A Reed Shaken by the Wind (2 page)

I
HAD
no very clear preconceived picture of Baghdad, and my experience of Arab towns had been limited to brief sojourns in North Africa. My first impression was that what the western colonial powers could do to a city in the way of desecration was nothing to what the Arabs themselves could do when they got going. And they had got going, with all the revenue of the oil fields behind their enthusiasm.

It is perhaps the least favourable time for many centuries for a stranger to see Baghdad; the moment of transition from an eastern to a western culture that has as yet little true meaning for the bulk of the people.

I have noticed that there is a longitudinal line east of which the squalor created by building appears as great as that of demolition. Buildings were going up everywhere, bleak blocks in the western tradition, whose desolate uniformity was increased by the veneer of dust and the rubble from which they grew; new roads and streets were everywhere under construction, and pale dust clung to the palm trees and tarnished their leaves. Dotted between the new roads and the new houses, and covered too with the dust of their construction, were mud houses and reed matting houses, but everywhere except where the traffic was thick lay litter and refuse, and everywhere the black kites wheeled on the bare sky overhead. Gleaming Cadillacs painted in fantastic colours blared their horns at ragged Arabs riding side-saddle on limping donkeys. Every possible permutation and combination between pure Arab clothes and pure European jostled the street, but the national garb is on its way out. European clothes are the official dress of Iraq, and in the towns anything else is equated with lack of education.

Unchanged through this noisy apostasy from tradition flow the broad and splendid waters of the Tigris, spanned only by three or four ugly iron bridges of British construction. Along its western bank are many of the old Turkish houses built round a tiled and mosaic courtyard, in whose gardens are trees where small pastel-shaded doves cluster on the branches like delicately bloomed fruit. But the Turkish houses, much in demand by British residents in Baghdad, are condemned. To the Iraqis, with gold in their hands and impatient for development, they seem archaic and unfunctional.

“They have only two words for everything,” said Thesiger,
“moderne
and
demodé,
and what isn’t the first is the second.”

Of the eight million people who live within the frontiers of Iraq, Baghdad now holds over a million, and more pour into the city every day. Except in the remote tribal areas the children now receive a school education, and as a result consider themselves too good to work on the land; indeed land work is considered to be the lowest of all occupations. So, hearing of great wealth in the cities—the picture thus presented being no clearer, perhaps, than it would have been five centuries ago—a youth will leave his home and drift to Baghdad. Here, to avoid loss of face, he will acquire European clothes, and these, being according to his means, are often already ragged and disreputable. If he is lucky he will find work at the equivalent of five shillings a day, but when it rains all employment stops automatically, and he is dependent on what he may earn by more dubious means. Thus juvenile delinquency is said to be practically universal, and after dark the streets are haunted by skulking striplings ready to grab or earn a coin by any means at their disposal.

Mass evils of this kind are perhaps inherent in any change as rapid and complete as comes to those countries where oil, the raw material of western industrial civilisation, is to be
found; but it is nevertheless a sorry moment in which to visit the oldest culture in the world, the country that taught the ancient Egyptians to write. It is a
fin
d’é
poque
, bringing with it corruption, unrest and bewilderment, of which only the highest level, that which has been educated for generations, is free. The town Iraqi now want one thing and one thing only, the American Way of Life, and the bulk of the people have as yet little realisation that this implies more than a multiplicity of sophisticated automatic toys, for some eighty per cent of the population of all Iraq is still illiterate. After four days in Baghdad I found myself remembering again Thesiger’s phrase: “tribesmen into corner boys”.

In Rashid Street, the Piccadilly of Baghdad, I tried to buy the standard primer of the language, Van Ess’s
Spoken
Arabic of Iraq.
In the bookshop an Iraqi girl with a lot of make-up told me in English that it was out of stock, but produced another with a similar title, which she said was much more highly thought of. This I bought, but it was not until after some days of utter bewilderment that I discovered that it was intended to be used in conjunction with gramophone records.

