by Kanan Makiya
“Are you saying we can do anything we want, and conversely, that anything that is done to us is equally legitimate? What will bring it all to an end? Violence never put an end to itself.”
“Not for nothing did our Sayyid call us the Army of the Awaited One. We are soldiers with a mission. Our mission is guided by the idea of the Return of the Imam; His realm is Justice. The signs of His Coming are everywhere. Whatever we do under such circumstances entails risk. But risk does not mean we should hesitate, and prevaricate, in the fear that violence might lead to excesses on our part. I embrace gladly the risk that violence entails, and accept the judgment and legitimacy for my actions that only violence can deliver.”
“You are saying that violence by itself can succeed in resolving what is good and right.”
“The question is not what is good and right—I take it you and I have no disagreement on that—but whether my kind of violence is capable of resolving to our favor the life-and-death struggle now raging in this land. To that question, I do not yet have an answer. Time will tell. But I do know that my actions today, and yours, will decide tomorrow. The Shiʻa are remaking who they are through struggle. To win is to be reborn free, rid of the centuries of servility that hung around our necks like a millstone; we are on the cusp of standing proud of who we are, no longer wailing and beating our chests like old women at a funeral. At times such as these, good men like you carry little weight, my dear friend. Only deeds and the relationship of forces on the ground count.”
“Listen to you speak, Haider! Violence takes away as much as it creates, and what it creates is sometimes worse than what is lost; it breeds monsters; it doesn’t make heroes.” I was raising my voice now, and in the back of my mind I could feel Grandfather listening. “You speak of resolving matters in our favor. Who is this ‘our’ you talk about? We will end up like the snake that eats its own tail. How can you win against the other half of your own self? Did we not fight side by side with Sunnis, when we fought against the Occupier in Najaf two years ago? Did they not stand by us then?”
“That was then, when we had hatred of the Occupier in common. Now we need to be reborn as Shiʻa, my friend,” Haider replied, lowering his voice but not softening its intent, “if we are to live as Iraqis tomorrow. With the fall of the Tyrant, and the withdrawal of the Occupier, we Shiʻa discovered the meaning of our presence on this earth, and the direction we must take to fulfill the promise implicit in the Return of the Imam. Our fight is to realize that meaning; it has less and less to do with the Occupier; necessarily, it is a fight among Iraqis, started by our enemies, haters of the Shiʻa; we have no choice but to pursue it to the bitter end. We do not have the luxury to be squeamish or make errors and experiment with talk and diplomacy. Victory will turn our audacity into a new and just order. Then, when it is all ended, I promise you, my friend, you will find me pushing myself to the front of the line, to stand before Him, and be judged for the terror I waged in His name.”
There was no moving him. His words were cast in cement. Gone were the questions and uncertainties previously entertained, as when he met that crazy preacher who had carried the ideas of Sayyid Sadiq to such ridiculous extremes.
“So tell me, my friend, you sought me out; you know me; you must have known the things I would say…What is it you want of me?”
“I missed you…I need you.”
Haider and Muntassir
“I need you,” he had said. The tears come to my eyes when I remember those three words. I longed to be there for him, but another part of me realized that to wean him of impulses grown so outsized was nigh on impossible. Where had they come from, these demons that had wreaked such damage upon my friend? Were they in his head in the shape of new ideas, or in the act of killing over and over again? War not only kills, I thought, lying in bed; it is disfiguring. Haider had not just aged; he had gone to seed. I could see it in his eyes; they had turned cold and forbidding. The conflict with his father had something to do with it. He had been devastated by his role in the slaughter of his friends in the orchard. He had healed by turning hard on the outside, while remaining a man at war with himself on the inside. Candor was his saving grace. If he had turned into a cauldron of turbulent emotions, he had the presence of mind to know that he too had betrayed. His betrayal had exiled him, leaving him with a hole in the place where his heart had been. It was not entirely his father’s fault that Najmaldin had accompanied him back to Iraq. Nor was it so outrageous that Abu Haider had married another woman during his years of exile in Tehran. Had not his father tried to reach out to him when he first came back? And had not the son punished the father by joining “the enemy,” so to speak, our army, a huge embarrassment for a Brigades Commander of the House of Hakim?
