Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (23 page)

chuckled and tossed her head.

The second bride sat in state in a large roomy house where

the walls were freshly whitewashed and the date-palm logs

supporting the roof were nearly new. I was surprised, and

Laila explained that this girl was the daughter of a prosperous

Sayid, who had a piece of good land near the sheik’s holding.

“Who is the girl marrying?” I asked.

“Abdu, son of Abdul Hakim,” answered Laila. “You know,

he is a very religious young man from an old Sayid family.”

Then I did remember Bob’s mentioning Abdu as an

unattractive but intense and ascetic young man, who was one

of the religious enthusiasts of El Nahra. Abdu organized

krayas during Ramadan, helped plan the yearly religious plays

and was a leader of one of the
taaziyas
, a group of young men

who performed ritual flagellations during Muharram.

I had difficulty reconciling my picture of the intense Abdu

with the young girl in white before me. Lovely and dusky, she

was loaded with gold: bracelets, earrings and two long

necklaces, one of gold coins and one of cone-shaped beads.

All were presents from her father, said Laila; he had given her

two sheep besides. Her groom was a poor man, though of an

ancient and pure lineage. Since the girl was a Sayid, she was

bound to marry a Sayid, for Sayid girls were given only to

men who carried the blood of the Prophet in their veins.

I praised the girl’s wedding dress, which fitted her

beautifully and seemed much better made than most of the

clothes I had seen in the settlement. The women looked at

each other but said nothing. I had made a mistake, but what? I

turned to Laila for help, and was shocked at the invective

which suddenly burst out of her. On and on she raved,

criticizing the cut and the seams and the way the neck was

finished, until I realized that one of her seamstress rivals had

been employed. Laila stopped as suddenly as she had started,

saying good-humoredly to me and the assembled women,

“The material is excellent—it must have cost at least three

pounds a meter—too good to be ruined by bad sewing.” We

rose and passed out into the alley again.

Laila rushed me along to the last house, murmuring that we

would stay only a minute there. “I wouldn’t go at all if it

weren’t for you,” she said. “It’s because I know this girl so

well and she is only fourteen, too young to marry; everyone

considers it great
ayb
[shame]. Her groom is an old man.”

But as we approached, I heard the beat of a kerosenecan

drum, and voices of women singing, “Samra, Samra, how

beautiful is my dusky maiden.”

“Why are they singing, then?” I asked.

“Because they feel sorry for her and want to cheer her up,”

said Laila.

The group of women and girls who sat in front of the door

of the bridal chamber urged us to sit down, but Laila glanced

into the poor room where the girl sat. In spite of the

voluminous folds of her white dress, she seemed thin and

small. She had been heavily made up to make her appear

older; unfortunately the attempt had not been successful, and

she looked like a child arrayed for a theatrical entertainment.

Staring straight ahead of her, like Sahura, the girl did not seem

to notice us, but she kept blinking repeatedly, like a child with

something in its eye.

“Let’s go,” hissed Laila, and we nodded at the old women,

refused politely their invitation to tea and although the girl

beating the kerosene drum shouted at us to stop, Laila plunged

on silently back toward the main road. Here, in the buzz of

activity and noise, she regained her good spirits. In the alley

we almost collided with a black-veiled figure who turned out

to be the sheik’s daughter Samira. She and Laila dissolved in

helpless laughter at the comic coincidence of their meeting.

“Watch the slops,” giggled Laila, pulling Samira out of the

center of the road.

Samira let out a mock scream and clung foolishly to the

side of the house nearest us. This brought on more laughter,

until we were silenced by Laila.

“Shhh,” she said sternly. “We must be quiet. The sheik

doesn’t know Samira is out, but she says the guards are

looking the other way tonight so all the women can see the

dancing. Alwiyah is out too. They are the two bravest.”

We took hands and moved along in the general direction of

the Sayids’ mudhif, heading toward a yellow glow of light

which was reflected in the sky above the flat roofs of the

houses. Somewhere a donkey raised his head and brayed

fiercely; Samira clung to me and screamed; we all laughed

again. There was much laughter in the crowds that moved

along with us—high-pitched giggles of children, deep laughter

from old women experiencing again, without the tension and

pain, the excitement of their own wedding nights, long since

past. The animals in the compounds we passed were moving

restlessly, snuffling in the darkness; the sound of the drums

was everywhere and even the dogs on the edge of the

settlement had joined the crowds and were yipping wildly.

The square around the mudhif had been kept open as a stage

for the entertainment and was glaringly lighted by scores of

lanterns placed every few feet along the ground. At least a

hundred men sat close together on the flat logs outlining the

square, smoking and drinking tea, for the wedding feast was

just over. Men were carrying out the empty food trays;

everyone had taken advantage of the free meal of rice, mutton

and flat bread in sheep broth provided by the grooms’ fathers.

I could see Bob sitting near the mudhif entrance, washing his

hands over a copper basin, and Mohammed stood nearby

conferring with a group of strangers.

“The dancers and musicians,” whispered Laila.

“But when will it begin?” I asked. We had been wandering

from house to house for two hours now; it was all very

interesting, but my legs were beginning to give out.

“Soon, right now,” said Laila, but she was wrong. A line of

little boys moved out into the square, to perform as they had

done during the Iid. One sympathetic drummer kept up a

desultory beat for them, and the boys’ mothers, anonymous

among the crowds of women who stood, three and four deep

on the edge of the square, clapped enthusiastically. We could

see the children’s lips move in the well-known songs, but the

sound of their voices was lost in the clapping and drumming,

the clink of tea glasses, the hiss of the Coleman lanterns, and

the hubbub of many men moving back and forth across the

square.

