Read Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village Online
Authors: Elizabeth Warnock Fernea
Tags: #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #General
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