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Copyright

Clive Holes;

Published On

2025-03-07

Page Range

pp. 681–694

Language

  • English

Print Length

14 pages

‘The Cobbler Made Money from the Town of ʿIfač’

A Satirical Poem in Iraqi Arabic on Corruption in the Iraqi Parliament

  • Clive Holes (author)
Chapter of: Interconnected Traditions: Semitic Languages, Literatures, Cultures—A Festschrift for Geoffrey Khan: Volume 1: Hebrew and the Wider Semitic World(pp. 681–694)
The article analyses a satirical poem written in Iraqi Arabic that critiques corruption in Iraq’s post-2003 parliament. The poem employs the proverb “The cobbler made money from the town of ʿIfač” to symbolise the futility and inefficacy of the parliament, likened to a cobbler in a town of barefoot people. Structured in quatrains with a repeated refrain, the poem highlights issues such as financial corruption, the misuse of power, and the socioeconomic decay of Iraq. Its imagery references Iraq’s wealth of oil juxtaposed with poverty and the people’s struggles with basic necessities. The poem critiques members of parliament for their greed and detachment from the populace, ridiculing their ostentatious appearance and self-serving behaviour. Drawing on traditional Iraqi poetic forms and proverbs, it bridges modern political disillusionment with cultural heritage, resonating deeply with the public.

Contributors

Clive Holes

(author)

Clive Holes (PhD, University of Cambridge) is an Emeritus Professorial Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. From 1969 to 1971 he taught English as a UNA Volunteer in Bahrain government schools, joining the British Council staff on his return to the UK in 1971. From then until 1983, he served in overseas postings to Kuwait, Algeria, Iraq, and Thailand, and completed a PhD in Arabic Sociolinguistics at Cambridge in 1981. He was appointed to a Lectureship in Arabic and Applied Linguistics at Salford University in 1983, and was then appointed Director of the Language Centre, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman, 1985–1987, returning to the UK to take up a Lectureship, then a Readership, in Arabic and a Fellowship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 1987–1996. He was appointed Khalid bin Abdallah Al-Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1997, retiring in 2014. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002. His research interests range widely over the Arabic language and its history, Arabic dialectology, linguistics and popular literature, especially oral poetry.