by Kanan Makiya
When I first joined the Army of the Awaited One, I paid no attention to our name, much less anyone else’s. I said dismissively, “It’s just a name! What is in a name anyway?” Following my discussion with the Sheikh about our army, and observing how some of our members read our name as a sign of the Coming of the End of Time, I started to think more carefully about names. What did they mean? Was a name a clue pointing to the nature of a thing, or merely an unimportant symbol or label accidentally or whimsically attached to it?
I remember, as a child, picturing a person by his or her name. The attributes of that person thus became attached to the name. Saddam, for instance, means the one who confronts, who smashes up obstacles. I was often struck by how well the Great Tyrant fitted the name bestowed on him at birth. Surely no father knows the kind of a son he will beget. How then did the inner core of the Tyrant’s personality come to fit his sign, his name from birth, so perfectly? This was a source of great wonder and mystery to me growing up. And so, if another infant of my father’s generation were to be called Saddam, I would be hard-pressed not to see in him the cold-blooded killer Saddam was.
A name, the good Sheikh of our neighborhood taught us, is a sign conveying knowledge of that which the name denotes; it is intended as a mark of distinction. So it troubled me that according to my notebook, there were 268 separate armed organizations operating in post-Saddam Iraq between 2003 and 2006. And all carried the name of the Lord, of which He has 99, or of His Prophet and His Companions. And these 268 names accounted among them for an average of 106 violent attacks a day in 2005, according to my calculations.
The good Sheikh would go on to say that past, present, and future are all contained within a name; the name may denote something existent, like religion, or nonexistent, like Justice in our world. When men swear or give an oath according to the saying “in the name of He whose name is in every chapter of the Holy Book,” it is because the name of the Lord, and His Prophet, or the name of the much-awaited Rightly Guided One, cannot be repeated often enough and is always filled with beauty, loveliness, and all good things, especially Holiness.
But, I said to myself after I did all my research, this cannot be true of men or organizations that take His name in vain, not just once or twice but over and over again. To inflate and multiply His name, and then maim and kill in His name, has to be a form of blasphemy. Because, our Sheikh said, there always remains a tiny little essence of a thing in its name, perhaps worn thin by time, like the paper-thin vestiges of a memory, so thin at times as to justify the thought that nothing was there—except the name. The mistake these inflators and multipliers of God’s name make is to forget there is always something left behind. Taken in vain and repeated in minute variations across the length and breadth of the land, a name necessarily has its connection to that original essence diluted to the point of denial of the very Sublime whom the name is trying to evoke. God, who does not cease to exist if men lose their faith in Him, nonetheless is rejected many times over when men do terrible things in His name, or take in vain the names of His Messengers. Not only, therefore, is the name of a thing important, but its inflation is also a debasement of the Lord Himself.
—
I presented Uncle with a report of my findings of 268 independently run armed militias operating in post-Saddam Iraq between 2003 and 2006. I accompanied it with many other statistics concerning casualties, armed operations in different districts, collapse of services in Baghdad, and plummeting electricity levels. He corrected and modified a few names here and there and reviewed my methodology, but by and large I could see he was as pleased with my work as he was taken aback at the results.
He then got up from his desk and sat me down on a sofa beside him. There was a bowl of pomegranates in front of us on a coffee table with small plates and a knife. They had come from the tree in our house, he said, picking the reddest and juiciest one he could find, and handing it to me. I cut the sphere in half as my mother had taught me, and then scored the two halves so that I could break it up into manageable pieces. He took one and motioned to me to do the same. Eating a pomegranate is normally a messy business, but not if you are as practiced at it as we all were in Uncle’s household. The art is to pick the seeds out of the segment using teeth and tongue, while using your hand to roll the segment from side to side; a matter of hand, eye, teeth, and tongue coordination; Uncle loved eating them that way.
“Excellent work, son…excellent. You know, I don’t get to see you much these days. We must change that. How is Haider?”
“I can’t find him; he is lost in the throes of the war in Baghdad.”
