by Gavin Young
Majid al Khalifah, the rheumatic old curmudgeon I had seen holding court in his tyrannical prime in 1953, may just be alive. He lived on in his Baghdad mansion after the revolution of 1958. He must be far older than Jasim bin Faris; about ninety, I suppose.
At the end of 1975, Amara took a long-considered decision and moved his family to Baghdad. He had been sick off and on for years; he had had two operations for a stomach ailment that sounded nasty and which was visibly weakening him, even if it would not prove fatal. He had come to look so haggard I would not let him take up a paddle or a pole; and his friends agreed with that. Even cultivating his rice fields had evidently become too much of a burden. So he made the great move. Now he has his sons in school in Baghdad and a small house there. He earns his living as a watchman in one of the city’s hospitals. His friends Farhan, Idan, Jabbar and Hasan bin Muhaisin tend his fields at Rufaiya and remember him. He visits them occasionally, and when I am with them they ask me to go and see him in Baghdad, which I do.
What is the future of the Marshes? I have indicated signs of progress. Doctors and nurses and clinics; schools; better access to the market towns and so more money; more cultivable land and so better food; lower taxes and no levies in kind: all these things the Madan have desired and required. For years governments expressed the intention of providing them.
Other, grander things have been in the planning stage at least since World War Two – flood control, irrigation systems, desalination schemes, land reclamation. Fine schemes like those are interdependent and they cannot be carried through overnight. Indeed they cannot be carried out at all if governments continually change, Ministers of Planning abruptly come and go, and priorities are inconstant. Iraq has money, oil, water. ‘Give us ten years of peace and quiet’, the planners and technicians say, ‘and we shall work wonders.’ If their prayer is granted, new dams in the north would divert water from the Euphrates and the Tigris to cultivate areas in north and central Iraq. The dams would reduce the volume of the waters annually replenishing the Marshes, and the Marsh region would naturally shrink. At the same time, new dams in the Amara area could turn the lower Tigris and Euphrates region into a vast and splendid rice-growing plain. If so, the future lands of the Beni Lam, the Albu Mohammed and the Muntafiq could rival the rich gardens of Sumerian Mesopotamia.
However the future develops, Iraq will need fish and reeds. Factories to process reeds into paper or fibre-board are to be erected on the edge of the Marsh not far from the little palm-shrouded town of Qurna for which across the centuries so many people fought. I hope for Madan, now that they have taken seriously to fishing, will still be appreciated for their incomparable prowess with boats and spears. It would be a pity if they were to abandon their ancestral homelands and become displaced peasants or factory-hands in anonymous overalls. It does not take long for proud rural peoples to go to seed in the amoral anarchy of towns: study the tragedy of the American Indians and the Indians of the Amazon basin.
Alcohol is a special danger. Nor is a townsman’s health – despite his proximity to hospitals – necessarily better than a countryman’s, even a Marsh Arab’s. Uncurbed disease was the scourge of the Marshes in the old days. But now, with doctors, medicines and hospitals newly available, the Madan will not be automatically better off if they are shifted to small, stuffy concrete houses. Their reed houses have been developed down the centuries to keep out cold and heat: they are easily and cheaply built and easily moved, and are often a good deal cleaner than those in the overcrowded city housing estates. The Marsh houses have an undeserved reputation of squalor, usually propagated by those who have never spent any length of time in them.
The Marshes are alive. They are not a variation on Disneyland. Real people live and work in them. They can be visited. Today there are half-reed, half-brick tourist guest-houses at Qurna and anyone who stays in one can see how the Sumerians lived and moved on the face of these wild waters. The restless canoes flit about; the robed Marshmen are there, too busy to spend much time talking to strangers but certainly not hostile. The great mudhifs, representing a uniquely magnificent form of the world’s architecture, crouch along the banks of the Euphrates like golden, hump-backed palaces. What you see today is very like the vision that captivated inquisitive George Keppel, or competent Colonel Chesney, or ‘Fulanain’ all those years ago.
