Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (9 page)

water from a branch of the Euphrates River were opened and

closed. The village and the surrounding farm community

depended on the water supply for life.

Along this bank, near the irrigation office, were the most

modern dwellings in El Nahra, two or three well-built houses

of fired brick, with tiled floors and carefully cultivated

gardens. This was the fashionable, the “right” side of the

canal, and the tribal settlement was obviously on the wrong

side. Why on earth didn’t Bob and I, foreigners and not

destitute, live on the right side of the canal, I was asked by the

women schoolteachers, the mayor’s wife, the engineer’s sister

and the doctor’s wife, the handful of middle-class ladies in the

town who entertained me at lunch and tea, polite, pleasant,

and quite puzzled as to our presence in this remote village and

our house among those of the tribal fellahin.

Khadija, the engineer’s sister, was from a tribal group

herself and could hardly contain her curiosity about the

women of the sheik’s house; she had never visited them, as

they were not of her social group. Paradoxically she would

have liked nothing better, for she enjoyed visiting the hut of

the man who cultivated her beautiful garden. In the gardener’s

one-room shack she could sit on the floor with his wife and

daughter, drinking tea and gossiping. This kind of visit was all

right—the gardener and his wife were her servants; she was

expected to be kind and visit them occasionally, bringing

small presents of tea and sugar. But the sheik’s house? Never.

She was above that sort of thing now. Her brother Jabbar, the

engineer, was a self-made man. An attractive, intelligent and

ambitious boy, he had graduated highest in his class from the

time he entered his village primary school until he finished

secondary school in his provincial capital. His achievements

brought him a scholarship to the engineering college in

Baghdad. Now he was an effendi, a white-collar worker; he

had risen higher than any member of his family before him.

His younger sister, brought to El Nahra to keep house for him,

had assumed his social status without his education and

intelligence; unfortunately, she had not even Jabbar’s good

looks in her favor. She worked at dressing smartly and

learning to make crème caramel, she obediently visited the

teachers and the mayor’s wife, tried hard to keep up with the

latest song successes of Abdul Wahab and Um Khalthum, and

asserted that she wanted to learn to read and write, but she was

equipped for her role neither by training nor by native

intelligence.

Jabbar wished her to become accustomed to conversing

with men so that she might be a companion as well as a

housekeeper for her husband; accordingly he invited Bob and

me to his house and insisted that the four of us sit and eat

together. Khadija was painfully embarrassed and could not

even look at Bob; she kept her eyes cast down and

occasionally giggled nervously. Jabbar decided I could teach

her to bake cakes and cookies like the upper-class Baghdadi

women; I tried hard, but she had neither talent nor interest.

Khadija seized on me out of loneliness and curiosity, for I

was so odd a figure in the village even she felt comfortable

with me. But the friendship was a difficult one. Unless I spent

every afternoon with her, which was impossible, she

complained to Jabbar that I did not like her; since Jabbar was

one of Bob’s closest personal friends in the village as well as a

key figure in his irrigation study, this made life troublesome

for all of us. I finally limited myself to a weekly visit with her,

and Bob told Jabbar that I was busy at home and helping him

the rest of the time.

Khadija dreaded marriage, she told me, because she would

have to leave Jabbar and her family and go with her husband;

I thought she feared more the burdens of cooking, child-

rearing and entertaining in a white-collar household, activities

at which she seemed bound to prove inadequate.

The teachers, the mayor’s wife and the doctor’s wife, all

fairly well educated, tried to be kind to Khadija, and although

she was pleased at their attentions, basically she resented

them. Hind, youngest of the three teachers, a lively witty girl,

tried to teach Khadija to read and write. At this time Jabbar

was considering marrying Hind; though nothing had been said

to Hind’s family, she had heard the rumors. When he suddenly

became engaged to another girl, Hind quite rightly tried not to

visit his house so often. But Khadija was furious and told me

over and over again that Hind had never liked her, that she

only wanted to marry Jabbar, and that was why she had visited

her before.

I did not believe this, for Hind was kind as well as sensible,

much like her older sister Aliyah, who had come to El Nahra

thirteen years before when the girls’ school opened and had

remained there ever since, teaching, in loneliness and

obscurity, the girls of this remote area. At first, she told me,

only a few girls, daughters of merchants and effendis, had

come to school; Aliyah had not been discouraged. She visited

the village families, not just once, but many times, until they

became used to her presence and were no longer suspicious.

She pointed out the importance of women learning to read, not

only the Koran (the women
mullahs
were available to teach

them that), but books about Islamic history, about sewing and

cooking. When Sheik Hamid married Selma, Aliyah went to

visit her and was welcomed warmly; they had mutual

acquaintances among the teachers in Diwaniya. Gradually the

tribal girls began to attend the school. First only one came

from each of the wealthier families, then the poorer girls, and

finally more and more of the villagers. The school had grown

slowly, but it had 175 girls now, and only three teachers.

Inspectors from the Ministry of Education had expressed

several times to Aliyah herself their amazement at the large

enrollment in such a conservative area, but knowing Aliyah

and the high personal respect she enjoyed in El Nahra, I was

not surprised.