“You are walking alone,” I read. “You want to talk to someone, so you talk to a young Baghdadi. You tell him ‘good evening’, and he replies. Then you say that you are an American and tell him your name. He is glad to know you and tells you his name is Said. You tell him you have just come to Iraq. You add that your friend came with you. You say your father has a farm near New York, and you work in a big automobile factory. And you want to work in the factory when you go back to America. While you are talking, Said’s friend Hassan comes up to you…. Said asks Hassan where he is going. Hassan says to the King Ghazi movie. It’s a good movie, he says.” I flicked over a few pages. “Father I want to introduce these Americans to you; this is
John and this is his friend Bill. John’s from New York but Bill’s from Texas.”
Father:
“My oldest son went to America. He’s an American now.” … “You have been introduced to an Iraqi named Ali. He asks where you are from. You say you are an American and tell him what part you came from. … You ask him if he knows Ford cars. Yes, he says, Ford cars are good, in fact he has one. He says there is a Ford factory in Baghdad. … Later you are walking around with Ali. Ali calls your attention to another man. What is his work, you ask. Ali says he doesn’t work; he is a merchant and has a big shop in the market. You ask Ali if he knows him. Ali says yes, and he also knows his son. His son doesn’t work much either, he likes to walk around all the time.”

Oh, Arabian Nights; oh, Christopher Columbus; oh, Tree of Knowledge of Good and Oil.

The Minister was gracious and affable. He thanked us for our courtesy in calling upon him, which, he said, was of course completely unnecessary, as Iraq was a free country and foreigners could travel where they wished. He touched on the problems of the expanding city. “All Iraq is coming to Baghdad,” he said. “Here they have everything they want; every boy has a wireless set, every girl a sewing machine. They leave the country for the towns as though they were running from an epidemic. We couldn’t stop them coming if we wanted to.” He armed Thesiger with letters to the Governors of the provinces in which we should be travelling, and that night we left by train for Basra.

Of Basra, the greatest port of the Persian Gulf, I had as fleeting and necessarily as superficial an impression as of Baghdad. Here, though the present Basra is not an ancient city, the old and the new, the east and the west, seemed even more inextricably woven, for the very new of the gleaming
traffic and the concrete buildings is set against a middle distance, rather than a far background, of primitive life.

We lived in the most modern quarter of Basra, Ashar—and during my short stay I saw little of any other—at a Consulate-General worthy to be an embassy, as the guest of a Consul-General worthy to be an ambassador. Beyond the green and gracious walled garden lay a broad street and then the great river, the Shatt al Arab, which is the fusion of the Tigris and the Euphrates in their last miles to the sea. Palms fringed the farther bank, and on its surface rowed, paddled, roared, stammered, or simply drifted, craft of every conceivable description. Big Arab trading boats under full sail, primitive bitumen-coated canoes from the waterways surrounding the marshes, motor launches and passenger paddle steamers, naval vessels, big ocean-going merchantmen, and completely circular rafts carrying loads of reed matting from the marshlands, drifting downstream without propulsion; the paths of all these were woven together like a tableau representing the history of surface craft.

The clothing of the people who crowded the streets was as diverse as the boats upon the river, but I began to understand the various grades, as it were, of dress in Iraq, and their social significance. There is only one reasonably constant factor, and that is the head-dress. Non-Europeanised Iraqis wear their hair shaven to a short stubble, and over it a skull cap, often bright or multi-coloured with floral design, oversewn into a quilted pattern. The skull cap, however, is usually hidden, except in the case of children, by the loose, turban-like
keffia
which is worn over it. The formal
keffia
in Iraq is white with a black pattern on it, like Rylock wire netting, and signifies that the wearer belongs to the Shi’a sect of Muslims, those who believe the Prophet’s son-in-law and cousin Ali to have been his rightful successor, and after him his two sons Hassan and Hussain. The first of these was murdered by his wife, and the other, driven by a frantic belief in his own cause, died a martyr’s death in battle,
backed by flames that he had lit to cut off his own retreat. His tomb at Kerbela, and that of Ali at Nejef, are the two great places of pilgrimage for the Shi’a sect. (The Shi’a and the Sunni, who preponderate outside the frontiers of Iraq and Persia, are the two great divisions of the Muslim world, the Sunni originating as followers of the Prophet’s uncle Abu Bakr. Sunni means, in a broad sense, “orthodox”, and Shi’a “partisan”.)

