The Rope

by Kanan Makiya

  “They are a minority and think like one, never seeking power over the whole of Iraq, only autonomy in a small corner of it. And they are pure victims.”

  “Pure victims? What is that?”

  “The kind of victimhood that is untainted by the blood and tears it took to make this country, to hold it together. Even when we used them as soldiers, they were sacrificial lambs, necessary casualties, not collaborators in the project of building this Arab Iraq of ours. We Shiʻa, on the other hand, are an integral part of the whole bloody enterprise, implicated in its every twist and turn. Men like your father fought Iran to a standstill in the 1980s; they were on the front lines, not the Tyrant. The blood spilled willingly in defense of Iraq was theirs. We took pride in their sacrifice. The Tyrant gave your father a medal, you know, for courage and gallantry.”

  “I didn’t know…I still don’t understand…”

  —

  We remained in Uncle’s office, lying back on the cushions he had strewn all around. His trusty retainer returned with a fresh pot of tea and replenished our glasses. Uncle seemed lost in thought. Having apparently reached some kind of decision, he rose from the cushioned floor and took to pacing up and down on his soft carpets in his socks, his chin lowered, almost touching his chest. He stopped and squatted to lift the corners of one of his Persian carpets, reminding himself of the colors and design of the one below. “Once a month I move the carpets around. Some on the bottom rise to the top; others stay where they are, or change location in the room. The sunlight then hits them from a different angle and they wear down evenly. Every time I do this my guests remark on how new and fresh everything looks. The cloth merchant down the street makes a point of visiting me just to see the new arrangement.” And then he dropped the carpet and returned to pacing.

  “It is with carpets as it is in life. We need to change perspective to be fully alive.

  “Consider love of self,” he suddenly said after a pause. “It is a perfectly natural impulse, wouldn’t you say?”

  “That is quite a change of perspective, Uncle,” I said, smiling a little. “Where would merchants be if they did not look out for their interests?”

  “Or love of God; it too is an extension of our desire to be in His good graces on the Day of Judgment, to enter Paradise and shun Hell. All God’s creatures start loving and looking out for themselves; it is normal and good.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “By extension, love of self is love of the family and local community into which one is born.”

  “Of course,” I said, puzzled.

  He was starting to talk to himself rather than to me; it was as though I was not in the room.

  “But that love has to be extended further; it has to reach out to others, in order to become true virtue. I mean, by itself there is nothing virtuous in loving oneself; it is just God’s way. How much further do you think it should reach out, son? What do you say?”

  “Uhh…I don’t really know, Uncle. I never looked at things that way before.”

  “It must embrace our neighborhoods, our cities, and our whole Shiʻa community. That goes without saying. But is that enough? We live in a world of nations and states. These are as necessary to our public lives as breathing is to our personal lives. Are we Shiʻa a nation? I don’t think so. Should self-love be extended as far as the whole country? The Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, said, ‘Love of the homeland is of faith.’ It follows that love of self should be extended to the boundaries of one’s country and that this love is a virtue esteemed by faith. All men should aspire to this virtue. But can one extend self-love too far? The great danger is that it becomes unreal and unrealizable. The Tyrant did that in his early years, when he forced us to love all Arab countries, treating them as if they were our own, belittling our own smaller Iraq for the sake of a pipe dream he called the Arab nation.”

  Uncle stopped now, and looked strangely at me as though unsure of himself.

  “Worse than the Tyrant, however, son—and please hear me out before you react—worse than him is the case of someone like your father: his communist beliefs entailed extending self-love to embrace all countries and cultures of the world, to embrace foreigners spread across all four corners of the earth; to all of them he wanted to extend love…love of the world, he called it…the whole world, a kind of universal love that included other nations and cultures and all living creatures in God’s creation…a far bigger fantasy than the Tyrant’s pan-Arab nation.”

  “Father believed that?” I asked, astonished.

