It was known about the late King Abdulaziz Al Saud, his strong belief in Arab unity and brotherhood, and his embrace of every Arab who sought refuge in him from the oppression of his country, the tyranny of his government, and the vices of time. This is not evidenced by his help in the beginnings of the unification of the Arabian Peninsula and the establishment of the third Saudi state with the experience of a few Arab personalities. There were Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Egyptians, and Libyans among them, and they were appointed as advisors and experts in the court of His Majesty, regardless of their religious or ethnic affiliations. Some of them were even granted Saudi nationality in appreciation of their services. His sons followed his path, and they did not find anything wrong with appointing non-Saudi personalities to important diplomatic positions. For example, we see King Faisal, by virtue of his position as Minister of Foreign Affairs, recommending a Lebanese Druze like Asaad Faqih to lead the Saudi embassy in the major capitals of the world (Washington), and choosing a Syrian Christian like Jamil al-Baroudi to lead the mission. Permanent Saudi Arabia with the largest international organization (the United Nations).
Among these personalities that Saudi Arabia embraced, preserved its dignity, and provided it with security and safety, are personalities who left their Iraqi homeland forced by the devastating political earthquakes or bloody tragedies witnessed by this Arab country in its contemporary history, or as a result of their exposure to injustice, persecution, and revenge.
This is a prelude to talking about a man of politics and governance and a scholar of law and the diplomatic, parliamentary, partisan and ministerial corps in royal Iraq, and a national figure who gave her country the juices of her thought and experience by assuming important ministerial positions in the fifties. Rather, he is the descendant of an honorable family that has historical, economic and social imprints in The history of modern Iraq in general and the history of the city of Basra in particular.
Born in Basra
Our conversation is about the late “Ibrahim Burhan al-Din Ahmed Nuri Bash Ayan,” the man who was a witness to one of the most turbulent periods of political fluctuations in Iraq, and a contemporary of all the transformations, events, wars and conspiracies that ravaged the Middle East since World War I. In it, we will rely on some of the books published by him, especially a book published by his son, the Saudi researcher Ahmed Burhan Al-Din, who is interested in history, religions, and Arabic and English literature. in computing from Britain at Aramco Oil Company in Dhahran at the Computer, Technology and Petroleum Engineering Center from 1984 until his retirement in 2010).
Our friend was born on June 10, 1915 in Basra, the third son of his parents who belonged to two well-known Iraqi families. His father is Ahmed Nuri Al-Bash, notables of the Abbasid Hashemi, one of the great landlords, merchants and notables in Basra, whose lineage is related to Al-Abbas bin Abdul Muttalib (the uncle of the Messenger, may God bless him and grant him peace) through a series of 14 caliphs from the Abbasid caliphs, starting with the caliph Abi Jaafar Al-Mansur and ending with the third Abbasid caliph. The thirty illuminated by God. And his mother is Mrs. Saniya Karima Abd al-Majid al-Shawi, one of the sheikhs of the Iraqi al-Ubaid clan, whose lineage is directly related to the kings of the ancient Himyarite Kingdom in Yemen.
When our friend was born, his father gave him a compound name, “Ibrahim Burhanuddin,” but it was customary to call him by the second part of his name, so he was known by it throughout his life without the first part. His upbringing was in a family that gave him love, tenderness, and great attention, but it was also strict in his upbringing and cultivating good qualities in him. He grew up on self-esteem, respect for others, generosity, courage to speak, enduring hardships, honorable competition with his peers, excellence in studies, and the love of archery, horseback riding and football.
When he was five years old, his father enrolled him in a kindergarten in one of the nuns' schools in Basra, and from there he moved to primary school at the Seif Governmental School near his family's home. At the age of twelve, his parents agreed to his desire to complete his middle and high school studies at the Public College of the American University in Beirut, just like his brother Abdel-Rahman, who studied in that college during his intermediate stage and then moved to complete high school at Victoria College in Alexandria. Thus, the man separated his parents for the first time in his life, heading to Beirut on his first trips away from his homeland, so he arrived in Beirut by land in 1927 through Damascus and Palmyra, and joined his school, in which he joined Iraqi students from the families of Al-Zuhair and Al-Naqeeb, and Kuwaiti students such as Badr Al-Badr Al-Qinai and Sheikh Muhammad Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah .
