A Reed Shaken by the Wind

by Gavin Maxwell

  “You are walking alone,” I read. “You want to talk to someone, so you talk to a young Baghdadi. You tell him ‘good evening’, and he replies. Then you say that you are an American and tell him your name. He is glad to know you and tells you his name is Said. You tell him you have just come to Iraq. You add that your friend came with you. You say your father has a farm near New York, and you work in a big automobile factory. And you want to work in the factory when you go back to America. While you are talking, Said’s friend Hassan comes up to you…. Said asks Hassan where he is going. Hassan says to the King Ghazi movie. It’s a good movie, he says.” I flicked over a few pages. “Father I want to introduce these Americans to you; this is John and this is his friend Bill. John’s from New York but Bill’s from Texas.” Father: “My oldest son went to America. He’s an American now.” … “You have been introduced to an Iraqi named Ali. He asks where you are from. You say you are an American and tell him what part you came from. … You ask him if he knows Ford cars. Yes, he says, Ford cars are good, in fact he has one. He says there is a Ford factory in Baghdad. … Later you are walking around with Ali. Ali calls your attention to another man. What is his work, you ask. Ali says he doesn’t work; he is a merchant and has a big shop in the market. You ask Ali if he knows him. Ali says yes, and he also knows his son. His son doesn’t work much either, he likes to walk around all the time.”

  Oh, Arabian Nights; oh, Christopher Columbus; oh, Tree of Knowledge of Good and Oil.

  The Minister was gracious and affable. He thanked us for our courtesy in calling upon him, which, he said, was of course completely unnecessary, as Iraq was a free country and foreigners could travel where they wished. He touched on the problems of the expanding city. “All Iraq is coming to Baghdad,” he said. “Here they have everything they want; every boy has a wireless set, every girl a sewing machine. They leave the country for the towns as though they were running from an epidemic. We couldn’t stop them coming if we wanted to.” He armed Thesiger with letters to the Governors of the provinces in which we should be travelling, and that night we left by train for Basra.

  Of Basra, the greatest port of the Persian Gulf, I had as fleeting and necessarily as superficial an impression as of Baghdad. Here, though the present Basra is not an ancient city, the old and the new, the east and the west, seemed even more inextricably woven, for the very new of the gleaming traffic and the concrete buildings is set against a middle distance, rather than a far background, of primitive life.

  We lived in the most modern quarter of Basra, Ashar—and during my short stay I saw little of any other—at a Consulate-General worthy to be an embassy, as the guest of a Consul-General worthy to be an ambassador. Beyond the green and gracious walled garden lay a broad street and then the great river, the Shatt al Arab, which is the fusion of the Tigris and the Euphrates in their last miles to the sea. Palms fringed the farther bank, and on its surface rowed, paddled, roared, stammered, or simply drifted, craft of every conceivable description. Big Arab trading boats under full sail, primitive bitumen-coated canoes from the waterways surrounding the marshes, motor launches and passenger paddle steamers, naval vessels, big ocean-going merchantmen, and completely circular rafts carrying loads of reed matting from the marshlands, drifting downstream without propulsion; the paths of all these were woven together like a tableau representing the history of surface craft.

  The clothing of the people who crowded the streets was as diverse as the boats upon the river, but I began to understand the various grades, as it were, of dress in Iraq, and their social significance. There is only one reasonably constant factor, and that is the head-dress. Non-Europeanised Iraqis wear their hair shaven to a short stubble, and over it a skull cap, often bright or multi-coloured with floral design, oversewn into a quilted pattern. The skull cap, however, is usually hidden, except in the case of children, by the loose, turban-like keffia which is worn over it. The formal keffia in Iraq is white with a black pattern on it, like Rylock wire netting, and signifies that the wearer belongs to the Shi’a sect of Muslims, those who believe the Prophet’s son-in-law and cousin Ali to have been his rightful successor, and after him his two sons Hassan and Hussain. The first of these was murdered by his wife, and the other, driven by a frantic belief in his own cause, died a martyr’s death in battle, backed by flames that he had lit to cut off his own retreat. His tomb at Kerbela, and that of Ali at Nejef, are the two great places of pilgrimage for the Shi’a sect. (The Shi’a and the Sunni, who preponderate outside the frontiers of Iraq and Persia, are the two great divisions of the Muslim world, the Sunni originating as followers of the Prophet’s uncle Abu Bakr. Sunni means, in a broad sense, “orthodox”, and Shi’a “partisan”.)

