The Weight of a Mustard Seed (17 page)

“If you know what you are, why are you asking?” Kamel Sachet retorted, angry, and reached for his gun. Aziz Salih Numan bristled and moved his own hand over the holster on his hip and continued to rant.

“You don't deserve such a position. I am the representative of the President! I will take my measures after this insult!”

The following day an informal peace meeting was held between the two at which Nejar (sometimes bodyguard to Aziz Salih Numan) officiated. There was tension and three Pepsis on the table.

Aziz Salih Numan leaned forward and asserted himself as a lecturing superior:

“You are the Governor. You have a high rank in the army. Your relationship with Saddam Hussein is strong. But listen. Nejar is a witness to what I will say to you: Don't behave like this, whether something is right or wrong—Your trust in Saddam Hussein is 100 percent, but Saddam needs the party more than he needs the army. He needed you as an army commander during the Iran-Iraq war, and he gave you cars with golden keys and he needed you in Kuwait. I know you are honest in your dealings with Saddam. But don't trust him 100
percent. We know that if I told Saddam that I, as his representative, was kept waiting and Kamel Sachet did not greet me, it's an insult to who? To him! You would be executed!”

Kamel Sachet knew what he said was true, but kept his pride: “I have done nothing to be executed for. It was an administrative mistake.”

 

K
AMEL
S
ACHET SPENT
a little over two years as Governor of Amara before the reports piled up against him, too many complaints from too many different quarters, and he was reassigned back to Baghdad, back home, to an administrative position in the Presidency in Baghdad, selling government cars. He was recommended for the job by Khalid al-Janabi, the sheikh of the Janabi tribe and then Mayor of Baghdad. It was a position which suited Saddam, it sidelined this recalcitrant and independent extremist, while keeping him occupied in a useful position, close by. Indeed, to Saddam it was a good fit, the office of selling government cars was always fraught with nepotistic deals but he could trust the unimpeachable reputation of his war-hero general to act without favoritism (Kamel Sachet would not even allow his own sons to buy one of the government cars he was responsible for—a piece of incorruptibility which greatly frustrated his sons) while detaching him from any military duties and separating him from the officer corps who revered him.

 

N
EJAR WAS EAGER
to describe Kamel Sachet's great qualities, his bravery and his goodness. But he made it clear, slanting his gaze, that he would protect Kamel Sachet's memory and reputation. “Don't go into personal details,” he warned me. “I
came up with Kamel Sachet, he did me many favors and I am loyal to him and I tell you to avoid these things. Many times I was in his house, many times, and I never met his wife or his daughters.” He looked me straight in the eye, trying to discern if I knew about the scandal. I returned his stare. Eventually he broke off his drilling and resumed the general's résumé.

“Kamel Sachet asked for retirement several times. I advised him not to take his request directly to the President, because the President would calculate this request and suspect it. This was one of his mistakes.” Nejar paused. “He wasn't afraid of Saddam Hussein. He was honest with him, he believed Saddam was his friend and trusted him and did not believe that he would betray him.”

The next time I saw Major Nejar we met in the coffee shop of my hotel. He seemed distracted and nervous. His swagger had sharpened into aggression. It was now mid April 2004 and Fallujah had blown up and Moqtada's Shia were revolting in Kufa and no one could pretend any more that the violence was just teething problems at the beginning of a new era of democracy and prosperity. Nejar no longer wanted to reminisce about incidents from Amara and talk about Kamel Sachet's achievements there. He had been driving a taxi to make ends meet but he was running out of money and the situation was not good enough for his pride or his pocket; he needed something that conferred a certain status. Without much preamble, he asked me if I could help him get a position in the new Iraqi Mukhabarat.

“Working for the Americans?” I was incredulous.

“I know things,” he hinted darkly. “I want a job. For my future.” He said he had put his name on the list but they had not called him. Some former colleagues of his had already been called and he was worried he was being ignored. He wanted
me to put a word in with someone, to get his name moved farther up the list. I told him I had no particular contacts with the Americans in the GreenZone and no way to do this. He went cold and repeated his request. He told me that any further conversations were connected to this favor. I repeated that I was only a journalist and powerless. He sneered, leaned back in his chair and clicked his fingers for the waiter to bring the bill. We never spoke again.

J
UST AS HE WAS PUBLICLY EQUANIMOUS AS GOVERNOR,
so Kamel Sachet had no choice in his appointment to his new position in the Presidential Office. He had long rescinded his pride in such matters and did not care about the outward appearance of demotion, but the constrictions and suspicion of Saddam's court strained his conversation and his mood. He went to his office every day, competently organized the sale of government cars and other extraneous items—an attempt by the government to raise some cash in the strapped time of sanctions—and spent the balance of his time building mosques.

