The Weight of a Mustard Seed (18 page)

I
N THE PREHISTORY OF ARABIA, BEFORE THE DAWN
of the Prophet, there was a Christian tribe of Yemen called the Kelbi led by a poet called Zuhair bin Janab. As Islam established and spread victorious, the Kelbis migrated north and merged with the Muslim conquests of Syria. Mo'awiyah, the fifth caliph, founder of the Umayyed dynasty, conqueror of Syria and Egypt, had a Kelbi wife. His son, Yazid, victor of Kerbala, slayer of Hussein, the martyred grandson of the Prophet (and thereby villain of all Shia), also took a Kelbi woman as one of his wives. Yazid died without issue in 683 and the dynasty passed to another branch of the clan; the Kelbi ran out of favor and retreated south along the Euphrates.

Lost in the vagaries of desert life, sand blown over gaps of dry centuries, over a thousand years the Kelbis became the Janabi tribe. Nomads, sheep herders, camel traders, they settled where they could find grazing and moved according to topography and war. They stretched from Ramadi and Fallujah to Hilla; and south, Mahmoudiya, Latifiya, Iskandariya, to Jurfa Sakr, west of the Euphrates. Some settled in Baghdad and wrote Janabis into documents and records, some settled near the shrines of Najaf and Kerbala and married and converted into Shi'ism. In the nineteenth century they sold food to the
Ottoman armies, in the early twentieth, they dug canals for the British, in the time of Saddam they filled the security services and the official ranks of the Iraqi state. The Janabis grew in number until they were a quarter of a million.

History came down in epics and poems, battles and heroes and feuds, folklore, shadow plays, the whispers of old men and grandmothers. A son was always taught ten generations of ancestors. Adnan Janabi, Sheikh of the Janabis, recounted to me fourteen with ease, his name long with antecedent:

“Adnan Abdul-Munim Rashid Ali Khalaf Ouaid Khattab Mohammed Alloush Mohammed Noufal Mohammed Ali Ougab…”

He remembered the death of his grandfather's last camel. It was 1945; he was five years old—he didn't remember why the beast died, just that it was the last camel, long useless, and its carcass made a shadow on the ground. Afterward his grandfather used the saddle to rest his elbow against Bedu tradition during tribal assemblies in the
mudhif,
the traditional meeting house built of reeds.

He told me about a vast bronze tray that he had inherited, 200 years old, capable of holding 250 kilos of rice, 4 whole rams and a baked bull. Adnan liked to use it every year at the Eid of the
Haj
, the time when sheep were slaughtered as festival sacrifice and their meat distributed to the poor. He had it re-plated with chrome because untreated bronze could react poisonously with food. It needed fifteen men to carry it so he had a special trolley made so that it could be more easily maneuvered.

Adnan laughed. “I mechanized it,” and he bobbed his head back from inhaling a long draught of
narghila
to watch Tunisia score against Spain in the World Cup. It was June 2006, we were sitting in a café in Beirut, marble and aged mirror,
clattering backgammon, TV screens for the soccer, glasses of milky arak and plates of pistachios. Adnan had moved to Beirut because Baghdad was too dangerous; he was a moderate and therefore found himself condemned by both sides: Sunni insurgents linked to al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and Shia revengists and their Mehdi army militias. “I am on all the best death lists!” Adnan did not look like a sheikh, he lacked the usual Iraqi belly, dyed black hair, mustache and swagger. Instead his frame was slight, his head was bald, his face clean-shaven and he carried the intelligent air of an ancient sage as he considered the soccer players sprinting up and down the green pitch. “Now Spain will come back, you see the Tunisians were lucky too early, the Spanish are stronger and they will win.” Adnan had a glass of wine before him, its level had fallen and he ordered another bottle and mocked his own indulgence: “And forty years ago I was a communist!”

In fact Adnan was, practically, an Iraqi anomaly, a leader without agenda, ideology, prejudice or hatreds. He felt an almost overwhelming helplessness in the surge of violence in Iraq; he tried when he could to broker kidnap deals, protect journalists investigating atrocities; he urged restraint, alliance, negotiation—but the bloodshed was out of control, the contents of Pandora's box had been tipped into hell. Every day the newspapers printed arbitrary statistics: 23, 42, 59, 130, 168—so many that the figures of the dead were lost in the numbers. The car bomb scenes of black smoke, white ambulance, red blood pools on the tarmac became as if by rote and went increasingly under-reported. Headlines were spiked with gore and vile innovation: decapitated heads wrapped in black garbage bags, bodies dumped by rubbish heaps with their hands bound and their skulls drilled, a daring kidnap raid that took over a hundred employees out of a ministry, a
new type of car bomb that released clouds of poisonous chlorine gas.