  The headcloth may be worn loosely draped over the head and shoulders or it may be wound up and tied into the shape of a turban; in either case it is held in place by a headrope or agal, two snake-like black twists fitting on to the crown of the head. The agal is like the top two coils of a weak spring, wooden at the core, and bound over with black wool. There are variations of the head-dress as there are of everything else; the very poor or primitive often wear no agal, and the keffia itself may be no more than a rag of any colour knotted round the head.

  But it is below the neck that the diversity of garments becomes really confusing. Basically, there is a single prototype of all the elaborations, a simple shirt reaching from the throat to the feet, like a nightgown, of any sober colour except black, and sometimes striped like pyjamas. This is the dish-dasha worn by all poorer people who have not yet adopted European clothes, but in cooler weather it is now quite customary to wear over this an ordinary European jacket. With or without this jacket the outer layer may be worn, a cloak or bisht, black, brown, or dark blue. It is never thick; in its crudest form it is loosely woven of hard, hairless brown wool and it is unornamented, but it may, among the more elegant, be diaphanous as fine muslin, and often carries an edging of gold braid and gold tassels.

  The next stage beyond the simple dish-dasha, among the well-to-do who do not wear trousers, is, broadly speaking, a coat and skirt of dark cloth. The coat is rather longer and fuller than is customary in Europe, and the ground-length skirt continues upward as a wrap-round dress, to form a V at the chest like that of an ordinary waistcoat. Above this V appears a shirt, but rarely a collar or tie, giving a somewhat unfinished appearance to an ambitious scheme. This is the customary wear of the sheikhs and other unwesternised people of importance. With it go black towny-looking shoes, but seldom socks. The poor people are always barefoot.

  I went to the suq to buy a belt. With recollections of North African suq, and that of Marrakesh in particular, I had expected quarters of leather-workers, gold-workers, silver-workers, rug sellers; all the enticements of beautiful and exotic goods. I crossed a wooden bridge over a canal cluttered with all types of boats and of Asiatic humanity. A negro in a knee-length dish-dasha clutched my arm and thrust a packet of postcards under my nose. They were, I saw, of another large negro posturing indecently in a very expensive-looking bedroom. As I brushed them away he instantly substituted a second packet. The top photograph was so excruciatingly funny that had I been in a less public place I should have asked to see the rest. A bulgy Semitic woman of uncertain age, naked but for a pair of very high-heeled shoes, posed with grotesque coquettishness against a painted backcloth of palms and minarets. Both hands were raised, one to shoulder level and the other curved high above her head in a parody of sinuous grace. From under coal-black eyelids she ogled the camera with a perceptible squint; but the beauty of the picture lay in what she was holding. Draped from her two upraised hands hung a thin rope-like length of black silk, cunningly screening from view every part of her body that would have been hidden by a modern two-piece bathing dress. I wondered whether these photographs were much in demand among the Arabs, for they could hardly have been calculated to call forth a frenzy of lust from a visiting European.

  I entered the suq and walked between lines of s
talls selling aluminium pots and pans, cheap Japanese china, bales of bright coloured Indian cotton, and fibreware luggage. Everything either came from Europe or was a further-eastern imitation of western commodities. At last I stopped a particularly European-looking Iraqi and asked him if he spoke English. Enough, he said; so I asked him if he could tell me where to buy a leather belt. “Leather?” he said. “I suppose it is possible. But why not plastic? It is much better. We all use plastic now; all the shops have plastic belts. Cheaper, better.”

