Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (7 page)

toward the door. The group followed, repeating the traditional

farewells,
“Ahlan wusahlan”
“
Tiji daayman
[come often],”

“Allah wiyach
[God go with you].” Selma bade me good night

at the door of her own courtyard, but the other women and

children walked to the entrance of the compound, where Ali

waited to accompany me home.

In the mudhif, lanterns had been lighted, and the tribesmen

going in and out were silhouetted in the shadowy arch. Stars

were coming out in the vast sky above the mud houses and

walls. Women passed us, silently padding down the path,

bearing jugs and cans to fetch the nightly supply of water from

the canal. I could see no faces, but several spoke to me. Ali

and I stood aside while a flock of sheep, baaing and snuffling,

shuffled along past, raising a fine cloud of dust into the

evening air as the boy shepherded them home.

Bob was waiting at our gate.

“How did it go?” he said.

“Fine, I think,” I answered. “I was obviously the biggest

curiosity to hit the compound in years, but they were nice

about it. But I’m really tired out.”

“Come tell me everything that happened,” he said, and we

walked up to our house together. It seemed very cozy and

calm and peaceful after the hubbub and strain of the afternoon.

When I mentioned Selma’s eating with me, he said that was

a very good sign.

“Twenty years ago,” he said, “a Shiite Moslem here would

not eat food which had been touched by Christians, and any

dish from which a Christian guest had eaten or drunk was

smashed so that the infidel wouldn’t contaminate the faithful.”

Although he knew this was no longer true among most of

the men, he had feared the women might still feel this way,

since they were relatively more isolated.

“Selma was very friendly, and a good hostess. She’s been to

school, you know.”

“No, I didn’t. What is she like?”

“Selma?” I considered. “She seems very good-natured; runs

the compound, I’d say; laughs a lot; is intelligent.”

“Yes, but what does she
look
like?”

“She’s beautiful,” I replied promptly, “running to fat, but

still beautiful.”

“I thought so,” Bob said.

I looked at him. He had never seen Selma but assumed she

was beautiful. Because he had heard stories about her beauty?

That was unlikely, since men did not discuss women in public.

Because her inaccessibility had surrounded her with mystery?

Then the abayah and the seclusion were an asset to Selma, for

they only increased her attractiveness. And they did not seem

to hinder her much in her private life either, for she had

seemed to me a happy and contented woman.

But I was still curious.

“Why did you assume she was beautiful, Bob?”

“Well, I hear that the sheik gave her family 1500 English

pounds when he married her, and she is his fourth wife.

Wouldn’t you assume from that that she was pretty special?”

“Yes, Bob, of course.” I couldn’t help laughing at his male

naïveté.

“Why are you laughing?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said. “Let’s have some more coffee before

we go to bed.”

3

Women of the Tribe

In a day or two Bob resumed his interviews and suggested I

might start visiting the women regularly and begin to keep a

journal. To help him complete his picture of tribal and village

life, I was to record observations about women and children

and activities within the home, areas which he had no

opportunity to study.

“Just go,” he said. “The sheik has told me several times that

you will be welcome in any house in the settlement.”

“No one has come to visit me,” I pointed out.

“Never mind; it may not be the custom here,” said Bob.

“You make the first move.”

I was too shy simply to knock on every door along the path,

but fortunately during the first days my reluctance did not

matter. Mohammed invited me to call on his mother, and in

his house I met many of the Sayids, six families who were not

members of the El Eshadda, but who lived with the tribe in a

sort of
noblesse oblige
relationship. Because of their descent

from the Prophet, the Sayids are bound to be treated with

some respect, and are used as mediators in tribal disputes. In

return for their services as peacemakers, the Sayids receive the

protection of the tribe, and they had been given parcels of land

when they first came to settle with the El Eshadda. The

ancient practice of giving other special privileges to Sayids—

plowing their land free, grinding their grain without

payment—was less observed now than before. But the Sayids

still received alms on religious festivals, and Laila, the local

seamstress, later told me she always sewed without charge for

Mohammed’s sister.

The Sayids had their own small mudhif on the edge of the

settlement, around which their houses clustered wall to wall.

The first time I visited Mohammed’s family, he called for me

after supper, carrying a kerosene lantern to light the way. We

turned off the main road into a dark and narrow alley which

wound among the low mud houses, each marked by one or

two lanterns hung inside the walls. Electricity was expensive,

and only the sheik and his brothers could afford it. At the end

of the alley the Sayids’ mudhif loomed, also lit by lantern

light, and, framed within its shadowy vault, a few men sat

cross-legged, smoking and playing backgammon. The slap of

the wooden pieces on the game board came to us distinctly

over the sound of their voices.

Ahead, in a doorway, stood the figures of two women, tall,

straight and thin like Mohammed—his mother Medina and his

sister Sherifa. Medina held a second lantern high. “
Ahlan

wusahlan,”
she said, and we crossed their dark court, where I

could hear the cow munching in the corner, into a tiny room,

swept clean and almost empty. I sat on a mat covered with a

rug and a white sheet. Sherifa insisted that I make myself

comfortable with a long pillow also covered with clean white

linen. She then brought in a charcoal brazier and we sat

around it, warming our hands against the cold.

They served me fruit on that first occasion, which I knew

was a great extravagance for them, but afterward when I went

to visit I was offered, like all their other guests, a glass of

lemon tea made by brewing the skin and seeds of dried lemons

(numibasra)
. Medina made it especially well.

