The Painful Path towards Civil Liberties and Social Justice Followed by the Iraqi Ḥayāt Šarārah

Ḥayat Sharārah (1935-1997) was an Iraqi academic who fought the imposition of the regime culture inside and outside the university classroom. She firmly opposed all forms of oppression – cultural or political. In her posthumous novel Iḏā al-ayyām aġsaqat (When the Days Grow Dark), she denounces the difficulties of university life in Baghdad under the regime of Saddam Husayn, when academia was humiliated, oppressed, and deprived of its independent voice. On 1 August 1997, a gas pipe exploded in her home in Baghdad, in the historic Madīnat al-salām (City of Peace), killing her and one of her two daughters. Although it was officially classified as suicide, the regime was thought to be behind these violent deaths. This chapter aims at analysing the painful private and professional path towards a peaceful society built upon civil liberties and social justice travelled by this researcher, writer, and translator persecuted in life and neglected for many years even after her death because of conspiratorial political censorship