  Wandering on through the suq I came at length to a quarter of so deafening a din that I realised that here at last was something actually being made. It sounded like hundreds of men hitting sheets of metal with hammers; and that was precisely what it was, sheets of aluminium being made into household utensils, and sheets of copper being fashioned into a particular shape of coffee pot that is standard throughout all Iraq. On that first visit it was the only evidence of any local industry that I discovered. I did in the end return with a leather belt, but on its inner surface was stamped in Roman letters the words “Made in Germany”.

  Three out of Thesiger’s four canoe boys had arrived to meet us in Basra. In those days when I did not know them I found their presence acutely embarrassing. At the Consulate-General Thesiger and I shared a huge bedroom. After my excursion to the suq Thesiger was nowhere about, and I sat down in an arm-chair to look at a map. After a few moments the door opened silently and the three canoe boys entered. I said good afternoon, which was about all I could say. They returned my greeting and sat down cross-legged on the floor, in a semicircle round my feet. All three stared at me without the least expression. Each dangled from his fingers a string of beads, one red, one yellow, and one white. The beads clicked slowly and rhythmically, my watch ticked, and if I looked up those six eyes still looked unwaveringly into my face. If I met any of their eyes individually they would glance away, but as I looked down again at the map they would come back to my face. I tried smiling at them, and they smiled back, but with anticipation, as though I were now about to say something, which I could not. I had already found out that my few words of North African Arabic were unintelligible.

  Amara, Hassan, and Sabeti; Kathia, the fourth, was to join us a day or two later when we began our journey. Both in feature and in character they were as unlike as they could be; they had little in common but the colour of skins. Amara was a handsome self-possessed youth of eighteen, fine boned, disdainful as an Arab stallion, often moody and withdrawn. He alone of them seemed always at ease in the surroundings of civilisation; there could never be anything gauche or awkward in his movements or in his response to an unfamiliar situation. At this time his natural vanity preoccupied much of his attention on his newly growing moustache and beard, at whose infinitesimal length he would snip, absorbed, with a pair of nail scissors. He liked mirrors.

  Hassan was a year or two older, a bouncing but volatile extravert with peculiarly heavy eyebrows and just-noticeably underhung jaw. He and Sabeti, both of whom were married, were the most habitually good-humoured of the four, but Sabeti’s good humour was of a different quality, something almost pathological; he was the type of the Family Slave. If there was any odd job to be done it was naturally Sabeti who did it; his desire to serve and to please seemed as if it must have been developed in compensation for a total absence of looks or charm. Sabeti looked like an apologetic crow, and the wide eyebrow-moustache that he wore did not succeed in any way in altering the essentially placatory character of his face.

  The map at which I looked while the three looked at me was so blank as to be scarcely worthy of the name. There were rivers, tributaries and distributaries, and great areas covered with a small tufted symbol to represent marsh. To a few place-names, very widely scattered, someone had added a question mark in red ink, and in some cases drawn a red line clean through them. This was the area of permanent marshland to which we were going, and the bulk of it lay some forty miles north and west of Basra. Some two-thirds of the way across it the Tigris ran from north to south, vertically, so to speak, while the Euphrates ran horizontally from the west to form the southern boundary.

  As recently as Biblical times the Persian Gulf stretched far up the country that is now known as Iraq. The two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, flowed separately into the sea; not, as they do now, through the common conduit of the Shatt al Arab on whose banks Basra stands. As the sea receded it left in its wake a country of marshes, creeks and lagoons, which was settled in earliest times by immigrants from the Persian and Turkish Highlands. The living conditions of these earliest settlers differed very little from those of the marshmen of today; their reed houses and their few possessions have been excavated at the level just above the virgin silt.

