by Kanan Makiya
“He lives, it seems to me, in an altogether different, unreal world.”
“What is real? Are not all worlds contained in this one?”
“Hmm…Who was his teacher?”
“Ayatollah Abu’l Qassim al-Khoei.”
“The Ayatollah who died in 1992?”
“The very same, and our Supreme Source of Emulation for a quarter of a century. On his deathbed, Khoei nominated him to be his successor.”
“Ayatollah Khoei had a son who lived in London, did he not?”
“Sayyid Majid, who escaped the Tyrant in 1991. His older brother was killed by the Tyrant because of it.”
“I did not know. What did the Ayatollah think of the death of Sayyid Majid?”
“He excused himself from his classes that day and went into mourning.”
“Did he meet with Sayyid Majid when he returned to Najaf in April?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He was prevented by your Sayyid’s followers. They cordoned off his house, demanded he return to Iran, and would not let Sayyid Majid through.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“You asked a question; I answered.”
“I am sorry. I did not mean to offend. I was surprised. I did not know…perhaps it was some overzealous followers. I am sure our Sayyid would not have approved.”
“Perhaps.”
“What is he like as a teacher?”
“Kind and tolerant, impatient of fuss and pomp. All he asks of us, his students, is that we learn to ask good questions of him.”
“Does he not teach you what to think?”
“He teaches us how to think.”
“Kind, you said. Many people are kind. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Perhaps, but few are tolerant.”
“What do you mean?”
“Accepting of difference. Looking into one’s own heart before judging that of another.”
“Including infidels?”
“Including infidels.”
“Did he support the Occupation?”
“No.”
“Did he oppose the Occupation?”
“No.”
“Why does he not speak up on public affairs?”
“He does not pretend to be qualified and prefers the company of his books to that of politicians.”
“What is wrong with politicians?”
“He sees the practice of politics as damaging to the soul.”
“The souls of Shiʻa politicians as much as the Sunni ones?”
“Especially those of Shiʻa politicians.”
“Why especially?”
“Because their responsibility is greater.”
“Greater?”
“The future of the country and all its many communities is in their hands.”
“But the suffering they must redress is greater.”
“Can suffering be measured? In any case, Shiʻa hearts have to be more forgiving than other hearts.”
“And you are saying at the moment they are not.”
“It is not for me to say.”
“I am glad he met with our Sayyid.”
“He would work with the devil to save Najaf.”
“Are you saying our Sayyid is the devil?” I said, getting angry.
“God forbid, no! He is a politician.”
“But the Ayatollah is also doing politics.”
“He rose out of his sickbed unwillingly, and only because the Holy City was in dire straits.”
“A reluctant politician, then?”
“Reluctant, but never a politician, which is why he is loved.”
—
I spent the month after the cease-fire lying on my bed in Uncle’s house in the Mishraq quarter gazing dumbly at the bare walls of the second-story room I had shared with Mother for so many years. In the corner was the rickety old chair and the chest that had contained Father’s letter; I carried it in a leather pouch around my neck these days. The room seemed to belong to another life, one I was growing distant from. My thoughts wandered from memories of camping out in the open courtyard of the Shrine between ever more dangerous forays into the Old City, to our movement’s now declining status in Najaf. The old man had done what neither the Americans nor the Iraqi government, and least of all the House of the Shiʻa, had been able to do. But he was leaning on our old enemies to do it, the House of Hakim, whose intent was to supplant us in Najaf. How did he do it? I wondered. What was the secret that had suddenly materialized into a million people swarming around his car and pouring into the city marching for peace? He was too feeble to walk, but not too feeble, it seems, to engineer miracles.