The first mosque he built was in Baghdad, in Saidiya, not far from his home, on a plot of land which Sheikh Khalid al-Janabi helped him to purchase. He built a plain concrete cube without a minaret—he did not believe in wasting money on decoration—and named it after one of his victories, which had also been the name of one of the divisions he had commanded, the Sadiq Mosque.

The mosque was pared back to the utilitarian; Kamel Sachet insisted on simplicity and reverence. He made sure that the gate was separated from the door of the mosque by a path, so that people could spend a few moments contemplating the distance from the earthly street and their quotidian cares to a
clearer-headed godliness. He did not allow shoe racks inside the mosque, as was usual; he said that shoes had no place in the mosque at all, not even carried in by hand, but must be left farther away by the entrance. Inside, the walls were unadorned except for a few
surahs
, the carpet was industrially woven and there was no air-conditioning which might have required the additional cost of a generator. Harith al-Obeidi, the young Islamic scholar Kamel Sachet hired as the imam, suggested he plant a small garden, something green and serene, but Kamel Sachet said he did not want to spend money on something that would be a distraction.

“His military character imposed itself on his religious behavior,” Harith al-Obeidi told me, complaining. I met him in Damascus in the summer of 2007 for tea on a restaurant terrace in the old city. He had become an MP in the post-Saddam era and he explained the state of political disintegration in the Baghdad that he had just left. The Sunni political tide had turned against pretending cooperation with the Shia parties and his Sunni faction had pulled out of the Maliki government. He threw up his hands, exhausted with cynicism at all the bombs, the militias and Iranian ambition and American short-sightedness…

“An officer will always be an officer,” he said of Kamel Sachet, reverting, more comfortably, to reminiscence. “I saw him once throw the shoes a man had carried in to pray outside the mosque. And he was obsessive about cleaning the mosque himself. He came every Thursday evening to wash the floors on his knees. Sometimes he brought his elder sons with him. And about paying for the upkeep. He did not like to receive donations. He would say, ‘We're not in need; I wont accept charity!' He didn't even like to replace worn-out furniture. The only important thing for him was to fulfill his religious duty.”

Harith al-Obeidi had studied at the Baghdad University School of Sharia, completed his MA in Islamic Science and Comparative Philology and written his Ph.D. thesis on the Rules of a Traveler According to Sharia. He described himself as a moderate, a man who preferred dialogue and who found the dictations of Kamel Sachet's extremism confining: “He was practically
Salafi
!” God was the only sanction, the Koran the only guide. Kamel Sachet would not allow him to counsel those who came for advice or with domestic troubles. According to him, a mosque was for prayer, not for pastoral care and community projects. He attached great importance to the memorization and recitation of the Koran and classrooms were set up to teach young boys, but he didn't allow the mosque to sponsor a youth soccer team, as some mosques did: soccer had nothing to do with the worship of God.

The Sadiq Mosque existed within the lines of Kamel Sachet's own design. It was the place he felt most at peace and relaxed. The moment he stepped across the threshold a smile spread across his face: grace of autonomy or God's space, free from any autocrat. He was, perhaps, even happy. Those around him knew that in these moments, anything they asked for, he would give.

 

I
ALWAYS IMAGINED
Kamel Sachet's relationship with Islam was personally defined, a private solace, interior world, retreat. Although he was more extreme than most he was not alone in his reversion. During the eighties and nineties there was a general trend toward the practice of conservative Islam in the Arab world. Women donned headscarves, bars were closed, public immodesty frowned upon and vilified. In some ways Islam seemed to become a shelter from reckless and unjust dic
tats of rulers and corrupt officials: a reaction against the secular regimes—of Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Morocco, Indonesia—as well as a rebuttal of the Western examples, of either communism (which had collapsed under its own weight) or the democracies of Europe and America which preached human rights and supported the monarchs and dictators who oppressed them. This upswell of Islam became a new kind of Pan-Arabism, a way to reclaim culture, morality, values, identity.

Dr. Laith's wife, Bushra, had taken up wearing the
hijab
late in life, but she could not explain exactly why—it was something sunk deep out of explanation. She said it just felt more comfortable. Um Omar had grown into her thirties following Western fashion and hemlines, but had bowed to the wishes of her husband and the justifications of her belief. Whenever I asked to see Iraqi family albums, the pictures would illustrate this progression: miniskirts to seventies feathered fringe and floaty sundresses to a headscarf and a full length coat; over two decades women had retracted into the safety of the enveloping
hijab
.