Nor are the Marsh Arabs less fine-featured than they were, or less mercurial. From all the excitements and excursions of my years in the Marshes, I find it hard to pin down the memory that most vividly conveys the essence of the people themselves. It is curious. I found it perfectly expressed in a quite unexpected place. In 1974, I stayed a night in the Government resthouse at Qurna. I had with me a translation of Tolstoy’s The Cossacks, and because the next day was cold and wet I stayed indoors and read it. There, in that incomparable story, a hunter spoke: ‘Ah yes, that’s the man I am! I’m a huntsman … I’ll show you everything…. Once I’ve found a track I knows the animal – knows where he’ll make to drink or roll about. Then I makes meself a perch and sits there all night, watching. What’s the good of staying at home, anyway…? ’Tis another thing altogether when you goes out at nightfall, selects a nice little place for yourself, stamps down the reeds and there you sits and waits like a good ‘un. In the woods you knows all what’s going on. You looks up at the sky, the stars pass over and you can tell from them how the time goes. You looks around you: there’s a rustling in the wood and you waits and you hears a crashing and a boar comes out to roll in the mud. You listens to the young eagles screeching, or the cocks in the village begin to crow, or the geese will be honking: if you hears geese you know it ain’t midnight. And all these things I know….’ Put Tolstoy’s old Cossack alongside, say, Chethir and his son Shibil, and they would sit together at ease. A Marsh Arab tribesman with his sun-baked face and calloused hands, lying up in his chabasha in the belly of the reeds, his net and spear in his mashhuf, and his battered gun, dagger and sickle to hand, would know what the Russian was talking about. When the soft, familiar stirrings of the untamed life around them fall on their ears like the well-loved sounds of an old song, Chethir and his friends enjoy, without having to define it, an enviable oneness with their world.
And now?
One day alone with young Shibil as he fished a lagoon, I said, ‘Before I returned here, I thought I would never see the Marshes or any of you ever again. I thought you might all have vanished.’
He slapped his bare chest with his hand, sending a sharp echo round the reed verge.
‘Vanished? We, Madan? Do I look as if I would ever disappear?’
He stood, laughing, in the prow of the canoe, brown and half-naked, his spear raised to strike down into the water.
And I thought: No, of course you don’t.
But age overlaps age. The Marsh Arabs’ way of life may, after all, be transformed before very long. I hope that they will be spared an abrupt uprooting, for that might kill something precious in them. All the same it may happen. So perhaps I should end with a prayer: That the descendants of the great Sumerians and of Khalid bin Walid’s desert warriors may retain their immemorial clarity of spirit, whatever befalls them.
Let that blessing be on them now. And, if at last they are scattered, may it fall two-fold on their children’s children in the centuries to come.
After which prayer from the heart, Ajram, if he heard of it, might murmur piously, ‘Allah Karim … God is gracious.’ And then, grinning at me – because too much solemnity makes him fidgety – add in his rough and ready English accent, ‘Damn and blast it!’
Epilogue
My blessing, however inadequate, came only just in time. Shibil uttered his triumphant shout – ‘Do I look as if I would ever disappear?’ – in early 1977. Ten years on it is very likely that he has indeed disappeared – into the meat-grinder of the war between Iraq and Iran that started only three years later. And many of my other Marsh Arab friends, too.
War or no war, it had always seemed
likely that sooner or later the Madan way of life would be transformed, perhaps to extinction. All those drainage schemes, so long threatened, would have come eventually. Those much talked of dams on the Tigris and Euphrates would have been built. No one could deny that Baghdad’s oil money and development programmes had already brought the Marsh people much needed benefits – doctors, clinics, ice, improved access to local markets, and so on. For better or for worse, inevitable ‘progress’ would have brought drastic change. Personally I hoped that it would mean little more than that the unique waterlands of southern Iraq would become solid earth, part of an extended Mesopotamian prairie or rice garden, fertile, even beautiful. Nothing like the Marshes, admittedly, but I hoped the descendants of the old Sumerians would manage to adapt to the new kind of open air life after their six thousand years in reeds and water. I hoped there would be no sudden, brutal upheaval; rather, a slow, gentle transition. Some hope.
In fact, by now an extraordinarily savage war has ripped, burned and laid waste increasingly large expanses of the Marshes for the best part of a decade. The Marsh Arabs have survived earlier twentieth century wars; as we have seen, they had actually taken on the British army with considerable success. This was quite different – this was late twentieth century warfare with ground-to-ground missiles, helicopter gunships, rockets, long-range artillery. What upheaval short of nuclear war could be more brutally destructive to such a vulnerable landscape. The horror dragged itself out with casualties rising beyond accurate estimate. When I had wondered what young Shibil’s future might be I had not predicted this.
