We were terrified that someone had seen her—that someone would send a message to the wrong people, who would try to assassinate her on her way back from the hotel, and that it would be our fault. But no one in the hotel even recognized her. In the abaya, she was completely safe: just another anonymous Iraqi woman.
Things got worse all summer. At night we left the door to our room open to let out the heat. One night a large rat ambled down the corridor, stopped at our door, and looked in hopefully, as though we might invite him in for tea. We kept the door shut after that.
Mohamad and I were both working all the time, exhausted and stressed and fighting constantly. The fights would flare up before we could catch them. The electricity would go out, there would be no water, and suddenly we would be fighting over who had forgotten to fill the gallon jugs. At the grocery store, if we were lucky to find two kinds of pasta, we would fight over which one to buy. And that was nothing compared to the serious fights like whether we should move to a “safer” hotel.
On Father’s Day, I borrowed Mohamad’s satellite phone and called my grandfather. He was ninety-two and deaf as a post. I lied and told him I was in Beirut, but I don’t think he bought it.
“Don’t stop any bullets!” he said, and chuckled. It was his favorite line from World War II, when he had been a radio operator in the Merchant Marine. His other favorite line was “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.”
My mother got on the phone. Grandpa’s sister Connie had joined the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) in World War II, and my mother had called her for advice on life during wartime. “Aunt Connie said you should take lots of calcium, and magnesium, and zinc,” she said. “And vitamin B for stress, and vitamin C too!”
Vitamins, in Baghdad: that’s my mom. If we could eat like kings when we were broke, homeless, and living out of our car, then why sacrifice proper nutrition in a war zone?
“Mom, it’s Baghdad. They don’t have Walgreens here. You can’t get vitamins. Most of the time you can barely get medicine.”
“Didn’t you say your driver gets vitamins from Germany?”
This was true: Abu Zeinab’s brother lived in Germany, and he had once offered us some European herbal supplements. I had forgotten all about it. But my mother remembered.
“And another thing,” she said. “Don’t fight with Mohamad—he’s a wonderful person, and we love you, and he loves you too. And the other thing is, it’s a war! What could be more stressful? Of course, you’re fighting. But I’m just so worried—I thought, Oh my God, these two people are arguing, and they’re going to step on a roadside bomb, and they’ll still be arguing!”
This was such an accurate description of us that I had to laugh.
“Also, make sure you exercise,” she said. “Keep track of your exercise, and your vitamins, and you won’t fight.”
I hear it all the time from Lebanese friends who lived through the civil war: In those days, the drinks were stronger. The music was louder, to drown out the shelling. The men were more tender, the women more brave. They stayed out dancing all night long because it was safer than driving home. “Every half hour was a new life,” is how my friend Adessa put it. “In that half hour, you had to reinvent yourself. And if you made it to the next bomb, you would reinvent yourself again.”
One of the secrets of life during wartime is that your senses become unnaturally sharp, more attuned to pleasure in all its forms. Colors are brighter, more saturated. Smells are stronger. Sounds make you jump. Music makes you cry for no reason. And food? You will never forget how it tastes.
In Baghdad, our friendships began to thrive just as the public sphere began to shrink. It became dangerous for Iraqis and foreigners to meet in public. And so instead of meeting our friends in hotels and restaurants, which was dangerous for them and for us, we ate in their homes.
Almost all of the food served in restaurants and hotels was social food: grilled meats, hummus, tabbouleh, kebab. But there was an entire universe of food—what Abu Rifaat might have called the “real” Iraqi cuisine—that you never tasted if you only ate out. This other cuisine was part of a hidden Baghdad, a life that people cultivated behind closed doors. Iraqis were still fighting to defend public life, but they were losing, and they knew it. And so people began to conduct their lives in private. They studied in living rooms instead of in universities; got their hair cut at home instead of in barbershops and beauty salons; and instead of going to plays or concerts, they watched the dizzying parade of Iraqi soap operas and reality TV shows that, for many, had replaced real life.
The history of a country is written in its food. Most Americans think of Arabic food as hummus and tabbouleh, the social appetizers of the Mediterranean. But Iraq had its own cuisine, a fusion of different culinary traditions that had evolved over centuries of migration and war. The Sumerians gave way to the Akkadians, then the Assyrians, whose empire spanned Iraq, the Levant, and parts of Turkey, Egypt, and Iran. The Assyrian emperor Ashurnasirpal, a master food propagandist, once threw a ten-day banquet for 69,574 guests. (A later Assyrian ruler dined underneath the severed head of an Elamite king mounted on a pole above the dinner table.) Then came a series of conquerors: Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Parthians, Romans. In the eighth century, when the Caliph al-Mansur founded Baghdad and made Iraq the center of the Abbasid Empire, he initiated what people still refer to nostalgically as the Golden Age of Islam.