“Perhaps he does not want you to find him?”
“I think you are right. I never told you, Uncle, that he did in fact kill Najmaldin. I apologize for not saying so before. He has been avoiding me ever since the meeting with his father.”
“I guessed as much. When you do run him down, talk to him; he is becoming too fond of this killing business.”
“Certainly. Uncle, can you tell me what you conclude from my findings? They trouble me.”
“As they should. You can live with guns and bombs and murder and mayhem…Things are bound to get better, you say to yourself. But this, the horror of it…,” he said, shuddering and pointing to the sheaf of papers that I had put down before him.
“What does it all mean, Uncle?”
“The end of Iraq, son…at least as you and I have known it.”
“No! I don’t believe it.”
“Once Saddam went, Iraq changed. You changed, the Sayyid changed, why, even I changed.”
“How…changed?”
“Ours is a new world where everyone wants to rule but no one is strong enough to do so.”
“Everyone will then want to keep on fighting.”
“Exactly, and whoever is left will be king of the ruins. No country to speak of. Only dead people.”
“Dead Shiʻa or Sunnis?”
“The dead have no sect.”
“Is Iraq that fragile?”
“Iraq is just a name, son, no longer even an idea, much less a nation. A name…one more to add to the two hundred sixty-eight other names you have just given me. Would that I could say otherwise, but I cannot; I would be wrong. Perhaps its fragility is why it never ceased to require the presence of a strongman to arbitrate between its different factions. But now even the name is fast disappearing. Notice not one of the organizations on your list confers allegiance to something called Iraq. That was never the case in the past.”
He was pointing to the many sheets of names scattered on the table before him, and then he looked up at me. “Your heart must now catch up with what your head has uncovered,” he said. “We all must now unlearn what we thought we understood but perhaps never did.”
“You are speaking in riddles, Uncle. I don’t understand.”
“To every idea that we adopt, there is a corresponding reality, which explains the hold that that idea has managed to exercise over our imagination. This reality is necessarily of a piece with the idea. Iraq is such an idea. On the eve of the Tyrant’s fall the idea was still alive, barely so, but still breathing in spite of the abuse it suffered from being represented by the Tyrant for so long. Think of Iraq, the idea implicit in the name, I mean…think of it as a basket of snakes, lifting the lid of which runs the risk of releasing deadly venom into a room full of people. That was the state of the idea on the eve of his fall. And yet still it was there, as a basket, with a lid on it, and in theory at least one could manage those snakes artfully, so as to orchestrate their return into the basket.”
“Not their destruction…but their return to the basket.”
“Those snakes are who we are, son. You, me, and all those people in two hundred sixty-eight militias out there,” he said with a wave of his hand in the general direction of the outdoors. “Ours has always been the culture of the tomb and the cleansing of the dead and the concealment of women. Politics was the art of returning us to the fold, to the ba
sket, a good thing. What actually transpired, and what your research has underlined, was our rejection of the basket. We have thrown it away…,” he said in an exasperated and tired tone of voice, “torn it to shreds.”
“And Iraq?”
“It has turned into a question for itself.”
Abu Muntassir
Had the man said “Abu Ahmed,” I would have paid no attention. But he yelled, “Abu Muntassir, more tea! Hurry up!”
I had been summoned to report to our army’s central headquarters building in eastern Baghdad. We were a group of about a dozen or so experienced comrades, skilled in different things, milling about in an anteroom adjoining the interview room, where high-ranking officers of our army were selecting candidates to serve on the detail that would guard the Tyrant following his transfer into Iraqi custody. Abu Muntassir’s job was the lowliest imaginable, making tea, gallons of it, which he both brewed and served, shuffling back and forth between his kettles and the officers shouting at him.
