Read Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village Online
Authors: Elizabeth Warnock Fernea
Tags: #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #General
and winning.”
“Haji Abdul Emir, our grandfather, you mean,” said
Basima.
“Sometimes I dream about Haji Abdul Emir,” Fatima put in
unexpectedly.
The girls exclaimed at this. “Really, Fatima?” “How do you
dream about him?”
“I dream he is on horseback,” she answered. “You girls are
too young to remember, but before Haji Abdul Emir got sick,
he had a beautiful horse—it cost nearly a thousand pounds. He
would gallop up the road to the mudhif very fast and all of us
children would run after him. Once he even rode a racing
camel up the road, a milk-white camel.”
“Well,” said Laila primly, “I dream about my friend Salima,
and when you leave us, Beeja, we will dream about you and
what good times we had together.”
“But I’m not leaving yet,” I pointed out.
“You will, and you will forget us,” they said.
“No, no,” I protested.
Fatima smiled and winked at Laila. “Let’s buy a charm
from Um Khalil so Beeja won’t forget us.”
“Or look in the Book of Stars and see what it says,”
suggested Basima.
“What’s the Book of Stars?” I asked.
“Selma has one, that she keeps hidden from Haji, and it tells
you about everything,” said Laila. “I’ve looked in it many
times to see whether I am going to marry and it always says
no.”
“I want to marry a fat man, a fat man,” chanted Nejla, “a
man as big as a bar-rel.” She laughed at her own joke, but no
one joined in; they were too interested in what they are saying.
“We don’t believe in the Book of Stars, Beeja,” said
Fatima, “we’re just joking. This kind of magic is against the
Koran.”
“But Fatima,” Laila put in, “the Book of Stars must be
worth something because look what Selma did with it!”
“What did she do?” I asked.
Fatima looked disapproving, but Laila plunged ahead.
“When Selma first moved into the compound, Haji would
sleep one night with her, the next night with Bahiga and the
night after that with Kulthum. But Selma didn’t like that at all.
She wanted Haji all to herself.”
“Laila—” cautioned Fatima.
“Well, she did, and you know it, and so she got this Book of
Stars from her sister in Diwaniya and after a while Haji
stopped sleeping with Bahiga and Kulthum and only came to
Selma.”
“Yes, but-”
“She did it with her Book,” finished Laila triumphantly and
looked around her for confirmation. The other girls nodded.
“That is against the Koran,” repeated Fatima angrily, “and
you should know better, Laila. You know what the mullah
says.”
“Is the
hiriz
against the Koran too?” I asked, trying to turn
the conversation. I had seen these charms everywhere in Iraq,
small silver or tin amulets containing a few seeds and a roll of
paper on which some Koranic verses had been written by a
mullah. The amulet was pinned to a child’s clothing to ward
off the Evil Eye, or it was suspended from the mirror of a taxi
to bring good luck. Something blue was usually a part of it, a
blue glass bead or a fine turquoise set into the silver of the
more costly amulets.
“Well, no,” admitted Fatima. “Everyone buys a hiriz for his
children. Rajat was so sick when she was a baby that my
mother bought three for her from Um Khalil.”
“If children are afraid at night, they hold on to the hiriz and
then they are all right,” Laila added.
“And a hiriz can do a lot of good,” put in Basima.
“Remember Um Farid?” They nodded.
“Tell me,” I pleaded.
“Um Farid was once asleep in her house. Her husband was
away and only her mother and her baby were there. A wind
came in the night and blew out the lantern, and a burglar came
afterward and Um Farid got such a fright she could no longer
speak. After a while her mother went to Um Khalil and bought
a big hiriz and Um Farid got better. She was at Sherifa’s house
the other day and said quite a few things.”
“I think Um Khalil must be very rich from this work,” said
Laila. “Once Salima opened a big black box which belonged
to her mother-in-law and it was filled with five-and ten-pound
notes.”
“That is bad,” said Fatima, “very bad. Um Khalil takes
money for doing good and for doing evil too. One of the wives
of Haji Abdul Emir used to claim that all magic, the Book of
Stars and even the hiriz, were
haram
, a sin against God. But
when she was very old she said that what you do for the good
of your family is all right,
halal
, but if you try to use magic
and charms for a bad reason, then it is haram.”
“It’s better to pray at the tomb of Hussein and forget all
this,” said Sanaa, who had been quiet throughout the
conversation. “Or pray for something and promise to fast in
Ramadan if you get your wish. Then one is sure one is not
committing haram.”
Sometimes Nejla would entertain us with imitations. She
loved to dress up in her father’s clothes and play the irate man,
scolding wives, daughters, or sons. Her instinct for gesture
and gait was excellent, and we could always guess who her
target of the evening happened to be. Her
pièce de résistance
of that summer, requested again and again, was the scene after
the kraya, when the mullah had set upon the girls who were
pulling at me. Nejla did us all, the rowdy crowd of little girls,
myself shrinking timidly away trying not to show my distaste
(how had she seen that?), the erect mullah shouting and
striking fiercely out in all directions.
In Sherifa’s little court the neighbor women gathered also,
and Laila, Basima and I would often walk up to spend part of
our evening there. Once a woman, distantly related to Sherifa,
began to query me about the intricacies of childbearing in
America.
“What I can’t understand,” she said, “is how American
women stop having babies. Do they refuse to sleep with their
husbands?”
“No, no,” chorused the group. “How could they? They
don’t, do they, Beeja?”
“No, they don’t,” I started.
“They have operations by men doctors,” offered Basima,
“so they don’t get pregnant.”
“But what if they do get pregnant?” insisted the woman.
“American women want children too,” I began again.
