Once things had quietened down in Lebanon, Hadi returned to Beirut, where he found himself forced into premature retirement. His absence from Iraq meant that his son Jawad was responsible for overseeing his properties in Baghdad, with which he provided an income for the family in Beirut, while Rushdi remained in charge of the family’s overseas assets. Hadi yielded grudgingly to the new generation. He knew he was fighting a losing battle, and that he had lost much of his standing as the all-powerful head of the family.
Neither Rushdi nor Bibi would let him forget his Dolphin Square mistake, and they dismissed any plans he might have with respect to real estate or agriculture. Stock markets and speculation were the way forward, Rushdi argued – things his old-fashioned father didn’t know anything about. Bibi’s comments were equally disparaging: ‘Hadi, you’re too old, what do you know? The children are more capable than you are; Iraq is gone.’ She resolutely confined his achievements to the past.
Bibi remained angry, bitter and resentful about what had happened to her family. She wanted to forget about her life in Iraq, unlike some of her sons and her husband, who yearned for what they had lost. It took the close encounter with death which the turbaned Indian clairvoyant in Cairo had predicted many years earlier to make her long for home. One day in late 1963 she collapsed at home and had to be rushed to hospital. A perforated ulcer was causing severe internal bleeding, but the doctors could not immediately locate the bleeding artery, and Bibi fell into a critical state as her blood pressure plummeted. For a time she was on the brink of death, and Hadi, Rushdi, Thamina and Talal prayed frantically for her. When she recovered, they appreciated just how precious she was to them, just as she realized how important her family and her homeland were to her.
35
Of Carpets and New Blood
The Emergence of New Patterns
(1967)
IN 1967 THE family moved to a building in the neighbourhood of Bir Hassan, in south Beirut, which enjoyed a sparkling view of the sea. Their new home was a pristine modernist four-storey building, which they called simply ‘the Building’. Made of stone and concrete, it was understated on the outside and spacious on the inside. The exterior stone was an unusual reddish-brown colour, reflecting the red of the surrounding earth. Two large palm trees flanked the entrance, an oblique reference to Iraq as they were not native to Lebanon.
Although the family still retained its Iraqi identity, Lebanon had pervaded it permanently. Bibi and Hadi now had several half-Lebanese grandchildren – Ali, Reem, Peri, Sarah, Bashar and Feisal – the offspring of Talal and Hazem. These children’s francophone and Francophile affectations and interests, owing to Lebanon’s historical and cultural links with France, contrasted with the distinctly anglophone Baghdad-born older grandchildren. Even their Arabic dialects were different, with the older grandchildren speaking in more guttural Iraqi tones, whereas the younger ones had a softer Lebanese speech pattern.
But it was the law of Bibi that dominated the Building, and for all her love of Lebanon she still hailed from another land. Dogs were not allowed, because she didn’t like them, and could always use the excuse that they were considered dirty animals in Islam. Cats were disdainfully tolerated, as Rushdi’s children Hussein, Nadia and Muhammad were obsessed with them, so long as Bibi didn’t have to see them. Following his grandmother’s dictum to a ‘T’, Salem, Jawad’s youngest son, bought a goat as a substitute for a dog. For the children who were born in Lebanon, Iraq and the family’s life there acquired a mythical status. This was personified by Hadi’s mysterious and dignified aura. He never talked about Iraq, especially not to his son Rushdi. His was a silent lament, expressed through small sighs and muted inhalations between sips of tea.
Not long after the family had settled into the Building, Khalil, the Palestinian doorman of the Kazan building who Bibi was very fond of, moved his family to Bir Hassan, followed by two brothers and a cousin. The Eritrean maids Hidat, Betahon, Pitcher and Rishan dominated the corridors and stairwells in their starched white aprons as they chattered in high-pitched Amharic. Exiles from their war-torn homeland, they were fiercely honest and loyal, yet also stubborn and volatile, often shouting back when aggrieved and locking themselves in their rooms in protest. Some of them had crucifix tattoos on their faces, a common practice among Ethiopian and Eritrean women. They were supported by a team of local dailies. Finally there were the Egyptian and Sudanese cooks, who ruled the kitchens and found great favour with the family by recreating the dishes of their homeland, in particular kubbat hamud (meatball and rice stew with turnips), sabzi (green stew with fenugreek) and of course the much-loved fesanjoon.