The town fathers knew that Aliyah was no modern upstart,

come to teach the girls to take off their abayahs and learn the

wicked, immodest ways of the city. Her family was from

Baghdad, it was true, but was known to be conservative and

religious; Aliyah wore the abayah herself and lived quietly

with Hind, their mother and another unmarried sister who

cooked and kept house. Jabbar once explained to Bob, “They

have no man to protect them, but their good reputation is

protection enough.”

Aliyah was anxious that I teach English part-time at the

school; she had asked the Ministry repeatedly for another

teacher to help handle the growing enrollment, one who could

manage English. But she was constantly disappointed, for

young girls did not want to come to a village as remote as El

Nahra, where there were no decent living facilities for single

women, few congenial companions, and not even the cinema

to distract them from the hard work, low pay and bleak

atmosphere. I would have liked to help Aliyah; we both wrote

letters and I was interviewed by the Ministry. They offered me

a job as an English teacher in the boys’ secondary school in

Diwaniya. “After all,” said the deputy Minister, “boys need to

learn English more than girls,” but I declined. So nothing ever

came of the project; I was sorry for Aliyah’s sake, but in the

long run it was better for Bob that I not be tied down every

morning.

I admired and liked the two teachers and enjoyed their

company. They were intelligent enough to have some grasp of

why we were there, and they accepted us without many

questions. I would have visited them more often except that

we all had our own work to do. But when I was depressed I

would put on my abayah and walk across the bridge to Sitt

Aliyah’s house. There I would drink tea and try to improve

my Arabic by talking and listening to Aliyah, Hind and their

visitors (they always had visitors, from every economic

stratum of the village) talk of books and movies and the place

of women in the new Iraq. It was comforting to know that

even in El Nahra there were women who cared about such

things, who worked subtly to improve conditions around

them, but always from a position of strength and acceptance in

their own community.

Um Saad, the mayor’s wife and the third teacher, was

another sort altogether. Highly educated, bearing the name of

a wealthy and ancient Baghdadi Shiite family, she was held

slightly in awe by the other teachers. In spite of her origins, or

perhaps because of them, Um Saad was slight and

unassuming. The moment I entered her house, I was aware of

taste and education. There was not a garish object or a wrong

color or texture. The pictures were old and good; the

bookcase-the only one I ever saw in El Nahra with one

exception (in the house of Khalil, the bright young man who

taught Arabic literature in the boys’ school)—covered one

whole wall of the dining room.

The mayor, Abu Saad, was something of a poet and Um

Saad read and criticized his work; she knew a great deal about

Arabic poetry of the past and present. Their relationship was a

close one: they had three sturdy boys, they were intellectually

companionable, they seemed very happy. But there was one

problem. Abu Saad confessed to Bob that he knew the

wearing of the veil and the hiding of women in the house were

old-fashioned and out-moded customs, that his wife was as

intelligent and sensible as he was and that he should

encourage her to enjoy the world as he did. But all of his

background warred against it; his father had been a mullah,

prominent in the business affairs of one of the most important

mosques in Baghdad. His grandfather had written books well

known throughout the Islamic intellectual world, urging

limited education for women but warning of the dangers of a

too liberal interpretation of women’s role. Abu Saad tried to

overcome this, but he could not; Um Saad tried to understand

and sympathize with his conflicts, but she could not. She

remained a devoted wife and mother, but she was quietly

disappointed that her husband did not have the strength to live

according to his own rational convictions.

The doctor’s wife never visited Um Saad; they had nothing

in common. Her name was Nadia; she was voluptuous, well

dressed, very coarse and very wealthy. Her husband, a

Christian, had renounced his faith and become a Moslem in

order to marry her. Dr. Ibrahim hated the village and despised

the tribesmen and fellahin; he told Bob at their first meeting

that the fellahin were animals, not human beings. After that

Bob avoided him whenever possible. He kept his dispensary

open only when he felt like it, and treated with contempt or

indifference the men and women who trooped to the

government clinic, racked with one or several of the diseases

endemic to the area–tuberculosis, bilharzia, malaria, amoebic

and bacillary dysentery. Although the sulfa and other

medicines provided by the government were supposed to be

free, Dr. Ibrahim charged for them. One night when

Mohammed’s mother was very ill, the doctor refused to go to

see her in his own car (it was raining and he didn’t want to get

it splashed with mud) and forced the distraught Mohammed,

in addition to the medical fee, to pay half a pound for a private

taxi to take him across the canal to the tribal settlement. The

tribesmen were silently contemptuous of the doctor. “No man

who changes his religion can be trusted,” they said, and dosed

their bilharzia and dysentery with caraway tea, buying aspirin

in the market for the pain.

This little group of civil servants and civil servants’

wives—Um Saad, Aliyah, Hind, Nadia and Khadija—were

always pleasant and always hospitable to me. Their lives were

remote from those of the tribal women I knew: their

upbringing and training, their aspirations and hopes were

different, for they were from the cities, which have developed

separately from the rural areas in the Middle East for

generations. But as I visited back and forth between the two

societies, sitting in a deep maroon plush armchair at Um

Saad’s or squatting on a reed mat at Mohammed’s, I was

struck too by the similarity in these women’s values. Though

the town and the country are worlds apart, a good woman is

the same in both spheres: her reputation for fidelity is above

reproach, she is hard-working, a devoted wife and mother, a

good cook and housekeeper, and a quiet, obedient companion

to her husband. And in spite of the relative obscurity in which

these women lived, I came to realize how much they

influenced men, their husbands and especially their sons, and