My mind turned to the exhausted and hollowed-out faces of the thousands of young men camped out with Haider and myself in the courtyard. I could see them fidgeting about to find a better position to sleep on the hard ceramic floor, or having their wounds cleaned and dressed before foraging for a bite to eat. We knew hunger that month. Days would pass on dry bread and water alone until fresh supplies were smuggled in. Then a dozen of us at a time would sit around a huge vat of warm rice and vegetables, the melted lard floating to the surface hiding the absence of meat. Eager hands wiped clean on soiled shirts would dig in from all sides as an outer ring of lads waited their turn, cracking jokes and slinging epithets at this or that politician. Only the Grand Ayatollah they did not joke about; they asked, instead, when he was going to deliver them; they asked like little boys who knew they had misbehaved.
I was prepared to die in Najaf, but only for them, for their frightened faces and dirty humor and smelly bodies. In the blink of an eye, they too would have died for me. When shrapnel or gunfire mauled one of us, we ruffians-turned-angels carefully washed and dressed our fallen comrade’s wounds. The dead we washed again, carefully, all over, lovingly wrapping a corpse before placing it in a simple wooden casket to await burial in the unknowable future. I was in charge of storing these temporary caskets and the erection of a timber scaffold to enable us to layer them, to store one on top of the other on a smaller footprint. Space was at a premium in the Holy Shrine that August. My monument stood impassively in the courtyard as a reminder, a giant ever-growing wooden tomb built up of many perfectly aligned discrete caskets, a stone’s throw from the silver mausoleum of the blessed Imam himself.
—
Life quickly went back to normal in Najaf. The Ayatollah was very much in command. Roads and sidewalks were cleared, and hopelessly damaged structures pulled down; new construction sprouted up everywhere. I felt myself changing along with my city—the city that no longer felt like mine. Those who were not present in the courtyard during those blistering hot August days no longer counted the way they used to. Our movement was still a formidable force in Baghdad. Perhaps I could move there, team up with Haider in an apartment in Sadr City. My band of brothers had dispersed after the month of fighting holed up in the Shrine; I would never see them again; it had been a moment, not to be repeated. Worse, as the days passed, and I would get up from my bed in the evenings to climb up to the flat roof and gaze at the star-studded sky, my comrades’ features began to dim. By the end of the month I was struggling to remember their names.
Late summer nights in Najaf, when it is still hot and dry during the day but cool and quiet in the early evening with a gentle breeze wafting across from the Euphrates River, these are times to be alone on the roof of Uncle’s house. I would stretch out on the summer beds prepared by Aunt, and gaze up at the incompleteness of the moon surrounded by mysterious flickering needle points of light organized into lines and orbits immeasurable distances away. These had meaning and structure, our Sheikh taught, forming shapes and constellations as mysterious as the workings of the mind of that old man. The Sheikh had taught Haider and me to trace out of those lines a handful of shapes. I remembered the stars that connected to outline a horse, an Arabian stallion, he said, in whom are gathered the traits of courage, purity of intent, and nobility of character.
I ne
eded to be alone to think about such things. Haider checked up on me from time to time, but he was distracted by tasks like resupplying under Uncle’s direction, finding secret new warehouses for ammunition and weapons, and preparing for future battles. My mind was elsewhere.
Defeat had factionalized us, with Uncle at the head of an “Iraqist” faction calling for increased collaboration with the Sunnis, and other leaders calling for a “Shiʻification” of our movement and a greater collaboration with Iran. Our Sayyid absented himself from answering such difficult questions. He went into retreat, biding his time before taking sides in the divisions that were everywhere opening up. But to the old man, such preoccupations were entirely foreign, or so I dimly discerned while lying on my back looking up at the stars. And then I remembered my comrades in the Shrine, who seemed to fall back on the old man for succor when the going got rough. Fall back on him, not on our Sayyid! What did that mean?
What kind of a Shiʻa was the Ayatollah? I wondered. That is a stupid question, I thought to myself. Why, he is the incarnation of the meaning of the word. He is the purest embodiment of who we all were and all the traditions we came from. But why did he not seem to need to brandish his Shiʻaness about, like the members of the Cabal of Thirteen did, or like some of our own members in the Army of the Awaited One nowadays did?
