by Kanan Makiya
I did not know what to say after that, torn between my feelings for Uncle and Grandfather’s emotion. In a different situation I might have dismissed what he said as the rantings of an old man, but that no longer felt right. The things I did not know, and might never know, were just too much. Then Grandfather said:
“I saw your father one last time after that.”
“What was he doing? What did he say…”
“Just before leaving, he came to tell me he thought his brother was right to lock down the house and made me swear on the Holy Book that I would make sure that neither your mother nor you went out looking for him. He was going to meet Sayyid Majid, who was as appalled by the behavior of the rebels as your father was. Both men thought the violence would be the Uprising’s undoing. Youths, sometimes led by clerics, were storming every public building. They would kill every official in sight, steal everything they could carry, spread a can of kerosene around, light a match, and get the hell out of there fast. He saw good friends of mine killed, old comrades or sometimes merely fellow travelers of the Communist Party—Falah Askar, Ridha al-Faham, Kareem al-ʻIraqi, and Hasan al-Najafi.”
“Why would the rebels kill aging Communists? They probably don’t even know what communism is. It doesn’t make sense.”
“They were not being killed for that, boy! Don’t be stupid! These were broken men, talented artists and poets from the good old days; the Baʻth courted them after they crushed communism in Iraq, and forced them to pen songs praising Saddam and the Baʻth. We had the whole intelligentsia in the palm of our hands in the old days, all through the 1970s. Did you not know that, son? Have I not told you the story of my good friend Hassan al-Najafi?”
“No. But tell me about Father.”
“Hassan was his friend as well. I used to organize poetry evenings in which Hassan always ended up as the star. He would recite to us some of his old compositions. Your father never missed a recital. Hassan, you see, didn’t believe in anything anymore and had never been a real card-carrying Communist…He just loved his work, which others abused for political ends. You know how it all started? No, of course you don’t! Ba’athi goons, you see, had broken up his wedding day; they beat up his wife, mauled her father, and smashed everything. The next day poor Hassan got a call directly from the Tyrant. That was in…let me see…1978! Yes, 1978, just before Saddam became president. He said he was very sorry to hear what had happened, and if only Hassan would compose a few verses on the achievements of the great Ba’athi revolution in Iraq, he would personally guarantee the culprits would be found and punished. It was an offer poor Hassan could not refuse…”
Grandfather fell silent.
“Well, what happened, Grandfather? You must tell me now.”
“They slit poor Hassan’s throat in the courtyard of the Shrine. They said he was a collaborator, and called it justice.”
We both fell silent. I was trying to imagine the scene with Grandfather’s poetry evenings, but it would run into images of old Hassan bleeding to death in front of the Shrine of the Imam, of Sayyid Majid being stabbed in the very same location twelve years later, and of Father running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to save somebody. I was trying but not succeeding to make sense of it all.
“Poor Hassan,” Grandfather suddenly said, starting to cry and mumbling softly to himself, his drained face looking like it was already touched by the earth to which it would soon return.
“He spent his best years in pursuit of art and high ideals; the realization of either would have satisfied him. But in the end both got drenched in the blood that pumped out of his throat in the Great Courtyard…Shame on them…Shame on us. What are we? Animals to be slaughtered and carved up?”
“We are victims, Grandfather…we have always been victims. But rest assured, we are fighting back now.”
“There is nothing reassuring about that, boy!” he suddenly snapped back. “In 1991, I saw so-called victims inflict more pain than was ever inflicted upon them…Those were not good men to be,” he said, speaking to himself rather than to me. “Better to retain one’s honor and self-respect, even as a victim…”
I was horrified! Was the honor in the deplorable and servile state of being a victim, or in the overcoming of it? I had joined the Army of the Awaited One to fight back. He was now saying that if in that fight the victim went too far, slitting poor Hassan’s throat, for example, his excesses under those circumstances were not justified. To be sure vengeance was not justified; God’s law is clear on that. But the Tyrant left us with no choice but to fight fire with fire. Surely violence in the service of one’s own self-affirmation and that of his community was right, consequences be damned! Am I to tell a man driven by pain and humiliation to obey rules in the life-and-death struggle he is waging to survive and remake himself into a new kind of man? We didn’t obey rules either in Najaf in August 2004. Nor did the Occupier. Why should the insurgents against the Tyrant have been expected to do so in 1991?