Adnan analyzed the situation perfectly correctly: he said law and order only existed when the central authority, the government of the state, maintained its monopoly on violence. In Iraq everyone had a gun and every political leader, sheikh and neighborhood don had an army/bodyguard/militia. This anarchy was the result, and as long as neither the Americans or the Kurds or the Sunna or the Shia were willing to cede to a monopoly, the anarchy would continue. “I am a realist. What I've learned from this life is to be realistic.”

During the World Cup Beirut was decorated with multinational flags: each household had picked a different country: Brazilian banners, the English cross of St George hung over balconies next to French tricolors and pizza places daubed in red, white and green. At night, when the bars let out after the matches, it was a carnival, cars streamed through downtown fluttering blue and white Argentine colors or the red flag of Morocco or green for the Sunnis who liked to support the Saudis. It was a parody of divided Beirut, a weird blast of irony, as a tooting cavalcade drove past the window while Adnan and I discussed the sectarian fighting in Baghdad. I told him I remembered the black Shia flags hung up in Baghdad to commemorate Ashura in 2004, the month of mourning, which were then never taken down so that they became, in effect, territorial markers.

We paused. It was very stark and clear. We shook our heads, drank more wine. How could this be stopped? It could not be stopped. We were sitting in a city where the pock-marks of bullet holes of fifteen years of civil war were still visible. Chaos could not be controlled; it seemed it had first to exhaust itself. After the soccer was over and the Spanish had indeed won, a
band played old Lebanese songs and everyone became sentimental, singing laments of love and war, clapping to encourage two red-lipsticked, full bodied Levantine women who got up to dance with sashaying hips and pathos, plucking the sweet melancholy rhythm from the smoky air with their fingertips. We applauded unknowing, as the last easy moment of a happy drunken corner of the Middle East slipped past midnight. Three weeks later Hezbollah and Israel went to war. More bombs, more death.

 

A
DNAN HAD KNOWN
Kamel Sachet well. Kamel Sachet's family hailed from the Albu Hassoun subdivision of the Janabi tribe, a clan with a hardscrabble history of marginal land and minority and a reputation of pride and aggression—Adnan told me that as recently as the fifties the Albu Hassoun had fought the fierce Garaghul over land that had been reconfigured by the meanderings of the Euphrates. There was killing on both sides but in the popular imagination it was the Albu Hassoun who cowed the Garaghul. Janabis liked to marry their daughters into the Albu Hassoun for the protection the alliance afforded. It was said a Janabi should always employ an Albu Hassoun bodyguard or else he would be robbed. “The Albu Hassoun were not to be meddled with!” Adnan laughed. “But Kamel Sachet was a great hero for all Janabis.”

Kamel Sachet's farm near Hilla was close to Adnan's father's land and Adnan got to know him in the eighties when he would often come to the
mudhif
and sit, a glass of tea in one hand, his red beret at his elbow, and wait patiently while the other guests dispersed. He preferred to talk to the Sheikh in a private audience, and Adnan perceived that he was indepen
dent, almost a loner. Adnan was impressed with his careful, frank manner of speaking and his tone of responsibility leavened with self-deprecation. Kamel Sachet liked to talk about his farm, irrigation and crops, date harvests, water rights. The Sheikh would tell him of tribal matters, the minor scandals of Janabis, who had positions in the presidential apparatus, and they would discuss people they knew, commanders, anecdotes, trouble and promotions. Kamel Sachet always offered to help any Janabi when he could. He paid for the daughter of an executed officer to go to university and study to be a pharmacist, he gave soldiers leave to attend funerals or weddings, or, if they had gone AWOL, an official note of excuse that could save their lives. This was the tradition of
wasta
, connections, the patronage of tribe.