Each floor of the building vibrated with a different variety of music. The pop songs of the Beatles and the Doobie Brothers competed with Bibi and Hassan’s classical Arabic music from their quarters on the third floor, while Sudanese music reverberated from the kitchen and Eritrean folk tunes wafted with the fragrance of incense from the maids’ rooms.
Bibi still adhered to a strict social code when it came to the women in her family. By the mid-1960s she was terrorizing her adolescent granddaughters Nadia, Kuku and Zina in Beirut with her judgements on their behaviour. It seemed as if her social points of reference had become stuck in the Baghdad she had left years earlier. She often used antiquated Iraqi terms which sounded faintly comical to her granddaughters, although they would never have dared to laugh to her face. When miniskirts came into fashion in 1965, the girls embraced them enthusiastically, shopping in fashionable Hamra Street with its growing selection of prêt-a-porter boutiques. However, without fail Bibi would reprimand them whenever she saw them in short skirts. She didn’t exactly forbid them from wearing them, but would simply tell them they looked like prostitutes. She was equally horrified to discover that her granddaughters paraded along the seafront in swimming suits – or, she described it, ‘naked for the world to see’. She would loudly lament her misfortune at having such slovenly relatives, conveniently forgetting the disapproval she herself had incurred when she had decided to throw off her abaya and wear short sleeves decades earlier. For their part, Raifa’s daughter Zina and her cousin Nadia felt a combination of outrage and shame towards their grandmother. Nadia dealt with Bibi’s criticisms with humour, concocting images of her in a miniskirt – which would not have been a pretty sight.
Bibi at a party in Beirut in the 1960s.
Conservative by nature, Bibi adhered to a self-formulated set of rules and customs. She held herself to be above reproach, and expected compliance from her tribe. Her view of women had not changed since the days when her own daughters had been young, and she may have felt pressured to preserve her granddaughters’ virtue in a society that wasn’t her own. Regardless of the freedoms the younger generation of women was increasingly able to enjoy, including access to education and careers, Bibi understood a woman’s role to be primarily that of wife and mother. For her, a single woman beyond a certain age was not only socially undesirable but a serious burden.
As Hadi’s mother Khadja had done so many years earlier, Bibi held court in her sitting room, an idiosyncratic and ageing woman with a penchant for silk dressing gowns and high-heeled mules. She seemed unaware that her criticisms might be destroying her granddaughters’ self-confidence. Although she could not force them to change their clothes when they visited her, she managed to instil in them a sense of difference, marking them apart from their friends, who didn’t have to face such harsh judgements from their families. The natural challenges of adolescence were complicated for the girls by a deeper sense of alienation, that of exile and of having lost their original identity. In time, some of these girls grew up with conflicting identities, a part of them remaining deeply entrenched in their family and its experience of loss, another part rebelling against this legacy as they tried to make sense of the world.
In the wake of the 1958 revolution, the family came to view itself increasingly not just as exiles, but as being at odds with the most popular political trend in the
region: Nasser and Arab nationalism. Nevertheless, they remained intently engaged with the latest developments.
Their most immediate access to the political opinions of the common people was provided by their Beiruti drivers. Bibi’s chauffeur Shehab al-Din al-Arab may not have been as grand as his name (there was a murky halo of suspicion around his character and his past), but that did not diminish her fondness for him. Shehab came every day after her siesta and drove her to the seafront, where she would go for a walk along the promenade, the Corniche. His younger brother Nabih became Rushdi’s chauffeur, and a popular hit with the grandchildren. He had a great fondness for Johnny Walker Black Label, and the gift of a bottle or two always went a long way in securing his good will. A colourful figure in his early thirties, he had a shameless appetite for sex and women. He often shocked the girls by showing them pornographic photographs while he was driving. They found his lewdness disgusting, but were secretly thrilled that he seemed to be treating them like adults (unlike Bibi). Nadia rather enjoyed these incidents; they were her way of resisting her overbearing father and grandmother.
