Read Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village Online
Authors: Elizabeth Warnock Fernea
Tags: #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #General
chuckled and tossed her head.
The second bride sat in state in a large roomy house where
the walls were freshly whitewashed and the date-palm logs
supporting the roof were nearly new. I was surprised, and
Laila explained that this girl was the daughter of a prosperous
Sayid, who had a piece of good land near the sheik’s holding.
“Who is the girl marrying?” I asked.
“Abdu, son of Abdul Hakim,” answered Laila. “You know,
he is a very religious young man from an old Sayid family.”
Then I did remember Bob’s mentioning Abdu as an
unattractive but intense and ascetic young man, who was one
of the religious enthusiasts of El Nahra. Abdu organized
krayas during Ramadan, helped plan the yearly religious plays
and was a leader of one of the
taaziyas
, a group of young men
who performed ritual flagellations during Muharram.
I had difficulty reconciling my picture of the intense Abdu
with the young girl in white before me. Lovely and dusky, she
was loaded with gold: bracelets, earrings and two long
necklaces, one of gold coins and one of cone-shaped beads.
All were presents from her father, said Laila; he had given her
two sheep besides. Her groom was a poor man, though of an
ancient and pure lineage. Since the girl was a Sayid, she was
bound to marry a Sayid, for Sayid girls were given only to
men who carried the blood of the Prophet in their veins.
I praised the girl’s wedding dress, which fitted her
beautifully and seemed much better made than most of the
clothes I had seen in the settlement. The women looked at
each other but said nothing. I had made a mistake, but what? I
turned to Laila for help, and was shocked at the invective
which suddenly burst out of her. On and on she raved,
criticizing the cut and the seams and the way the neck was
finished, until I realized that one of her seamstress rivals had
been employed. Laila stopped as suddenly as she had started,
saying good-humoredly to me and the assembled women,
“The material is excellent—it must have cost at least three
pounds a meter—too good to be ruined by bad sewing.” We
rose and passed out into the alley again.
Laila rushed me along to the last house, murmuring that we
would stay only a minute there. “I wouldn’t go at all if it
weren’t for you,” she said. “It’s because I know this girl so
well and she is only fourteen, too young to marry; everyone
considers it great
ayb
[shame]. Her groom is an old man.”
But as we approached, I heard the beat of a kerosenecan
drum, and voices of women singing, “Samra, Samra, how
beautiful is my dusky maiden.”
“Why are they singing, then?” I asked.
“Because they feel sorry for her and want to cheer her up,”
said Laila.
The group of women and girls who sat in front of the door
of the bridal chamber urged us to sit down, but Laila glanced
into the poor room where the girl sat. In spite of the
voluminous folds of her white dress, she seemed thin and
small. She had been heavily made up to make her appear
older; unfortunately the attempt had not been successful, and
she looked like a child arrayed for a theatrical entertainment.
Staring straight ahead of her, like Sahura, the girl did not seem
to notice us, but she kept blinking repeatedly, like a child with
something in its eye.
“Let’s go,” hissed Laila, and we nodded at the old women,
refused politely their invitation to tea and although the girl
beating the kerosene drum shouted at us to stop, Laila plunged
on silently back toward the main road. Here, in the buzz of
activity and noise, she regained her good spirits. In the alley
we almost collided with a black-veiled figure who turned out
to be the sheik’s daughter Samira. She and Laila dissolved in
helpless laughter at the comic coincidence of their meeting.
“Watch the slops,” giggled Laila, pulling Samira out of the
center of the road.
Samira let out a mock scream and clung foolishly to the
side of the house nearest us. This brought on more laughter,
until we were silenced by Laila.
“Shhh,” she said sternly. “We must be quiet. The sheik
doesn’t know Samira is out, but she says the guards are
looking the other way tonight so all the women can see the
dancing. Alwiyah is out too. They are the two bravest.”
We took hands and moved along in the general direction of
the Sayids’ mudhif, heading toward a yellow glow of light
which was reflected in the sky above the flat roofs of the
houses. Somewhere a donkey raised his head and brayed
fiercely; Samira clung to me and screamed; we all laughed
again. There was much laughter in the crowds that moved
along with us—high-pitched giggles of children, deep laughter
from old women experiencing again, without the tension and
pain, the excitement of their own wedding nights, long since
past. The animals in the compounds we passed were moving
restlessly, snuffling in the darkness; the sound of the drums
was everywhere and even the dogs on the edge of the
settlement had joined the crowds and were yipping wildly.
The square around the mudhif had been kept open as a stage
for the entertainment and was glaringly lighted by scores of
lanterns placed every few feet along the ground. At least a
hundred men sat close together on the flat logs outlining the
square, smoking and drinking tea, for the wedding feast was
just over. Men were carrying out the empty food trays;
everyone had taken advantage of the free meal of rice, mutton
and flat bread in sheep broth provided by the grooms’ fathers.
I could see Bob sitting near the mudhif entrance, washing his
hands over a copper basin, and Mohammed stood nearby
conferring with a group of strangers.
“The dancers and musicians,” whispered Laila.
“But when will it begin?” I asked. We had been wandering
from house to house for two hours now; it was all very
interesting, but my legs were beginning to give out.
“Soon, right now,” said Laila, but she was wrong. A line of
little boys moved out into the square, to perform as they had
done during the Iid. One sympathetic drummer kept up a
desultory beat for them, and the boys’ mothers, anonymous
among the crowds of women who stood, three and four deep
on the edge of the square, clapped enthusiastically. We could
see the children’s lips move in the well-known songs, but the
sound of their voices was lost in the clapping and drumming,
the clink of tea glasses, the hiss of the Coleman lanterns, and
the hubbub of many men moving back and forth across the
square.