  “Indeed he did. He subordinated love of self to love of the world, and that God never asked us to do; it is abnormal. But I could not convince him of it. We used to argue about these things; those stormy discussions remain some of the most memorable moments of my life…By God how he could talk, your father!…He lit up the room; everyone turned to listen. He had a way about him…”

  Were those tears welling up in Uncle’s eyes? He turned his face away from me before I could be sure. It had come so suddenly. I stood as still as a stone, not a flicker of movement apart from my eyes, which were following his lips opening and shutting like a fish out of water. I looked into the dark space between his lips, lost in the immensity of his and Father’s past opening and closing before me.

  “Understand, son! I loved him dearly; we all did. Your grandfather doted on him; everyone loves a dreamer…He was my little brother…,” he said, almost choking on these last words. “Perhaps his ideas and way with words made him a beautiful person, something I never claimed to be. But it also made him a poor judge of human nature.”

  He collected himself and turned to look at me; it was as though a veil had slipped from his face, opening up to my gaze a man who normally did everything in secret.

  “The smart thing to do,” Uncle said, “is to couple love of one’s nation to hatred of the foreigner, something your father also did not know how to do…I mean, how can you hate if you love everything equally…but it is what our leader, the Sayyid, is doing…and what his father, Sayyid Sadiq, did before him.”

  “Is that what you did, Uncle? Is that why you became an Islamist?”

  “I sought to belong to those I was born among. That impulse burned in me like a red-hot coal when I was young. All those people who walk the streets of your neighborhood, and go to the same mosques and teahouses that you frequent, live by the same ideas of right and wrong that we call Islam. When I walked among them, in the souk or in the Great Shrine, I sucked in the smell of their sweat and the smoke of their cheap cigarettes, and I fell in love with them; their tears were my tears. How you cried on that march to Karbala! Remember? Like you on that day, I yearned to be at one with them, to feel their pain even when I had not fully experienced it. I learned from them, not from books or clever men like Abu Ammar, that when they hurt, they find a language to express their pain. These languages may be wanting in precision, because they take the form of stories. Our rituals and stories of heroism and self-sacrifice, our tears and lamentations, these are my people’s language; it is the only one they have with which to ward off the evil there is in the world.

  “I wanted a politics in which we Muslims could see ourselves without outsider help in the shape of intellectuals and their foreign ideas. Only then would I find my roots and become at one with their hopes and desires. These feelings drew me to Sayyid Sadiq, our Sayyid’s father. He was a cleric of the common man; he hated the ivory tower cleric. In his teachings I found a home such as my father, your grandfather, was never able to give me, a sense of belonging to a thing bigger than myself, but not one that was so big you got lost in it, like my brother did, God rest his soul.”

  “So you are a Believer?”

  “I don’t practice as much as I like to, I admit…that is not for talking about in front of others! However, I gladly do what is expected of me, like pray in public. Praying in private feels too much like hypocrisy. I am not personally committed to ritual. But you cannot get total immersion in a people whose polit
ics is so sensual without conforming to what they cherish. When I follow the crowd in prayer, I take pleasure in being at one with them. Islam gives us that breathing space; it does not make excessive demands on a man’s soul; it simply asks him to conform. And so, yes, I am a Believer.”

  “If Islam comes first, and derives from love of self, what follows?”

  “Hatred of the one who is not you, the infidel or the foreigner who wishes to occupy or steal from you. Think of the Occupier in our land today as that distant foreigner, toward whose culture and values our self-love cannot be extended, as your father would have us do. We should not even try.”

  “But hate is such a vile thing, Uncle!…Mother would never have approved.” And then I remembered what my father wrote to Mother in his letter: “Teach him never to act out of hate.” But I didn’t say anything. Uncle was replying.

  “Look at the skin on your hands, son; it is turning brown and dark from all that training in the desert sun. I see a new leanness and hardness in you. You are no longer a boy…That is a good thing! It is the man you are becoming who must learn to hate, not the boy your mother kept hidden from the world. Without skin like that you will never be able to fight the foreigner, whether he comes from America or from Iran. The members of the Cabal of Thirteen are incapable of hating, much less fighting, the foreigner to whom they owe everything. They turn hate inward, onto their own, but in the name of their own. They occupy the space of that contradiction. Couple these two things together, hatred of the foreigner with love of self extended to your community and your state, and you have the foundation of a well-ordered and virtuous society.”

