupation and the early years of Iraq’s monarchy.

Born in Baghdad around 1897 into a respected merchant family, al-Shabandar came of age as the old Ottoman order was collapsing. At just twenty, he witnessed one of the most dramatic moments in modern Iraqi history—the fall of Baghdad in 1917, when British troops entered the city as the Ottoman army withdrew.

He described those hours vividly:

“The news was confused and the rumors many. What was certain was that the Turkish army was in continuous retreat before the British advance. Fear filled the hearts of the people — fear of the retreating Turks, fear of the advancing British forces, and, worse than both, fear of the surrounding tribes during the interval between withdrawal and occupation.”

That night, an explosion shook his home; the detonation of a Turkish ammunition depot marked the empire’s retreat. In the aftermath, he witnessed chaos and looting, reflecting bitterly on the illusion of liberation:

“We had been angry and resentful of the Turks for their oppression, yet God showed us at the hands of the British occupation what made the Turks’ injustice seem gentle and merciful.”

In the decades that followed, al-Shabandar rose through Iraq’s political and diplomatic ranks. Fluent in several European languages and educated abroad, he served as Iraq’s representative to the League of Nations, held postings in European capitals, and twice served as foreign minister during the monarchy.

But his political fortunes shifted with the tides of history. In 1941, as part of the nationalist Rashid Ali government that sought to free Iraq from British control during World War II, al-Shabandar found himself on the losing side of the Anglo-Iraqi War. When British forces defeated the insurgent regime, he fled to Tehran, only to be arrested and extradited back to Iraq.

In 1944, he was sentenced to four years in Abu Ghraib Prison, where he endured solitary confinement. It was there, in a small, dimly lit cell, that he began drafting the reflections that would later become his Baghdadi Memoirs.

He described those years with painstaking clarity:

“Yes, I am now in Baghdad, in Iraq, in Abu Ghraib, in this desolate room of this desolate building, a prisoner in solitary confinement. The door is locked, the guard paces the dark corridor back and forth before the cells. Is this a disturbing dream or a bitter reality?”

Even in captivity, al-Shabandar’s sharp humor and intellectual rigor persisted. He compared Iraq’s prison system to Europe’s darkest institutions:

“If the Dachau concentration camp is a stain of shame on the German people, then Abu Ghraib Prison will bear the same shame upon those who created it in Iraq.”

The words would prove prophetic, echoing across decades as Abu Ghraib became infamous once again under foreign occupation.

Al-Shabandar’s Baghdadi Memoirs are not only political testimony but also an intimate portrait of a city in flux, from its narrow alleyways and riverside markets to the salons where politicians and poets debated the future of the new Iraqi state. He wrote of floods, uprisings, and court intrigues, but also of the humor, irony, and contradictions that defined Baghdadi life.

He recorded his impressions of key figures—Nuri al-Said, Tawfiq al-Suwaidi, Muzahim al-Pachachi, Taha al-Hashimi, and others—offering insight into the personalities who shaped modern Iraq. Yet his writing remains intensely personal, driven less by political ambition than by a desire to understand his country’s restless soul.

Half a century after his death, al-Shabandar’s voice resurfaced when his son prepared the memoirs for publication, and Faisal al-Damlouji helped bring them to print through Riyad al-Rayyis Publishing House in London and Cyprus in the early 1990s.

For readers today, his writings serve as both historical record and moral reflection, tracing the dreams, failures, and perseverance of a generation that sought to define Iraq’s place in the modern world.

Baghdadi Memoirs can serve as a mirror of Iraq’s current fractures. In a country still reeling from foreign interventions, institutionally hollowed out and struggling to reclaim its sovereignty, his reflections acquire renewed urgency. He wrote with prescient clarity about prisons that would “bear the same shame” as Europe’s darkest camps—words hauntingly echoed when Abu Ghraib Prison re-entered global infamy under another occupation.

His intimate portrayals of Baghdad’s alleyways, cafés like the famed Shabandar Café (which he owned), and the political salons where “the people are one” despite difference, stand today as a counter-narrative to sectarian geography, splintered national identity, and institutional decay in Iraq. The fact that al-Shabandar was both insider and prisoner—diplomat, foreign minister, exile, and inmate allows his memoirs to speak simultaneously of ambition, hope, and the limits of power.

In Iraq’s present moment, where public trust is low, governance is weak, and debates about identity, sovereignty, and reform are urgent, his writings should challenge all of us to inquire: Are the structures of the state being rebuilt? Are citizens truly “under the roof of law and justice,” as he insisted? The book compels us to remember that the past was not simply a prologue but a living component of today’s political culture.

Thus, al-Shabandar’s voice remains vital. For Iraq to move beyond its cycles of interference and stagnation, it must engage with the lessons of a leader who chronicled not only the rise of a modern state, but its vulnerability when power is unaccountable and history is forgotten.

Musa al-Shabandar—the witty satirist, the exiled diplomat, the prisoner with a pen—remains one of Iraq’s most overlooked storytellers. From the confines of his cell, he wrote not merely to remember, but to ensure that Baghdad’s story, in all its pain and vitality, would be known, understood, and learned from by the generations to come.

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