Clay appeared to his usual welcome of excited locals and visitors giddily trying to make sense of his choices. (Where cars are not taken for granted, and solitude is more pitied than celebrated, a bike seemed an odd pick for a long, voluntary journey—especially for a foreigner expected to have every flexibility.) It was always like this when he coasted into town, he said, and the four of us Americans went to drink hot tea sweetened with cardamom and eat meat on skewers with chewy bread and onions. Clay was an ex-Marine who had done tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, he typically chose vacation spots amenable to bike trips: France, Italy, Jordan. In Kurdistan, he was a tourist like us, taking time off from his job teaching English at a school in Egypt.
“I wanted to come back here,” he said. “It’s nicer to get to talk to these people instead of having to fight them.”
Days later in a small town a hundred miles away, we thought we saw Clay once more. He didn’t see us—maybe I was just delirious from the driving. Maybe it was the image that stuck with me, the image of a soldier on his first tour as a tourist, working his way through former battlefields looking for a chat.
He had been to war, right here, and he felt the urge to reconnect. He knew things I would never know. He had seen Iraq from the ground while I had seen it only from the air and through the veil of news reports and eight time zones—and still, we had all come to see this place outside the frame of war. His presence was an affirmation: there are answers to find here.
We kept on driving, hurried like first-timers. On a road that hugs the cliffside above the waterfall, the Gali Ali Beg Canyon unfolds in deep ravines into the wild. Honey from the area is prized, and hushed salesmen offered amber jars out of their cars for the startling equivalent of fifteen American dollars, and, at least at that moment, a gentle unwillingness to negotiate. At the vistas over the gorge, fitted with tables and plastic chairs fashioned to look like tree stumps, Kurdistan presents one of the strongest cases for its reputation of calm normalcy: Domestic tourism is booming like few places in the modern Middle East. Visitors are not only Kurds, but busloads of Iraqis from Mosul and Tikrit and Basra.
Two buses had come from Baghdad, and everyone seemed thrilled to be outdoors. The crowd of a hundred or so danced and cheered while a small band struck up pulsating tunes on trumpet, snare drum, and tom-tom. They wore lanyards with yellow cards that said Al-Balid Al-Jamil in big letters: The Beautiful Country.
A man in a purple sweater handed me his trumpet and let me play. I think he offered with his eyes, and I must’ve accepted with mine. Absurdly, a microphone was produced out of nowhere with its cord trailing unplugged, and they conducted a brief and enthusiastic interview. I was American, I said, and watched faces sour—interest replaced by resentment. “Laa yastatiia‘a,” the tom-tom player objected. He can’t be.
I had let my comfort in stereotypes about the north carry me away. Americans were now liberators in Kurdistan, where Saddam was forever a genocidal menace. In Baghdad, we’d hear again and again, life is not better, the streets are not safer, and people are no happier in the war’s wake. The band didn’t look pleased.
WE STOPPED ON A SUNDAY in Aqrah, a famous town built into a gritty hillside in Iraq’s modern Ninawa governorate. The houses cover the lower hills in a blanket of tan brick with rare pastel highlights: key lime, yellow, purple. Once an Assyrian town, Aqrah is now mostly Kurdish Muslims. Mosques had released hundreds of children from their Eid al-Adha prayers, and they were pouring through the streets in turtleneck sweaters and suits waving ice cream cones (a Kurdish favorite is a mix of six neon-colored flavors) and toy guns. Many had returned for the holiday from new residences abroad, in Stockholm, in Russia, in Canada. “Do you speak Swedish?” kids asked expectantly.
The town was celebrating. A pair of policemen carrying rifles guided us up the road with kids following behind and twentysomethings in shiny suits striking model poses and demanding to have their pictures taken. Four pairs of girls shrieked and flew in happy circles on a mini Ferris wheel operated by a hand crank. If I had learned anything about Kurdistan, I could appreciate their love of amusement parks—the drive from Erbil passed at least three giant Ferris wheels in the middles of nowhere.
