Safa Abdul-Aziz Khulusi (Arabic: صفاء عبد العزيز خلوصي‎; 1917–1995) was an Iraqi historian, novelist, poet, journalist and broadcaster.

His grandfather resettled the family in Baghdad where he served as an officer in the Ottoman army, but was killed during the military withdrawal from Mesopotamia at the end of World War I. Khulusi was inspired to pursue a literary career from an early age by his uncle, the novelist and poet Abdul-Majid Lutfi.

[1][2][3] Khulusi travelled to London in 1935 on an academic scholarship,[4] living there until the latter stages of World War II and insisting on staying in the city during The Blitz.

Many years later, when Khulusi met the man again and questioned him on his role in the king's death, the former student answered "all I did was remember Palestine, and the trigger on the machine-gun just set itself off".

[1] During Saddam Hussein's regime Khulusi spent most of his time in England where he enjoyed a greater freedom of expression in his writing, returning to Iraq for a couple of months a year to avoid the English winter.

Academic Eric Ormsby summarizes Khulusi's claims as follows, In a massive tome, the professor argued that the lone survivor of the shipwreck of an Arab merchant vessel washed up on the shores of Elizabethan England and made his way, wet, bedraggled, and famished, to the nearest village where he found hospitality and shelter.

This thesis, which would have delighted Jorge Luis Borges, rested not merely on fanciful historical supposition but on a mad, meticulous, and painstaking inventory of Shakespeare's vocabulary.

[18][19] Khulusi set out to introduce English readers to contemporary Iraqi poetry by translating the works of some of the most prominent and influential poets of the first half of the 20th century.

[3][20][21][22][23] This was a period of significant social and political change, an era of wars and civil strife, and also a time when poetry was highly valued and influential in Arab society and particularly in Iraq.

The appearance of a famous poet at a public meeting for example, would generate a large crowd, and mainstream daily newspapers regularly replaced their lead paragraph with poetic verses employing all manner of eloquence and rhetoric to win the affection of the reader and sway a political argument.

[3][20] From the end of the 19th century, the rise to prominence of talented radical poets Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi (1863–1936) and Ma'ruf al-Rusafi (1875–1945) popularized poetry containing social and political themes.

According to Khulusi, both al-Zahawi and al-Rusafi learned from contemporary Turkish poets, such as Tawfiq Fikrat, the value of charging poetry with powerful messages.

[20] Al-Zahawi's poetry extolling a utopian society was his attempt to set the agenda for a social revolution, particularly on views towards women in post-Ottoman Iraq.

Khulusi renders the incendiary work including what he calls “Zahawi's tirade against the veil”: Khulusi illustrates al-Zahawi's attempt to introduce the concept of gender equality in his celebrated poem Ba'da alfi 'Am (A Thousand Years Hence): As with al-Rusafi and al-Zahawi before him, Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri (1899–1997) also versified his challenge to the established attitudes towards women.

He illustrates the gulf in society by describing life in the houses and villas of the rich, built next to shanty dwellings where the deprived live in squalid conditions with their children and livestock.

Khulusi tries to capture the tone of sarcasm of the original poem: Martial law in 1948 was officially a means to protect the military operations in Palestine and to save the rear of the Arab armies.

Umm Nizar is followed into print by a number of other women including her daughter Nazik Al-Malaika, who writes emotional, imaginative and rebellious odes.

Fatina al-Naib, better known by her pen-name Saduf al-'Ubaydiyya, composes poetry for her own personal enjoyment rather than public acclaim and eventually finds that she has completed the contents of four volumes.