Return to the Marshes

by Gavin Young

  At flood-time, you see Marsh householders raising the level of their island floor with fresh rushes. You see them at other times weaving low barriers, perhaps 6 inches high round the buffalo-platforms that project from the rear of houses, ‘like,’ Gavin Maxwell wrote, ‘round after-decks of medieval galleons’. These are not so much to prevent the buffaloes and cows that share the family’s living space from escaping – buff aloes are far too lazy and spoiled to want to escape, and cows don’t like deep water – as to provide a useful rail to which one can tie up one’s canoe.

  *

  Presently, unsettled Semitic peoples – Akkadians, Aramaeans – came from the north and the deserts. The mixture of these Semites with the non-Semitic Sumerians produced what we know as ‘Babylonians’. But the buffalo-and fisher-people of the Marshes were not always left in peace. Centuries followed of shift and counter-shift in the power-play of the various states of Mesopotamia – of tooth and claw struggles between their rulers. Then the ‘Romans’ of the ancient East arrived: the ruthless Assyrians with their irresistible war-machine.

  Their blood-and-thunder dominion in the area disrupted a relatively peaceful period between about 1400 and 1000 BC in which the kings of the great powers, Egypt, Babylon, Assyria and the Hittite kingdom in the north, found it best to preserve a careful balance of power. In Babylon, the great King Hammurabi codified laws, built temples, reformed agriculture. But trouble was near. What had been described as the ‘barbarous and unspeakable cruelty of the Assyrians’ soon overwhelmed the area.

  Ashurnasirpal, Shalmaneser, Adadnirari, Tiglathpileser, Sennacherib, Ashurbanipal: the names of the Assyrian kings ring out like the reverberations of barbaric gongs. Sennacherib was the king who, more than any other, impinged on the Marsh Arabs. In his capital Nineveh, from 705 BC he proclaimed himself ‘the great king, the mighty king, king of the universe, king of Assyria, king of the four quarters (of the world)….’

  Soon, two of his lightning campaigns – his war-making ranged across the Middle and Near East from Egypt to southern Persia – shattered the peace of the Marshes. In his first campaign of 703 BC, ‘raging like a lion and storming like a tempest’ (his own words), he captured Babylon and his charioteers careered south in hot pursuit after the king, Merodachbaladan. The escaping king was lucky enough to reach the Marshes. There, he plunged into the reed-beds, and because the Madan rallied to his assistance, he was safely hidden. However disgruntled he may have felt, Sennacherib caused it to be recorded in his annals, ‘I hurried after him (the king) and sent my warriors into the midst of the swamps and marshes and they searched for him for five days, but his hiding place was not found.’

  Sennacherib did not, however, return to Nineveh empty-handed. He took 208,000 prisoners and mules, horses, cattle and sheep. ‘The people of Chaldea, the Aramaeans … who had not submitted to my yoke, I snatched away from their lands, made them carry baskets and mould bricks. I cut down the reed marshes which are in Chaldea, and had the men of the foe whom my hands had conquered drag their mighty reeds (to Assyria).’

  A later campaign, in 694 BC, took Sennacherib, still ‘raging like a lion’, to Elam or southern Persia on the Gulf (the ‘Bitter Sea’). To prepare for that expedition, he built ships on the Tigris at Nineveh. When they were ready his cohorts moved down in them to Bab-salimet, at the mouth of the Euphrates.

  ‘My brave warriors (Sennacherib recorded) who know no rest, I embarked in the ships, and provided supplies for the journey and straw for the horses, which I embarked with them. My warriors went down the Euphrates on the ships while I kept to the dry land at their side….’ A Marsh flood pinned him and his men in the ships for five days. Then, ‘the ships of my warriors reached the swamps at the mouth of the river, where the Euphrates empties its waters into the fearful sea.’

  After the Assyrians, came the Chaldeans and Medes who destroyed the Assyrian empire. Then came the neo-Babylonians, whose King Nebuchadnezzar defeated an intruding Egyptian Army in 605 BC. But by 539 BC Babylon was nearly finished. Cyrus the Great of Persia captured it. And after Cyrus came the Greeks. Alexander the Great passed through southeast Mesopotamia on his return from India to Ctesiphon. He died on the Tigris there, possibly from a fever picked up in the swamps. His admiral, Nearchos, established a port near Basra (which did not yet exist) not far from modern Khorramshahr. It was variously known as Alexandria, Antioch and Spasinou Charax. Much merchandise passed through it from India to Arabia. But no trace of it remains today.