The drummer grew tired and stopped. The boys moved

away, but nothing happened. Laila evidently sensed my

impatience, and began to prod and push and elbow me

forward and backward and sideways, until she had succeeded

in pulling us both into a place among the women where we

could see clearly the whole bright square.

“Now, now, see Beeja!” she said.

I looked and indeed the strangers and Mohammed had

moved into the center of the square, followed by a drummer

and two pipers who experimented with one tune, then another.

After a long wait and some words between the musicians and

the dancers, the three dancers linked arms closely and leaped

into a
chobi
. The drums burst forth, five, six, then ten, the

pipers joined in, and the men settled back to enjoy the long-

awaited and expensive spectacle. But the dancers still were

not satisfied, for they would leap and twirl gloriously for a

moment, and stop to scratch their heads under their kaffiyehs

and argue with one another. Mohammed, standing on the edge

of the square and carrying a long staff to indicate his role as

master of ceremonies, looked alternately perplexed and

annoyed. Men began to murmur, and finally Ali, the father of

Sahura and Hassan, leaped to his feet.

“
Yallah
,” he shouted, “we are paying good money for this.

Let’s have the wedding dance and finish with this fooling

around.”

The dancers stopped, Mohammed move in to intervene, and

Ali strode furiously into the square. This seemed to have the

desired effect. Quickly one of the dancers dropped out, the

second adjusted his kaffiyeh and the third shed his aba, pulled

out and put on a woman’s dress. A scarf was tied tightly about

his hips, belly-dancer style. His kaffiyeh wrapped round his

head like a turban, he was at last ready and moved toward his

partner.

Pipes and drums clashed raggedly, found the desired tune,

and the music swelled out, above the rhythmic clapping of the

crowd and the high-pitched ululating wails of the women. The

man held his arms up and concentrated on his footwork, not

looking at the “woman,” who undulated provocatively toward

him, each body movement accented with gestures from “her”

long, thin arms and hands. Lighted from above and below by

the lanterns, the dancers cast vast shadows on the square,

shadows which moved silently together and apart.

Closer and closer together the dancers came, and when the

“bride” nearly touched her partner with her hips, the audience

cried, “Ah,” and a long wail tore through the air. One of the

grooms leaped into the square and pinned a bank note on the

dancer’s dress. At this signal the man dropped out, and the

drums and pipes began a new song for the bride’s solo. This

started slowly, a free-form undulating and wheeling across

and around the dusty square. But in a prolonged whirl the

kaffiyeh flew off the dancer’s head, releasing an astonishing

amount of long black hair which fell crazily about his head

and shoulders. Faster he pivoted and leaped, the hair

streaming and the long hands flung about in an agony of

passion.

“He is good,” I whispered. Laila’s eyes were fixed on the

man-woman figure twirling in the yellow glare of the lanterns,

while the women screamed and the men counted the turns

with “Ah,” “Ah,”
“Yallah,”
and a spatter of coins and

applause. How long could he keep this up? High above the

maze of drums wove the thin melody of the pipes. The coins

showered in, raising little spits of dust as they fell. The dancer,

perspiring freely, clapped those long hands against his temples

to keep the tangled hair out of his eyes as he whirled—dust,

hair, hands, feet moving in the changing shadows and

flickering lantern light. A group of men pushed through the

crowd into the square, the dancer stopped and the drums

ceased.

“The mullah has come; it is time for the weddings,”

whispered Laila. The bridegrooms and their close relatives

rose. “First the men will go down to the canal to wash their

faces and hands, and then each will go with the mullah to his

bride’s house, where he will say that he agrees and she will

say that she agrees. After that he will go in to his bride.”

The crowd rushed to follow the young men and their escorts

toward the canal. “We stay here,” said Laila.

“Why?” I asked, wanting to see the washing ceremony at

the bank.

“It’s only for the men,” she said, “we stay here,” and she

strengthened her grip on my abayah, so I turned back to the

square, no longer a stage as the men hurried across it,

oblivious of the exhausted dancer hunched against a log,

drawing on a cigarette and pushing back his hair. His two

companions were combing the dust for stray coins.

I gradually became aware that the drums had started up

again, a low throbbing beat which continued insistently under

all the noise. The beat was cut by volleys of rifle shots.

“They are coming back from the canal,” said Laila.

I would have loved to follow one or another of the groups

led by the mullah as they headed to one bridal house or

another, signed the papers, the girl and man solemnly agreeing

to take each other as man and wife, and then entering the

bridal chamber together. But this was not to be. I stood with

Laila and Sherifa and Medina and the sheik’s daughter

Samira, who could see nothing either but nevertheless were

chattering with excitement.

“They’re coming back, they’re coming back,” the murmur

reached us from women closer to the alley, and we could hear

the men approaching and entering a house near the mudhif.

“Come on, Laila,” I pleaded. “It’s just down the alley. No

one will see us in the dark,” and she agreed. When we reached

the door, the groom, followed by the same insistent drum roll,

was going in the gate. His mother and the bride’s mother were

already inside, said Sherifa, to bear witness to the fact that the

consummation was a proper one.

The mullah came out.

“He has gone to his bride, I think,” said Laila.

The drum roll continued and the crowd shifted uneasily,

whispering and chattering to each other.

“It’s taking him a long time,” cackled one old lady. “What’s

the matter with him, is he sick?”