Muntassir, Victorious, is a unique name among us Shiʻa, especially after the fall of the Tyrant, because it could be taken to simply mean what it says, or, in the case of Muntassir’s father, it could be taken to be an identification with the goals of the eight-year-long war against Iran, which we had all been happy to identify with under the Tyrant. Things had now changed, and the name Muntassir, like Umar, was a liability, not only because there were Iranian agents everywhere, but also because some of our own could turn nasty at the idea that Iraq had triumphed over an Islamic Republic of the Shiʻa.
I turned to the tea maker and asked if he used to have a soft drinks stand on the Karbala-Najaf road, and a son a few years older than myself. He confirmed both things, delighted that someone would know who he was, and added that his son had been killed in 2003. I told him that not only was Muntassir my friend but I was with him when he died. We embraced warmly, tears welling up in his eyes.
When we separated, still holding each other by the shoulders, he lifted a heavily lined and pockmarked face, pain-filled and unashamedly ignorant, the face of human goodness, I thought, now all lit up by his smile and sparkling eyes glistening with tears at meeting a friend of his son’s. I asked him what he was doing here and when he had joined our army. He replied that he had done so shortly after the death of his son nearly two years ago.
“Why?” I asked, astounded that a man so advanced in years would even consider, much less be accepted for, membership. “To avenge the spilled blood of my son,” he answered, referring, of course, to the House of Hakim, whose men had repulsed our ill-advised assault on their headquarters in the Shrine in Karbala, leading to the death of Muntassir.
We talked about Muntassir, how he died—I hid the worst of it—the great admiration he had for his father, the black boots that he treasured—and, yes, he did show up at the recruiting office wearing them—his patriotism, his spirit of sacrifice, the consideration he would show toward others, especially his comrades in arms; above all we talked of his love of Iraq, something I soon gathered Muntassir absorbed from his father; it was not an abstract, theoretical kind of love, but one that attached itself to a particular street here, the grocer’s shop there, his neighborhood, and even the marshes region in the south, which the Tyrant had drained. He talked about the plants Muntassir grew up with, down to the palm grove a short walk away from their old house (now reduced to rubble), and the animals—Muntassir kept a dog, which his father had to hide from the neighbors because they considered dogs unclean. Then it dawned upon me that I needed to give Abu Muntassir the black boots his son had bequeathed to me. I would be returning them to their original owner, to remember his son by. Of course he would not accept at first, saying his son’s wishes were that they pass on to me, anyway he was long past fighting age, and did I know they had always been uncomfortable, causing foot sores…all excuses, because I could see that he was delighted by the idea.
I insisted that Muntassir had given me the boots not as a gift but as a matter of trust—a lie, but a harmless one—that he had specifically asked me to give them to his father should our paths cross, that anyway my work had turned me into a kind of nomad who could not afford to travel with excess baggage of any kind, my life having become one of hopping from city to city, and from house to house, and that under these complicated circumstances he would in fact be doing me a favor by accepting the boots, which would in turn fulfill my obligation to his son.
After that, he could only thank me, promising that he would let his sister and her family and the Sheikh of his local mosque know, and that it was his and his son’s wish that the boots be returned to me upon his passing away. I thanked him, and said I felt doubly honored, first by his son for giving me the boots, and now by him for willing them back to me.
My interview with the selection committee over—it settled my assignment to Saddam’s personal guard detail—I asked Abu Muntassir to wait while I bolted off to my lodgings to collect the boots and dash back; he was there waiting for me when I returned, seated now on the concrete steps leading into the decrepit concrete-block building that served as our offices in Sadr City, the interviewing having finished and all work for the day ended.
—
A few weeks later, I thought I would surprise Abu Muntassir at work. I was in the neighborhood, under no obligation to anyone; it just seemed like a nice thing to do. But he was not there. A barefooted young lad in torn and filthy trousers was making the tea instead, using the same kettles and teacups Abu Muntassir had been using.