I was travelling far from Iraq when the war started in September 1980, and for a few years after that, so it was not until March 1984 that I was able to return to the Marshes once more. Already there were changes. The fighting to the south, east and north of Basra, and to the east of Amara, had been desperate. Several times already Khomeini’s ‘martyrs’, fanatical religious old and the oldest over sixty, had launched themselves in human waves into the eastern Marshes, disdaining death in desperate efforts to cut the main road between Basra and Baghdad. The idea was to isolate Basra itself and then to storm on to ‘liberate’ Kuwait. Of course, Nejef and Kerbela were golden prizes, too; the capture of the Holy Cities of Shi’adom would symbolize the crowning victory of fundamentalist Islam. The Ayatollah must have convinced himself that around the shrines sacred to Hussein, Ali and Abbas the Hot-Headed One, his soldiers would be welcomed as long-awaited heroes by their joyful coreligionists of Iraq. Surely around those serene portals delirious crowds – Marsh Arabs included – would hail the soldiers of the Great Ayatollah with clapping and ululation, the dancing of ecstatic hosas, and triumphant fusillades. But the Iraqi army had halted these headlong and suicidal attacks and Iranian bodies had been strewn in their thousands the length of the border. Khomeini’s ‘martyrs’ had dented the Iraqi front line here and there – occupying part of Majnun, the island oil field in the Hawaiza Marshes – but there had been no breakthrough to the Baghdad-Basra road. Nevertheless, shells were dropping with grim regularity upon Basra itself, and returning I found the city – Sinbad the Sailor’s city, Ralph Fitch’s ‘towne of great trade of spices and drugges’, the ‘Venice of the East’, the scene of my youthful labours with Ralli Brothers and my first fateful encounter with Wilfred Thesiger – slit-trenched, bunkered and sandbagged like London during the Blitz.
When I applied in Baghdad to re-visit the Marshes themselves, I was told that the region had become a military zone and so I had to have an escort. My chaperone turned out to be an Iraqi army major with a ginger moustache who from his stocky build might have been a karate expert and who came from Mosul. He knew next to nothing about Marsh Arabs. Why should he? In former days Iraqis who came from north of Kut had barely heard of them, although during my stop in Baghdad I had learned that the nation’s newspapers had taken to extolling the Marshmen – and Marsh women – in the most glowing terms for their patriotic fortitude in the face of the enemy. What an irony! For years I – and before me Thesiger – had been regarded as crackpots for spending so much time with a poor and backward people who insisted perversely on inhabiting a squalid and undesirable swamp rather than the ‘modern’ if utterly soulless housing estates of the capital. I had become accustomed to the little smiles of disbelief when I spoke of the virtues the Marsh Arabs had inherited from the eighth century influx of tribes from the Arabia of Khalid bin Walid – thrift, hard work, courage, simplicity, generosity, reverence. Not virtues universal in big cities. As to Marsh women, I had been accustomed to add, they had always been a back-parlour power in the Marshes. Now the patronizing smiles had given way to talk of heroes and heroines.
The ginger-haired major was friendly though suspicious; he must have wondered what on earth this foreigner was up to heading into 6,000 square miles of fenland into which he himself would never have willingly ventured. He had been taken aback on our first day out of Mejar el Kebir when his much darker sergeant-major turned to me smiling and said, ‘You circumcised me thirty years ago. I remember very well.’
‘That was my friend Wilfred Thesiger,’ I replied.
The sergeant-major told me he came originally from Al Aggar and we chatted enthusiastically about Haji Yunis and Jasim bin Faris. The major was impressed, but evidently his suspicions remained because he did not allow me to pass the night at Sayyid Sarwat’s, ignoring the pleas of the old sayyid’s sons. So for the first time in thirty-two years I was obliged to motor back to sleep in an hotel in Amara. What treachery did the Iraqi army think I would get up to at night in the Marshes? Would I signal to Persian aircraft with my flashlight? Make maps of the regions (though Wilfred and I had made all the most accurate maps of it ourselves)? I felt disbarred from my home-from-home, and I could see that Mottar and Abbas and the rest of those old friends were upset that all of a sudden their natural hospitality was somehow unacceptable.
But that was war.