  “You can count on me, Uncle. You know that. Always.” And then, I don’t know why, I added: “You are the father I never had. Know that I am with you until the end.”

  I felt myself coming alive as I said those words; I felt the doubts that had beset me following the death of Muntassir lifting, filling me with a new sense of discovery and purpose. The words touched him; I read it in his face, but he made no acknowledgment.

  Three Houses

  In a sermon, our Sayyid had described the September 11 attacks as “a miracle and a blessing from God,” words that infuriated the Occupier. Our papers and publications were closed down. Uncle went into hiding, moving to a well-guarded secret basement in Najaf. Then he called for me. I was not told where he was, but taken to him.

  Armed men were hanging about, doing nothing for the most part, but tension and anxiety lined their faces. I was ushered in to see him. He ordered the door closed and, after a few pleasantries, seated me across from his desk.

  There was tea on a kettle by his side. After pouring me a glass, he leaned forward, his elbows on the table, his heavy jowls resting on the interlaced fingers of his big hands, his eyes boring into mine like daggers. The expression on his round face was gentle, yet I felt uncomfortable and did not know which way to direct my gaze.

  “Look at me, son,” he said quietly, settling the question.

  “We are now at war with the Occupier. You will be stationed in Najaf, with Haider and your unit. Our forces will shortly be reinforced from other parts of the country. Understood?”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “I have information that an arrest warrant is about to be issued for the Sayyid. You must move carefully, even inside Najaf.”

  “Arrest warrant!” I said, shocked. “How dare they? On what charges?”

  “Do you remember that corpse of an American agent that you saw on April tenth of last year, the day after the regime fell?”

  “Yes, of course. How could I forget?”

  “The Occupier is trying to pin his death on the Sayyid.”

  “Who was he?”

  “I told you, he was an American agent.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Khoei.”

  “The same as the Ayatollah who died in 1992?”

  “His son, Majid.”

  “And did the Sayyid have anything to do with his death?”

  “Of course not!” he said, his face turning grim. “The man was seen by worshippers in the Shrine of the Imam in the company of the Kelidar, the most hated man in the city, the Custodian of the Shrine and holder of its keys, a well-known Baʻthi who boasted photographs with the Tyrant in his office in the Shrine. The two were seen entering the office. Worshippers gathered outside, demanding that this much-hated man, the Custodian, be handed over to them. Shots were fired from inside, killing a man in the crowd. When people saw this, they rushed the office, and in the altercation that followed both men were knifed to death. The Sayyid had nothing to do with it. Some of his followers tried to protect Majid, but failed to get to him in time.”

  —

  Images of that first corpse in the alley near our house in Mishraq, of the stab wounds and the dried blood and the shredded clothes, had been fading, smothered by the daily assault of thousands of similarly terrible images—until Uncle’s words, like a bolt of lightning, brought them back into focus.

  I had been living in the eye of the storm for twelve months, but now I was yanked back to the beginning, to the day of the fall of the Tyrant, April 10, 2003. Uncle did this by simply dropping a name. I had cajoled him into it, to be sure, and succeeded where I had not succeeded twelve months earlier with Mother, but still I had succeeded; he had spoken the name Mother had not wanted me to hear, the name no one would utter in public although everyone knew it was out there: Sayyid Majid, scion of Ayatollah Khoei, Shi‘ism’s Supreme Source of Emulation and most senior religious authority until his death in 1992.