The radio in Rushdi’s midnight-blue Oldsmobile became a political battleground. In the morning, Nabih drove Rushdi and his son Muhammad to work and to school. Father and son listened to the BBC World Service, the Voice of America or Israel Radio’s Arabic-language station. The tone of the reports was restrained and poised. In the afternoons, the ambience in the car was entirely transformed when Nabih picked up Muhammad alone. By then the radio would have been retuned to Sawt al-Arab from Cairo, Nabih’s favourite station and the complete opposite of the BBC, noisy and unstructured. It was the station that Muhammad’s young uncle Ahmad had listened to at school when he wanted news of home.
When the 1967 Arab–Israeli six-day war broke out, the presenters of Sawt al-Arab strove to outdo each other with their exaggerations. At the precise moment that the Israeli air force had destroyed its Egyptian counterpart, Sawt al-Arab was declaring victory for Egypt, claiming that the Egyptian air force had destroyed the Israeli planes amongst a host of other fictional triumphs. Two days later the Israeli military captured the Golan Heights in Syria, the West Bank in Jordan, the Sinai desert, the Suez Canal, and was within close proximity of Cairo. Egypt had lost nearly all of its military equipment, and thousands lay dead or wounded. The war represented an overwhelming humiliation for the Arabs. Nasser’s lies to the people were exposed, and a feeling of dismay grew among the millions of listeners to Sawt al-Arab. It was the beginning of the end of Nasser’s influence and the dominance of Arab nationalism.
The Chalabis kept an open house, and their most colourful visitor was undoubtedly Hadji Abbas Faili, the most successful carpet merchant in Baghdad. Hadji Abbas had taken over the family business from his equally brilliant uncle several years earlier, and both nephew and uncle had enjoyed a longstanding relationship with Hadi that dated back to the thirties. They had supplied a large percentage of the precious Persian carpets he had collected over the years. On moving to Lebanon Hadi had arranged for many of these to be smuggled out of Iraq overland, through the Syrian plain and the mountains to Beirut. A selection of other valuables, such as his collection of silver sculptures, crystal and porcelain, had been moved in a similar way, in small batches discreetly over time, but everything else remained in Iraq.
Hadji Abbas was a member of the Faili Shi’a Kurdish community of Baghdad, who were distinctly woven into the fabric of the city, dominating the markets in the old quarter, and who would be among Saddam’s worst victims in the years to come. A small, dark, wiry man with a large nose and big ears, Hadji Abbas was invariably dressed in a beige or grey suit without a tie. He would always arrive at the Building without warning, causing a great commotion as he pulled up outside the entrance. Reaching the third floor, he would call out loudly: ‘Chalabi, I have new carpets to show you!’ This announcement would be followed by an extended lunch, with all the family gathering around to listen to his stories.
Hadji Abbas had travelled extensively in the pursuit of his business. He had visited Malta before the outbreak of the Second World War, seeking out British admirals as potential buyers for his luxurious goods, but had been unimpressed by their parsimony. On one occasion, one of a pair of sixteenth-century Shah Abbas gold-embroidered carpets fell into his hands. It was regal beyond imagination, and inspired him to write a letter to the Queen of England herself, proposing that she buy it. Hadji Abbas was scandalized when he received a letter from Buckingham Palace stating that there was no budget to buy such an expensive item at that moment. It shattered all his preconceptions about the British monarchy.
He told a story of how he had once had an ulcer operation in London while he was visiting a relative. Afterwards, he asked his nephew to get him a tasty, oily dish from an Iraqi restaurant on the Fulham Road. The nephew smuggled it onto the ward under his coat, and when the plump matron found out and started berating him, Hadji Abbas just screamed at her: ‘Get out, you buffalo!’ These were four of the fifteen words he knew in English.
The family elders would hungrily ask him for news from Baghdad and he obliged in his street Baghdadi, which they hadn’t heard spoken by anyone else in years. Rushdi was particularly fascinated by Hadji Abbas’s tales, although he was horrified by his table manners: he dug directly into the dishes with his fork, ignoring the interim step of his plate.
