Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (36 page)

use my Arabic among the throngs of strangers. My only

alternative was to follow the line of black-veiled women in

front of me carrying their bedrolls on their heads.

But my feelings of dismay receded before the sights and

sounds around me, the city decked out in all its finery for the

yearly festival and the thousands of people pushing forth to

the golden mosque.

We were passing an elaborate diwan, a tent which had been

erected just off the main street, carpeted in fine Persian rugs

and hung with tapestries. A few obviously rich male pilgrims

had settled into overstuffed gilt chairs. Undisturbed by the

crowds milling by, they were sipping coffee in comfort while

they fingered their worry beads and listened to readings from

the Koran piped in through a radio loudspeaker.

The town was a sea of splendid colored flags and strings of

colored lights. Every shop, from the shabbiest kiosk offering

cigarettes, shoelaces and chewing gum to the larger

“magasins” displaying Western clothing in the window, had

some illumination and flew a green flag for Hussein, a black

one for mourning, and often others of pink and purple, scarlet

or sky blue. Some were mere token flags, a twist of cloth

suspended from a stick and propped up among the wares, but

others were elaborately embroidered with mottoes and hung

from carved gilt standards. Long bright bars of pink-and-white

neon illuminated with a garish light the mourning finery

which decorated the major coffee shops and hotels: black silk

banners lettered in white; fringed tapestries portraying in vivid

colors the important events in the lives of Hussein or the

Prophet, black-framed portraits. The smaller mosques had

erected black canopies at their entrances; clusters of flags

marked the doors and from each mosque now we could hear

the chant of the muezzins, high and shrill from the many

minarets of the town, summoning the crowds of faithful to

their noon prayers.

We walked and walked in the blazing sun, probably not as

far as I thought, for I had to struggle constantly to keep up

with my companions, elbowing and prodding my way, even

pushing with my satchel to get through the tightly jammed

masses of people. Occasionally the crowd would separate me

for a moment from the figures of Fatima and the other women

from El Nahra and I would panic and push ahead fiercely,

hardly caring whom I shoved, until I could again see, among

the hundreds of black-clad women with bedrolls on their

heads, the bright familiar bundles on the heads of the women I

knew.

Where to step was another problem. The sidewalks were

fast being transformed into
byut
, temporary households set up

for the duration of the pilgrimage by families who could not

afford lodging elsewhere. This was the great holiday of the

poor, to come by truck, donkey, horse or camel or even on

foot from all parts of the Shiite Moslem world, and camp out

on the sidewalk as close to the great mosque as possible, so

that they might go many times each day to pray at the tomb of

the martyr. Even as we walked, people were unrolling mats,

setting down squares of carpet and claiming a strip of

sidewalk as their own. The old people sat on the strip to hold

the space while the wife or son went to buy fuel for the Primus

stove, to fill a battered teakettle with water, or bring bread and

a measure of sugar. Turning to look back at a woman in face

veil and abayah sweeping her square of sidewalk with part of

a broken broom, I was elbowed into a blazing Primus stove on

which someone was preparing lunch. I felt a stab of pain as

the flame seared into the side of my shin, but there was no

time to stop and look down to see how bad the burn was. I had

to fight to catch up with Fatima again.

Finally, after half an hour of tortuous walking, we turned

into the main street. My leg was throbbing steadily by this

time and my shoulders and arms ached from the effort of

keeping my abayah modestly around me and holding onto my

satchel at the same time. My face veil, which I had been so

worried about losing, was pasted to my face with sweat, and

sweat dripped down my arms and legs and into my shoes. I

tried to jerk my abayah up and pull it around me more

securely. What would I do if it were to slip down and I were

revealed, uncovered and foreign, in the middle of this crowd?

Why had I ever come anyway? Then suddenly, in a break in

the crowd, I saw at the end of the street the three golden

domes and the slender minarets of Hussein’s shrine

shimmering in the dusty sunlight like the fantastic mirages

seen by the faithful in the desert. Crowds milled below the

minarets, which reached their shining peaks up into the fierce

blue sky. A little boy pushed past, shouting in my ear,

“Sammoon! Sammoon haar!” and Rajat pulled me by the

hand. The moment passed, but it had crystallized everything

about this strange day for me: the golden mosque, the flutter

of bright flags, the small boy shouting in my ear, the sibilant

sounds of Koranic verses sung from the loudspeakers, and the

smells of sewage, strongly brewed family tea, and perfumed

Arab gentlemen hurrying by.

The crowds were pushing us forward with them to the

mosque. As we tried to step aside and let the strongest go past,

we were knocked against old ladies selling eggs packed in

grass-lined woven baskets, against the itinerant peddlers

loudly hawking the tinware and painted enamel bowls that the

poor bring back as keepsakes from the pilgrimage. In the huge

circular open area surrounding the shrine, the earliest-arrived

pilgrims had camped, and these households bore signs of

longer habitation—an old man sleeping on a mat, a girl

washing a cooking pot in a cupful of water. Trays of food

were offered for sale: chickens, roast fish still clamped in iron

grills, bowls of stew, but few could afford to buy. Fatima

looked longingly at the fish.

“I think I’ll ask how much it is,” she said.

The other women laughed. “You wouldn’t.”

“I will too,” insisted Fatima and marched up to the peddler.

“How much?” she repeated, and snorted derisively at his

reply. “Who do you think will buy your fish?” she asked. “Is it

made of gold?”

