The Most Famous Saddam Hussein Books

By Leslie Ball


Saddam Hussein served as the president of Iraq between July 16th 1979 and 9th April of 2003. He was executed by hanging on December 30th 2006 in Green Zone Bagdad. By the time of his death, he had written four novels and several poems. None of the Saddam Hussein books ever came in his real name. He used a pseudo name He Who Wrote It to publish all his works.

Zabibah and the King is a novel published in 2000. The CIA believes that he wrote the novel though he could have been assisted by ghost writer. It is tells the story of a powerful ruler in medieval Iraq who fell in love with a common girl known as Zabibah.

Zabibah is married to a rapist and cruel husband. The setting is Tikrit somewhere in the 7th or 8th century. Saddam was interestingly born in Tikrit. A new edition of the book was released in 2004, having been edited by Lawrence Robert. There was a rumor that the movie where Sacha Baron Cohen starred was adapted from this story but it turned out not to be true.

The Fortified Castle is a 713 pages novel that was released in 2001. It is an allegory of a delayed wedding of a hero of the Iraq-Iran war. The hero is supposed to get married to a Kurdish girl. It features three main characters. Two of them are brothers named Mahmud and Sabah. They come from the rural western bank of Tigris River and are born of a farming family. The third character is Shatrin, a lady from Suleimaniya.

The meeting point for the three characters is University of Baghdad. This happens after Sabah has escaped from the Iran captives who held him and his friends as prisoners of the Iraq-Iran war. He was captured after getting wounded in the battle fields.

The Fortified Castle is considered a clarion call to Iraqis to unite. The mother of the war hero is confronted by pressure to divide their wealth. She does not bow to the pressure, insisting that the property is impossible to buy using money. In her words, the property can only be claimed by those who fought and shed their blood for it. A third book entitled Men and the City never got the attention given to the other titles.

Begone Demons is loosely translated as Get Out You Damned. The book is said to have been completed a day before US invasion. It captures the theory of Zionist-Christian conspiracy to fight and oppress Muslims and Arabs. The story appears to be a reference to the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11th. The naming of characters is suggestive of the Muslim-Christian tussle.

Begone Demons was again published by Tokuma Shoten Publishing in Japan, Tokyo in 2006. Eight thousand copies were printed under the title Devils Dance. The Turkish translation was done by Humam Khalil. In Jordan, Raghad Hussein attempted to publish it by printing a hundred thousand copies. The government stopped the publication. It has since not be published or distributed in any other language.




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