On the way down, with a train of fascinated and apprehensive children, we bumped into fifteen-year-old Umar from Volgograd. “They are following you because you are girls . . . to see what you are doing,” Umar said to Sue and Charlotte of his fellow townspeople, presumably those who weren’t in frilly dresses. “All will follow her and try to get her.”
They were also curious, Umar said, because there were only ten female drivers in all of Aqrah. Sue drove our big Hyundai unapologetically.
I still thought of Sue the way I’d known her first—as president of the Student Council, and because I never knew what “Student Council” really meant: as President. Charlotte called her “The Sue Yang.”
There was a comfort in having Madame President at the wheel. And when we drove, I grew into the role of the backseat—and because I thought of backseat driving as a cardinal sin, I became lazier as a matter of principle.
Here: the freedom of traveling with the fixedness of a small group—as detached from our environs as a pinball, but as tightly podded as three pips of cardamom. I didn’t need to fight every second for connection. But maybe that was why I didn’t take notice of my companions even as much as I would a houseguest—moving together, I assumed a kind of closeness that made Charlotte and Sue like parts of me, and me like parts of them. I became more selfish, but I liked to think the self was all of us.
I traveled more comfortably not alone, but more dully. And when I noticed the dullness: a new discomfort, a feeling that I was not doing enough.
Umar was celebrating the Eid according to village traditions: 6 A.M. prayer followed by house visits and gift giving—chocolates, cakes, pepsi (a catchall for any dark soda in Kurdistan)—to other families in town. His family would stay and chat for ten minutes and then move on to the next house.
And what about the Christians? we wondered. He didn’t know much, but there was a church near his house that he had never been inside. We were curious about the minorities in the secessionist state.
Umar offered to guide us to the plain stucco building behind a gate with a crucifix on it. He spoke quietly in Kurdish on our behalf to a few men outside and we were all invited in, warmly; we encouraged Umar to poke in with us to the services held on the small second floor. A dozen or so congregants sat in pews. Umar looked nervous, standing with his back against the wall. He was afraid of “talk,” he said. The village had eyes, and if they saw him at a church, he’d never hear the end of it.
The priest was delighted. He showed us scripture in Syriac (the modern dialect of Aramaic written in an ancient script that looks one part Hebrew, two parts kooky computer font) and invited us to come to a full sermon he was about to give half an hour away in the town of Malabrouan. Umar left the church for the first time in his life and bade us farewell—he wouldn’t go further with this crowd. Happy to have practiced his English, he was relieved to watch us go, grateful to be free again from the fear of gossip. We followed the priest’s pickup truck in the darkness to a stocky yellow building swarming with car lights, took off our shoes, and fell into line behind the regulars.
I couldn’t follow the service—in Kurdish with passages in Syriac—but I liked being a nonpracticing Jew in a Christian service on a Muslim holiday. And when that smugness faded, I settled in to the atmosphere, ancient and magnificent, nurtured by the reverence of the parishioners. The priest in long robes spoke to a full room. Charlotte, half-Jewish, half-Christian (wholly Christian to the congregation), was half-pushed, half-invited to give a short speech in Arabic. She was a traveling Christian, and to the priest, this was the only sensible thing for her to do before the services returned to normal. When the congregants rose, I rose. When they sat, I sat. When they sang, I hummed a tune of my own devising.
Something always drew me to religious hub
s. I wasn’t here for divine salvation, but I felt beneath any conscious logic that there was potential in these churches, in the mosques, in the spaces where synagogues were and might have been. Politically, I knew these houses of worship were lighthouses along the sectarian borders that divided the country—there was no denying that the identities that had brought people here mattered. But political curiosity wasn’t what had drawn me here.
In Hawler Mall, I performed the Tall White Celebrity show. In the canyon with Clay and fellow tourists, I was a stand-in for the American military. And yet, if I disconnected from those identities, I was as rootless and aimless as I had been by Osama’s cricket pitch. But if I could sneak up on deliberate, voluntary connections, maybe I could slip into one with lighter baggage.