  The single, most dramatic event in the history of the Near and Middle East, leave alone in the Marshes, was the coming of Islam. By that time, successive migrations of tribes from the Arabian desert ensured that, whether they were by religion Byzantine Christian or heathen, the peoples of southern Iraq were part of the Arab race.

  In AD 634, two years after the death of the Prophet Mohammed at Medinah, the dashing Muslim general Khalid bin Walid, appropriately nicknamed ‘the Sword of Islam’, appeared on the edge of the Euphrates delta with a force of 18,000 Arabian tribesmen. He was the Napoleon of the age. He stormed up to the oases of Iraq fresh from brilliant campaigns in north and central Arabia. So far Khalid’s newly Islamized warriors had seen little but desert and mountain. Now these lean, ascetic Arabs of the wilderness stared wide-eyed at what to them was a kind of Paradise. They had never set eyes on canals and greenness like this before, or waving corn, or such water. They were, after all, about to descend into a new cradle of civilization and the arts. For that is what this, by now Persian, province, governed by dihqans, or Persian district officers, had become. The new civilization had overlaid the older glories. Ur, Babylon, Nimrud and Nineveh of the Assyrians were by now nothing but shapeless mounds. And now even this new and apparently unshakeable power – the Sassanid empire of Persia – was to be swiftly robbed of its fairest acquisition.

  First, the wild-eyed fighters of Arabia dispersed a Persian army glittering with princes and nobles at the wells of Hafir on the desert’s edge. The Persian soldiers were said to have been bound together to prevent flight and so the battle became known as ‘The Battle of the Chains’. The warriors of Khalid bin Walid were soon racing their horses to the Euphrates and hell-for-leather across it through the edge of the reed-beds. The ultimatum Khalid gave out to the people of the region said, in effect: ‘Accept the faith and you are safe; otherwise pay tribute. If you refuse to do either, you have only yourself to blame. A people is already upon you, loving death as you love life.’

  Khalid’s ultimatum worked. The Marsh peoples and peasants were not molested; their lands remained theirs. The Christian tribes of the area agreed to pay tribute and were permitted to remain Christian without further interference. Next, however, the Muslim army suffered a set-back. In November AD 634, the Persian hero, Rustam, the brave and energetic administrator of a corrupt and crumbling empire, rallied his forces. He advanced across the Gharraf with elephants, ‘their howdas manned with warriors, like moving castles’. He unfurled the imperial banner of panther skins. And he defeated – almost annihilated – the Arabian army near Hirah, west of the Euphrates.

  All the same, the Persians were doomed. The Muslims rallied and defeated them at the battle of Boweib in AD 635. And soon, Rustam was killed at Qadisiyah and his Sassanid army routed for good. The Caliph Omar now decreed the founding of two new cities in the south: Basra and Kufa. Both were military bases. The houses in both cities were at first made of reeds; and in both the first mosques were built of reeds and clay, and then clay brick. Both places soon grew into major centres of the Islamic world. Omar named Kufa the capital of newly-conquered Iraq. Basra became the bustling half-way port of commerce between the eastern and western worlds.

  The local population welcomed the Arabian soldiers. The tribes of Mesopotamia were mostly Christian at that time and had not been well treated by the Persian Zoroastrians. They felt the Persians to be aliens. Now their ties with the Arabs of the desert, already strong, were reinforced. In the wake of victory, many more desert trib
es moved eagerly into the lush Mesopotamian plains. In the markets, and in the fields bordering the waterways and lagoons, these pure Arab camel-breeders from the Peninsula met the Marshmen, learned their ways, married into them, and gave back their new faith, Islam, in return.

  *

  Under Ali, the fourth Caliph, Kufa, Basra and the regions surrounding them again became the scene of conflict. Ali had moved his capital to Kufa from Medinah, after assuming the Caliphate. He was the Prophet Mohammed’s first cousin, and his son-in-law. But there were many who refused to recognize his accession, and these included the Prophet’s favourite and hot-tempered wife, Ayesha, and Zubair bin Awwam and Talha bin Abdullah, two of Mohammed’s companions. The three of them raised a tribal army in Basra and despite efforts by Ali, who was an affable man, to avoid a conflict, he was forced into battle. ‘The Battle of the Camel’ was joined between Ali’s tribal forces and those of his opponents in December AD 656. The formidable Ayesha became a rallying-point as she sat prominently in a camel-borne litter (hence the name of the battle) which was soon full of arrows like a pin-cushion. It was a tragic affair. The fighting was fierce and fratricidal: the Beni Rabia of Kufa fought the Beni Rabia of Basra, and other tribes were similarly riven. The noise of the armies coming together was ‘like that of washermen at the riverside’. By evening Talha and Zubair were dead. Ali brought down Ayesha, shrilly protesting, from her disabled camel and gently packed her off home to Medinah. Ali was magnanimous. He stayed a few days in Basra and had a large trench dug for the many dead. A small town named after Zubair exists to this day among acacia groves just outside Basra. After this first bloody fight between Muslims, the Marsh people must have returned to their lagoons more thoughtful men.

