"Iraqi academic Falih `abd al-Jabbar expressed his disappointment as one of the Iraqis who have “waited in exile for over three decades” hoping for the urban Iraqi middle class to “rise and rebuild the civic state”, only to discover that this class had “acquired much of the pettiness of its rural leaders ... and had submitted to the flood of the migrant rural poverty”. This thesis of the rural-urban divide is quite familiar in modern Arab political writing (as in the sociological works of the Bahraini intellectual Muhammad Jabir al-Ansari); but what `abd al-Jabbar ignores is that the ‘urban’ population of Baghdad was capable of similar displays of public violence in 1941 and 1958 before it was ‘polluted’ by the rural migration."