Here was a chance to bear witness to gatherings that had nothing to do with me. They were prime locations to pan for connection. “Friday” and “mosque”—jumu‘a and jaam‘a—come from the root “to gather.” Arabic words for synagogue and church, kaniis(a), come from an old Semitic root: “to assemble.” For good measure, the English synagogue is Greek, from sun- “together” and agein, “bring.”
After the sermon, we gathered with the priest in the dark parking lot to finally introduce ourselves. It was easier for my nationality to fade as we unwound from Arabic, a mutual second language, in French, a sort of third. Jean-Jésus had studied in France and spoke the clear French only foreigners can manage. “Où Eve!” he asked me when he learned my name. Where’s Eve! He translated his joke proudly to his followers in Arabic. It was a joke older than many civilizations, but it made me imagine a time when it would have been fresh, like we were two old friends shooting a three-thousand-year-old breeze.
I took that moment to tell him I was Jewish. He hardly paused. It was finally getting through to me: it was pointless to try to find my footing by seeking the borders my Jewishness hit. I’d never find an identity in a space bound by prejudice. In blood or language or faith, “Jew” was a nametag I wore largely for the right to rebel against some vague outside pushing in. If I wanted to find an identity that connected to the whole world—I couldn’t look for it in a box defined by what the world was not.
All this time, I dropped “Jew” like a sounding line, waiting for some kind of bump that would tell me how far away the other was. I always lost those lines in the sea.
This was a great thing I should have remembered: the marvelous capacity of human beings to Give Zero Shits. Sure, love’s opposite is not hate (but apathy), everyone told me at the onset of text-driven flirting; but it took a long time to understand the B side—that love is not necessary to prove a lack of hatred. Over time, past points of difference turn wonderfully unremarkable.
Jean-Jésus waived good-bye to Charlotte, and then to Sue. “Say hello to China for us!”
FIFTY MILES TO THE WEST, as the story goes, the town of Lalish was transplanted directly from the heavens. According to the Hymn of the Weak Broken One, one of the most important sources of the Yazidi creation story, “When Lalish came / Plants began to grow,” and the world was set in motion.
We parked outside the town in our dirty car, abreast the heavy metal stanchions; no roads continue through Lalish. The holiest site in the Yazidi faith, Lalish sits in a lush valley, one turn off a quiet stretch of highway. It shares its effect with corners of Damascus or Old Jerusalem, old mortar over even older stones, replicated by the newer buildings in shades of gold and tan. Tiny houses pile up the hill on top of one another behind a central courtyard. Large cobblestones fade into hard, packed dirt.
To the right as you enter is the sanctuary of Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir, a Sufi mystic born in the 1070s in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley. Sheikh Adi traveled to Kurdistan and developed a following in Lalish, where he died and was most likely buried around 1160. For Yazidis, he is accepted as the avatar of Tawusi Melek, the Peacock Angel.
In the 1840s and 1850s, the writing of British supertravelers like Sir Austen Henry Layard and G. P. Badger introduced Yazidi culture to the west. Yazidi belief structure and traditions reflect an affinity with branches of all three Abrahamic religions, especially Nestorian Christianity and Sufi Islam, and a deep connection to Zoroastrianism, Mandaeism, and Manichaeism. Belief in reincarnation is fundamental. But when we arrived, none of us knew much more than the stigma: for a millennium, Yazidis have been defamed as devil worshippers.
It was our first audaciously sunny day in Iraq and children would occasionally push past to chortle up the path around the sanctuary carrying picnic trimmings to the top of the hill. A holy man was playing with the squirrels. He was dressed entirely in layers of simple white with a black sash tied around his waist. The soft white band of his hat separated its black cap from his equally black, thick hair and beard. A heavier gray robe with red lining draped over his shoulders all the way down to wool slippers checkered in orange and black. When he held out an almond, a squirrel would stretch itself upward on its back legs to paw it from him—if it couldn’t, it would latch on to his hand and hold on for a ride.
With the squirrel waiting for its chance to pounce from the entablature, the man introduced himself as Baba Chawish and offered us the grand tour. “Muslims?” he asked, in Arabic. “I’m Jewish,” I said. He nodded in his placid way, oozing calm. “Many Yazidis have Jewish friends on the Internet.”