Just when I thought we could not go further, we stopped, at

the entrance to a side street leading away from the shrine and

here, unexpectedly, ran into some other women from El

Nahra. Fatima was overjoyed; the women embraced each

other like long-lost sisters and we promptly deposited our

luggage in the shade of a house, sat down on our bags, and

began to exchange experiences. In a few minutes Sherifa and

Medina, who had come the day before, wandered up, and we

embraced again. Medina dug out a handful of pumpkin seeds

from an inside pocket and handed them around. The holiday

had begun.

While the women talked, I looked about me. A flashing

neon sign to our left announced the presence of a first-class

hotel, and above the sign on the hotel’s spacious balcony I

could see a group of wealthy Pakistani pilgrims, the men in

snowy white, the women in brilliantly colored saris, drinking

lemonade and watching the crowds below them in front of the

mosque. On a mat near us four children and an old woman

huddled together, watching the mother trying to make tea on a

Primus stove which alternately smoked and belched forth

yellow flame. A few feet away a small boy lay rigid on a rug,

his head supported by a pillow, while two women and an old

man took turns fanning him. The younger of the women was

trying to force a few spoonfuls of hot tea between the boy’s

clenched lips. The man removed his kaffiyeh briefly, mopped

his forehead and passed his hand over his face. Then, while I

watched, the adults moved the boy’s pallet into a larger patch

of shade, away from the traffic, and I got a closer look at the

child, who was emaciated, his eyes glazed and sunken from

fever, the skin of his face tight over the bones, the mouth

slack. He looked very near death. The father now began to fan

and the two women straightened out the boy’s thin dishdasha

and arranged his feet more comfortably. At first I wondered

why on earth they had brought this sick child to Karbala in

such heat, but the obvious answer came. Dying on pilgrimage

assures the soul immediate entrance into heaven.

Fatima leaned over to tell me that we were going to a house

just down the street, where some of the women we knew had

stayed in past years. Through a large central courtyard full of

women and children, we were ushered into a small room

where the dirt floor was covered with part of a mat. A painted

and locked wooden box stood in a corner. That was all. Before

I could summon up my scattered bits of Arabic to ask Fatima

about Uncle Yehia, she had disappeared, and Rajat with her. I

was left in the room with our luggage and Um Ali, an older

woman from El Nahra whom I knew only slightly.

“Where have the girls gone?” I asked.

Um Ali grunted. She did not know. Perhaps they had gone

to the mosque.

We sat in silence for a few moments. I was tired, dead tired.

And I was thoroughly annoyed with Fatima for leaving me

behind without explanation, as though I were a sack of

potatoes or at best a poor relative of whose reactions one

could not be certain. Surely Fatima was old enough and

experienced enough—but there I stopped. Fatima was

certainly old enough, past twenty-five, but she was hardly

experienced enough to handle any out-of-the-ordinary

situation. That situation, apparently, was myself. She hadn’t

wanted to take me to the mosque, perhaps. All right. I

understood that. But was I then to be dumped thus,

unceremoniously, in a corner whenever they went off to

participate in anything on this five-day holiday? If that were

the case, why had I come? But it seemed there was nothing I

could do about it, because I was totally dependent on her. Or

was I?

A crippled boy whom I had seen occasionally in the

settlement limped into the room, sat down and looked up at

me. Um Ali grumbled to herself, produced a few coins from

the knotted corner of a handkerchief and gave them to the boy

with instructions to buy her some sugar. Aha! An emissary to

the outside world. I produced a few coins of my own for the

boy and asked him to bring me a Pepsi-Cola.

The Pepsi-Cola, which was quite cold, raised my spirits

considerably. I loosened my abayah, wiped my arms and face

with a handkerchief and examined my burn which had now

developed a puffy white blister but did not hurt any more. Um

Ali drank her tea and dozed in a corner. Flies buzzed about

over her empty tea glass. I waited.

Sherifa came in to whisper that she thought we were to stay

at Fatima’s uncle’s house.

“Why don’t you go there?” she asked.

I replied truthfully that I did not know.

“If you don’t stay there, you may not find any place, it is so

late,” warned Sherifa. “Tell Fatima. Even this place is full.

The room you are sitting in now has been reserved for

tonight.”

I will, I thought grimly, if I ever see her again.

When Rajat appeared after nearly an hour, I pounced on

her.

“Why,” I said, “don’t we go to Uncle Yehia’s?”

“Oh, we can’t possibly go to my uncle’s,” she answered. “It

would be great shame [ayb] because we didn’t bring any big

presents, like chickens or butter.”

I pointed out that I had two cakes and a bag of fruit which

she herself had carried the whole length of Karbala for that

very purpose.

She merely stared.

“Are we to stay here?” I asked.

“No, it is full.”

“Then where will we sleep tonight?”

“After lunch,” said Rajat patiently, in the manner one uses

with a recalcitrant child, “we will look for a place. Fatima says

so.”

“Where?”

“Near the mosque,” she answered. That was all I could find

out.

At that point I decided I could not face the possibility,

which was now very real, of sleeping on the street. It was past

three o’clock, the ceremonies were scheduled to begin at

sundown, and as Sherifa had pointed out, most of the available

space was filled by now. Sleeping on the sidewalk did not

bother me so much as the prospect of keeping myself wrapped

up in abayah and veil for five days and nights, with no private

place in which to wash or go to the toilet. All the apocryphal

stories of Shiite fanaticism rose before me, and I had a few

bad moments imagining a Grade ? extravaganza in which I

was unveiled as an infidel and an impostor in the middle of

the night by excited crowds and borne aloft to the mosque

where I was presented to the mullah to do with as he wished. I

knew I was being silly, that my friends were with me, and that

even sleeping in the street would not be a catastrophe, but by