Unable to continue his studies at university and refusing to join the army and fight alongside Iraqi troops, Ali turned to writing. The interruption in his academic life afforded him the space to develop his writing career, which began with writing poems and essays.

“I was deeply doubtful that politics could save us,” Ali says. “In times of war and dictatorship, literature offers the last shelter for freedom. Science is a way to understand the world, but literature helps us survive the horrors of life.”

Under the Ba’athist regime of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Ali published relatively few works due to heavy censorship. What he did write was not published until years later. The poetry he wrote from 1983 to 1986 was published in 1992. The first novel he wrote, in 1987, was published in Sweden in 1996.

“Publishing was not my goal at that time,” Ali says. “I was mostly afraid of my inner censor, the fears I had inherited, the prejudices that were imposed upon me and that I had unwillingly absorbed. My main struggle was against this kind of unconscious censorship. In the East, it is not only the political censors who do the job, but networks of religious, ethical, ideological censors. As writers, we have to face all these taboos. In Kurdistan, there is no direct censorship by the authorities, but there is political, social, and religious intimidation, which are no less firm or cruel than direct censorship.”

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Ali’s most prolific writing period followed the 1991 uprising against Saddam’s regime, which resulted in de facto independence for the Kurdish region of Iraq and a consequent release from the stifling censorship of the Ba’athist state. While the achievement was celebrated as a historic victory, Ali says it also “shed light on the intellectual emptiness of the nationalist movement,” which was unable to keep up with the significant changes during that period.

“The predominant Kurdish political schools of thought still clung to the same shallow ideological trivialities,” Ali says. “We needed to address modern questions like, Why did attempts at revolution result in relapse and a regression of human values? Or, Why were attempts at modernization failing in Eastern societies?”

Ali and a group of fellow intellectuals thus founded the journal Azadi (Kurdish for “freedom”) with a view to answering these questions. “The magazine was the first step towards a critical examination of dogmatic Marxism and insular nationalist thought,” Ali says.

Distrust of Ideologies

In his writing, Ali strives for introspection. Few, he says, have had the courage to approach the traditional power structures in Kurdish society with a critical eye and dispel what he refers to as ethnic and religious illusions.

“In the East, we have entire communities that are afraid to face up to their secrets, their histories of atrocities, and confront the illusions surrounding them, and readers are not used to writing that is free from ideology. The political solutions to our problems have resulted in further fascism and destruction. I do not pretend to present any solutions in my books; I simply present questions regarding our responsibilities as humans. The basic questions in my writing are ethical ones: the meaning of human solidarity, absent of the ideological, ethnic or religious.”

His novel I Stared at the Night of the City (originally titled Ghazalnus and the Gardens of Imagination), explores themes of corruption and authoritarianism among the political elite and the efforts of artists and intellectuals to abide by their principles and flourish in this environment. It likewise symbolises the struggle of writers to break free from the control of political parties, which, as Abdulrahman noted in a 2008 article for the BBC, own most of the publishing houses in the region.