AS INSTRUCTED, we took our shoes off before entering the sanctuary complex, but I made the mistake of stepping directly on the threshold. Two girls giggled, half-hiding behind the corner and motioned for me to step over. Down the first set of stairs, there is a second courtyard. In the far corner is a high stone arch, decorated with small treelike adornments like little spiky teeth. A religious man leaned faithfully against the plinth, wearing brown robes and a black coat under a red and white keffiyeh. A wooden door was propped open beside him, the entrance to the temple proper, and we shadowed close behind the guide that Baba Chawish had charged with leading us three Americans through the mazes.
The long entrance chamber is supported by a span of arches whose pillars are wrapped in lustrous cloth. The wrappings are made of smaller and larger pieces in no strict pattern—the first pillar was dressed in a big swath of electric pink with a shoulder covered in a shiny green, the next in overlapping drapery of purple and yellow and red and orange. A row of tombs stands against the wall, each one fully covered in bright colors. On these fabrics, and the slack hangings that run from pillar to pillar, Yazidis tie a knot and make a wish.
There are no windows in the shrines, and as we followed deeper into the rounded tunnels through tiny doorways it grew darker and darker. On one tunnel’s mural, a woman in an Indian sari gazes intently at a bronze depiction of a peacock. A few naked lightbulbs stick out from a cable fixed to the wall. Underneath, in a trough along the walls of some sacred chambers, are hundreds of ceramic jugs, Greek amphorae. They hold locally made oil used to feed the holy lamps in and outside the sanctuary. On the path up to the top of the hill, there are dozens of nishan, smooth niches in hollowed-out stones painted white for lamps to be lit.
From the top of that hill, two conical spires shoot upward from the roof of the sanctuary. The tallest is directly above the tomb of Sheikh Adi; the lesser tops the room holding the remains of Sheikh Hesen, the third leader of the following at Lalish after Sheikh Adi, and the incarnation of the Angel Darda’il. A local man was standing by a second exit from his chamber—from there, a damp staircase descends underground into the cramped “Cave,” which is linked by tunnel to the larger “Cavern.” Philip Kreyenbroek and Khalil Rashow, devoted scholars of Kurds and Yazidis, mention these spaces with little detail in their definitive book God and Sheikh Adi Are Perfect: “These caves are felt to be extremely sacred, and their existence is normally hidden from outsiders.”
But the man at the top of the stairs beckoned impishly and I ducked into the staircase. (Archeologist-spy Gertrude Bell described just the same thing a century earlier, departing from a group to sneak down into the caves in her vi
sit to Lalish in 1910.) At the end of the tunnel I could hear the sound of water gushing into a pool. The man moved toward the sound. The Cavern is pitch-black but for one lightbulb that reveals rippling water, undeniably clear even in the dark. I could hardly tell how large the space was, and I could barely see the source: a fast-moving cascade roars chest high out of the back wall, filling the room and channeling out through somewhere I couldn’t see. The man bent and splashed his face, inviting me wordlessly to do the same. My time in Iraq had been almost exclusively cold, but I closed my eyes and splashed too, feeling the crisp bite of my first attempt at bathing in Kurdistan. Then he dipped his hands into the pool and slurped a cupful, urging me to follow.
This was the Zemzem Spring, named for the miraculous well that appeared to Ishmael and Hagar, Abraham’s second wife, as she ran back and forth through the desert near Mecca. According to legend, this life-giving water is sprung from the same source, a thousand miles away.
I was really, really thirsty. And to drink from a sacred spring . . . but I held back, on an impulse I almost never have. It was still Iraq, I remembered, and there was a lot I didn’t know.
Back above, the tightening passageway through the sanctuary opens into its final chamber. I moved slowly behind a small group of Yazidi visitors, who kissed each doorway as we passed from room to room. In this stark marble space, square under the high spire, the sarcophagus of Sheikh Adi is alone and covered like the others in a bricolage of knotted linen. Airier than other spaces, Sheikh Adi’s tomb doesn’t have walls so black and suffused with the throaty smell of oil fumes. We took a moment to breathe.
The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Page 15