The woman burst out, “So do I, but I have ten,
ten
, and the
doctor says I will die if I have one of those operations, but I
don’t care. If I have another baby, I will die anyway. I’m
pregnant again, and I’ve eaten lots of pumpkin seeds, but
nothing has happened. So now what do I do?”
“Never mind, Um Ali,” cautioned Sherifa. “Go to the
midwife. She knows how to get rid of babies. And don’t
worry. God knows best.”
The woman gestured impatiently and sighed, a long, tearing
sigh.
“Really,” counseled Sherifa, “the midwife is very good.
And not expensive either.”
Talk turned away from the woman’s insoluble problem.
Laila blurted out that she had always considered Christians
unclean because she had been told that they did not shave any
of their body hair.
“And is it true,” asked Basima, “that in America they put all
the old women in houses by themselves, away from their
families?”
I admitted that this was sometimes true and tried to explain,
but my words were drowned in the general murmur of
disapproval.
“What a terrible place that must be!”
“How awful!”
“And their children let them go?”
“Thank God we live in El Nahra, where the men are not so
cruel!”
It had never occurred to me before, but the idea of old
people’s homes must have been particularly reprehensible to
these women whose world lay within the family unit and
whose whole lives of toil and childbearing were rewarded in
old age, when they enjoyed repose and respect as members of
their children’s households.
For months the women had begged me to tell their fortunes
with coffee cups. This I could not do, but finally I admitted I
could read palms, and soon the palm reading became part of
the summer evening’s entertainment. I had to change my
approach, for one could hardly say, in this culture, that a
woman would have four or five flirtations and then a
marriage, but rather that she would have many offers before
marrying. Travel for these women meant religious pilgrimages
or visits to the doctor; a long travel line indicated a possibility
of visiting Mecca. Everyone wanted to know whether she was
jealous, whether she was passionate. The passion was
important; the married women would giggle and tell the
unmarried ones that they had yet to learn how much fun it
could be to sleep with one’s husband.
“Always?” I asked.
“Of course,” they would reply. “If we did not enjoy
sleeping with them, how could we love them?”
I thought to myself, truly how else, for they seldom saw
their husbands except to serve them at meals, and at bedtime.
On the night of the prophet Mohammed’s birthday a fine
full moon rose over the canal. For the occasion, the main
street of El Nahra and the suq as well had been hung with
paper streamers and colored lights. Bob left after supper to
attend the festivities, a skit to be held in the suq, followed by
refreshments. Laila and Sherifa and Fatima and Basima and I
could not stay indoors that night. We were not daring enough
to cross the canal, but sat in a row by our wall, wrapped in our
abayahs, watching the reflections of the colored lights and the
moonlight in the water and listening to the sounds of
merriment from the opposite bank.
Fatima and Laila tried to persuade little Rajat to go across
and watch the skit and come back and tell us about it.
Although Rajat wore the abayah, she was only eleven and
could easily have passed unnoticed, but she grew shy and
stubborn and refused to go alone. Fatima, to make up,
entertained us with accounts of the skits she had seen when
she was a girl and had hovered around the suq on the night of
the Prophet’s birthday.
“I wasn’t afraid of life the way this one is,” she said with a
contemptuous glance at the shrinking Rajat. “Abdul Latif, the
mukhtar
of the suq, always played the stupid pilgrim on his
way to Mecca,” she began, “and the foreigner was always
played by—” and she went on, describing the skit in detail,
complete with gestures, until we all laughed at her cleverness.
The moon was high in the sky and we sat close together,
loath to leave, when Rajat, the shy rabbit, sprang up as if shot,
hissed that she could hear Nour and her father coming along
the road, and that we had better hurry home.
We rose quickly and almost ran toward our respective
houses, still in good spirits. As I closed my gate behind me, I
heard the men’s voices on the path and knew the women
would be safely home before them.
When Bob came, he presented me with two pieces of
imitation toffee and a Jordan almond, the “favor” of the
evening.
“It was very interesting,” he recounted. “Abdul Latif, the
mukhtar, played a stupid pilgrim on his way to Mecca. He
meets a foreigner on the road, and this was very well done, I
thought, by a man named—”
“Yes,” I smiled. “I know.”
He looked a bit surprised. “What do you mean? Were you
there?”
“No, but it was just as good,” I answered and went on to
explain about my evening with the girls by the banks of the
canal.
16
Hussein
During the summer we also acquired an armed guard, or rather
Abdulla, Sheik Hamid’s brother, acquired him for us. Abdulla
told Bob that Haji felt we should have a guard, and had
instructed Abdulla to find us the right man. So we took on
Hussein, more to please Abdulla than out of any felt need for a
man with a loaded rifle to stand outside our door every night
Hussein belonged to another clan of the tribe, a somewhat
impoverished group which lived down the canal about half a
mile. Hussein’s wife Sajjida, accompanied by two thin
daughters, came to visit me, and I returned the call.
Their house was poorer and smaller than any in our
settlement. The single room was hardly more than a hovel,
with a ceiling so low one could not stand upright, but the floor
was swept neatly and the one reed mat was clean. We had
Coca-Cola, all of us, sitting together knee to knee in the tiny
room—Hussein, Sajjida, an aged woman cousin who lived
with them, and the two little girls.
After that Sajjida and I visited each other several times, but
though we both tried, the relationship never ripened into
friendship, for the odds were too uneven. I had so much and
Sajjida so little. I was the one who was at fault, for I felt
uncomfortable, but Sajjida felt no constraint at all and would
ask me constant and unanswerable questions.
“Can’t you give me something to keep boy babies alive?”
she said once, looking around the room as though the answer