Read Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village Online
Authors: Elizabeth Warnock Fernea
Tags: #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #General
use my Arabic among the throngs of strangers. My only
alternative was to follow the line of black-veiled women in
front of me carrying their bedrolls on their heads.
But my feelings of dismay receded before the sights and
sounds around me, the city decked out in all its finery for the
yearly festival and the thousands of people pushing forth to
the golden mosque.
We were passing an elaborate diwan, a tent which had been
erected just off the main street, carpeted in fine Persian rugs
and hung with tapestries. A few obviously rich male pilgrims
had settled into overstuffed gilt chairs. Undisturbed by the
crowds milling by, they were sipping coffee in comfort while
they fingered their worry beads and listened to readings from
the Koran piped in through a radio loudspeaker.
The town was a sea of splendid colored flags and strings of
colored lights. Every shop, from the shabbiest kiosk offering
cigarettes, shoelaces and chewing gum to the larger
“magasins” displaying Western clothing in the window, had
some illumination and flew a green flag for Hussein, a black
one for mourning, and often others of pink and purple, scarlet
or sky blue. Some were mere token flags, a twist of cloth
suspended from a stick and propped up among the wares, but
others were elaborately embroidered with mottoes and hung
from carved gilt standards. Long bright bars of pink-and-white
neon illuminated with a garish light the mourning finery
which decorated the major coffee shops and hotels: black silk
banners lettered in white; fringed tapestries portraying in vivid
colors the important events in the lives of Hussein or the
Prophet, black-framed portraits. The smaller mosques had
erected black canopies at their entrances; clusters of flags
marked the doors and from each mosque now we could hear
the chant of the muezzins, high and shrill from the many
minarets of the town, summoning the crowds of faithful to
their noon prayers.
We walked and walked in the blazing sun, probably not as
far as I thought, for I had to struggle constantly to keep up
with my companions, elbowing and prodding my way, even
pushing with my satchel to get through the tightly jammed
masses of people. Occasionally the crowd would separate me
for a moment from the figures of Fatima and the other women
from El Nahra and I would panic and push ahead fiercely,
hardly caring whom I shoved, until I could again see, among
the hundreds of black-clad women with bedrolls on their
heads, the bright familiar bundles on the heads of the women I
knew.
Where to step was another problem. The sidewalks were
fast being transformed into
byut
, temporary households set up
for the duration of the pilgrimage by families who could not
afford lodging elsewhere. This was the great holiday of the
poor, to come by truck, donkey, horse or camel or even on
foot from all parts of the Shiite Moslem world, and camp out
on the sidewalk as close to the great mosque as possible, so
that they might go many times each day to pray at the tomb of
the martyr. Even as we walked, people were unrolling mats,
setting down squares of carpet and claiming a strip of
sidewalk as their own. The old people sat on the strip to hold
the space while the wife or son went to buy fuel for the Primus
stove, to fill a battered teakettle with water, or bring bread and
a measure of sugar. Turning to look back at a woman in face
veil and abayah sweeping her square of sidewalk with part of
a broken broom, I was elbowed into a blazing Primus stove on
which someone was preparing lunch. I felt a stab of pain as
the flame seared into the side of my shin, but there was no
time to stop and look down to see how bad the burn was. I had
to fight to catch up with Fatima again.
Finally, after half an hour of tortuous walking, we turned
into the main street. My leg was throbbing steadily by this
time and my shoulders and arms ached from the effort of
keeping my abayah modestly around me and holding onto my
satchel at the same time. My face veil, which I had been so
worried about losing, was pasted to my face with sweat, and
sweat dripped down my arms and legs and into my shoes. I
tried to jerk my abayah up and pull it around me more
securely. What would I do if it were to slip down and I were
revealed, uncovered and foreign, in the middle of this crowd?
Why had I ever come anyway? Then suddenly, in a break in
the crowd, I saw at the end of the street the three golden
domes and the slender minarets of Hussein’s shrine
shimmering in the dusty sunlight like the fantastic mirages
seen by the faithful in the desert. Crowds milled below the
minarets, which reached their shining peaks up into the fierce
blue sky. A little boy pushed past, shouting in my ear,
“Sammoon! Sammoon haar!” and Rajat pulled me by the
hand. The moment passed, but it had crystallized everything
about this strange day for me: the golden mosque, the flutter
of bright flags, the small boy shouting in my ear, the sibilant
sounds of Koranic verses sung from the loudspeakers, and the
smells of sewage, strongly brewed family tea, and perfumed
Arab gentlemen hurrying by.
The crowds were pushing us forward with them to the
mosque. As we tried to step aside and let the strongest go past,
we were knocked against old ladies selling eggs packed in
grass-lined woven baskets, against the itinerant peddlers
loudly hawking the tinware and painted enamel bowls that the
poor bring back as keepsakes from the pilgrimage. In the huge
circular open area surrounding the shrine, the earliest-arrived
pilgrims had camped, and these households bore signs of
longer habitation—an old man sleeping on a mat, a girl
washing a cooking pot in a cupful of water. Trays of food
were offered for sale: chickens, roast fish still clamped in iron
grills, bowls of stew, but few could afford to buy. Fatima
looked longingly at the fish.
“I think I’ll ask how much it is,” she said.
The other women laughed. “You wouldn’t.”
“I will too,” insisted Fatima and marched up to the peddler.
“How much?” she repeated, and snorted derisively at his
reply. “Who do you think will buy your fish?” she asked. “Is it
made of gold?”