After lunch Hadji Abbas would walk out onto the balcony and call down to his workers to start unloading his latest goods. Carpet after precious carpet was unfolded in the drawing room before the haggling started. Bibi was entirely ignorant about carpets, but was nevertheless prepared to chip in with her opinions, prompting Hadji Abbas to turn from Hadi to her and ask, ‘Madam, when are you going out today, so I can do my job properly?’ Once his business was concluded he would often leave his carpets at the Building for months, giving Hadi the opportunity to ponder them before he appeared again.
Hadi had always loved carpets. He had grown up in a culture that was heavily influenced by Persia, where carpets were greatly valued. Carpets created spaces, not simply as objects on the floor, but around which people lived and upon which they prayed, ate and slept. For Hadi, they were also a manifestation of a spiritual beauty inspired by nature, which he loved, whether they had ornate floral sequences or medallions that spread out from the centre; whether they were Isfahanis, Tabrizis or Serafians with their intricate pictorial depictions of fables in many colours. Carpets were an expression of creativity that Hadi cherished; unable to create them himself, the next best thing was to collect them, discovering their origins and assessing their delicateness according to the number of stitches per square centimetre. Besides being an integral part of his culture, they were also a measure of his success, as he collected valuable and rare specimens.
There were other, less agreeable, aspects of life in the Building which brought back memories of Iraq. In 1966 Hadi’s Lebanese friend Kamil Muruwa was assassinated. Muruwa was a dynamic Shi’a writer from south Lebanon who had worked his way up through the ranks of Lebanese journalism and founded his own newspaper, al-Hayat, in 1946. A forthright critic of Jamal Abdul Nasser, he was shot dead while sitting at his desk. All fingers pointed to Nasser, who had resented Muruwa’s censure. There was much anger and rage in the Building at the murder, which stirred up painful memories of the 1958 coup and Nasser’s role in it.
There was other tragic news in 1966. A few months after returning from the Hajj and visiting Bibi and Hadi in Beirut, Ni’mati died of kidney failure. Hassan and Jawad buried him in Najaf, near other members of the family. When Hassan broke the news to him over the phone, Hadi was devastated. He had known Ni’mati since he had been fifteen and Ni’mati eleven, and remembered how Ni’mati had become separated from his parents at the shrine. Now Hadi was the one who was inconsolably lost.
36
The Ruins of Kufa
A Coup and a Birth
(1968–1972)
THE BA’ATH COUP of 1968 followed a similar
pattern to the previous ones, with the use of the military to seize power in Baghdad at the end of July 1968. In the past five years the Ba’ath Party had undergone restructuring, recruiting high-ranking Iraqi Army officers and building up its intelligence wing, which under Saddam would develop into a brutal, repressive organization. The use of violence under this regime would reach an unprecedented level, with access to power limited to an ever-shrinking circle of patronage that was based on mistrust and exclusivity, limited to members of Saddam’s tribe in Tikrit. A wall rose around the country, making Iraq darker and even more inaccessible to the rest of the world, although because of its oil wealth it could continue to exert its weight. After Jawad, unable to tolerate the pressures of the new regime, finally left Iraq, Hassan had prided himself on the fact that, as the only family member remaining in Baghdad, he was representing the Chalabis and perpetuating their presence in their homeland. But within a few months it was clear that he too could no longer stay.
In 1967 Hassan had joined a group of intellectuals who wanted to found a modern secular university in the ancient city of Kufa. An important centre for Arabic literature, theology and philology in the ninth and tenth centuries, Kufa was also the birthplace of the renowned Kufic script. There was much enthusiasm for the project, and its supporters included prominent Shi’a figures from afar such as Sayyid Musa al-Sadr, a liberal Iranian cleric of Lebanese origins, and a considerable number of the Iraqi intelligentsia. When the Ba’ath Party took over the government in 1968, the society came under attack and one of its members, Kadhim Shubbar, was arrested. It transpired that the secret police had been closely following its activities, convinced that it was merely a front for Shi’a political activity. In early 1969 the Ministry of the Interior issued an order closing down the society completely, condemning it as a Shi’a Iranian project run by agents and spies. The same old theme had resurfaced, with the Sunni ruling elite accusing the Shi’a of unpatriotic conspiracies. News spread that Shubbar had been tortured, but had refused to denounce his colleagues.
Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family Page 36