  I thought Muntassir had fallen victim to a great feud between the Houses of Hakim and Sadr, but a third great clerical House was in the mix, the House of Khoei, about which I knew little. Could Majid’s death be about clerics who had collaborated with Saddam and others who hadn’t? The father of our Sayyid, Sayyid Sadiq, had made that accusation, saying that Ayatollah Khoei collaborated with the regime in the 1980s to marginalize him, Sayyid Sadiq, in the clerical establishment of the Holy City. The same accusation was leveled at Sayyid Sadiq after 1992, because whisperings from both the House of Hakim and the House of Khoei said he owed his elevated position after the death of Ayatollah Khoei to the Tyrant, who entrusted the rebuilding of the destroyed city of Najaf to him, providing him with funds. Was that true? Were both allegations true?

  Perhaps the feuding was not about collaboration with the regime at all, but collaboration with the Americans, which made sense, as Uncle said the murdered Majid was an American spy. But it couldn’t have been about his collaboration after the fall of the regime, because our Imams in their sermons after the Tyrant’s fall were blasting moderate clerics for this every Friday and they never mentioned Sayyid Majid’s name. What held them back? The Occupier was not in Najaf during April 2003, and the Occupation had not even begun when Majid arrived nearly two weeks before the fall of Baghdad. Therefore the collaboration, if true, had to have been with the Occupier before the Occupation, at a time of sanctions and great hardship for the people, when the Occupier was still only a would-be invader. If that were true, the charge of collaboration would apply to the whole Governing Council and countless others.

  The three great clerical houses were always in competition over money, large sums from the contributions of pilgrims and wealthy donors. The House of Khoei had controlled the disbursement of the lion’s share of contributions. The House of Sadr, beginning with Sayyid Sadiq, our Sayyid’s father, wanted a larger share, particularly in view of their growing popularity during the late 1990s. When our Army of the Awaited One took on the House of Hakim in Karbala, in the battle that killed poor Muntassir, the rumor spread that it was all about money from the Shrine of our martyred Imam Husain.

  —

  But money was a poor explanation for the murder of Sayyid Majid, seeing as how the House of Khoei had lost its control of revenues arising from the Shrines in Najaf and Karbala after the death of the Ayatollah in 1992. The House of Khoei was not in need of more mon
ey, being far better funded from the large Shiʻa communities worldwide, especially in India, Africa, and the Far East.

  What if the struggle were not about finances or collaboration, but a clash of ideas concerning the role of the clergy, ranging from the activism of the House of Sadr to the passivity and quietism for which the House of Khoei was famous?

  Our Sayyid, following in the footsteps of his father, took to heart words attributed to the first Imam, the incomparable ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, who said that in each historical period there were two Imams: one silent and passive, the other vocal and active. The Imam, may God’s blessings shower upon him, warned that such a state of affairs could lead to strife in the community. On this basis our Sayyid distinguished between vocal clerics, like himself, and silent ones, like Khoei, whom he despised, as his father had done before him.

  The vocal clerics seek an active political role, and openly advocate an Islamic state, while the silent ones reject political involvement by the clerics on the grounds that the realm of politics is bound at all times to corrupt true religious belief, at least until the Infallible Imam, the only true successor to the first Imam, returns. They prefer to talk among themselves in the meantime, one authority to the other, and have disdain for speaking to the masses on all-important matters of governance. Thus was the tumult of war and politics around the fall of the Tyrant matched by a war of ideas both within and among the three great Houses of Shi‘ism in Najaf.

  The quietists had a very poor view of our movement, considering us vulgar troublemakers, especially after some young men calling themselves followers of the Sayyid—some of whom may have been in the Great Courtyard of the Shrine of the Imam on the day of the murder of Sayyid Majid—surrounded the house of Khoei’s successor, Najaf’s Grand Ayatollah, demanding he go back to Iran, from whence he had come. The siege was on April 10, 2003, the day of the murder, and was only lifted days later after the Ayatollah called in two thousand Arab tribesmen from the outlying villages to disperse the mob. We Sadrists consider the traditionalists opportunistic collaborators, and said as much every Friday from the pulpits of our mosques. Some of our wilder members even tore down pictures of the Ayatollah on the streets of Najaf, until our leaders put a stop to it.