Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (30 page)

might be found in the closet or the bookcase or behind the

radio.

I must have looked perplexed for she explained that she had

had two boys, but both had died, one after four months.

Hussein had told her that in America boy babies did not die.

“What do you use?” she wanted to know.

While we were in El Nahra she had another boy, born dead,

and when I went to see her she merely looked at me out of

huge sunken eyes. I felt ashamed, thinking of the vitamin pills

and orange juice and incubators and oxygen tents in the

maternity hospitals at home. That whole world might have

been on another planet, so far was it from the hovel where

Sajjida lay on a worn reed mat and delivered one dead baby

after another.

“Is it true that you eat meat every day?” she said another

time. I think the question was purely one of curiosity but I

wasn’t sure and again I felt ashamed. For the first time since

coming to El Nahra, I had become distinctly aware of hunger.

Although I had read of famine and seen films and photos, I

realized I had never personally known anyone who went to

bed hungry. Sajjida and her little girls often did, or at least

they had before Hussein had found work. Even with a steady

income, their average daily diet consisted of bread and tea,

rice and dried dates occasionally, meat rarely.

Hussein was lucky to have a job in El Nahra, but many

other members of the clan had turned to migrant labor. They

traveled to Baghdad in early spring to hire out as workmen in

the building trades; in Baghdad they could sleep in the streets

on the warm summer nights, and thus save almost all their

earnings to take back to El Nahra and support their family

during the winter. The clan had been hit hardest by the soil

salination which was creeping slowly over most of the

farmland. Forced by one bad season after another into near

bankruptcy, the members of the clan had either sold most of

their land, bit by bit, to Haji or one of his uncles, or simply

abandoned it.

Yet, Hussein told us proudly, his clan was the oldest clan of

all, and the sheik of his clan had once been the sheik of the

entire El Eshadda. He did not seem to feel any resentment

against Haji Hamid for being the current leader and

landowner, though he may have kept silent since it was to Haji

that he owed his present job. Bob believed that Haji felt some

responsibility for the fate of Hussein’s clan, for it was reported

that he gave rice and flour regularly to the poorest families.

We thought his insistence on an armed guard for us simply a

way of providing income for still another poor family, but we

were wrong. Hussein, it turned out, had had a good job with

the irrigation department, but when Abdulla approached him

as a representative of his clan, Hussein dutifully gave up his

job and came to us. We wondered then whether Hussein’s

undue praise of Haji might not have been a bit forced, because

the irrigation department job would have been permanent,

whereas we were temporary guests at best.

There was no doubt, however, as to Hussein’s pride in his

lineage and his clan. He could give us, from memory, his

entire family tree going back five generations, when one

Jassim and his brother Shebib had settled in the valley. This

was what it meant to have a sense of the past, for Jassim’s and

Shebib’s eight daughters and sons, their husbands and wives

and children and
their
husbands and wives and children were

as real to Hussein as though they were alive today, although

they had been dead for more than a hundred years. As a boy,

Hussein had spent the long summer evenings and the long

winter evenings sitting in the tribal mudhif with the men; he

had heard his father talk of the family and the clan and the

tribe and, hearing it again and again, stored it in his memory

as evidence of his own identity, his place in the world, such

evidence to be passed on to his children after him. This was

what kept Hussein and Sajjida alive, I think, for certainly

nothing in their physical environment augured toward hope or

pleasure, but they felt themselves part of the chain, passing on

jassim’s and Shebib’s ancient blood to their thin daughters,

who would marry cousins within the clan and so continue the

lineage. Then Hussein and Sajjida could die in peace, assured

that they had done their duty and that something of themselves

lived on.

Each night at sundown Hussein reported for work, his rifle

over his shoulder. He slept outside our gate. The nights were

warm and he insisted that he did not need a mattress or a

sheet. I don’t know that the consciousness of his presence ever

gave us any greater feeling of security, but it did touch off two

incidents which were the talk of El Nahra for days afterward.

One night we had as a guest an Iraqi woman schoolteacher,

a friend of mine from Baghdad. She had come to visit because

she was interested in the area, she said (she had never been

outside Baghdad in her life), but after she had arrived, she

seemed very nervous and kept asking us questions about the

friendliness of our neighbors. We had convinced her finally, I

think, of the tribe’s good will and hospitality, and had just

settled her for the night in our best bed when we were nearly

startled out of our shirts by a volley of rifle shots, very loud in

the still summer night, which thudded directly into our garden

wall. My friend leaped out of bed with a cry of fright and

came running to me in her nightgown, then turned back in

sudden modesty to look for her robe. Bob shouted that he was

going out to investigate and at this my friend clung to me and

began to tremble all over.

“Don’t let him go out there, B.J.,” she pleaded. “Please!”

I pointed out that he had already gone and I was sure there

was some simple explanation, but my friend would not be

comforted.

She wrung her hands and kept repeating, “Oh, you don’t

understand, you just don’t understand,” until Bob finally

reappeared.

Although he had only been gone a few minutes, it seemed

much longer. He appeared unconcerned, and explained that

Hussein was considering buying a gun from one of the sheik’s

guards and they had been trying it out by shooting it into the

mud wall of our garden.

My friend looked at him suspiciously. “You are hiding the

truth from me,” she said accusingly.

“No, honestly, that is what he said,” Bob replied.

