Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (19 page)

Inside the mud walls the women were already at work, but

they rose to greet me, and we shook hands and exchanged the

salutations of the day,
“Ayyamak sa’ida
[May this day be

happy for you].” Hard candies were offered and
kolaicha
, the

sweet cakes of sugar, oil, barley flour and cardamom seed

made especially for the Iid.

“Come up above, we can see better from there,” said Laila,

leading me up a narrow stair to the wide roof covering one

end of the compound which had been used as an observation

post when the house had been a fortress. From the low

battlements we could view discreetly the increasing activity

around the mudhif. The clearing was just beginning to fill with

men, and servants hurried about, filling the animal troughs

with water and stacking freshly cut grass into piles for the

visitors’ horses. A thin ribbon of smoke spiraled from the

mudhif entrance, signal that the coffeemaker, freed grandson

of a Negro slave, was roasting beans over charcoal.

Since early morning tribesmen had been arriving from

outlying clan settlements. Even now, from the roof we could

see several small figures of horsemen on the flat horizon,

outlined against the bright blue sky. They gradually assumed

shape as they approached in twos and threes, and we could see

the men’s abas and kaffiyehs billowing behind them in the

light breeze, and their saddle buckles glinting in the morning

sun. Then there was a pause as the horses were hidden in the

shady palm grove, a sudden clatter of hoofs as they burst out

of the grove onto the hard-packed silt of the clearing, and

shouts of recognition as the men dismounted, tied their horses

and turned to greet the sheik, who was seated ceremoniously

on a pillow just inside the entrance. Bright rugs had been laid

on the floor next to the arched walls of the mudhif, and here

the men took their places after exchanging traditional

greetings with the sheik and the men already present. The

coffeemaker brought them a sip of bitter coffee in a tiny china

cup; they drank the coffee, and the arrival was officially over;

the men settled themselves for low-voiced conversation with

their fellow tribesmen, some of whom they might see only on

these occasions.

Laila was very excited, and pointed out individuals to me—

Hikmat, her mother’s cousin from the El Jurayd clan; two

brothers of Sheik Hamid’s first wife; a gray-bearded man

riding up with his three sons, the subchief of one of the

original clans of the El Eshadda. There also, said Laila, was

Sayid Muhsen, descendant of a Persian family which had

settled in the El Eshadda area a hundred years ago. Sayid

Muhsen was well known for his progressive ideas. I

remembered that Bob had told me Muhsen had built a school

in his little settlement of fifty families and had gone to

Baghdad to beg a teacher from the Ministry of Education. It

was rumored that the girls and boys of the settlement attended

school together, which was almost unheard of in the Diwaniya

area. There—Laila paused—yes, she said, it was Urthman,

one of the estranged uncles of the sheik. The quarrel over the

succession to the sheikship still smoldered between the two

men, but on feast days Urthman came to say his salaams to

Hamid. Laila predicted, however, that Urthman would not stay

to lunch.

The crowd was growing, augmented by the men of our

settlement, who were emerging from the houses along the path

in new white dishdashas and freshly pressed abas. Boys and

girls dashed round the clearing, excited by the activities of the

festal day and dazzled by their own sartorial splendor, the new

sandals or tennis shoes, the girls in bright dresses, the boys in

striped dishdashas. They ran between the women’s quarters

and the mudhif, bearing messages in both directions.

“Haji wants tea now for him and three guests,” announced

Abbas, second son of Selma.

“Yes, yes,” answered Selma, preoccupied with the rice

paste she was patting into shape for
kubbas
.

“Now, Mother,” insisted Abbas.

“Who are the guests?” Selma wanted to know.

Abbas listed them, and within a few minutes every woman

in the compound knew that the mayor, the engineer and a

visitor from Diwaniya had come to pay their respects to the

sheik.

The women had been at work since five o’clock, but now at

ten, instead of losing heart at the prospect of the 300 lunches

to be served hot at noon, they were gayer than ever. Even

Kulthum who, as senior wife, was supervising the

preparations with seriousness and dispatch, paused in her

work to exclaim in surprise when told that Urthman had

arrived and might stay to lunch. Laila translated, telling me

Kulthum had remarked acidly that Urthman’s winter harvest

must not be too good if he found it necessary to cadge a free

meal from the nephew whom he cursed in every coffee shop

in the vicinity. But I gathered from the tone of the laughter

and the blushes on the sheik’s daughters’ faces that Kulthum’s

comment had been a good deal more pungent than that.

For the feast, a cow and five full-grown sheep had been

killed; Laila took me to the slaughterhouse behind the

women’s quarters where Abu Selman, the sheik’s official

butcher, had ceremoniously slit the throats of the animals and

murmured the customary blessing over them. Abu Selman was

now skinning the carcasses and removing the entrails. The

kidneys, liver, heart and brains were set aside for special

dishes; the head, stomach and feet of three of the sheep were

turned over to the sheik’s daughter Samira, who would clean

them and make them into
patcha
, a local delicacy. The other

two sheep were to be roasted whole over a charcoal spit and

the eyes and ears offered as treats to the most honored guests.

Abu Selman chopped the carcasses into great chunks and his

son carried them on tin trays to Kulthum, who waited with her

sharpened knife to cut the mutton and beef into still smaller

pieces. The piles of fresh slippery meat were washed and

washed under the water tap, then went into salted water to be

boiled until tender over fires of dried palm fronds that were

blazing all over the eastern corner of the court. This boiled

meat and its broth, together with bowls of vegetable stew,

mounds of rice and piles of wheat bread, formed the meal

which would be served to the tribesmen.