2006
Justice
My past, Haider’s past, the past of all of us who leapt into the future with our eyes shut in 2003, is the rule of the Great Tyrant. It lasted longer than the age of three-quarters of the population. Two Iraqi generations knew nothing but him. Grandfather’s past was much larger than ours. He had seen many Iraqs come and go. There was no war or revolution or cruelty or form of human degradation that he had not lived through. Or so I thought, until the bulwarks of Shiʻa pain burst on the day we put him in the ground, the twenty-second of February to be exact, the day the Wahhabi, Haters of the Family of the Prophet, attacked a site sacred to us Shiʻa—the Askari Shrine in Samarra. They tied up the guards and blew up the Shrine, filming themselves doing so—an act of pure provocation. The pictures spread like wildfire. We were incensed; the Sayyid was enraged; Uncle threw up his hands in despair. A tidal wave of rage swept over the land.
Hitherto, we Shiʻa had patiently endured the violence directed at us; we stood by when 270 pilgrims were killed during their pilgrimage, and when suicide bombers targeted us, in our mosques and marketplaces, or at our weddings, or wherever we might assemble.
Hitherto, the war between Iranian and Iraqi Shi‘ism, between the House of Hakim and the House of Sadr, was fought in the background; we conducted it with vigor among ourselves, and poor Muntassir and Najmaldin died because of it.
Hitherto we had listened to the words of restraint of the Grand Ayatollah, words that so resembled those of his teacher and mentor during the 1991 Uprising…We’d listened and obeyed, confining ourselves to fighting the Occupier. Again he was urging restraint, asking that the sanctity of all Muslim mosques and homes be respected. This time we did not listen, and the pent-up rage of the Shiʻa ripped through even his words of restraint.
The government issued denunciations and decried “foreign” sedition. The Parliament disintegrated amid recriminations and shouting matches. And the House of Hakim redoubled their dirty war of assassinations-by-night of regime loyalists, or people denounced as such. The Tyrant’s outlawed party, they said, was responsible for the dastardly deeds.
Only our Sayyid tapped into the street’s pulse, and felt its force, unleashing us upon the city. A new war of Shiʻa against Sunni commenced in Baghdad, less than six months after the old one with the Occupier in Najaf had ended. It was a war whose language had been foreshadowed by the Cabal of Thirteen, but it was ours to wage on the ground.
No sooner had it begun than a strange thing happened, something no one had expected at the outset: the once frightened ordinary Shiʻa of Baghdad, who had never warmed to the Cabal of Thirteen, turned to us as their saviors, to our Army of the Awaited One, and even when it was not our own men wreaking havoc on Sunni neighborhoods—exacting retribution, forcing Sunnis out of their homes, gunning them down at checkpoints, and robbing them of all their possessions—people said it was.
Our movement and its army, hailed by all for its gallant fight against the Occupier in the summer of 2004, now
struck terror in Sunni hearts. We were the great bogeyman, dubbed the Frankenstein of Baghdad by some, stalking the streets of the city at night while unspeakable horrors were being committed. Policemen doubled up as death squads, switching over to our uniforms at night—no one else’s—and claimed to be fighting for our Sayyid, manning unauthorized roadblocks at random, robbing innocent passersby, and killing every male with a Sunni name or from a Sunni neighborhood.
Black was the color of our uniforms, pitch-black from head to toe with a black ski mask. Thus did we dress our killer squads, and chilling they were to behold, even when they were not bursting open your door and dragging out your menfolk. Pictures of our Sayyid were pasted onto each and every Sunni house, and woe to any man, woman, or child who tried to take them down.