Kamel Sachet's deepening religious observance was obvious. He read many religious books and often listened to religious sheikhs, but Adnan noticed that he did not follow any one in particular. He fasted when the calendar required and prayed according to the timetable, but he deplored extra fasting or praying through the night as mystical indulgences. Even when his father died Kamel Sachet did not attend the funeral; he said such gatherings were distasteful to him and not true Islam. In the Hadith it is written that burials should be quick and simple without pomp and fuss. Adnan's elder brother Khalid, then Mayor of Baghdad, who had succeeded his father as Sheikh, had to send a car for him so that Kamel Sachet would be able respectfully to receive the envoy that Saddam was sending.

Kamel Sachet acquiesced to this political nicety, but he made it clear to his brothers: “This is your right to receive condolences if you wish. But I am here as my social duty, I am not here to receive condolences.”

I suggested to Adnan, during one of our conversations, that Kamel Sachet's religiosity was, in some measure, a moral retrenchment. Adnan nodded.

“His battle was internal, to reconcile himself with the state. He was exercising his duty as an officer, as a general. He did not become a recluse or a rebel. He did not become Osama bin Laden or a saint. He was not a weak person who did good deeds in order to go to heaven. But he needed this rock to hang on to as he tried to navigate his moral compass in a corrupt state in which he was an important person.”

Kamel Sachet became trapped by his position and his duty to his position. Adnan had spent much of his life recusing his own position. In the sixties he had studied economics in London and been part of an Iraqi exile group that monitored human rights abuses and political prisoners during the short lived Baathie takeover in 1963. In the seventies he had returned to Iraq and accepted a position in the new oil ministry helping to organize the nationalization of Iraqi oil, long a dream of his. But he soon ran foul of Vice President Saddam Hussein. In 1973 OPEC announced the oil embargo in response to the October war with Israel; Adnan discovered that Saddam was involved in selling oil in breach of the embargo, behind the back of the Baath Party regional command. Somehow (
wasta
) he survived Saddam's anger and managed to retire to the country.

“I put on a
dishdasha
and became a farmer and I had the biggest fish farm in the Middle East and I became a very rich man with that fish farm.”

He did all that he could to live apart from the regime and its entrapments. His brother Khalid was the opposite. Khalid became close to Saddam, he often went hunting with him, and rose through the Party ranks to Mayor of Baghdad—Adnan admonished him, tried to reason with him, but to no avail.
Part of the reason that he was left alone in his country exile, he knew, was that Khalid had brokered an understanding with Saddam. But after many years excused, he found himself pulled back into the morass. In 1995, Khalid died in Rome, possibly poisoned, possibly on Saddam's orders; Adnan became the new Sheikh of the Janabis and was duly summoned.

A car was sent to his house in Baghdad. He did not know where he was being taken nor could he ask. On arrival at a government building he was shown to a room and told to wait. After a while, perhaps half an hour, he was taken in a second car, escorted through a checkpoint into the grounds of the Republican Palace. He was shown into an anteroom where his identity documents were re-checked and his name uttered into a telephone. The officers there smiled and were respectful and asked him politely if he had waited long, if his family was well,
inshallah
, it was hot today, more hot than usual! They asked him to take everything out of his pockets, wallet, house keys, a small notebook, which they took and placed in a pouch. Then a doctor in a white coat came into the room and asked him to open his hands facing up and traced his palms with his fingertips like a fortune teller. He was told to take off his watch. He was told to take off his clothes. The two attending officials remained polite. He took off his vest and his underpants. The officers checked his clothes thoroughly and ran their hands over every seam and looked carefully inside his polished shoes. This naked humiliation—Adnan pursed his lips with distaste and shame as he remembered—induced a measure of self-recoil.

He was asked to put his clothes back on, and when he had dressed, he was shown into an office guarded by two soldiers on the door. Mr. President, Saddam Hussein, sat behind a large but ordinary desk. Adnan stood before him; there was no chair
to sit on. Saddam leaned back in his chair, cleared his throat and chortled what he imagined was a friendly greeting. “Heh heh heh.”

Adnan's position as Sheikh was both precarious and protected. He tried to avoid the functionary requirements, the summons of all Sheikhs and the hand-outs of envelopes of money, “a pathetic amount, less than $1,000; I took it only once, because a Janabi in the Presidency advised me I must, and I gave it away to charity.” Like almost all Iraqis, he maneuvered the best he could manage and hoped for an Iraq after Saddam.