I asked after Abu Muntassir, and was told he had gone for a drive two Fridays ago in a twenty-year-old Czech Skoda with his sister and her two small girls; they went for the day to Najaf to pray in the Shrine of the Imam and then picnic with the children in the courtyard. On the way back he ran into a U.S. Army checkpoint. In broad daylight, sunlight glinting off the windshield of their car, he must not have seen the checkpoint soon enough, or more than likely he did not understand—no one did—the system of hand signals and flashing lights invented by the Occupier to order Iraqi vehicles to pull over. The soldiers, marines from Texas younger than myself, opened fire with heavy machine guns, convinced they were being attacked by a suicide bomber (the state of the ancient vehicle did not help matters, old cars being more expendable for suicide bombers than new). The Skoda, which by itself was a death trap, lurched off to the side, hit a concrete barrier, and burst instantly into a ball of fire. The identities of the bodies were tracked down from the car’s number plate. An American force of several Humvees duly showed up at Abu Muntassir’s sister’s house to offer condolences, and a wad of dollars in cash, which, to our shame, the husband of Abu Muntassir’s sister accepted.
Haider
In the end it was Haider who sought me out. In three years, he had aged unnaturally; you could see it in the lines on his face.
He fell upon me, hugging and kissing both cheeks. I reciprocated, tears welling, until several minutes later we found ourselves with arms outstretched, holding one another firmly by the shoulders. I said, “God, how I have missed you. Where have you been? Why were you avoiding me?”
He looked at me softly, the aging falling away just for a moment, and said, “I couldn’t…see you, I mean.”
“Couldn’t see me? My dear Haider, not me…We have walked through fire together.”
“I know, my friend, I know. That is why I felt so guilty, you standing up for me the way you did at that wretched meeting…May God cast that man’s soul into the everlasting fire.”
He couldn’t even bring himself to name his father. “But of course I would,” I said; “what did you think…”
“I knew what you would do. That is not it. I was…how can I say it…ashamed of your judgment, unspoken no doubt. We know one another only too well,” he said with a small laugh.
The tears ran down my cheeks, and I put my arms around him, as sorry at that moment for the man I was as he.
Later that evening, after a heavy meal in a kebab kiosk near his house
, we turned to politics. I mentioned the cleansing of Sunni neighborhoods that was going on in Baghdad, and the “disgraceful gossip” surrounding his name, which, I said, I did my utmost to repudiate at every opportunity.
“What gossip are you referring to?” he asked me.
“People are exchanging stories about you terrorizing neighborhoods and torturing Sunni prisoners with an electric drill.”
I didn’t get the angry dismissal of the rumor that I expected.
“I make no apologies, and you shouldn’t either, my friend, not on my behalf. The public good demands from us terrible things.”
“Haider, I don’t understand…these are fellow Iraqis we are talking about! Most of them are innocent of the bombings and killings being done in their name.”
“The days of lamentation and breast beating have gone. Our innocence is gone. We Shiʻa are too often short of steel to stiffen our resolve. But the circumstances are changing us.
“We are Shiʻa now, first and foremost!” he said, raising his voice. “Then Iraqi, and only after that Arab! All is the politics of life and death now…We must act, as our enemies have always acted, with warlike fervor and force. The struggle over who is to rule is a bloody one. There are no two ways about it. Two communities are at war with one another. The choice not to take sides, to shed crocodile tears over the resort to violence, is today the unethical choice; dare I even say it, the seditious choice. Would you have us make a pact with the powers of darkness?”
“But we will lose such a fight, my dear friend,” I said loudly, throwing my hands in the air. “Everyone will lose…There has to be a plan, a moral underpinning that rules our actions. Surely there are laws to which we are not indifferent…There is a constitution, which—”
“Which means nothing,” he interrupted equally vigorously, “mere paper and words, if the very core of who you are is under attack. When we joined the Sayyid’s army, we washed our hands of those laws you talk about. We obey a higher law now. Anyway, if there are laws and a constitution, where is the state to uphold them? Do laws not require violence to uphold? If there is no state, what are we to do…Say it…Why do you hesitate?…I will say it for you: take the law into our own hands, carry out the violence ourselves, in self-defense if you prefer to put it that way.”