To the Abbasids, whose scribes translated Greek and Persian texts, cuisine was a science—a branch of medicine as well as an art. The Abbasids transformed the banquet from a display of raw power into an elite salon. The caliph would flaunt his knowledge of cuisine as well as that of painting, poetry, music, and history. Cooking was a social art: poets would recite long, flowery descriptions of banquets to win the caliph’s favor. One caliph even staged a cook-off between his courtiers, like a medieval Iraqi version of Top Chef.
Like the rulers of any empire, the Abbasids were cruel, repressive bastards. But they were bastards with style. They presided over an explosion in agriculture and trade that historians describe as a medieval green revolution, taking spices and fruits from Asia to Europe and spreading agricultural innovations to the countries they ruled. They fused the indigenous desert foods with Persian and Byzantine court cuisines to create a culinary revolution that forever changed the way the world ate.
As Islam swept out from the Arabian Peninsula and across the Middle East, it picked up the cuisines of its converts. The classic Bedouin food—roasted goats and sheep, grilled camel, bread cooked in ashes—mixed with Indian spices, Persian pilafs, Turkish yogurt cooking, and Byzantine vegetables.
Arab writers churned out treatises denouncing the fruity, effeminate Persian pilafs and praising manly Bedouin fare. But it was a losing battle: the traditional diet of the desert Arabs was transforming, picking up Persian touches like spicy rice with nuts and raisins, broth flavored with noomi Basra, the little dried limes, and the sweet-and-sour sauces that distinguish Iraqi cooking to this day. The Arab Muslims conquered infidel souls; but the non-Arab converts took over the Islamic palate. Ibn Khaldun’s endless struggle between Bedouins and urbanites, it turned out, made for a rich and varied cuisine.
The Abbasids went the way of all empires in 1258, when the Mongol chieftain Hulagu, the grandson of Genghis Khan, sacked Baghdad. Medieval chroniclers tell how the Tigris ran red with blood on the first day and black with ink the next, when the Mongols eviscerated the Abbasid libraries and tossed the books into the river. But the Mongols couldn’t destroy the food: the Abbasids had already exported their cuisine to Europe, where its influence remains to this day, especially in Spanish cooking. Escabeche, the marinated fish or chicken that is a staple of Spanish and Latin American cuisine, descended from the piquant Persian condiment sikbaj. The little Spanish meatballs called albóndigas began as al-bunduqieh, from the Arabic bunduq, “hazelnut,” a playful name for the tiny, filbert-sized meatballs that Arab cooks would put in soups.
And when you drink a mint julep, think of its great-great-ancestor, the syrupy julab, from the Persian for “rosewater.”
After the Mongol rampage, Baghdad became a backwater where various tribes and dynasties—Seljuks, Mamelukes, Persians, Ottomans—fought back and forth for centuries. The irrigation system collapsed. The fertile plains became deserts. The Ottomans finally took control, only to be supplanted after World War I by the British, who stitched together a nation out of the fragments of vanished empires.
A map of modern-day Iraq will not tell you this history, but its food will. Each empire imposed its influence on the country’s cuisine, which is why stuffed vegetables are called dolma in Iraq, as they are in Greece and Turkey, and not mehshi, the Arabic word for “stuffed”; it’s why Iraqis drink out of glassat, the Arabized plural of the English word “glass,” and Iraqi pickles are sometimes called by the Farsi word turshi. To this day, the boundaries defined by food and language often reflect the differences between people much more accurately than the lines drawn arbitrarily on maps.
Iraq’s cuisine echoes its position at the intersection of vastly different regions: the Levantine world, the Arabian Peninsula, Turkey, and Persia. Baghdad was the table where they all sat down. Fesenjoon, the sweet-and-sour pomegranate dish with walnuts, came from Persia. Tashreeb, the bowl of broth-soaked bread with chicken or lamb, was an old desert meal from the Arabian Peninsula—now flavored with Indian spices and noomi Basra. Karada street vendors fried their catfish in sunflower-gold curry powder, rich with turmeric, a fleeting aftertaste of the historic community of Iraqi Jews who once traveled between Baghdad, Bombay, and Calcutta. The old Mesopotamians still lurked in places like Khan Dajaj, Chicken Inn, a simple working-class restaurant where everybody got a whole roasted chicken swaddled in a shell of Iraqi bread that you unwrapped and then ate from like a Sumerian king.