Betrayal brooks little interrogation to he who lives with it. What better way of living with it than to continue to do what you do best—be a warrior, in Haider’s case—and do it with a tremendous excess of zeal, focusing like a laser beam on the task at hand, never considering that the future will be forever altered because of it. With zeal in killing as a line of work is bound to come a measure of success, the measure being how much territory one has captured, or how well cleansed a particular neighborhood has become of its former inhabitants, not to mention your continuing to hold that territory and setting up a whole variety of “protection” rackets (on movement, goods, security) to keep your men and your immediate superiors happy, their palms well greased.
But this kind of success came at a price: Haider had turned arrogant, quick to take offense, often at a wholly imagined slight, like the time he knocked one of his men down to the floor in front of me for not giving the proper salute, when it was clear that the poor soldier had not even realized Haider was in the room. Haider was becoming someone for whom the differences between flattery and the truth were impossible to pin down. He could no longer hold friendships, much less make new ones; at least he tried to make an exception in my case.
I could not help but compare Haider with Muntassir. Both were made of the stuff that the Tyrant had left behind; they carried in their hearts that same exaggerated legacy of pain and idealized victimhood; not to mention they were both soldiers of the army that was now focused on doing the exaggerating: my very own Army of the Awaited One.
We were all young Iraqi males who embarked upon our journey to the new world with no occupation other than to become followers of our Sayyid, he who hated the sport Haider excelled in: football. Why did our leader hate such things? Because his father, Sayyid Sadiq, consumed with fury at the Houses of Hakim and Khoei, had so decreed. No other reason.
Haider had survived because he knew how to adapt to every twist and turn of his rapidly changing times. His soul paid the price for it, not by dying but by living; it was the cost of living in dark times. Muntassir, by contrast, the Victorious One, died horribly, writhing in pain, and yet fundamentally at peace with himself, the same predictable and sociable soul that he had always been. An all-around “good man” who could live on dreams, Mother would have said, something Haider was incapable of. Muntassir’s strength lay in his character, his moral nature, you might say, and not in how quick he was to grasp the relativity and transience of all things.
No doubt I exaggerate Muntassir’s virtues, seeing in him a lost ideal of an equally lost world that perhaps even never existed. It doesn’t matter. Muntassir is what I needed him to be.
Muntassir would never have survived the new Iraq even if he had emerged unscathed from the assault on the Shrine in Karbala. Something else would have felled him. His nature was mysteriously at odds with his times. Between the death of the one and the meteoric rise of the other lay the distance a whole generation of young men had traveled since the fall of the Tyrant.
—
Haider, now a true solitary, insisted I move into his house in Baghdad. He would not take no for an answer. I began to feel he was forcing me upon himself, perhaps throwing himself a lifeline because he sensed he was drowning. He had no one left w
ho loved him except his mother, and she was out of reach in Najaf, a city too dangerous for him to be seen in. In those days I still thought I could help him. But I was wrong.
The house that was our home for the next three months, until the day after the hanging, when I collected my stuff and left without even saying goodbye, had been “liberated” from a former officer of Saddam Hussein’s secret police. Or so Haider said. They must have lived like pigs. Its front door opened onto an alley with an open gutter for sewage running down the middle of it. But the slant of the concrete trough was too slight. The sewage wouldn’t move along unless you hosed it downstream, pushing it along to the next group of houses at least twice a day. Otherwise the stench was too unbearable. That passed for the municipal system of waste disposal in my neighborhood, and I daresay it is still like that today.