The sun climbed higher, and the heat from the fires added

to the general discomfort; the women were sweating profusely

through their black garments. In one corner the sheik’s

daughters and their cousins were peeling squash, chopping

spinach and cutting up onions and tomatoes for the vegetable

stew, to be flavored with a bit of fat meat, garlic, salt, celery

leaves and raw ground turmeric. Three women were mixing

and patting barley dough into flat loaves; a small girl sat

brushing the flies away from rows of plates of cornstarch

pudding.

“More fuel, Amina,” called Kulthum. “Samira! Sabiha!”

Armloads of small sticks and fronds were brought and Amina

stoked the open fires.

“Here, too,” Alwiyah shouted. She stood at the door of the

kitchen, wiping her eyes with her foota while smoke billowed

white around her. “Quickly, Amina, hurry.”

“Yes, yes,” muttered Amina, depositing more fuel at the

door.

“No, inside,” and Alwiyah gave her a good-natured push.

Grumbling, Amina entered, dropped the fuel and

reappeared wiping her eyes.

“It’s hot as hell in there!” she announced to the whole court,

and everyone laughed as she elbowed Alwiyah and then ran

like a naughty child from the sheik’s daughter’s outraged

dignity.

“What are you cooking?” I asked Alwiyah, and she showed

me into the kitchen, a long mud-brick room without smoke

holes, where six or eight women were stirring and tending

enormous pots cooking on open fires. The smoke hung in the

room like dense fog, and the women would stir for a few

moments, then walk to the door to wipe their streaming eyes

and mop their sweat-streaked faces. Yet they laughed as they

did so.

“These are the dishes for the sheik and the special guests,”

Alwiyah said. This explained the women’s good nature

despite the heat and smoke. They had been chosen as the best

cooks, to prepare food for Haji’s tray.

“Don’t stay in here, Beeja—it’s too hot,” warned Alwiyah

with a hand on my shoulder. But I wanted to see the food, so

the pots were uncovered one by one: ground liver stewed with

tomatoes, kubba, fried eggplant, patcha, saffron rice. Four

chickens were being grilled over charcpal in the bank of round

brick ovens along one side of the kitchen.

“Beeja, the hosa is beginning. Come on,” called Laila.

Bob had told me to watch for the hosa, which in the past

was always performed before the tribe went to war or set out

on foraging raids into the desert. Now it served as a rally of

support for the tribe and for its leader, reviving memories of

the El Eshaddas’ exploits and inspiring tribal pride in their

collective glory.

“Come quickly,” said Laila, and we hurried up to the roof

again. The crowd was backing away from the front of the

mudhif, leaving an open space for young tribesmen with rifles

held high to assemble in a circle. The sheik stood near the

entrance, the proper position for him during the songs of the

hosa, which praised him and his lineage. Bob, I saw, stood

beside the sheik.

The circle of tribesmen were shuffling slowly to the right,

while one recited a rhymed poem in a high singsong voice.

This was greeted by shouts of approval; the moving circle

repeated the poem and added a refrain before stopping to fire

guns into the air. With a shout from the audience, the cadence

was resumed; another tribesman offered a poem, the circle

moved and chanted to the refrain and the hosa was on in

earnest.

“Hikmat is saying a verse about what a brave warrior

Hamid’s father was against the British,” Laila told me.

Then came a loud paean to Hamid himself, “A great

politician, a generous man,” repeated Laila. The circle moved

faster and faster, and the figures were nearly obliterated in

clouds of dust raised by the shuffling men. One man and then

another, exhausted by their exertions in the hot sun, dropped

out of the circle and others took their places. As enthusiasm

mounted, more tribesmen offered spur-of-the-moment poems

and these were greeted by louder and louder shouts of

approval. The staccato sound of rifle shots reverberated

around us, and the verses came so quickly it was difficult to

hear anything above the shouts and rifle fire. But I was almost

certain I had heard some words in English, repeated over and

over.

“What is that?” I asked Laila.

“Oh, that is an old poem,” she said. “ ‘Elizabeth, great

queen Elizabeth, you were always our friend before, why did

you desert us in Palestine?’ ”

The women were calling us down to help load trays, for the

sheik had ordered the food. Then we mounted the roof again,

and as the first line of men servants emerged from the

women’s quarters, bearing large trays of steaming rice on their

heads and followed by small boys carrying the plates of stew,

the hosa stopped. The men fired one last barrage of rifle shots

and disappeared into the shadows of the mudhif. Lunch was

served.

None of the visiting tribesmen had brought his family with

him, but one very old and poor woman had come with her son

and was eating with the oldest inhabitant of the women’s

quarters, a crippled and half-blind wife of Hamid’s dead

father. Because of their age, these women had been served at

the same time as the men; they squatted together by a tray of

food in a shady alcove near Kulthum’s apartment, eating

slowly, without a word to each other.

In the compound, the women rested in the shade. At

midmorning they had snacked on fresh bread and bits of meat

and were content to sit until the men were finished and the

platters returned, partially empty, from the mudhif. Then we

would eat together from one of the big tin trays, and then, too,

the women would know whether or not their efforts had been

a success. There was no doubt that the poorer tribesmen would

eat as much meat and rice and stew as they could, but it was

the trays of delicacies which would be scrutinized carefully to

see whether the kubbas and the patcha, the liver and grilled

chickens, the eggplant and the pudding had appealed to the

more sophisticated palates of the effendi guests, and, of

course, to Sheik Hamid himself. No word of praise would be

uttered, but every woman in the compound would be able to

tell, from the amount left on the platters, whether Selma’s

special kubba was really so special, and whether the daughters