  Ali’s conflict with his Syrian-based Umayyad rivals for the Caliphate (which has been compared to the rift between Protestants and Catholics) continued until AD 661. Then this gentle and valiant man was assassinated on his way to the mosque at Kufa. He was buried at Nejef nearby and became a saint to the Shia Muslims.

  Ali represents to Muslims, and indeed to all Arabs, the sum of chivalry and virtue; he is the paragon about whom tomes of poems, proverbs and stories have been written. So, to only a slightly lesser extent, is his martyr son Hussein, who marched to Kufa with a pathetic band of 200 supporters to claim his dead father’s Caliphate from the Umayyad governor of Iraq, was surrounded at Kerbela by a much larger force and defeated and killed on the tenth day of Muharram AH 61 (10th October, AD 680). Abbas, another of Ali’s sons, lost both arms and then his life as he tried to fetch water for his brother Hussein’s doomed companions. To a Marsh Arab today, an oath in Abbas’ name is the most binding of all oaths. ‘B’il Abbas, by Abbas….’ you hear a man cry in a crowded reed mudhif, and you see the others nodding, as much as to say, ‘Oh well, that’s true enough, then’. The Arab rosary (the Sibha) is still used, either as ‘worry beads’ or to obtain Divine Guidance in this fashion: isolate a section of the beads and name them left to right ‘Allah, Mohammed, Ali, Hussein, Abu Jahl’. If the final bead coincides with one of the first four names all is well – go ahead with your plan: if the final bead falls to Abu Jahl, a contemporary of the Prophet but an enemy of Islam, call it off. Thesiger and I taught them another system and soon the Marsh echoed to young voices chanting

  ‘Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Mo! Catch a nigger by his toe.

  If he squeals let him go. O-U-T spells out so out you must go!’

  All Marsh Arabs are nominal Shias, although some pray irregularly and some younger men nowadays do not pray at all. The shrine cities of Kerbela, where Hussein is buried, and Nejef, are intensely revered places of pilgrimage and those who make it are called Zairs. You can see mahailas (big sailing-barges) on the Euphrates bearing the coffins of the faithful, Marsh Arabs among them, to those sacred resting-places.

  *

  These exciting and historically crucial events had proved almost fatal to the agricultural economy on which Iraq depends. The story of Mesopotamia is, after all, a story of irrigation. The early Sumerians’ skill in reclaiming land has been the wonder of irrigation experts ever since. Their dykes enclosed vast areas in which five towns and prosperous villages were settled below sea-level. The enclosed, reclaimed land was irrigated by means of openings in the dykes. But later these skilful works were undone. In the fifth century AD there was one of many periods of political confusion and administrative neglect. Towns and fields were flooded as ill-kept dykes crumbled away. Later mismanagement frustrated further attempts at reclamation. The destruction of one of the most sophisticated and skilful water-control systems ever conceived by man was carried yet another stage farther by the failure in the seventh century AD of a well-meaning Sassanian king. He mobilized every able-bodied man in a desperate rescue operation. He even publicly executed – by crucifixion – forty dyke-builders who had somehow failed to block a vital breach. All to no avail.

  In this dismal decline, the golden age of the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al Rashid (AD 786–809) in Baghdad represented a mere breathing space. This magnificent Arab ruler, a more glorious contemporary of Charlemagne, supervised an energetic programme to restore the dykes and canals of the lower Tigris and Euphrates. Eleven hundred years later, Sir William Willcocks was to agree with Harun, that by far the best way of re-irrigating those areas was by re-digging and re-opening the watercourses of the Babylonians. This, rather than embark on a whole new scheme, Harun’s governors proceeded to try to do. The result was successful and a further period of agricultural richness. Barley, wheat, rice, dates, sesame and sugar burgeoned across the land. It did not last. After Harun and his son, it was essentially downhill all the way. By AD 1000 the mightiness and magnificence of Harun’s empire had shrunk to a mere province, weakly and corruptly governed. In 1258 the Caliphate of Baghdad was extinguished for ever by the invasion of Hulagu, the grandson of Jenghis Khan, and his hordes of Mongol soldiers on shaggy ponies, who laid waste the ‘incomparable sacred city’. Hulagu made a macabre pyramid of the skulls of Baghdad’s poets, scholars and divines and turned Iraq into a governorate of the Mongol rulers in Iran. The superb irrigation system – the perfect network of dykes with which Harun had reclaimed tracts of the Marshes – was deliberately destroyed by Hulagu and finished off, in 1401, by the armies of Timur the Lame. The garden province, the richest in the Abbasid empire, degenerated into a water-strangled region of tribal grazing with a dwindling population in a few towns. Paradise was lost and has yet to be regained. From then on, the Tigris slopped its waters unchecked sideways, east and west, below Kut and on each side of Amara (or where Amara would be later). The Euphrates overspilled south towards the sea from Suq-esh-Shiukh. And these flood-waters created new Marshes, permanent and accepted.