Just when I thought we could not go further, we stopped, at
the entrance to a side street leading away from the shrine and
here, unexpectedly, ran into some other women from El
Nahra. Fatima was overjoyed; the women embraced each
other like long-lost sisters and we promptly deposited our
luggage in the shade of a house, sat down on our bags, and
began to exchange experiences. In a few minutes Sherifa and
Medina, who had come the day before, wandered up, and we
embraced again. Medina dug out a handful of pumpkin seeds
from an inside pocket and handed them around. The holiday
had begun.
While the women talked, I looked about me. A flashing
neon sign to our left announced the presence of a first-class
hotel, and above the sign on the hotel’s spacious balcony I
could see a group of wealthy Pakistani pilgrims, the men in
snowy white, the women in brilliantly colored saris, drinking
lemonade and watching the crowds below them in front of the
mosque. On a mat near us four children and an old woman
huddled together, watching the mother trying to make tea on a
Primus stove which alternately smoked and belched forth
yellow flame. A few feet away a small boy lay rigid on a rug,
his head supported by a pillow, while two women and an old
man took turns fanning him. The younger of the women was
trying to force a few spoonfuls of hot tea between the boy’s
clenched lips. The man removed his kaffiyeh briefly, mopped
his forehead and passed his hand over his face. Then, while I
watched, the adults moved the boy’s pallet into a larger patch
of shade, away from the traffic, and I got a closer look at the
child, who was emaciated, his eyes glazed and sunken from
fever, the skin of his face tight over the bones, the mouth
slack. He looked very near death. The father now began to fan
and the two women straightened out the boy’s thin dishdasha
and arranged his feet more comfortably. At first I wondered
why on earth they had brought this sick child to Karbala in
such heat, but the obvious answer came. Dying on pilgrimage
assures the soul immediate entrance into heaven.
Fatima leaned over to tell me that we were going to a house
just down the street, where some of the women we knew had
stayed in past years. Through a large central courtyard full of
women and children, we were ushered into a small room
where the dirt floor was covered with part of a mat. A painted
and locked wooden box stood in a corner. That was all. Before
I could summon up my scattered bits of Arabic to ask Fatima
about Uncle Yehia, she had disappeared, and Rajat with her. I
was left in the room with our luggage and Um Ali, an older
woman from El Nahra whom I knew only slightly.
“Where have the girls gone?” I asked.
Um Ali grunted. She did not know. Perhaps they had gone
to the mosque.
We sat in silence for a few moments. I was tired, dead tired.
And I was thoroughly annoyed with Fatima for leaving me
behind without explanation, as though I were a sack of
potatoes or at best a poor relative of whose reactions one
could not be certain. Surely Fatima was old enough and
experienced enough—but there I stopped. Fatima was
certainly old enough, past twenty-five, but she was hardly
experienced enough to handle any out-of-the-ordinary
situation. That situation, apparently, was myself. She hadn’t
wanted to take me to the mosque, perhaps. All right. I
understood that. But was I then to be dumped thus,
unceremoniously, in a corner whenever they went off to
participate in anything on this five-day holiday? If that were
the case, why had I come? But it seemed there was nothing I
could do about it, because I was totally dependent on her. Or
was I?
A crippled boy whom I had seen occasionally in the
settlement limped into the room, sat down and looked up at
me. Um Ali grumbled to herself, produced a few coins from
the knotted corner of a handkerchief and gave them to the boy
with instructions to buy her some sugar. Aha! An emissary to
the outside world. I produced a few coins of my own for the
boy and asked him to bring me a Pepsi-Cola.
The Pepsi-Cola, which was quite cold, raised my spirits
considerably. I loosened my abayah, wiped my arms and face
with a handkerchief and examined my burn which had now
developed a puffy white blister but did not hurt any more. Um
Ali drank her tea and dozed in a corner. Flies buzzed about
over her empty tea glass. I waited.
Sherifa came in to whisper that she thought we were to stay
at Fatima’s uncle’s house.
“Why don’t you go there?” she asked.
I replied truthfully that I did not know.
“If you don’t stay there, you may not find any place, it is so
late,” warned Sherifa. “Tell Fatima. Even this place is full.
The room you are sitting in now has been reserved for
tonight.”
I will, I thought grimly, if I ever see her again.
When Rajat appeared after nearly an hour, I pounced on
her.
“Why,” I said, “don’t we go to Uncle Yehia’s?”
“Oh, we can’t possibly go to my uncle’s,” she answered. “It
would be great shame [ayb] because we didn’t bring any big
presents, like chickens or butter.”
I pointed out that I had two cakes and a bag of fruit which
she herself had carried the whole length of Karbala for that
very purpose.
She merely stared.
“Are we to stay here?” I asked.
“No, it is full.”
“Then where will we sleep tonight?”
“After lunch,” said Rajat patiently, in the manner one uses
with a recalcitrant child, “we will look for a place. Fatima says
so.”
“Where?”
“Near the mosque,” she answered. That was all I could find
out.
At that point I decided I could not face the possibility,
which was now very real, of sleeping on the street. It was past
three o’clock, the ceremonies were scheduled to begin at
sundown, and as Sherifa had pointed out, most of the available
space was filled by now. Sleeping on the sidewalk did not
bother me so much as the prospect of keeping myself wrapped
up in abayah and veil for five days and nights, with no private
place in which to wash or go to the toilet. All the apocryphal
stories of Shiite fanaticism rose before me, and I had a few
bad moments imagining a Grade ? extravaganza in which I
was unveiled as an infidel and an impostor in the middle of
the night by excited crowds and borne aloft to the mosque
where I was presented to the mullah to do with as he wished. I
knew I was being silly, that my friends were with me, and that
even sleeping in the street would not be a catastrophe, but by