The drummer grew tired and stopped. The boys moved
away, but nothing happened. Laila evidently sensed my
impatience, and began to prod and push and elbow me
forward and backward and sideways, until she had succeeded
in pulling us both into a place among the women where we
could see clearly the whole bright square.
“Now, now, see Beeja!” she said.
I looked and indeed the strangers and Mohammed had
moved into the center of the square, followed by a drummer
and two pipers who experimented with one tune, then another.
After a long wait and some words between the musicians and
the dancers, the three dancers linked arms closely and leaped
into a
chobi
. The drums burst forth, five, six, then ten, the
pipers joined in, and the men settled back to enjoy the long-
awaited and expensive spectacle. But the dancers still were
not satisfied, for they would leap and twirl gloriously for a
moment, and stop to scratch their heads under their kaffiyehs
and argue with one another. Mohammed, standing on the edge
of the square and carrying a long staff to indicate his role as
master of ceremonies, looked alternately perplexed and
annoyed. Men began to murmur, and finally Ali, the father of
Sahura and Hassan, leaped to his feet.
“
Yallah
,” he shouted, “we are paying good money for this.
Let’s have the wedding dance and finish with this fooling
around.”
The dancers stopped, Mohammed move in to intervene, and
Ali strode furiously into the square. This seemed to have the
desired effect. Quickly one of the dancers dropped out, the
second adjusted his kaffiyeh and the third shed his aba, pulled
out and put on a woman’s dress. A scarf was tied tightly about
his hips, belly-dancer style. His kaffiyeh wrapped round his
head like a turban, he was at last ready and moved toward his
partner.
Pipes and drums clashed raggedly, found the desired tune,
and the music swelled out, above the rhythmic clapping of the
crowd and the high-pitched ululating wails of the women. The
man held his arms up and concentrated on his footwork, not
looking at the “woman,” who undulated provocatively toward
him, each body movement accented with gestures from “her”
long, thin arms and hands. Lighted from above and below by
the lanterns, the dancers cast vast shadows on the square,
shadows which moved silently together and apart.
Closer and closer together the dancers came, and when the
“bride” nearly touched her partner with her hips, the audience
cried, “Ah,” and a long wail tore through the air. One of the
grooms leaped into the square and pinned a bank note on the
dancer’s dress. At this signal the man dropped out, and the
drums and pipes began a new song for the bride’s solo. This
started slowly, a free-form undulating and wheeling across
and around the dusty square. But in a prolonged whirl the
kaffiyeh flew off the dancer’s head, releasing an astonishing
amount of long black hair which fell crazily about his head
and shoulders. Faster he pivoted and leaped, the hair
streaming and the long hands flung about in an agony of
passion.
“He is good,” I whispered. Laila’s eyes were fixed on the
man-woman figure twirling in the yellow glare of the lanterns,
while the women screamed and the men counted the turns
with “Ah,” “Ah,”
“Yallah,”
and a spatter of coins and
applause. How long could he keep this up? High above the
maze of drums wove the thin melody of the pipes. The coins
showered in, raising little spits of dust as they fell. The dancer,
perspiring freely, clapped those long hands against his temples
to keep the tangled hair out of his eyes as he whirled—dust,
hair, hands, feet moving in the changing shadows and
flickering lantern light. A group of men pushed through the
crowd into the square, the dancer stopped and the drums
ceased.
“The mullah has come; it is time for the weddings,”
whispered Laila. The bridegrooms and their close relatives
rose. “First the men will go down to the canal to wash their
faces and hands, and then each will go with the mullah to his
bride’s house, where he will say that he agrees and she will
say that she agrees. After that he will go in to his bride.”
The crowd rushed to follow the young men and their escorts
toward the canal. “We stay here,” said Laila.
“Why?” I asked, wanting to see the washing ceremony at
the bank.
“It’s only for the men,” she said, “we stay here,” and she
strengthened her grip on my abayah, so I turned back to the
square, no longer a stage as the men hurried across it,
oblivious of the exhausted dancer hunched against a log,
drawing on a cigarette and pushing back his hair. His two
companions were combing the dust for stray coins.
I gradually became aware that the drums had started up
again, a low throbbing beat which continued insistently under
all the noise. The beat was cut by volleys of rifle shots.
“They are coming back from the canal,” said Laila.
I would have loved to follow one or another of the groups
led by the mullah as they headed to one bridal house or
another, signed the papers, the girl and man solemnly agreeing
to take each other as man and wife, and then entering the
bridal chamber together. But this was not to be. I stood with
Laila and Sherifa and Medina and the sheik’s daughter
Samira, who could see nothing either but nevertheless were
chattering with excitement.
“They’re coming back, they’re coming back,” the murmur
reached us from women closer to the alley, and we could hear
the men approaching and entering a house near the mudhif.
“Come on, Laila,” I pleaded. “It’s just down the alley. No
one will see us in the dark,” and she agreed. When we reached
the door, the groom, followed by the same insistent drum roll,
was going in the gate. His mother and the bride’s mother were
already inside, said Sherifa, to bear witness to the fact that the
consummation was a proper one.
The mullah came out.
“He has gone to his bride, I think,” said Laila.
The drum roll continued and the crowd shifted uneasily,
whispering and chattering to each other.
“It’s taking him a long time,” cackled one old lady. “What’s
the matter with him, is he sick?”