I recalled Uncle’s remark that the members of the Cabal of Thirteen wore their newfound Shiʻa identity like an ill-fitted suit. But not the Ayatollah. He seemed to wear it like it was his skin, unself-consciously; he took it for granted, never thinking twice about it, and certainly not with every passing day as all the rest of us Shiʻa of Iraq were doing since the fall of the Tyrant. We were all talking about what it meant to be a Shiʻa. Should we join this House or that House? Which had the better interpretation of an Islamic state? Was the Imam’s return imminent or not? Should one be Shiʻa first and Iraqi second, or vice versa? Was it permitted to pray in a Sunni mosque?
Such questions bedeviled us. But not him. Oh no! The old man had no problem being the incarnation of the quality of being a Shiʻa on the one hand and praying in a Sunni mosque on the other. Born in Iran but loyal to Najaf, a quietist compelled to activism, neither an Iraqi patriot nor an Iranian one, a man who abhorred the public eye but was adored by the public. He loved Iraq and Iran, and probably many other places too, like one loves the birds and the flowers and the trees. Equally. There are differences, I imagined him saying, but no hierarchy, no competing loyalties—the Holy City excepted, of course.
Under that glorious dome of the night sky, I envied one who could know himself, and be known, like that; a man with no divided loyalties, who saw no contradiction between being himself and the rest of the world; all he seemed to ask for was the solitude of his books. I wonder why? To know himself even more, no doubt. Could we all be like that? I wondered. Was it imaginable? Or was there only one of such a man?
I began to wonder if he was a bit like Father. Did the old man, like Father, extend self-love to embrace all countries and religions of the world, including unbelievers and infidels, to all of whom he extended love, not hate? Uncle had said it was necessary to hate the foreigner. I couldn’t imagine the old man hating anybody. But then I couldn’t imagine him agreeing with Father either. What did that say about being him? During that month of recuperation at home in Najaf, his enigma, I concluded, was as dizzying and incomprehensible as the immensity of the stars and the galaxies above.
2005
Betrayal
The story of Sayyid Majid continued to haunt me. Who was this threatening figure who had appeared out of nowhere? Why was a collaborator, the son of a Grand Ayatollah, seeking an audience with his father’s student, another Grand Ayatollah? I could no longer accept things the way everyone—Uncle, the Sayyid, the Iraqi government, the Occupier, the Governing Council, and the Cabal of Thirteen—wanted them to be accepted. There had to be more to his story than anyone had led me to believe. Even though I did not believe in our Sayyid’s responsibility for Sayyid Majid’s death, I felt a growing obligation to know what happened on April 10, 2003.
What was in this so-called file of evidence the judge had collected against our Sayyid? Who was this man who had started deposing witnesses immediately after the murder, before there were any foreign troops in the city? Should our movement worry about the file the judge had assembled? Might some unscrupulous politician leak it to discredit us in the upcoming elections for the Constituent Assembly, which our Sayyid had reluctantly agreed to participate in following the resolution of last summer’s fighting in Najaf? The arrest warrant had after all been suspended, not rescinded.
Could one man have been responsible for the murder, stabbing frenziedly over one hundred times? Or were the killers a collective of a hundred or so separate men? More likely they were a handful of conspirators, each striking multiple times. It had to be a group killing, I concluded, with many parties at once intent on the deed. Did the perpetrators know whom they were killing? Was there prior intent to kill a Grand Ayatollah’s son? Not if it had taken place in a back alley, at night in some dark Godforsaken corner of the city. But Sayyid Majid was cut down on a glorious spring afternoon, and first assaulted in the Shrine, while speaking before a crowd many hundreds strong. People said he spoke for thirty minutes before the crowd turned into a mob. How can a man stand for thirty minutes listening to a speech without asking his neighbor who it is that is speaking?
They knew who he was.