Study in Beirut
During his studies in Beirut, Burhan Al-Din noticed his reluctance to study scientific subjects and his passion for studying literary and human subjects. national and national issues. It is also because of the opportunities that Beirut provided for him to learn about new cultures and patterns of thinking and friction. He was born with the feeling that specializing in the humanities is the best way to serve his country and free it from restrictions and advance it. That is why we find him, after graduating from public college and joining the American University directly, joining the Faculty of Law, in which he spent an orphan academic year, after which he decided to return to Iraq to continue studying law at the University of Baghdad. It is said that the reason for his transfer is his feeling that his university is linked to colonial, alienating goals, and therefore is not suitable for a young man like him who has patriotic tendencies and belongs to a family that raised him against the British occupation of his homeland. However, there is another explanation that may have been closer to the truth, as the period of his studies in Lebanon coincided with the exposure of his family to a series of financial crises, like other Iraqi families, due to the conditions of the global recession.
He graduated from Baghdad law school in the summer of 1937, and his sense of his national identity as an Arab increased in line with the current prevailing at the time among his generation’s yearning for unity, independence, and confronting Zionist plans. And those with low incomes, so he left the legal profession, saying that he was raised in a family that was accustomed to giving, not taking. At the time, he was upset that he could not achieve his ambition to pursue his postgraduate studies. After that, he responded generously to performing the compulsory military service, as it develops in a person the advantages of masculinity and self-reliance, avoiding resorting to using the high status of his family to exempt him from service.
diplomatic sector
In the year 1938 he joined the diplomatic corps, representing Iraq in ancient and civilized countries such as: Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, Iran and Britain. His profession, travels, movements and meetings refined his personality and expanded his perceptions and experiences, which made him reconsider some of the assumptions with which he began the stage of his boyhood and youth, and re-evaluate previous conclusions arising from those assumptions.
The first period of his career, between 1937 and 1948, coincided with sad personal events, including the death of a number of his family members, such as the death of his father, who was a support and guide for him, and the exposure of his family to more difficulties and financial crises for internal and global reasons. The same period also witnessed grave events at the national, Arab and international levels. On the Iraqi level, extremely serious and unprecedented incidents took place, such as the coup of Lieutenant General Bakr Sidqi in 1937, in which the founder of the Iraqi army, Lieutenant General Jaafar al-Askari, was killed, the collapse of the coup government headed by Hikmat Suleiman and the killing of King Ghazi in 1939 in mysterious circumstances, and the occurrence of the Rashid Ali al-Kilani movement that lasted two months in the year 1941 with all its devastating political and security effects, especially on Basra, in which his family was forced to play a pivotal role in preserving civil peace during the administrative and security vacuum resulting from the movement, and the outbreak of unrest and violent clashes between the people and the authorities in early 1948 due to the signing of a treaty by the government of Saleh Jabr. Portsmouth with Britain, before the government was forced to cancel it under street pressure.
On the Arab level, the most dangerous event was the acceleration of Zionist plans and Jewish immigration to Palestine and the subsequent loss of it in the wake of the 1948 war, an event that had serious repercussions on Iraq. At the global level, the most prominent danger was the outbreak of the Second World War and its continuation until 1945 with all its well-known effects on the Arab countries, especially Iraq, which had a large share of its repercussions due to its strategic location and resources.
Parliamentary work
In the next six years (from 1948 to 1954) Burhan al-Din moved to the stage of parliamentary and party work. Where he entered parliament as an independent elected representative from Basra, and with a group of deputies, he contributed to the establishment of an opposition parliamentary bloc in early 1951, which soon turned into a political party called the “United Popular Front.” In fact, his involvement in this parliamentary and partisan experience helped him to crystallize his position on many complex internal and external political issues, especially since that period was full of political strikes and partisan and popular movements calling for reform, and the emergence of the Iraqi Communist Party hostile to the monarchy and conservative forces, not to mention the June coup in Egypt. Against its monarchy, which encouraged and enticed a number of Iraqi junior officers to form coup cells to follow the example of their Egyptian peers. During this period, the two most important personal events in his life were: the death of his older brother Abd al-Rahman in the summer of 1953 as a result of a brain hemorrhage, and his marriage in the fall of 1948 to his cousin, who bore him 5 children.
