Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (31 page)

uncivilized.

“And then you will go home to America and lecture and tell

everyone that all Iraqis are backward, uneducated,

superstitious people.”

Bob was quite disturbed. “Jabbar,” he asked, “do you really

believe I would say that?”

“Well, why shouldn’t you?” Jabbar replied. “I myself find

these ceremonies primitive.”

Bob tried to reassure him, told him of the processions of the

Western churches, of the self-mortification practiced by the

early Christian martyrs and by some contemporary religious

orders. Jabbar nodded, but seemed unimpressed.

“I used to walk in the processions myself when I was a

child,” said Jabbar. “I do not think such things are peculiar to

us. That is not the whole point. The point is also a political

one.”

“Political? How?”

“The British encourage these productions just to exaggerate

the differences between Sunni and Shiite Moslems, and thus

keep the Arabs from uniting as one people,” he said. “But

when the revolution comes, all this will change.”

“Perhaps,” Bob replied, and they finished the evening by

drinking together nearly a whole bottle of arak, the strong

local liquor brewed of dates which, when mixed with water,

tastes and looks like Pernod.

Every woman who could afford to give an appropriate gift

to the mullah held a kraya in her home. I listened to the

mullah’s sermons and the women’s chanting in the house of

Laila, in the apartments of Kulthum and Selma, in the house

of Sherifa, and in the house of Abdulla’s wife Khariya. But I

was beginning to shrink from the evening sessions, for one of

the mullahs had apparently decided that I had been an

observer long enough. She would stand beside me during the

kraya, exhorting me to beat my breast and shouting the

responses in my ear so I would join in. I found I was reluctant

to do so, partly out of shyness, partly because I suspected the

mullah had other things in mind for my religious education

after Muharram was over. Laila and Sherifa made excuses for

me on these occasions, but even they suggested I might

participate. It was becoming a difficult situation and neither

Bob nor I could think of a quick and easy solution.

Fortunately I was saved from the necessity of facing this

particular issue by an emergency call from the Davenports,

our missionary friends in Hilla. Joyce, just beginning her third

pregnancy, had been ordered to bed by the doctor. Would I

come and help with the household and the two small boys

while she was out of commission? I was doubly glad to say

yes, for the Davenport house had been a haven for us on many

occasions. When Bob was first scouting for a village in which

to settle, the Davenports had offered him their spare room

whenever he should be near Hilla. Months later, when he fell

ill on our way back to El Nahra from Baghdad, we had stayed

with the Davenports until he was able to travel again. And I

found that when I needed a break from the village round and

the eternal struggle with Arabic, my energy and optimism

were restored in two or three days spent speaking English with

Joyce and playing with the children.

Joyce was ill and terribly tired, so I stayed with her almost

until the end of Muharram. My last night in Hilla was the

night of the wedding procession, and that day Rosa, the

Davenports’ servant girl (a Christian), and Um Hussein, the

gatekeeper’s wife (a Moslem), talked of nothing else. Um

Hussein came to the back door several times to hold

whispered conferences with Rosa, who would then manage to

say loudly, in Joyce’s hearing, that it was really a shame that

we couldn’t all go to see this beautiful thing. But Joyce and

Harold were a bit doubtful, wondering if it was wise for

Christians to wander out on such a night. By suppertime we

could hear the crowds gathering in the streets, and even the

boys felt the excitement.

“Hussein is going to the procession with his mama,” said

Stevey accusingly. He was nearly five, and Hussein, the

gatekeeper’s son, was only four.

“Go, go,” said Timmy, pounding the table with his spoon.

Rosa brought in a bowl of rice pudding. “Let me take the

children, madame,” she pleaded. “It will be very pretty and

everyone is going.” Joyce looked at Harold.

“I’ll go along,” I offered. “If I wear my abayah no one will

notice me, and the children are so small no one will notice

them either.”

At that moment Um Hussein arrived at the door again,

bearing paper flowers and candles for the little boys, and at

this overture Joyce and Harold gave in.

All of the people of Hilla seemed to be out that night.

Hundreds of children, dressed in their best, walked with their

parents, carrying candles and paper flowers or fresh-leafed

branches of laurel. After a time several policemen marched by

in a group—a signal, according to a woman standing near Um

Hussein, that the procession was about to begin. The children

lit their candles and joined together in a long, uneven queue,

chanting as they moved along the street. The parents walked

beside them, and one father carried his infant daughter in his

arms, holding her candle and laurel branch and singing as he

walked. Then came flags—green, Hussein’s color, black and

scarlet, and standards of colored lights. Finally the wedding

float appeared, borne aloft by eight young men, an elaborate

glass-sided palanquin in which a married couple could easily

be carried through the streets by bearers. This one, however,

was empty. Mounted in a gaily painted and carved wooden

frame, the palanquin was decorated with tiny glass lamps and

gilded globes.

“What is it?” asked Timmy.

“See how beautiful it is?” hissed Rosa. She had only one

eye but that one was sparkling with enjoyment.

“Yes, but what is it?” Timmy insisted.

I was not quite sure how to reply, but Stevey, the five-year-

old, solved my problem, for as the palanquin passed us, the

eight bearers shouted in unison and all of the colored globes

suddenly blazed with electric light.

“It’s a Christmas tree!” shouted Stevey in ecstasy.

“Christmas tree!” echoed Timmy.

“Shhh,” said Rosa, but no one had heard. They were all

looking in admiration at the glittering palanquin, with its red

and blue and green lights brightening the night.