The headcloth may be worn loosely draped over the head and shoulders or it may be wound up and tied into the shape of a turban; in either case it is held in place by a headrope or
agal,
two snake-like black twists fitting on to the crown of the head. The
agal
is like the top two coils of a weak spring, wooden at the core, and bound over with black wool. There are variations of the head-dress as there are of everything else; the very poor or primitive often wear no
agal,
and the
keffia
itself may be no more than a rag of any colour knotted round the head.

But it is below the neck that the diversity of garments becomes really confusing. Basically, there is a single prototype of all the elaborations, a simple shirt reaching from the throat to the feet, like a nightgown, of any sober colour except black, and sometimes striped like pyjamas. This is the
dish-dasha
worn by all poorer people who have not yet adopted European clothes, but in cooler weather it is now quite customary to wear over this an ordinary European jacket. With or without this jacket the outer layer may be worn, a cloak or
bisht,
black, brown, or dark blue. It is never thick; in its crudest form it is loosely woven of hard, hairless brown wool and it is unornamented, but it may, among the more elegant, be diaphanous as fine muslin, and often carries an edging of gold braid and gold tassels.

The next stage beyond the simple
dish-dasha,
among the well-to-do who do not wear trousers, is, broadly speaking, a coat and skirt of dark cloth. The coat is rather longer and fuller than is customary in Europe, and the ground-length
skirt continues upward as a wrap-round dress, to form a V at the chest like that of an ordinary waistcoat. Above this V appears a shirt, but rarely a collar or tie, giving a somewhat unfinished appearance to an ambitious scheme. This is the customary wear of the sheikhs and other unwesternised people of importance. With it go black towny-looking shoes, but seldom socks. The poor people are always barefoot.

I went to the
suq
to buy a belt. With recollections of North African
suq,
and that of Marrakesh in particular, I had expected quarters of leather-workers, gold-workers, silver-workers, rug sellers; all the enticements of beautiful and exotic goods. I crossed a wooden bridge over a canal cluttered with all types of boats and of Asiatic humanity. A negro in a knee-length
dish-dasha
clutched my arm and thrust a packet of postcards under my nose. They were, I saw, of another large negro posturing indecently in a very expensive-looking bedroom. As I brushed them away he instantly substituted a second packet. The top photograph was so excruciatingly funny that had I been in a less public place I should have asked to see the rest. A bulgy Semitic woman of uncertain age, naked but for a pair of very high-heeled shoes, posed with grotesque coquettishness against a painted backcloth of palms and minarets. Both hands were raised, one to shoulder level and the other curved high above her head in a parody of sinuous grace. From under coal-black eyelids she ogled the camera with a perceptible squint; but the beauty of the picture lay in what she was holding. Draped from her two upraised hands hung a thin rope-like length of black silk, cunningly screening from view every part of her body that would have been hidden by a modern two-piece bathing dress. I wondered whether these photographs were much in demand among the Arabs, for they could hardly have been calculated to call forth a frenzy of lust from a visiting European.

I entered the
suq
and walked between lines of stalls selling
aluminium pots and pans, cheap Japanese china, bales of bright coloured Indian cotton, and fibreware luggage. Everything either came from Europe or was a further-eastern imitation of western commodities. At last I stopped a particularly European-looking Iraqi and asked him if he spoke English. Enough, he said; so I asked him if he could tell me where to buy a leather belt. “Leather?” he said. “I suppose it is possible. But why not plastic? It is much better. We all use plastic now; all the shops have plastic belts. Cheaper, better.”

Wandering on through the
suq
I came at length to a quarter of so deafening a din that I realised that here at last was something actually being made. It sounded like hundreds of men hitting sheets of metal with hammers; and that was precisely what it was, sheets of aluminium being made into household utensils, and sheets of copper being fashioned into a particular shape of coffee pot that is standard throughout all Iraq. On that first visit it was the only evidence of any local industry that I discovered. I did in the end return with a leather belt, but on its inner surface was stamped in Roman letters the words “Made in Germany”.