Saddam himself was always sensitive to his costume. In the seventies he had been known for his fine tailored suits and Italian shoes, the international man of sophistication; in the eighties he was rarely out of uniform (which he wore plain and unadorned in the manner of Napoleon and Stalin, other rulers who understood the necessity of theater), by the nineties his portrait, rendered in ceramic tiles, paint, plaster, ink screen or sculpted in bronze, wore whatever the scene demanded: a mortar board outside a university, a stethoscope outside a hospital, rich tribal robes on the highway to Amman, battledress next to a parade ground, even, apparently without irony, Kurdish dress, complete with baggy pantaloons, at the entrance to Kirkuk.

Saddam went along with the new wave of religious conservatism, crafting rhetoric and ordering props in line with the tenor of the times. He initiated construction on the Mother of All Battles Mosques in Baghdad to be the largest mosque in the world, he redesigned the national flag to include the inscription
Allahu Akbar
, God Is Great, and had a Koran written in blood, which he claimed was his own. But it was as if he were trying to have dominion over the sea. Prayer is collective and Friday sermons occasions for opinion. As much as the new religious mood washed the public shore with a soothing lap, it also swelled into opposition. Islam politicized, became an ism, into Islamism. And mosques were the natural meeting places.

Young men came to Friday prayer to listen to imams preach an Islam that was enshrined in Sharia godliness and therefore purer and higher than that of man-made secular authority. During the week they went to prayer after work and then hung around in the courtyard until the final evening, talking among themselves. They discussed Islam and
Sharia
and studied the Koran and the Hadith, the life of the Prophet that accompanies the Koran, grew their beards, wore the traditional
dishdasha
instead of foreign modern trousers; some even wore it deliberately short, above their ankles, in the fashion of the early followers of the Prophet Mohammed. The security services sent undercover agents to infiltrate congregations. Obeidi laughed, “But everyone knew who they were because they were the ones wearing short
dishdashas
but on their face they only had a mustache.”

During Ramadan in 1993 Kamel Sachet asked a famous and controversial cleric to lead the prayers at the Sadiq Mosque. Banners advertising his arrival were put up all over the neighborhood and on the appointed Friday the mosque was full and the streets around overflowed with hundreds who unrolled
their prayer maps on the tarmac and squatted by the curb to listen to the sermon through the loudspeakers. The cleric, from the same tribe as Kamel Sachet, had been recently denounced by the government and removed from his position on the Islamic Committee; and his popularity was in proportion to his dissidence. His tannoy words were clarion and boomed across the nodding crowd: One day the end would come for secular regimes! Islam was the only right and correct way!
Sharia
was every man's obligation before God! It was the duty of the youth to stand up, to obey their religion and their God and to follow in the example of the Prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him)!

Harith al-Obeidi said he himself also began to use the pulpit as a challenge. He stopped leading with a prayer for the life and health of Saddam Hussein and often took the risk of delivering sermons without first receiving the required permission from the official Islamic Committee. “If I was preaching at another mosque I would arrive just before I spoke and leave directly afterwards to avoid the Mukhabarat.” But it was always risky; several times Mukhabarat agents came to the Sadiq Mosque with questions and intimidations.

“Why do you not offer prayers for the President?”

“Come to the office to answer some questions.”

“Why do so many young men come to your mosque?”

“Does Kamel Sachet know there are so many?”

“Who are they?”

“The mosque should not be open between sunset and evening prayers.”

When al-Obeidi told Kamel Sachet about their visits, he cursed their intrusions and called them dogs.

It was difficult to tread the line between the accusation of opposition and the justification of the sanctity of worship; but
it was an equally hazardous balancing act for Saddam: the fatal car crashes and ambushes by “unknown assailants” of popular imams blew into riots. Kamel Sachet never allowed his outward mask of fealty to slip, but in court circles, among men like Aziz Salih Numan, Hussein Kamel and Ali Hassan al-Majid, Kamel Sachet was openly called a
Wahhabi
. Reports were written accusing him of having treasonous Saudi connections and receiving Saudi funds for his mosques.

After a couple of years Harith al-Obeidi resigned from the Sadiq Mosque. Perhaps he felt too exposed, perhaps, as he said, he had grown tired of Kamel Sachet's interferences and his iron stricture. “I don't like radicalism,” said Obeidi. “Kamel Sachet imposed too many of his own personal opinions on me and on the mosque.” The imam who had spoken during Ramadan fled the country not long afterward and was sentenced to death in absentia. Unfavorable reports piled up in the file of Kamel Sachet.