by Kanan Makiya
“The Tyrant died well,” interrupted Haider, “I grant you that. But what else did you expect of him! What would it say about us that we allowed ourselves to be ruled for three decades by a man who was a weakling, lacking in courage and self-respect? Think instead that he died in the way that he lived: violently, cruelly. There is justice of a sort in that.”
“Are we like him? And what does it say of us that we allowed the blessed Imam to die alone? What do both deaths say about us? That is the question we should be asking ourselves.”
“You are doing it again…you are putting the Tyrant on the same plane as the blessed Imam. The devil has taken charge of your tongue!”
“Bah! Stop this posturing, Haider…When men die, be they saints or devils, a chapter in the book of lives is not simply thrown out; it is translated into a new language. I fear the new chapter of the Tyrant’s life that is about to replace the old one we have just closed.”
Haider took to pacing the room, and looking at me strangely. I had seen him agitated before…but it was too late for either of us to back down.
“I revere the blessed Imam as much as you do…and would exchange my life for his if I could, as I know you would,” I continued, “and do I need to tell you of all people how much I hate the Tyrant; he took my father to a horrible end, for God’s sake. But what happened today in that execution hall is not an ending; it is a dreadful beginning.”
“What are you so afraid of?” asked Haider, who was genuinely puzzled.
“I fear the Tyrant will continue to rule over us, even in death. Dragons’ teeth have been sowed by the manner of his death. So he died well. And we expected it of him…all the more reason to execute him more impressively than he was able to die. In the name of all that we Shiʻa have to lose, you and I and all the poor broken-down people of this country, I ask you, why did we give him the last word?”
“My rope,” Haider suddenly said, trying to change the subject. “Did you get me the piece of rope you promised?”
—
The rope…the wretched rope! I was hoping he had forgotten the damn thing. How I wish I had never promised him a piece of it.
The day before the execution, filled with a sense of my own self-importance, I made a rash bargain with those less fortunate among my comrades in the Army of the Awaited One: I promised them a piece of the hangman’s rope, which I was sure I could spirit out of the execution hall. The deal was that I would sell whatever length I could obtain for so many thousand dinars per centimeter. Naturally there was no question of charging Haider for his piece; it would be a gift in honor of our lifelong friendship.
Selling the rope had been my idea to start with, but I soon became aware others were doing it. If ten thousand was the going price before the hanging, God knows what it became after. When I left the compound the haggling was still in full swing. Even ministers and high-ranking officials were caught up in it. Everyone wanted a memento to show that they had been there.
All around us the new politicians—“Foreigner Iraqis,” Haider called them, the ones who rode into office on the tanks of the Occupier—were establishing new ideas of right and wrong; they thought about position and money, devising ingenious ways of stealing the one through the other. And we, young soldiers and activists, learned from them. Why, only the other day I read in the paper that members of Parliament had voted into law a motion to quadruple their salaries. The worst offenders were those who’d returned from lives abroad, caring only to line their pockets and then rush back to whatever country was left doling out welfare checks to the wives and children they’d left behind.
That is how it all started—the affair of the rope, I mean.
A handful of hours separated the “before” of the hanging from its “after.” Before, I bragged about the rope; after, I saw nothing to brag about. Instead I felt ashamed. Mercifully, my parents were no longer of this world to witness my shame in 2006. I don’t know what Father would have done; I never knew him. I grew up with the fact of his disappearance in 1991. His body was never found. Not a trace of it anywhere; I know, I searched frenziedly in the summer of 2003 and couldn’t find it. Still, I know it is out there somewhere. A fact that is also a non-fact never entirely goes away; it is like the dust that Mother battled with daily. Knowing that is not knowing continues to hang around in the air like dust, in the little nooks and crannies of our minds.
Mother would not have said a word about the rope. She who had drilled into me the desire to excel, to be top of my class, along with the idea that the world outside her purview was dirty, polluting, and to be shunned at all costs…all she had to do was look. Her eyes would have bored into my very depths. She was only doing what all good mothers do in lands ruled by tyrants and revolutions and wars. For all those mothers, politics is betrayal, soldiers are brutal, and politicians liars.
But we children of the Great Tyrant were behaving as though it was the physical and literal world that was real and permanent. It was not freedom and the end of war and tyranny that were real; it was the rope that was real. And I was cashing in on that new reality. A world-changing thing—the end of tyranny—had atrophied to one of its artifacts. Too late did I awake; too late did I realize that we had been prostrating ourselves before new idols, like a piece of the hangman’s rope.
When the Tyrant dropped through the trapdoor, wildly bucking his bound feet, fighting to the very last millisecond of his life, I saw myself as though for the first time, with my entire being. Something in me had rotted, and neither my friend Haider, nor Uncle, to whom I owed everything, nor the Sayyid, in whom I had so fervently believed, could reverse the stench I now emitted. I was too far gone, marooned, directionless, lost to myself and to others, knowing neither who I was nor where I had come from nor where I was going. This is the moment when I no longer wanted to have anything to do with the rope.
