Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (26 page)

women I knew who usually vehemently criticized the man in

such cases agreed that Abad was justified. Further, they

approved of his choice, a recently widowed young woman

with two small boys. By marrying the young widow, Laila

explained to me, Abad would improvp the situation in his own

house and also provide a good home for the fatherless family.

Or so he thought. When Hussna heard of the plan, she was

reported to be thoroughly enraged. Without saying a word to

her husband or her neighbors, she borrowed fifteen pounds

from her mother and took the earliest taxi, leaving the village

one morning at dawn. By noon, fascinated neighbors coaxed

her mother into admitting that Hussna had gone to consult one

of the powerful wise women in Samawa, some fifty miles

away. Um Khalil, the village dignitary, could write charms to

keep babies from harm and other such simple things, but the

women in Samawa, I was told, could do anything: bring a

baby boy, even twin boys, to a woman who had been barren

for years; cure any sickness; even strike an enemy dead. But

their charms and cures were expensive.

By late afternoon everyone in El Nahra knew where Hussna

had gone, and her husband, sitting nonchalantly with friends

in the coffee shop, was eyed curiously by acquaintances and

passers-by. What would happen? Even I stared at the

ordinary-looking man as Laila and I walked by on our way to

visit the school. Abad’s hand trembled a little, perhaps, as he

raised his glass of tea to his lips, but that was all. The widow

kept to her house. We were told that Hussna had returned late

the same night, and that in the morning the widow’s oldest

boy was sick with fever and dysentery. The child recovered,

but Abad abandoned his plan of taking another wife. Hussna

reigned alone and triumphant in her slovenly house, and Abad

was seen more and more often in coffee shops. Within a few

months the widow and her children were forced by economic

circumstances to leave the village and move in with relatives

in Diwaniya.

When I asked Laila about this, she pooh-poohed the whole

chain of events. “Once long, long ago, my grandmother’s

sister went to Samawa and paid ten pounds and when she

came back, her husband never beat her again,” she said. “But

my sisters and I don’t believe in these wise women, who have

never been to school or studied with the mullahs and don’t

know a single verse of the Koran. Years ago, yes, but now,

no!”

Bob told me the men joked about the charms of Um Khalil

and scoffed at the mention of the wise women of Samawa, but

visits to any of the wise women were always noticed, and

served to draw attention to the household in question. This in

itself may have had some effect on the men.

Few women went to the extremes of Hussna. However, Um

Khalil had regular visitors, as did the woman mullahs of El

Nahra. Medical services were relatively new to the village,

and in case of barrenness or serious illness in themselves or

their children the women had little recourse except their own

experience, prayer, or a charm. They purchased charms to

make cruel husbands kind, indifferent ones loving, to prevent

divorce, to keep new babies safe from the Evil Eye. But more

than any other single thing, they prayed, purchased charms,

connived against being supplanted by a second wife.

This fear of the women seemed to me out of all proportion

to the facts. In the tribal settlement of one hundred and four

households, for example, only nine were or ever had been

polygamous. There had been four divorces in the past year and

a half. The Koran allows a man to take up to four wives, if he

can provide for them equally and give them all the same

amount of affection. But it is expensive to take more than one

wife. Another bride price must be raised, ranging anywhere

from 10 to 150 or even 500 pounds, depending on the

economic and social status of the man and girl involved.

(Selma, Sheik Hamid’s wife, had commanded a bride price of

1500 English pounds.)

After the initial investment, the man must pay for food and

clothing for the new wife and her prospective children. In case

of divorce, the man must return a certain portion of the bride

price to the woman or her family, and must continue to

provide for the children of the marriage. And in addition to

monetary considerations, there is the inevitable hullabaloo as

the two or more women fight for supremacy in the household.

Bob reported that the men mentioned the last problem most

frequently; the quarreling among the women affected the

man’s peace and comfort, and most men confessed that,

though they often desired another wife, they found it easier

and cheaper to make do with one, even though one might not

have the whitest skin, the darkest eyes or the longest hair of

any damsel in the village.

But another wife was always a possibility which rose to

trouble the hearts of the women, I noticed, when they were ill

or out of sorts. They talked of it constantly, in a joking,

indirect way most of the time, though there were times when

the discussion became very serious. I, in my peculiar situation,

was a favorite target for jokes on the subject.

“When,” the women would ask, giggling, “is Mr. Bob going

to take another wife?” We had been over this ground many

times before, in Laila’s house, in the sheik’s house, in other

households which I visited regularly, and my answer was

always the same.

“He might like to,” I would say, “but our religion and the

laws of our country permit him to have only one wife at a

time.”

“But,” came the inevitable argument, “isn’t our way better?

Mr. Bob can divorce you and then you have no home. But if

the sheik were to take another wife [sly dig at Selma, who

always looked uncomfortable at this point] he would still have

to take care of all his present wives and children. Which is

better?”

And before I could reply they would chorus, “Our way is

better,” nodding their heads to each other in agreement.

Next someone would say, “Oh, by the way, I hear Mr. Bob

is going to marry one of the sheik’s daughters.”

I was supposed to register shocked disbelief, which I

always did, and the women would nudge each other and laugh

at my mock consternation.

