This issue inaugurates what I would regard as the decline of the Kingdom’s philatelic output — henceforth we see more stamps, of generally lower quality. Commemoratives, which a prudent issuing policy had hitherto managed to entirely suppress¹, begin to appear; and we cycle rapidly through several new definitive issues. So I might skip through the Kingdom’s final decade at a slightly faster clip than was taken for the previous few.

To begin, it might be useful to insert a short outline of King Faisal II’s early years: he was mentioned only in passing on the previous page. During the 1941 coup d’etat he was retained as monarch, although he was kept strictly under house arrest, first in the royal palace in Baghdad and later in a remote location in Kurdistan. Freed following the recapture of Iraq by the British, he generally stayed in Iraq until 1948, when he was sent off to England to be educated. He entered Harrow School in 1949 and stayed until he reached eighteen in 1953, at which point he was sent back to Iraq to be formally crowned (and invested with the full powers of the monarch). It goes without saying that, while in England, he had no input into the governance of his country.

Anyway, back to 1948. Controversy was immediately generated by the Treaty of Portsmouth, signed on the 5th January of that year. This treaty was a re-negotiation of the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, and it offered Iraq additional concessions. Britain, however, was to retain an input into the administration of the country: this stirred up considerable ill-feeling, as did the fact that the treaty had been negotiated entirely in secret, the bare fact of its existence having been announced only a few days before it was signed. Widespread demonstrations against the treaty were rapidly mobilised, and were given additional force by the general backdrop of food shortages (“nearly famine conditions,” writes the usually sycophantic De Gaury) and economic stagnation. Prince al-Ilah (still, of course, the Regent), feeling the need for a concession, refused to ratify the Treaty and fired the Prime Minister², but protests (frequently violent, and repressed in like manner) continued on for a few months.

These grievances were however soon overshadowed by the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli War in May. Iraq participated in the war in its capacity as a member of the recently-formed Arab League, and the League’s frequent defeats by the Israelis whipped up considerable anti-régime, anti-Jewish and pan-Arab sentiment. The government declared martial law at the war’s outset, but the strength of anti-government feeling led to further re-shuffling of the cabinet, culminating (to significantly condense matters) in the return of Nuri al-Said as prime minister in January 1949. True to form, he took full advantage of the emergency powers at his disposal: opposition political parties were suppressed (accused of having instigated the various disorders which had taken place since the previous January — a charge which seems to have credited them with considerably more resources and influence than they actually possessed), and he used a combination of threats and hastily-introduced laws to expel almost all of the country’s Jewish population.

Relations between Al-Ilah and Al-Said were poor, but they continued to share a similarly autocratic, technocratic, pro-Western vision for the country. At any rate, Al-Said was unquestionably the most influential figure in Iraqi politics (and the most competent), so Al-Ilah was, for the moment, reluctantly obligated to keep him around. Al-Said, meanwhile, must have been aware that the régime’s best interests were, in broad terms, identical to his own; and that, notwithstanding his personal enmity with the Regent, he was closely identified with the monarchy and its system of government.

Al-Said was (to simplify greatly) in power most of the time until November 1952, holding the prime ministership either personally or through one of his puppets. During this period he successfully negotiated a new, and more profitable, arrangement with the foreign-dominated Iraq Petroleum Company (although this, inevitably, was criticised by those who sought full nationalisation), and he established the Development Board – intended, as the name suggests, to centralise control over the development of the country’s infrastructure.³

This doesn’t admit of a neat segue (at least to somebody as inarticulate as myself) but I think it would be worth taking a pause to survey the turmoil in the Arab world contemporary with the events being described here. Anti-Western sentiment was the common factor: the narrative ran, far from unjustly, that the West, via its local henchmen, was keeping the Arabs repressed and divided while exploiting them economically. The Palestinian issue was especially conspicuous: many Arabs felt they could draw their own conclusions from seeing the pro-Western, Western-installed Arab regimes flailing impotently against the Israelis. The West remained, however, omnipotent and unreachable — in sharp contrast to its Arab sympathisers.

On 17 February 1948 the pro-British King of Yemen was shot dead by (per De Gaury, if not elsewhere) a member of the Young Men’s Muslim Association (an Egyptian Islamist-type organisation). A former Prime Minister of Lebanon was assassinated by a fanatic on 16 July 1951 — rumours ran that he planned to normalise relations with Israel. On 20 July King Abdullah of Jordan was killed, for much the same reasons. Finally, and most importantly, King Farouk of Egypt was overthrown on 23 July 1952, replaced with the aggressively anti-Western, pan-Arab Nasser régime. Having taken power, Nasser became the figurehead and inspiration, in Iraq and elsewhere, for those who wished for a government along similar lines in their own countries.