PART TWO
APRIL 2003–NOVEMBER 2006
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
W. H. AUDEN
2003
Najaf: April 10
“There is no God but the One God”; again ten seconds later, “There is no God but the One God”; and again for the last time, “There is no God but the One God”; that is how long it takes for the procession of mourners to carry a coffin past the second-story wooden lattice window of the room in Uncle’s house in Najaf, which my mother and I used as a bedroom.
The projecting screened window may have kept the street shaded and cool, and the house private and discreet, but it did nothing to the noise outside my window; if anything it reinforced it, as if the sound waves wormed their way in through the holes in the wooden screen and bounced about wildly between the four inside walls.
Growing up in Najaf, I played, laughed, and dreamed on streets and alleyways filled with sounds of mourning and dead people: the famous dead of centuries past, and the unknown newly dead, whose coffins streamed into the city daily through my neighborhood, carried by wailing mourners from the four corners of the earth, all shouting “There is no God but the One God” so that normal passersby would jump out of their way. Every Shiʻa male and female in the world desires to be buried in the city in which I was born, irrespective of where he or she dies; it is the last obligation imposed by the dying on their descendants, and my mother and I paid the price.
Our house was located in the city’s Mishraq quarter, in the northeastern quadrant, a quarter that houses the tomb of the great scholar and Grand Master of our sect, Abu Ja‘far al-Tusi, from whom all schools of Shiʻism are descended. Tusi left Baghdad for Najaf in the eleventh century to found his college of theology; a line of t
eachers stretches continuously from this original college to the well-known scholarly families of our times—the Houses of Sadr, Hakim, and Khoei.
Many other tombs of distinguished personages are located in my neighborhood, as well as houses for pilgrims and Servants of the Shrine of the Imam, a monument that sits at the city’s geographical center and is magnificently crowned with a golden dome covering the silver tomb of our first Imam, ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, and father of Imam Husain, martyred nearby. Pilgrims are told the story of how the city was founded: When the first Imam was stabbed to death in Kufa, his body was put on a camel, which was released to wander into the desert. The place where it stopped is where the Imam was buried, and the holy city of Najaf grew up around his tomb.
The number of people buried in Najaf far exceeds the number who live there—no one knows by how much—and our city’s cemetery, named the Valley of Peace, where I often played, is where we made a stand against the Occupier in 2004, and stood our ground for months; it reaches into the Shrine and is the largest cemetery in the world. Pilgrims in the hundreds of thousands, second only in number to those who perform the hajj in Mecca, come annually to the Shrine of the Imam to lament his death, which is the death of Justice in this world; they do so in the hope that they will be able to find both in the next life. Those of them who enter the Shrine from the north do so through the Tusi gate, named after the great teacher and a ten-minute walk from my house.
All of these newcomers to our city need to be fed, housed, washed, buried, told tall stories, and sold false trinkets. Add to that what we Shiʻa call the “portion of the Imam,” the one-fifth of their income owed by the Shiʻa to their clerics in the absence of the twelfth Imam, and it is fair to say that my city’s economy rests on the dead and the dying.
The residents of Najaf are famously clever, hurtfully witty, and notoriously deceitful and cantankerous with strangers, whom they treat as prey to be fleeced; they particularly loathe the seminary students who come to study, reserving their most bitter invective for those who come from Iran. There is nothing like a holy city, and pious visitors, to make a city’s normal residents mostly unholy and consistently impious.
Death is the only ruler Najaf has known, which is why my mother called it the “City of the Dead,” and would exhort me, even as a child, to promise that I would never bring up my children in a place of such ill omen, something that upset her sister to no end, who said her words were disrespectful to the Imam if not bordering on blasphemy.
She, of course, was never given a choice in the matter, having a thirteen-year-old boy on her hands when my father disappeared in the year of the Uprising Against Tyranny. But he was by her bedside at my birth, in the year of the Tyrant’s ascension to power, holding me in his arms for hours, I am told, before being swallowed up to serve in the Great War with Iran. We hardly saw him for the next eight years. Uncle, who is married to my mother’s older sister, came to the rescue, and I was raised in what became his house, the house of my grandparents on my father’s side, and their parents before them.
The house nestles between three other houses, two to the north and south of us, and one to the east sharing our back wall; the only entrance to and exit from the house is through the courtyard on its western side, at whose center grows my uncle’s pride and joy, an ancient pomegranate tree eight meters high with a thicket of spiny curling branches spreading overhead that had been there since Grandfather was a child; he grew up watering the sapling daily, in the early evening. From the courtyard an opening through a short corridor takes you to the gate leading to a twisting alleyway that passes by a college of theology founded by the Sadr family in the direction of the Tusi gate, the northern entrance to the Imam’s tomb.
This orientation, and the rumor that a huge commotion was going on in the courtyard of the Imam’s Shrine, is the only reason that I saw what I saw on that fine sunny Thursday in April, the day of the fall of Baghdad and my country’s Occupation by foreign armies.