Without warning, the generator failed and the lights went

out. The bearers cursed, lowered the palanquin, fussed with

the mechanism until the lights flashed on again, lifted it once

more and the float continued down the street.

We turned toward home, for it was now long past the

children’s bedtime, but the chants echoed after us, and the

loudspeakers in the coffee shops blared far into the night the

refrain of the marchers:

“Hussein, ya Hussein.”

“Hussein, he dies tomorrow.”

After the wedding procession begins the period of deepest

mourning during Muharram. My train arrived in Diwaniya,

the railroad junction, after the ceremonies were finished, but

Bob told me about them as we drove, in the familiar old taxi,

over the road to El Nahra.

This night, in Diwaniya, the flags and the standards of

colored lights were only a prelude to the taaziya, or mourning

procession of men. Wearing only black, their shirts cut out at

the shoulders, they marched in groups of twelve or eighteen,

chanting in unison and flagellating themselves with chains and

swords.

“How do they flagellate themselves?” I asked.

“Well, they beat themselves with the chains mostly,” said

Bob. “The chains are bound together in bunches, like a cat-o’-

nine-tails. A few men cut themselves lightly with the swords,

too. They had several male nurses walking with the group, and

once they stopped a man and bandaged up his head before he

continued walking. Also there was an ambulance.”

“It sounds frenzied,” I said.

“Oddly enough, it wasn’t,” Bob answered. “I was really

struck by how orderly the whole thing was. And it was quite

moving.”

He added, “Jabbar says there’ll be an even bigger one

tomorrow, which is Ashur, the tenth of Muharram. That’s the

day Hussein was killed.”

“Even in El Nahra?”

“Yes,” he said. “Jabbar says taaziyas are organized in every

Shiite village in southern Iraq. They practice in advance and

the village takes up a collection so that its taaziya can be

represented in the big mourning procession which takes place

every year, forty days after Ashur, in Karbala. That,” he put

in, “I’d really like to see.”

“Why don’t you go?”

“Jabbar says better not, but anyway we’ll see the one

tomorrow.”

Early next morning Laila arrived to welcome me back.

“You must come right now so we can get a good place to

watch the procession.”

I started out the door in my abayah, but Laila held back.

“What is the matter?”

“Well.” said Laila, “my sisters told me not to ask you, but

we are friends and I thought you would like to see it and so—”

“And so what?”

“I—we—Beeja, you do want to see the play of the big

battle when Hussein was killed, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course, but Bob says it is not going to be held in El

Nahra.”

“It isn’t, I know,” said Laila, stepping close to me, “but it is

being held in Suffra, just down the canal. Why don’t you ask

Mr. Bob to take you in a taxi, and then I can ask my father if I

could go too.”

I smiled to myself, wondering how many days and nights of

plotting had gone on among Laila and her sisters before they

had formulated this plan. I promised Laila I would try.

Bob had left earlier for the mudhif, and Laila and I joined a

group of women who stood at the corner of Laila’s house,

commanding a view of both the road and the clearing around

the mudhif. The women were visibly perspiring in the hot sun,

but they Were in a holiday mood. We could hear shouting and

chanting from the other side of the canal.

“How is the American lady in Hilla?” asked Fadhila.

“Did you see the wedding procession there?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was lovely.”

“Wait until you see the taaziya
here
, Beeja,” said Sherifa.

“It is always very good.”

“There’s Mr. Bob standing with Haji Hamid and Abdulla,”

Laila interrupted. “See, right by the door of the mudhif,” and

I, squinting against the sun, could just make out Bob’s white

shirt and khakis among the abas and kaffiyehs.

“Every year the taaziya comes to the mudhif,” explained

Sherifa. “Afterward the people from the market and from the

rest of the village sit down and have coffee as the guests of the

El Eshadda.”

The shouting was coming closer and several women peered

down the empty road.

“Look, look Beeja,” hissed Laila.

A few children had turned the corner by the canal and were

running toward us up the path, which was now lined with

women pressed close together, their abayahs drawn over their

faces. In the crowd of villagers which followed the children,

we could see the green and black flags heralding the

appearance of the taaziya.

“Ya,
Hussay-in!”
The men in black or white moved within

the crowd, but remained together as a group, in the form of an

uneven circle. A few were stripped to the waist. Their heads

were bound in black kerchiefs, they stared straight ahead of

them as they walked, and their right hands, holding bunches of

chains, swung up in answer to the cry, and came down with a

thump on the bare shoulders.

“Ya Hussay-in,”
they cried again in unison, moving ahead

in formation, and the chains thudded on their shoulders again.

An anonymous wail came from one of the women lining the

path, and the ululation was taken up by the women clustered

against the wall of the sheik’s house and standing around the

edges of the mudhif clearing.

“Hussein!” the men cried, so close to us in the bright

sunlight I could see their shoulders bruised blue from the

blows of the chains. The rest of the refrain was lost in the

general hubbub, women wailing and children crying. In the

hitching area near the mudhif the horses whinnied.

Several groups of taaziyas were moving into the clearing,

chanting together, then apart, and in the syncopation of the

chant and the stamp of bare feet in the dust we could hear, as

regular as a metronome, the chains jingling, free in the air, and

the dull thud as they struck flesh. The flags wavered on the

outskirts of the clearing where the tribesmen had gathered,

and the taaziyas moved in formation toward the door of the

mudhif. The sheik moved forward to greet the participants,

and the tribesmen and townsmen went with the taaziyas into

the mudhif to drink tea. An old Sayid in a green turban

circulated among the bystanders, collecting contributions for

the performers’ coming trip to Karbala.