1958
As is well known, the Iraqi monarchy fell on July 14, 1958, following a coup led by army officers. The military's revenge on its senior figures was brutal and bloody. As for the ministers and officers loyal to the monarchy, including Burhan al-Din, whose family in Basra was subjected to various humiliations and hardships, they were arrested from their homes and imprisoned. In detention centers in preparation for their trial through the farcical People's Court led by Fadel Al-Mahdawi, which accused our friend of a number of accusations, including interfering in Syria to separate it from Egypt, squandering the people's money by spending it on weapons, plotting and inciting against Syria and Lebanon, and working to push Iraq's policies towards a destination that contradicts the interest of the homeland. In the end, he was sentenced to death, so he accepted it with equanimity, to be taken to a horrible cell where he was subjected to various types of psychological and physical torture, before it was decided on July 14, 1961 to pardon him and release him along with others.
government position
At that time, fears increased inside Iraq and some countries in the region about the dangers of communism and the communist tide based on Moscow's support, which prompted countries such as Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan, with Western instigation, to coordinate, cooperate and conclude agreements that developed into the establishment of the Baghdad Pact. In the early 1950s, Burhan Al-Din had noticed the infiltration of his colleagues outside his party, so he began to doubt the feasibility of partisan work as a means to address the issues of the homeland and the nation, which prompted him to the idea of working from within the government and not from outside it to achieve his political principles in the service of his country and people. So, when Nuri al-Saeed invited him in the summer of 1954 to join his government as one of the young, competent and experienced elements, bypassing his opposition to his policies, Burhan al-Din agreed and entrusted him with the position of Minister of State for Arab Affairs, followed by the position of Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs, and then the position of Minister of Foreign Affairs by name following Musa Shahbandar resigned in 1955 due to health problems. This represented an important turning point in his career, and the beginning of his holding ministerial portfolios in successive Iraqi governments formed by Nuri Al-Saeed, Abdul Wahhab Morgan, and Ahmed Mukhtar Baban. It is worth noting that despite his professionalism carrying the foreign affairs portfolio in the ministerial formations, Nuri al-Saeed entrusted him with the guidance and direction (media) portfolio in the last government that he formed in 1958, so he accepted reluctantly, at a time when Iraq’s relations with Nasserist Egypt were in their most complex stages and the media was Al-Masry was completely devoted to undermining monarchical Iraq and its policies and inciting against its symbols, including Burhan al-Din, because of his role in following up the procedures for completing and declaring the Arab union project between the Iraqi and Jordanian kingdoms and drafting its constitution and its provisions in 1958 as a response to the Egyptian-Syrian unity. Thus, our friend will be the first Minister of Information in the history of Iraq, and he retained this position in the next government headed by Ahmed Mukhtar Baban on March 19, 1958.
Intention to retire and hate political work
His son Ahmed said in his book that his father, before the July coup, had hated political work and had intended to retire and rest in a medical clinic in West Germany, but the bloody coup caught up with him.
After leaving work, he found that residence and work in Iraq for those who were like him were no longer safe or available, so he decided to move to Lebanon, in which he did not find a source of livelihood that would secure a decent and safe life for him. . Thus, he settled there with his family from the end of 1963. In 1965 he was transferred to a job as a legal advisor to the Saudi Ministry of Defense in Riyadh. During his stay in Saudi Arabia, he was following the events of Iraq with pain and heartbreak, and his sorrows began to accumulate with the departure of a number of his relatives and friends in Iraq without seeing them or participating in bidding them farewell, including his close friend, Major General Ghazi al-Dagestani, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Royal Army, who was saddened by his death in his exile in London in 1966. Then his pain increased when the Iraqi embassy in Jeddah refused to renew his passport and asked him to renew it personally in Iraq, which prompted him, in 1974, to approach the Saudi officials to grant him a replacement passport, and King Faisal agreed to grant him and all members of his family Saudi nationality on March 5, 1975. It made it easy for him to enroll his middle son, Ali, in the College of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, and to travel to Jordan to meet some of his relatives.
The most cruel moment for him in Saudi Arabia was the martyrdom of Al-Faisal, who honored and sponsored him and had great respect and appreciation for his positions and internal and external policies. Two weeks after the departure of Al-Faisal, our friend suffered a heart attack, and he was admitted to the hospital in Riyadh, then he had several similar attacks until his death in 1975 in Jordan, six months after his first injury.
Written by: Dr. Abdullah Al-Madani abu_taymour@