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