These things continued to happen in our name all through the year. How had a war against foreign Occupation come to this? Uncle tried to stop it; the Sayyid, taken aback by the furies he had unleashed, and losing control of his own men, also tried to put an end to it—to no avail. I was rushed from one flashpoint to the next, urging restraint, but it was like dousing an inferno with teacups.
Haider had metamorphosed during this war from the anxious, wild-eyed man who had beaten Najmaldin to a pulp into a leader of men, as famous for his ruthlessness and ferocity against Sunni foes as he had been against Iranian “agents” like Najmaldin. Fighting Sunni terror transformed him.
His name popped up whenever a new pile of Sunni corpses was found with holes drilled into their hands and feet, and especially when the coup de grace took the form of a hole drilled all the way through the victim’s skull. Rumor said that the electric drill was Haider’s trademark. Sunni killers preferred the knife—the Prophet’s Companions used knives, they said—beheading their foes, not crucifying them. The Sunni knife was pitted against the Shiʻa drill all through the battle for Baghdad. The men under Haider’s command, and eventually throughout the ranks of our army, took to calling him Dhu’l Fiqar, the Sword of Justice that had belonged to the First Imam; his enemies called him ʻAzra’il, the hideous-looking, avenging Grim Reaper.
I looked for Haider everywhere, but did not run into him during the worst of it. One moment he was there; the next he was gone; the only traces of his work were rotting corpses and rumors swarming around them like flies. Perhaps that was a good thing; it might have ended badly between us. We were in the same army, but on opposing sides of this new war.
He had cooled down by the time we finally met in the summer. Or perhaps I needed to believe that, and it was not really the same Haider, just another changeling fathered by the country’s demons, mirroring in his person the twists and turns of so many young Iraqi men—killing Americans one day and fellow Shiʻa the next; hating Iranians on the third day, and playing electoral politics on the fourth; and now cleansing the city of its Sunni Arabs. We switched enemies and alliances with dizzying speed all through that year. By the end of the Battle of Baghdad we controlled half the city, had ejected one-third of its former Sunni residents, and controlled 80 percent of the Shiʻa areas within it.
—
I write “we,” but, I now asked myself, who was “we”? I had pushed the question to one side before, until Grandfather, in a moment of lucidity during my vigil by his side, forced it out into the open.
“And you!” he snapped nastily. “What are you doing in that ragtag army? Some army! Your father and mother are turning in their graves. The ‘Awaited One,’ my ass! I thought you were smarter than that!”
“Grandfather! You are insulting a great Sayyid, descendant of the Prophet and son of a line of martyrs, all of whom died fighting for Justice!”
“Justice!” he screamed in my face. “They slit poor Hassan’s throat for that, you know! And your father died for it. As did a hundred thousand other good men by his side. And my old friend, Haider’s grandfather, died for it, thirty years before them.”
“I thought you two had a falling-out…”
He collapsed back into the bed, exhausted by his outburst. Even the hollows in his cheeks seemed to sink deeper into his face.
“You think because we disagreed over how to fight the fascists, I didn’t know how he died, or for what. Perhaps his courage made me look small; perhaps that is why I bore him a grudge. Have you thought about that? Oh yes, he died for a good cause, for justice in this world…they all died for that, long before your Sayyid was born. Did your Sayyid raise so much as his little finger against fascist dictatorship? Never. Did your Sayyid, or for that matter his father, rise to the defense of those who did? Not once. Did they at least say that all those Iraqis before them also died for justice? No, they didn’t. Instead they called them heathen-loving atheists, who had to be crushed in the name of God Almighty.”
And then his voice picked up strength and he started shouting again. “Where is the justice in that, I ask you? Where?…Go on, tell me! I am sick and tired of all the noble things men say they want to die for. Give me reasons to live, not die!”
“Grandfather, please…take it easy. Shouting is not good for your health…To live…I agree with you. That is what it is all about. I live for justice, or at least strive to…Is there something wrong with that?”
“Don’t! Don’t live for justice. That is a stupid thing to do,” he said scathingly, but quieting down. “We have been put on this earth to live. Life is a gift with but one purpose in mind, and that is in the living of it.”