When I arrived at the place where the old sayyid had lived, the big guns were rumbling, distant but menacing to the east behind Al Azair. As soon as I stepped ashore under the willow tree by the stream’s edge I knew that there had been changes. I was not surprised when they told me the old man had died a few months before, I had had messages to that effect. Mottar greeted me now, all in black, and young Sayyid Abbas drove up in a taxi. I hardly recognized him in the battledress of an army lieutenant. ‘I heard you were coming,’ he said grinning, ‘so I got leave.’ He had been in action near Basra more than once. He showed me a badly treated knee – a shattered kneecap, a patchwork of clumsy stitches. He also showed me two medals for bravery – eight-pointed stars with crossed swords in gold and black and red ribbon.
‘Two hundred thousand people came to my father’s wake,’ he said. ‘From Baghdad, Basra, Kuwait, even Bahrain. All the tribes came, of course, the Shaghanba, the Fartus, the Suwaid…. We killed dozens of sheep. My father sent for you when he was dying.’
‘Yes, the message came too late.’ It is something I shall regret for the rest of my life.
Near the Wadiya stream, workmen were building a shrine for the old sayyid. It would have a tiled dome and marble walls. ‘Pilgrims will come here,’ Abbas said. ‘Though, of course, my father’s tomb is at Nejef.’ In the Vale of Peace, under the shadow of the mosque of Ali, where he would have wanted to be. God whiten his face in Heaven.
I asked Abbas: ‘Is a Christian allowed to visit him there?’
‘We’ll go together,’ he said. He went on, ‘You know very well that our father was of the same religion as Ayatollah Khomeini’ – he meant they were both Shia Muslims – ‘but he had no time for him. That old Persian wants to take us over. To separate us from Baghdad. To defeat us by dividing us.’ We sat later that day on the grand old mudhif and friends and neighbours had gathered. I noticed several people mentioned Qadisiyah, the battle of AD 635, in which the Persian hero, Rustam, had been killed and his imperial Sassanid army decisively put to flight by the Muslim Arabs from the desert of the
west. And they used the old, old word ‘Ajami’ meaning ‘Persian’, not ‘Irani’, as a sign of mild contempt. The clock had been put back. History was repeating itself. Arabs were fighting Persians again and blood was thicker than religion.
Abbas said, ‘The war made my father very sad. He didn’t like to talk of it very much.’ Two of the sayyid’s nephews had been killed in the fighting near Abadan. Of course, Abbas himself would go back to the front.
‘Why, Abbas, why?’
‘Well, the republic needs me.’
Without Sayyid Sarwat, Wadiya seemed a lesser place. In this book I have tried to show what a good friend he was to me. All Muslims say, ‘In the name of God, the Kind, the Merciful,’ but I doubted if the Ayatollah Khomeini, for all his Islamic fundamentalism, would have shown such unstinted friendship to a non-Muslim. If there was one thing Sayyid Sarwat abhorred it was religious fanaticism. It drove out two things he placed above all: kindness and compassion. He believed in the kind, the merciful god.
My white tarada – Sayyid Sarwat’s gift – lay in the stream like a pale echo of our friendship. It looked as if it needed repairing.
Time was short so I travelled to Sahain’s in a motorized bellam. Sayyid Abbas came with me and Farhan (who had run across the fields from his house in Rufaiya) and one or two others. Our passage through Rufaiya created something of an explosion of emotion. Perhaps the isolation of wartime was responsible. I don’t know. It must have startled the ginger major. It seemed as if Rufaiya’s entire population – every man, woman and child – was dancing about on the curved roofs of the reed houses lining the channel, waving and shouting like people possessed. From every side I heard, ‘Gavin! Gavin!’ Familiar faces, familiar voices. Dogs barked. Buffaloes roared. I slowed the bellam and stood up in it and waved back and yelled back in a voice I hardly knew as my own, ‘God give you help! God give you peace!’ – traditional words, but I meant them as never before. And then I saw Jabbar – Jabbar, who had taken the prow-position in the white tarada so many times on so many adventures. He was waving on the bank quite near us. ‘Let me come,’ he called as we pulled alongside. He ran home to collect his Kalashnikov and a small bag and then came aboard, looking darker, and stronger, his moustache thicker and his grin wider. He was in a special army unit, he confided when he was safely aboard. Marshmen like him crept about the eastern Marshes in mashhufs, using the Madan’s age-old hunting techniques against the Persian invaders. A sensible idea.