“And you believe it?” she insisted.

“Of course,” said Bob. She was still not convinced, so I

made some tea and we sat in the kitchen, talking of other

things, until my friend was calm enough to go back to bed.

The next day, when we went to visit the women, they had

all heard the story and went out of their way to tell my friend

how rude they considered such behavior, especially to a guest

as distinguished as herself. I think she was mollified, but she

never saw us again without reminding us of the “Experience

with the Tribe,” as she called it.

The second incident proved to be not so easily forgotten.

One night I was raising the mosquito net to climb into my bed,

which had been set outside in the garden, when I was struck a

furious blow on the head. I screamed, loudly and

involuntarily, and screamed twice more in rapid succession

before I recovered enough to pull myself together and look

around to see what had happened. Then I felt rather silly and

embarrassed, for on the ground by the bed lay a mourning

dove, fluttering and trying to rise. Later Bob and I decided that

a hawk must have dropped down on the dove, which in turn

plunged to escape capture and hit my head accidentally on its

downward flight. But that was later.

The doorbell now began to ring furiously. Bob had been in

the toilet when the incident occurred; as I ran around the

house, I saw him coming from the garden and he motioned me

back as he headed for the door. A shot was fired just before he

reached the gate.

In five minutes Bob was back, looking very puzzled, and I

am sure I did not help matters by flinging myself on him and

sobbing. I was trying to explain what had happened, but I was

nearly incoherent.

“Hussein insists you were screaming, but I told him no,”

Bob said.

“But I
was
screaming,” I replied.

“I didn’t hear you,” he insisted.

As the story gradually emerged, he began to laugh. “Now I

see why Hussein was acting the way he did.”

“Why?” I asked.

“He obviously thought I was giving you a good beating,”

Bob explained, “and when I said you hadn’t screamed, he

nudged and winked so I would know he understood.”

He laughed again and looked at me. “You’ll have some

explaining to do tomorrow in the harems,” he said.

Bob was right. For some reason the women found this story

extremely funny, whether because they believed it
was
a bird

or because they thought I had concocted an ingenious tale to

hide my wifely punishment, I don’t know. But whenever

conversation languished during the rest of the time I spent in

El Nahra, Laila or Fatima would say, “Tell us the story of the

bird that hit you in the head,” and when I obliged, everyone

would dissolve into hysterical laughter. It became one of my

most successful social anecdotes.

17

Muharram

That year the Islamic month of Muharram came in August,

when the heat had reached its peak, and no breeze came after

sundown. The hot close nights were filled with the sound of

religious chanting and breast beating, for krayas were being

held everywhere, in the suq and in the mudhif for the men and

in private homes for the women. Attendance was greater than

at the krayas of Ramadan, for El Nahra is in a Shiite area and

the month of Muharram is of special significance to all Shiite

Moslems. It was during Muharram, in the seventh century,

that Hussein, grandson of the prophet Mohammed, and the

imam
or religious leader at that time, went to Kufa to press his

claim to the caliphate and was slain in battle on the plains of

Karbala. Hussein’s death contributed to the split into Shiite

and Sunni sects which persists in Islam to this day.

Each year during Muharram the pious Shiite communities

in Iraq and Iran and in India commemorate Imam Hussein’s

martyrdom, through daily krayas and through mourning

processions and passion plays which dramatize each important

occasion in the last days of the martyr.

“You will see them all, Beeja,” promised Laila. She, like

the other women, was very excited about the coming events,

which marked an annual period of color and drama in the

village.

First of the major occasions was the wedding procession, in

memory of Hussein’s daughter’s marriage, which had taken

place just before his departure for Kufa.

“In the wedding procession my little sisters will carry

candles. All the small children do,” said Laila.

“The burying is also very good,” she added, “but very sad.

We will go to the mosque that day and you can come with us.”

Go to the mosque? “Yes, I would love to,” I answered. No

one had even suggested I go near the mosque before. But

Laila was already onto something else, the re-enactment of the

battle between Hussein and his foes, which, it appeared,

would not be presented in El Nahra.

I asked, “Why not? I should think it would be exciting to

watch.”

“Oh it is,” she replied.

“Then why isn’t it going to be presented?”

Laila was vague. “Ask Mr. Bob,” was all she would say.

Bob asked several of the tribesmen, who were also vague

about the reasons, and finally he turned to Jabbar, the

irrigation engineer.

“It’s very simple. The sheik and the mayor won’t put up the

money,” explained Jabbar. “The government asked for 2000

English pounds this year.”

Bob was puzzled and said so. “You mean the government

charges the village for putting on the battle scene?”

No, Jabbar answered. In the past the battles had sometimes

led to bloodshed when feuding families had used the general

confusion and excitement as a cover for settling old scores.

First the government had tried to prevent the performances.

Failing in this, they required the village to pledge a large

amount of money which would be forfeited in case of trouble.

“Why are you so curious to see this sort of thing?” Jabbar

then asked Bob.

“Why not?” Bob retorted. “All the tribesmen seem to find it

interesting.”

“Oh yes, of course, the ignorant people, yes, they enjoy it,”

Jabbar replied, “but it really has nothing to do with us. I

cannot see why you should bother.”

His manner was so odd that Bob pressed him until Jabbar

finally burst out that he was certain that Bob would find the

ceremonies, especially those of flagellation, primitive and