“Ahlan wusahlan,”
I would say, “all of the sheik’s

daughters are my friends.”

At this point the joke would cease being a joke, and one of

the older women would intervene. Once Kulthum, the sheik’s

oldest wife, touched me considerably by adding, “Don’t

worry, Beeja, we would never let them do that to you because

you are like our own daughter and we would not want to hurt

you.” If it had been her own son who was involved she might

very well have been able to prevent such an eventuality, for I

had been told by Bob that the men sometimes considered

themselves victimized by their mothers, who always had the

final say in choosing their sons’ wives.

However, by the time a man had accumulated enough

wealth to marry a second time, his mother was usually dead.

The marriage of middle age tended to be a marriage of

pleasure, the girl chosen by the man himself rather than by the

women of his household. A man in comfortable circumstances

who married again when his first wife was past the

childbearing age was doing what was expected of him,

although the occasional malcontent who wanted to divorce or

remarry with every change of season was considered

irresponsible. Bob found that the sheik, if he discovered that a

poor tribesman was contemplating marrying a second time,

would often try to dissuade him. For the sheik knew that,

given a bad harvest, such a family would be an economic

drain on the entire community.

In the time of the prophet Mohammed, polygamy was

considered a great step forward. Mohammed wanted to

discourage the pre-Islamic practice of female infanticide, and

check the polygamous situation which seems to have bordered

on licentiousness. To provide for the extra women he ruled

that men could marry up to four wives. Today polygamy is

disappearing in the cities of the Middle East, where it is rare

and frowned upon. Some Koranic scholars have even gone so

far as to insist that the Koran has been wrongly interpreted for

centuries.

But in rural areas polygamy persists, partly out of tradition,

partly because it still fills a social and economic need. In the

cities women are now attending schools and colleges, taking

jobs in the offices, factories and schools of a growing

industrial

society.

Some

are

becoming

financially

independent, and though still tied closely to their families,

they are beginning to weaken even these bonds by establishing

separate households when they marry.

Yet in rural areas like El Nahra the extended family is still

the basic social unit. There is no place for a woman outside

the houses of her father, her husband, her brothers or her sons.

Even as a second or third wife, a woman has a role and status

and purpose. She has a respectable place to live and food to

eat; her children, who will support her in her old age, have a

chain of relatives to whom they may turn for marriage

partners, for jobs, for bare subsistence if necessary. And the

women of El Nahra, though they feared being replaced by

other wives and insisted vehemently that two women were too

many in any house, were well aware of the alternatives. I

know of no woman in the village or tribe who would have

chosen spinsterhood and isolation rather than marriage,

whether as the first, second or third wife of a man.

In El Nahra, I found, polygamy was more or less palatable

to a, woman, depending on the personalities of the wives, the

temperament of the husband and the demands of the particular

household. Sheik Hamid’s first wife had died giving birth to

her third child. The sheik then married Kulthum and, fairly

soon after, Bahiga, who cared for the motherless babies as

well as bearing their own children. I did not hear much of the

earlier history of the two women, but when I knew Bahiga and

Kulthum they appeared friendly, though they did not visit

each other in their private apartments. When Sheik Hamid was

forty-five, he married for the fourth time, the beautiful Selma.

Selma was married for her beauty and education (she had

finished high school) as well as to cement a political alliance

with a distant section of the tribe, but she did not sit in idle

splendor on the pink satin bed, waited upon by servant girls

with plumed fens. She had been married also because she was

desperately needed as a working member of the household.

When he married Selma, Haji Hamid had recently

succeeded his father as sheik, and thus was responsible for the

traditional hospitality in the tribal mudhif. There were fifteen

growing children in the compound, and Bahiga and Kulthum,

aging now, could barely keep up with their duties. In addition

to child care, laundry, tending the sick, keeping their own

apartments and the compound in order, they had to cook three

meals every day for approximately sixty people (fifteen

children, two wives, the wife and four children of Sheik

Hamid’s eldest son Nour, the sheik himself, the aged wife of

the sheik’s father, two sentants and from ten to thirty tribal

retainers and guests who ate regularly in the mudhif). Even

with Nour’s wife, the two servants and teenaged daughters to

help, this was an enormous task.

Selma lived in her own house for two years and bore her

first child before moving into the compound with Kulthum

and Bahiga. I knew, for I had been told by each wife in turn,

that they were jealous of the sheik’s affections and felt

rejected when he favored one woman’s child over another, or

brought gifts to one and not to the other two. Yet the three

women depended on each other, and knew that their work

would be much more difficult without the help of the others.

The basic jealousies and petty dislikes were there, but they

were submerged and mitigated by the necessities of daily

living.

Not all women accepted the situation with such good grace,

however. I remember a young woman whom I met by chance

in Selma’s room one summer evening, a woman from an

outlying clan settlement who had left her husband, fleeing to

the sheik’s harem, traditional respectable refuge of women in

difficulties. She had arrived just before dark, Laila whispered

to me, and had been telling her story over and over again to

the crowds of women who came to see her.

It was not an unusual story, I gathered from the comments

of the group. The second wife of a middle-aged tribesman, she

had been married just a year. But from the day after her

wedding, the first wife and the mother-in-law had joined