Anyway, back to Iraq. Opposition to the régime, having been smashed in 1949, began to gradually regroup in the early 1950s. Actual organised opposition groups were as disparate and disorganised as ever, but general nationalist, pan-Arab and anti-British sentiment, combined with resentment of Al-Said’s stranglehold on power, were enough for a widespread, if incoherent, opposition to coalesce around. ⁴ A day of planned protests in November 1951 (prompted by the Iraq Petroleum Company deal) was easily suppressed.⁵ Stronger, better-organised protests in November 1952 damaged the credibility of the current (pro-Al-Said) Prime Minister, who resigned (once again, to greatly simplify the situation).

Here things took a small but not unimportant turn. The Prime Minister’s departure came at a moment when relations between Al-Ilah and Al-Said were even more tense than usual, and Al-Ilah decided to take the resignation as an opportunity to flex his muscles. Having the power to appoint a new prime minister, he went beyond the usual bunch of seat-warmers for Al-Said and appointed a senior military figure, General Nureddin Mahmud. The appointment of a ranking soldier was a breach of recent tradition, and seemed a sign that the army was once again free to overtly engage in the country’s politics, after having spent a decade in the doghouse following the 1941 coup. General Mahmud imposed martial law once again and cracked down on the protests. Scheduled elections in January 1953 however saw him lose power to an Al-Said nominee, and it seemed the experiment was over for the time being. Al-Said procured his own appointment as minister of defence in the new cabinet, and used the position to suppress any interventionist tendencies in the military leadership.

King Faisal returned to Iraq for his coronation in May 1953, as noted above. Although the regency was now formally over, Faisal lacked the ability and inclination to strike out independently — family ties kept him loyal to Al-Ilah, and his political inexperience led him, not unreasonably, to defer to Al-Ilah and Al-Said on decisions. So Al-Ilah stayed on at the top of politics, notwithstanding his having been deprived of his official powers.

More political experimentation followed. Faisal, at the instigation of Al-Said, appointed a new government headed by relatively new face Fadhil al-Jamali, a Shia of reformist inclinations. This seems to have been a gamble, albeit a calculated one, on Al-Said’s part: the symbolism of the appointment was a sop to Shias and to the opposition, and was counterbalanced by the fact that, although Al-Jamali, was a reformist, he envisaged his reforms along legal, constitutional lines rather than revolutionary ones; and he was independent of the main opposition groups, such as they were.

We haven’t met the Shias in a couple of pages. Throughout the forties and early fifties they had been continuing on in much the same way as before: although they had bought into the system in general terms, they continued to be under-represented in the government and the professions— an inequality which was becoming increasingly jarring as the amount of prosperous, educated Shias steadily increased. Such people were, of course, susceptible to the blandishments of the political opposition, and Al-Said seems to have regarded Al-Jamali as somebody who could distract the Shia middle class in a pro-régime direction.

After all that, the Al-Jamali government failed to enjoy much success. Al-Jamali, not unsurprisingly, had his own ideas beyond being a pet opposition figure for Al-Said. He ended martial law (in place since late 1952, as above) and made some other liberal reforms, including increased toleration of political parties in September. This went past Al-Said and Al-Ilah without demur, and Al-Jamali followed it up with plans for land and civil service reform. Here things foundered. Wealthy Sunni landowners remained a bedrock of support for the régime, and civil service appointments were regarded by those with the power to grant them as a vital mechanism for dispensing patronage and exerting influence. Such reforms would have been unacceptable in any event, but their having been proposed by a Shia whipped up sectarian tensions on top of that. Al-Said (who, it must be remembered, was in some ways a reformist himself, albeit firmly in his own authoritarian, technocratic, simonist style), initially backed Al-Jamali and tried to force through a somewhat watered-down version of the reforms. But opposition to them was of such force and loudness that Al-Said eventually decided to cut his losses: he accepted Al-Jamali’s resignation in April 1954. Al-Said then left the country for a while, no doubt disappointed with the way things had turned out.

An entirely artificial place to cut off the narrative, but we have quite a few more stamps still to get through, so I’ll curtail matters here for the moment.

I do quite like this issue, on balance: the portrait is attractive and well-executed (albeit a very poor likeness), and the decision to scrap the old frames was, I think, a timely one — the clean modernity of the new design perhaps, without being too fanciful, suggests something of people’s hopes for their young new monarch. The source of the portrait is unclear to me: it’s reminiscent in general feeling of the photos of the King taken by Dorothy Wilding, without seeming to be a copy of any of them.

An easy set to acquire, with the exception of the 1 dinar which isn’t particularly common. My own specimen has a few flaws as can be seen. That the main issue had a couple of follow-ups I would attribute in the usual way to rate changes and consequent colour changes.