Directly above the gutter, and bridging the two sides of the alley, was a tangle a meter deep of electrical wires sagging dangerously in the middle directly over the flowing sewage. Everyone was of course pilfering his electricity from someone else; it was impossible for even the most skilled electrician to tell who was stealing from whom and who was paying for what. Not that it made much difference when you had less than two and a half hours of electricity a day, compared with five times that in the days of the Tyrant. Haider had installed a generator to make up the difference, the fuel of which was “donated” as alms to “the Sayyid” by the petrol station two streets over.
My private room, which overlooked the alley and its tangle of wires, had two large dead cockroaches on the floor when I first moved in, and one flitting about when I flipped back the covers on the mattress. Haider chose, for “security reasons,” to sleep in a room toward the rear of the house, close to the outdoor toilet, which spewed a smell so foul that no amount of disinfectant could dispel it. In Baghdad, he had become, it seemed, much more acquainted with the seamy side of life than he had been in Najaf. At night, when I wanted to wash my face before going to bed, more often than not the tap wouldn’t run, because, Haider pointed out in a rare flash of humor, there was not enough water to go around in Mesopotamia, the land of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the two greatest rivers of antiquity.
Upstairs, through Haider’s room, was the armory, which he kept padlocked, the key always hanging on a chain around his neck. It contained a dozen light automatic rifles, mostly Kalashnikovs; three wooden crates of hand grenades; a rocket launcher with a two-case supply of rockets; and a heavy-duty machine gun fitted out for rapid assembly on a pickup truck and designed for service by a crew of three. But there, in pride of place, centered on the white wall facing the door, hung his Dragunov sniper rifle, which he had operated, and I had spotted for, during the Battle of Najaf in 2004. The room, like a polished idol, stood apart from the rest of the house; it was spotlessly clean and free of dust, the weapons gleaming and well oiled, all neatly arranged in purpose-built racks on the walls.
Baghdad
There were no children on the streets in the fall and winter of 2006, when I moved into Haider’s house; there would have been trees, but they had been cut down during real estate booms that eliminated the city’s parks and gardens of once beautiful upper-middle-class homes. You told the seasons apart by the temperature—whether or not it was possible to fry an egg on the car’s hood—or by the kinds of fruits and vegetables found in shops, because there were no more orchards. The prices of everything, not just real estate, rose and fell precipitously, always rising higher than they had fallen, and they did so to the drumbeat of the violence to which the city was being subjected.
The Baghdad I finally settled into was a city of ordinary people turned even more ordinary because they were so afraid; ordinary people scurrying about in despair to get away from streets and public places; ordinary people suspicious of or indifferent to one another, wanting only to burrow themselves in their houses like moles going to ground; it was as if the city was in the early stages of being stricken by a mysterious plague: frightened, but not yet in total panic, a city of barely controlled chaos threatening to implode.
Gone was the desire to stand out and be different, to dress well and look handsome, to see and be seen at a restaurant. Gone was the desire to linger and stare, to window-shop and stroll, or to just sit in a café doing nothing but gaze…and be gazed at in return.
By the time I arrived in Baghdad, it had been broken up and radically segmented. Blast walls of concrete meant to keep bombers at bay, decorated at checkpoints with plastic flowers, made an appearance—the Occupier’s contribution to urban decor. Did the vast stretches of slums, the piles of uncollected garbage, the broken-down sewage and water delivery systems, the wretched street facades garishly painted in a newly discovered maintenance-free Chinese aluminum paint, did all of these things sit on top of the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid’s fabled city of antiquity? I wondered. Perhaps there was an underground city I was not aware of. Haider, a king astride the apathy that had leveled everyone else down, took it upon himself to dispel my misgivings by driving me around to show off the sights.
“Here are the Ceremonial Parade Grounds,” he would say; “there is the Unknown Soldier monument”; and then, when I asked him what was left of the architectural wonder of the perfectly symmetrical round city that Abu Ja‘far al-Mansur had founded in the eighth century, he took me to a roundabout and said, “See over there…that is Abu Ja‘far al-Mansur himself. What do you need his city for?”