I spent many such evenings in Mohammed’s house, where I

was treated almost as a relative, and where the atmosphere

was relaxed and the conversation gay. The family, once well-

to-do and highly respected in the community, had retained a

general air of taste and dignity in spite of misfortune. They

still owned 200 acres of land, but because of soil salination, a

mounting problem in the area, less than twenty acres could be

cultivated. Their present poverty-stricken state was mitigated

by Mohammed’s job with us. They were “gentility in

straitened circumstances” but they were cheerful about it, and

that made all the difference.

When the family land had first begun to salt up, Medina’s

husband had left El Nahra to find work. He had not found it,

but in Kut he had found a rich sheik whose personal charity

was the support of Sayids, so he had settled there, and only

visited El Nahra when he was sick or needed help. Medina

made the best of it. She was only forty-five, but she looked

seventy, so thin that every bone in her hand was visible. Her

skin was seamed and wrinkled by years of work in the hot,

drying sun, her mouth shriveled into empty gums. Her black

garments had been new many years ago, but she wore them as

though they had been bought yesterday; she still hennaed her

fingernails and outlined her eyebrows with dull blue kohl.

When she was feeling poorly, which was often, she lay on a

mat and her voice became the dry, cracked whine of an old,

old woman. But when she felt well she sailed down the alley

like a queen, her black garments flowing behind her. In the

afternoon sessions in the sheik’s house she was always treated

with courtesy and respect. She talked animatedly and smoked,

one after the other, the cigarettes offered by Selma—she was

too poor to buy them herself. The women listened to her

attentively and laughed at her jokes; she had a way of

gesturing with a cigarette and tossing her head back as she

talked—she had style. I never met anyone who disliked her.

Women would bring her food from their own limited stores

and visit her in droves when she was too sick to get up from

her pallet.

Sherifa carried herself like her mother, with a dignity not

always seen among the poorer people in the settlement. I was

told that when Sherifa had been younger, she had been very

handsome, and her husband had bought her much gold

jewelry. But the man went bad, no one could explain why; he

had deserted Sherifa after her baby boy died; she was now

neither widow, virgin, nor divorcee, and hence had no future.

Yet she was intelligent and industrious and her advice was

much sought after by other women and girls. She kept

chickens and sold eggs; she raised lambs in the spring and

sold the meat and wool. She helped keep the family alive.

The younger brother, Abad, was twelve, ambitious and

clever. He was in the sixth class at the local primary school,

and at night he sat on the path under a street lamp to study his

lessons, for the two lanterns in his house were not strong

enough to read by.

There was an older brother, Abdul Karim, who seemed to

have been born without energy. Theoretically he was a sheep

trader, but few people had seen him at work. His wife,

Fadhila, was vigorous and attractive, with strong arms and

bright eyes; she laughed from deep inside, a loud, healthy

laugh which infected even the dourest old ladies. Her greatest

sorrow was that she had no children. According to local

beliefs, it was always the wife who was at fault in these

matters. In a society where childlessness is grounds for

divorce, Fadhila, despite her health and energy, was judged

inadequate as a woman and as a wife.

Fadhila and Abdul Karim lived in their own room, across

the court from that of Mohammed, Medina, Sherifa and Abad.

Each household was economically separate, but Fadhila and

Sherifa shared the chores, bringing cans of water from the

canal several times a day, sweeping the court, feeding the

cow, the lamb and the chickens, baking the barley bread and

doing the cooking, the dishes, the laundry. Fadhila preferred

the dishes and the laundry because it gave her an opportunity

both morning and evening to exchange gossip with the other

women of the village who squatted along the canal, scouring

their pots with the gritty silt of the bank and scrubbing their

families’ clothes in the muddy irrigation water.

Down the alley lived the sheik’s gardener and servant, my

guide, Ali, with his wife, Sheddir, and their grown son and

daughter. Their house was even more modest than

Mohammed’s. A small court where Sheddir cooked on a

Primus stove, a lean-to for the cow and chickens, an oven for

bread, and one tiny rectangular room where the entire family

slept on mats on the floor because they could not afford a bed.

One wooden chest, its blue paint peeling, contained their few

possessions. A lantern hung on a nail, and on the mud-and-

straw walls of their room pictures had been pasted or tacked—

pictures cut from magazines of Mohammed the Prophet, of a

traditional Arab beauty in abayah and fringed head scarf.

Ali’s salary as the sheik’s gardener and servant was minute;

most of what he earned was in kind. He had access to the

garden to cut grass for his cow, and he always received a

small share of the sheik’s grapes which he could trade in the

market for barley flour or rice. Ali was saving money to help

his son get married. Since Ali was a poor man, only twenty

pounds was needed for the bride price, the sum set by custom

within the tribe and paid by the groom’s father to the bride’s

father. The bride’s father uses part of the money to help his

daughter buy furniture, household goods and her trousseau.

But twenty pounds was half of Ali’s annual income. How,

then, to hurry up the procedure? Ali’s daughter was of

marriageable age, too, and since paternal first-cousin marriage

was the preferred marriage in any case, Ali was negotiating

with one of his brothers who also had a boy and a girl. If the

fathers could simply exchange children, two marriages would

be made for the price of one and the family line would be

assured of continuance. A fair exchange. This was the kind of

strategic arrangement which many poor
fellahin
families