—
Not a single member of the Cabal of Thirteen seemed troubled by the fact that they had covered up the killing of a man who had been their friend. They had worked with this man closely in London during the years of opposition in exile. They knew his family, and had accepted his hospitality. They had kissed his hand out of respect for his father, the Grand Ayatollah of his time, Sayyid Abu’l Qassim al-Khoei, the most revered religious scholar of our age. This was no ordinary man. Sayyid Majid was an illustrious member of our own Shiʻa community. Had not these friends of his set out to defend the interests of the Shiʻa inside the Governing Council? Was that not what the Cabal of Thirteen, or the House of the Shiʻa—whatever you want to call them—was all about? During all the meetings the Thirteen had in July and August 2004, drafting the language of the secret letter designed to cover up his killing, didn’t at least one of them remember those days in London, and ask himself: “So who killed my friend and colleague at whose house we often pondered such weighty issues as the fall of the Tyrant and what to do the day after he fell?”
Did the Cabal of Thirteen agree with Uncle that their friend was a collaborator? Is that why they were so willing to gloss over his murder? But if he had collaborated during those days of exiled opposition, which he undoubtedly had, then so had they; they had done the same a thousandfold, and were no doubt handsomely rewarded for it.
The Cabal of Thirteen betrayed Sayyid Majid, not caring a fig whether or not he had been a collaborator.
This, it seemed to me then and it seems to me today, was not a case of one sect betraying the other; nor a case of one political party or leader jockeying for position and betraying the other. It was the worst kind of betrayal: the kind that happens inside the same family, among men of the same sect all bound by the idea of their victimized sect’s right to power, men who had worked decades to bring about the fall of the Tyrant…and then the day he falls, the one takes to stabbing the other in the back! If our new would-be Shiʻa rulers found it that easy to betray so illustrious a one of their own, then who was there among the rest of us ordinary Shiʻa, not to mention other Iraqis, whom they would not betray?
—
I can understand betraying your country for the sake of your community, fighting alongside your kin even when you know they have done wrong, fighting simply because you are of them and not to stand by your own is unthinkable. There is honor of a kind in that. The only person you will have then betrayed is yourself: what you stand for, and the kind of man you aspire to be. When I lie to protec
t my friend, I am that kind of a betrayer. I can live with that. But I cannot live with betraying my own. So it was with Cain’s betrayal of his brother Abel, and Yusuf’s betrayal at the hands of his brothers, who were so jealous, they planned to kill Yusuf to keep their father’s love all to themselves. That kind of betrayal is beyond the pale.
Was the Cabal of Thirteen jealous of Sayyid Majid? Did they fear he would suck all the glory out of toppling the Tyrant for himself? Did it matter that Sayyid Majid had been cut down on the day of the fall of the Tyrant, and in the holiest site of the holiest city of our Shiʻa world? Did it matter that he had appealed to his friends on the day of the murder?
No one seemed to give a damn as to who the real murderer of Sayyid Majid was. The Cabal of Thirteen did not want to talk about it; above all they did not want anyone in the outside world to even know that such a murder had happened. The more secular ones among them had plans, Uncle said, to use our movement and our Sayyid to split the Islamist camp, not only across sectarian lines, but also within our own Shiʻa sect, to bring the House of Sadr into the Governing Council in order to weaken the House of Hakim and the prime minister’s Party of the Call. They told the Occupier that all his problems would disappear once our Sayyid was brought into the tent, instead of left to piss on it from outside.
I found myself gradually turning against the very people whose ideas about the Shiʻa I had once admired: ideas like the singular place of our Shiʻa victimhood under Saddam, or ideas about the sectarian all-Sunni state he had set up, and our God-given right as Shiʻa to take back from Sunnis by guile or by force that which was our due, and then rub their faces in the dirt after we took it. Not for them was the warning of our incomparable First Imam: an eye for an eye turns the whole world blind.
These Foreigner Iraqis did not understand us; nor did the Occupier. All they cared about was that the house of straw they had so elaborately erected did not go up in flames over the killing of Sayyid Majid.