“But do we not live for a purpose?”
“Live for the light in a lover’s eyes and the beauty of a flock of birds in the ebbing light…Live for the shape of the crescent moon and the taste of a juicy pomegranate. Justice is but a means to go on living for these things; it is not a substitute for them…The moment justice is pursued with the same zest as life, it turns into a monster capable of indescribable cruelties, and therefore itself a crime. God save us from impassioned men burning with zeal to be just! Their justice is a harbinger of death. Never go looking for it, son, because when you look too hard, you will find it in every infraction; why, you will even find it where there is none. That is how things are…”
“Should we Shiʻa not seek to right the wrongs done to us in the past?”
“How can we? The past is but a camouflage for memories that are forged and reforged in a world that is daily being made anew. The past lives only in our imagination and dreams. What is wrong with you?…Look into yourself, son. A fighter in an army that awaits some magical being’s descent from the heavens to deliver…what? Justice? And the moment it arrives, the moment He makes His appearance, this is supposed to mark the end of the world. What is the point of that kind of Justice if we are to perish at precisely the moment it appears?”
The Awaited One
I joined the Army of the Awaited One in a fever for Justice. I had not been brought up a particularly observant Muslim in Uncle’s household, but I became one after I joined.
Our Sheikh taught that Islam was a religion of justice, not love as Christians believed; justice for the poor and the oppressed whom I had marched and cried with on the road to Karbala three years ago; justice for Palestine, which the Jews had snuffed out. Going to the mosque, listening to Friday sermons, fasting and learning to say certain phrases in praise of the Lord, forged a sense of brotherhood among my fellow soldiers. Fighting for Iraq was fighting for justice, as it had been for my father before me. Justice for Iraq meant fighting the foreigners who coveted it, and other Muslim lands, as the Jews had coveted Palestine.
None of this changed because we were now soldiers for Islam in the Army of the Awaited One. Islam was in and of itself justice for Muslims wherever they may be in the world. Nor was I alone in this; all the sons of my neighborhood were like Haider and myself, fired by justice and less observant of ritual and literal readings of the Quran. Growing up in a Holy City has that effect, especially when you have to put up with the idiocy of pilgrims and simple souls from the provinces, who when they joined the Army of the Awaited One did so with ver
y different expectations.
Over the years I mixed with many kinds of comrades in the Army of the Sayyid. I envied someone like Muntassir at first the ordinariness of and simplicity of his world, to which he was still deeply attached. One needs to live in the trivial and the commonplace at times, in the watching of Mother tending to our room, or the fussing of Aunt over what she needed to shop for. That aspect of my life had disappeared after the fall of the Tyrant. But once the war of Iraqi against Iraqi broke out in February 2006, and was heralded as soul-cleansing Justice for us Shiʻa, the simple and the ordinary ended, and the fantastical arrived, filling the heads of these same simple souls I had once envied with strange new beliefs that stamped out old-fashioned notions of fighting for justice for Palestine or Iraq, or old-fashioned notions of loyalty to family and country.
“The downfall of the Tyrant is a sign,” one such zealous recruit said to me. “The arrival of the Occupier is a sign!”
“Of what?”
“The Coming of the End of Time and the return of the Imam.”
“Has He come out of Occultation?”
“Yes.”
“Who is He?”
“He has come in the guise of our Sayyid…come to deliver Justice. We are His avenging arm; we are His sword and the rock upon which He will stand to establish the reign of Absolute Justice.”
“It can’t be; he would have told us so.”
“It has to be. Why else are the Sunnis blowing up our Shrines and killing our pilgrims? They seek to kill Him. We need to root them out…There are more signs…”
“Such as?”
“Chaos, suicide bombers…why, even the electricity cuts. Our Shiʻa dead are piling up in the streets. Sunnis are hiding the Haters of the Family of the Prophet in their neighborhoods and homes…We must root them out…The government is more corrupt than Saddam ever was…They steal openly. The Great Imposter is coming…”