  As the centuries went by, the great area of marshland exposed by the sea became divided into areas of seasonal flooding, semi-permanent marshlands; and, fed by the many distributaries of the two great rivers, a central area of permanent marsh which exists to this day. These permanent marshes lie low between the courses of the two great rivers, and extend east of the Tigris over the Persian frontier. The farther the sea has receded the farther south has become the area which is at all times of the year without solid ground, and until Thesiger came there in 1950 it has remained one of the unexplored territories nearest to civilisation. Whereas the areas of seasonal flooding, the great rivers themselves, and the fringes of the permanent marsh, have all been visited both by travellers and by armies in wars of European origin, the heart of the marshes and its people have remained unknown.

  It was, I had learned from Thesiger’s article, a tribal area inhabited by some half dozen tribes whose frontiers extended arbitrarily outside the marshes. Some of them claimed to be not of Arab descent, while others contained a liberal sprinkling of Sayids, or linear descendants of the Prophet. The generic name for the marshmen is Ma’dan, a term used to define not a tribe but a way of life; the people who have for many centuries been proficient in extracting their livelihood from a waste land of water and of reeds, and who have had little or no contact with the world outside.

  Because the physical geography of the country has been in such constant change it is difficult to trace the origins of the Ma’dan with any certainty. The marshes were very much farther north when the first immigrants came from the east to settle there, and that was more than five thousand years ago; during the Dark Ages there were other happenings besides the successive conquests of the Medes, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and finally the Arabs, that may well have added stranger blood to that of the marshmen. In the early part of the ninth century A.D. bands of robber gipsies settled in the marshes. After a while, their numbers increased by malcontents and refugees from justice, these became proclaimed rebels against the Caliph, who found this petty insurrection so difficult to quell that he was taunted with being unable to catch a few hundred frogs within arm’s reach of him. They capitulated at last, but it seems that those who could remain among the reeds did so, mistrusting the promise of amnesty should they emerge.

  Some fifty years after this, in 869, there began a rebellion which for nearly fourteen years shook all Southern Iraq, and which seemed, indeed, as if it would throw out the Arabs and lead to a negro empire in the east.

  The confusion that had succeeded the death of the Prophet in A.D. 633, and the strife over the dubious succession, was still at that time fruitful ground for exploitation by any unscrupulous claimant. More difficult was the amassing of a following strong enough to enforce the claim.

  In the two hundred and fifty years since Mahommed’s death his soi disant linear descendants had become legion, and there was, therefore, nothing original in the fact of a certain Ali ibn Mahommed, a man from near the modern city of Teheran, giving himself out to be of the blood of the Prophet; nor in his early unsuccessful attempts to gain influence in various communities where existing schism offered a foothold for opportunism. He failed in Basra—a town standing farther to the west than the present city of the same na
me—and was forced to flee to Baghdad, but not long afterward he returned to the south with quite a different plan in mind. He had chosen for his raw material of rebellion the mass of African slaves who were called Zenj, men of the country now known as Zanzibar.

  Huge numbers of these slaves were occupied on the waste land that lay to the east of Basra, engaged in digging away the surface stratum of soil, rich in profitable saltpetre, and at the same time exposing the cultivable layer beneath it. Their work was of the hardest, and their living of the meanest, for here was none of the affection and tolerance that can grow between the master and the slave who is attached to one family or household. In these men who hated all but their own kind, Ali—“the Abominable One”, as he came to be called—saw the strength and ferocity that should sweep him to power.

  His approach to the slaves reveals a cynical acumen, a deep psychological insight, worthy of any later propagandist. He spoke to them with the tongues of God and of Mammon, so that the two images became for them inextricably confused. The religious sect to which he proclaimed allegiance—inconsistently with his alleged descent from the Prophet’s daughter—would appear to have been chosen solely for one of its slogans: that the ruler should be the best man “even though he were an Ethiopian slave”. To that sect, the Kharijites, the deadliest of all sins was failure to acknowledge themselves as the true representatives of Islam. All other Muslims, therefore, they might dutifully destroy as infidels.

  That was clearly the doctrine most likely to appeal to the slaves in their bitterness, and on the worldly side he preached not the right of equality with their overlords but their right to own slaves themselves.