Man in the Alley
Turning into the alley toward the Tusi gate, I ran toward the Shrine only to find my way blocked by a huddled group of wide-eyed, morose-looking men from the neighborhood. There were twenty or thirty of them staring silently at a crumpled-up heap of clothing on the ground, soiled and encrusted with dirt. Between their white robes, I could see that the clothing dressed the body of a man.
“Who is he?” I asked Uncle, who was looking grimly at the scene.
“An American agent,” he said. “They are everywhere. Baghdad fell to the Americans today. We must be vigilant.”
“Where is Saddam?”
“He was seen this morning in the Abu Hanifa Mosque in ʻAdhamiyah. His Special Guard fought some skirmishes with the advancing American forces and then he disappeared with his men, into hiding. He will lead a resistance to the Occupier. You can be sure of it.”
I pushed my head between him and the fellow on his right, and squeezed my way through to the front, where I now had a clear view.
“He looks like one of us. How can you tell he is an agent?”
“He was carrying dollars, lots of them.”
The corpse was lying on its side, limbs twisted like pretzels, the fingers scrabbling in the dust, clutching at rubble, blood everywhere soaking into what had been a shirt. Sixteen stab wounds I tallied before losing count; I later found out there had been over a hundred. There were no dollars.
Returning home, I discovered my mother already knew what had been found in the alley. Her face was drained and pale, as though she had seen a ghost, and she didn’t want to talk to me about it, barely suppressing her anger that I had lingered at the scene. She would not hear me out and seemed to know a surprising amount about what had happened.
“He was an American agent,” I said, trying to get her to take me seriously.
“What makes you think that?” she asked tersely.
“Because the Americans entered Baghdad yesterday and he was carrying dollars,” I said lamely.
“A man has been butchered in broad daylight by large numbers of men in front of thousands of witnesses. You hurl accusations at him; he cannot talk back. Why did my son and the son of his father not see a victim, of whom we have more than enough in Iraq? Did you see the dollars?”
“No. But Uncle said—”
“People say many things.”
“Why would he say it if it were not true?”
“The things people say come from the sufferings inflicted upon them, which in turn they inflict on others.”
It was the sharpest criticism I had heard her make of my father’s older brother, on whose protection and generosity she and I relied. I did not understand what was going on.
“So you know who he was.”
She would not answer. Nothing I said would persuade her otherwise.
March on Karbala
The next day, I secretly joined Uncle and his friends on the three-day walk to Karbala called for by the Sayyid, a son of the House of Sadr, in his first Friday sermon delivered from his father’s mosque in Kufa on April 11. The Tyrant’s agents had assassinated his father in broad daylight four years earlier, and everyone attended the son’s first sermon to hear what he had to say.
He did not call on us to celebrate the fall of the Tyrant on April 10; he called on us to undertake a pilgrimage with him on foot to the neighboring city of Karbala, Shrine of our Imam Husain son of ‘Ali, to honor the fortieth day of his martyrdom on the banks of the Euphrates in the year 680.
I saw pilgrims mourn that day as if our Imam had died yesterday; they would pummel their chests, wail and slap their faces, then whip their backs with chains until the blood was streaming down their white shirts, all practices denounced by the traditionalists. It was so overwhelming; I could see that even Uncle was getting upset.
“They are taught there is great virtue in heaven in shedding tears and blood over the death of the Imam,” he said, angry with himself for showing emotion and pulling me away.
“They wake up to miracles in the middle of the night, dreaming that they have seen the Imam, his wounds healed by their tears. Fools! Simpletons! How are we to prevail with such supporters?”
Did he really mean it? Or was he covering up for his own feelings? I assumed the Sayyid had hidden intentions in mind in calling this march, meanings that only he could read connecting two cataclysmic events: the fall of the Great Tyrant and the cruel death of our Imam 1,323 years earlier at the hands of his ancient counterpart, Yazid son of Mu’awiyya. What were they?
Walking alongside Uncle, in the midst of the million or so men, women, and children who heeded the Sayyid’s call, American helicopters hovering over us like black insects, my heart was bursting with pride as I carried a flag of mourning for the death of my Imam all those centuries ago. Indeed, the past was present; the Truth of the Imam was Justice for us; like a grain of salt in a vast ocean, my own person dissolved into the slow-moving waves of people wailing and crying to its rhythms. Or was it the crowd that was for the first time in my hitherto insignificant life finding itself in me?
The Sayyid was making me feel the way I was supposed to feel all the time, especially during the rituals in which we Shiʻa mourn the death of Imam Husain but which Mother would never let me join. She worried. Too much politics, she said. “Cry for the Imam alone,” she used to say. “Then he is in your heart.” But we young men of the Shiʻa were no longer cautious in the way we used to be before the fall of the Tyrant; our Imam was being reborn; it was a moment of celebration. I had been granted the privilege of walking alongside him, side by side with the poor and the oppressed, with whom I could now for the first time feel wholly and completely at one; it was not a mourning; it was a crusade.