  Meantime the population of the Marshes was, of course, swollen by an influx of Arab refugees fleeing from the Mongol massacres. And no doubt, the Madan had been joined earlier by some at least of the survivors of a great slave uprising in the Basra region against a ninth century Caliph of Baghdad. Its leader, called Ali the Abominable, made his headquarters in the Marshes and from the shelter of the reed-beds carried on a guerrilla war of ambushes and night-raids, actually capturing Basra before his own capture and execution fourteen years later. The Caliph’s general sent his head to Baghdad, and his rebel army was scattered utterly. How many fugitives found permanent sanctuary in the Marshes? Some, surely.

  *

  After the stunning blow of the Mongol invasion the history of Iraq shades into the struggle between Persia and Turkey. The details of it do not closely concern the Marsh Arabs. In the period of Persian hegemony, we know that the Arab governor of Basra paid annual tribute to the Shah. And that when Baghdad fell to the Turkish Sultan, Sulaiman the Magnificent, in 1533, the tribes of the Gharraf, the central and Hawaiza Marshes, and of Basra quickly made obeisance to him. This did not mean that from then on the tribes knuckled down obsequiously to the Turkish Pashas in Baghdad. On the contrary, they remained extremely restless, as is their nature. For
example, a large Turkish expedition (300 ships) had to be sent to Basra in 1546. After the battle near Chubaish, the tribes were chased back to their reeds. Yet in 1549, they were in arms again. This time, Ali Pasha Tamarrud, the captain of the Janissaries, the Sultan’s finest soldiers, trounced them at Medinah on the Euphrates. But the uncrushable Madan continued to menace the approaches to Basra.

  *

  By 1500, Arab traditions were universal in Iraq. From Mosul to Basra, the Arabic language and Arab culture rooted in Islam prevailed. In the south, apart from Basra, the principal townships were Dair (on the Shatt al Arab), Nahr al Antar, Mansuriya, and Kut al Muammir. The modern towns of Amara, Kut al Amara and Nasiriya did not exist before the nineteenth century. The Sultan decreed Basra a wilaya (governorate) under the Pasha of Baghdad. And the Wali of Hawaiza ruled the Arab tribes of Arabistan – notably the Kaab – who grew rice and bred buffaloes in the marshes and bush-land that spread across what is now the Iraq-Iran frontier, east of Qurna and the Shatt al Arab towards Ahwaz.

  Turbulent times, to say the least, persisted for the next 300 years and more. Basra remained a hornet’s nest of trouble for Iraq’s Ottoman rulers, despite expedition after punitive expedition sent from Baghdad. Nothing the Pashas did could eradicate those human Arab hornets – crack battalions of Janissaries armed with matchlock firearms, the chopping off of heads, fines, imprisonment – no armies, no punishments had any lasting effect. In the seventeenth century, indeed, Arab hostility became so intense that one Turkish Pasha in Basra could stand no more of it and decamped, handing over his administration (for a sum of money) to an Arab leader called Afrasiyab. Not much is known of Afrasiyab, but his remarkable son, Ali Pasha, in 1624 repulsed a Persian invasion at Qurna with Portuguese naval help, and was altogether a fine cultured specimen of tribal nobility. Ali Pasha’s court at Basra was compared by some people to that of Harun al Rashid himself. The arts flourished; government became liberal and humane in this state within the Turkish state. Even the Marsh Arabs were mollified for a time. But only for a time. Ali’s graceless offspring, Hussein Pasha, predictably lost the tolerance of the Madan by instituting a buffalo tax. And so, when the Sultan’s army finally cornered him at Qurna, he found his tribal allies melting away into the reeds.