The eighth-century Caliph had indeed been sculpted in exquisite detail, as though the artist and his model had needed multiple sittings to get everything right—the aquiline nose, a high and protruding brow that was noble-looking, the neatly trimmed beard without a hair out of place. He had been cast in bronze to become the man himself, in the flesh, as it were, frozen in place at the center of a roundabout. Of course, no one knew who the real Abu Ja‘far al-Mansur was, much less what he looked like. Still, he had been conjured up to grace traffic jams, his bronze skin turned blotchy with layers of dust impacted into mud, and dead flowers strewn in circles all around as though to decorate a tawdry idol.
Was this city of false memories the same as the one in which my father’s hero, the great Sufi mystic Hallaj, had roamed, preaching to thousands on its streets? Where was the square in which he was crucified? Where did the court that tried him sit? Or the palace that exonerated him? How far were these places from the square in which the great man himself was crucified? I don’t ask for precision, not even for anything that can be seen, just the evidence that someone cared: a rough sense of place, a marker in the ground maybe, saying this was one such place; over there was another. Perhaps then I can walk from marker to marker, and connect the city’s sorry present with its imagined past. But I can do none of those things. No one can, because no one knows.
—
We lived in the Cairo district of Baghdad, on the eastern side of the Tigris. Our all-Shiʻa neighborhood lies between the districts of Kadhimain, west of the Tigris, and Sadr City (previously called the City of the Revolution), the social base of our movement, to the east. Sadr City is not really a district but a twin city to Baghdad, numbering two million people; its size and location made it strategically important to the control of Baghdad. Our movement renamed it in 2003, just after our Sayyid led the million-strong march on Karbala, calling it the City of the Martyr Sadr, in honor of the father of our Sayyid, Sayyid Sadiq, who was gunned down by the Tyrant in 1999.
Haider’s house suited me fine because it was a few minutes’ walk to the University of Imam Ja‘far al-Sadiq at the head of Palestine Street, and a further short walk down Palestine Street would take you to Mustansirriyya University, named after the oldest university in Baghdad, established in the thirteenth century, whose library I often used. It is a short drive from there to the Shrine of the Imam Musa al-Kadhim, after whom the district of Kadhimain is named, by way of the Bridge of the Imams, scene of the stampede last year in which one thousand pilgrims fell to their deaths into the Tigris, fleeing rumors of a
suicide bomber in the Shrine of the Imam. The pressure of the one million or so pilgrims escaping the Shrine caused the bridge’s iron railings to give way. Some government imbecile had ordered the other end of the bridge closed because of a security alert, and there was nowhere for the crowd to go other than drop nine meters into the Tigris or be crushed to death on the bridge.
To get to this bridge from our house requires driving through the Sunni neighborhood of ʻAdhamiyah. The bridge connects the two oldest quarters of Baghdad, one Shiʻi, built around the Shrine of the Imam Musa al-Kadhim, and the other Sunni, built around the tomb of the Great Imam Abu Hanifa an-Nuʻman, a renowned scholar and founder of the Sunni school of Islamic jurisprudence in Iraq.
Haider’s dream was to conquer this Sunni quarter, ʻAdhamiyah, bastion of Arab nationalism in modern times, which is why he chose to live close to it in the Cairo district; he wanted men to say in future times that he was the one who had brought ‘Adhamiyah to its knees. He never realized this dream; the men of ‘Adhamiyah held firm throughout the civil war, walling out men like Haider with concrete, upon which they hung banners with slogans like “No Entry to Police,” “No Entry to Iranians,” “No Entry to Zoroastrians,” and “No Entry to Solaghis,” after the name of the minister of the interior from the House of Hakim who ran secret prisons torturing Sunnis and who was responsible for the order that closed the Bridge of the Imams. The banners were signed: “The People of ‘Adhamiyah.”