In the end, I realized that the beauty of masquf lay in its intersecting lines of descent—in the very fact that I couldn’t pin it down. Its origins didn’t matter half as much as what people thought they were. If every Iraqi I asked spoke of masquf as a dish that belonged to another group, perhaps that was precisely the point: it was a national dish, the cuisine of a place and a time where identities—ethnic, sectarian, ideological—dissolved, at least for the golden hour of waiting for your fish to be prepared. It didn’t matter whether masquf was invented by the Sumerians, or the Assyrians, or the Christians, or the Muslims, or the Jews. What mattered was that everybody thought of it as somebody else’s dish and yet also entirely their own.
Sami Zubaida is a professor emeritus of politics and sociology at the University of London’s Birkbeck College, and one of the world’s foremost scholars on comparative food and culture. He grew up in the Baghdad neighborhood of Baitaween in the 1940s. In those days, Zubaida told me, hummus was practically unknown in Baghdad. But in his neighborhood, which was fairly cosmopolitan, it was common for families of different faiths and backgrounds—and hence, different food traditions—to send their neighbors plates of food. Zubaida’s Iraqi Jewish family had friends from Syria, where hummus was a staple; the men did business together, and the women exchanged food. “That was my first experience of hummus,” he told me, laughing. “They would send us that and tabbouleh. These were novelties to us.”
I asked Dr. Salama if Iraqis of her generation had grown up eating meze like hummus, tabbouleh, and fattoush. “Grilling bread and putting it on a salad?” she said, laughing. “No, we never did this. All of these salads—tabbouleh, fattoush, even this, what do you call it”—we were sitting at a table spread with meze, and she pointed to a round dish of baba ghanouj, which many Lebanese call mtabal—“this mtabal, all of them were new to us. When I was a child, we didn’t eat them. We had jajik and the cucumber and tomato salads. Those were the famous Iraqi salads.”
After 1948, Palestinian refugees who moved to Iraq made Levantine food more familiar. But it was during the oil boom of the 1970s, when middle-class families like Roaa’s earned enough money for vacations abroad, that Mediterranean food became widespread. Families traveled to Turkey, Syria, or Lebanon and came back with a taste for little Mediterranean salads. “By the end of the 1980s, we started to have little shops selling these dishes,” said Dr. Salama, “and people would have them for dinner.”
On the surface, my first awful meal at the Hamra Hotel might seem like evidence that Iraq had no cuisine. But once I dug a little deeper, I found a different story altogether: the fattoush spoke of a precious, fleeting era when ordinary Iraqi families could travel to the Mediterranean. The hummus without olive oil reminded you that Iraq’s indigenous vegetable oil, as Herodotus pointed out, came from the sesame instead of the olive. Even the shish kebabs contained layers of meaning: chicken kebabs are shish taouk in Beirut and most of the Levant, tikka dajaj in Baghdad. According to Zubaida, tikka is an old Persian word (no longer used in Iran but common in South Asia and Iraq) for single or odd-numbered pieces of meat. A simple skewer of meat; but in its various names, a tale of empires fighting to dominate the land where civilization as we know it began.
When I talked to Zubaida and Dr. Salama I finally realized why the food at the Hamra had been so bad: it wasn’t Iraqi. The food foreigners were eating in hotels and restaurants was not Iraqi at all but a series of murky transliterations of Mediterranean food. To judge Iraqi food by the meze in Baghdad’s upscale hotels and restaurants—unhappy émigrés from the empire of olive, fig, and vine—was like denouncing midwestern cuisine after trying chop suey in a suburban Indianapolis mall.
During the summer of 2004, we often visited Sheikh Fatih and Dr. Salama for lunch. Sometimes they fed us masquf; sometimes chicken and lamb. Roasted meat is ceremonial, the food traditionally served to honor a guest. But on our last visit, we got a taste of something different.
Dr. Salama sent two of her young bodyguards to pick us up. One was skinny, with a craggy, narrow face and an angry squint. The other was just a kid, with baby-fat cheeks underneath his fluffy beard. They greeted us by putting their hands on their hearts. When they smiled, their desperate faces transformed, and they looked almost hopeful. Then they ushered us to a bulletproof black Mercedes.
Inside the car, the younger bodyguard slid a cassette into the tape player. It was latmiyat, the rhythmic throbbing songs that commemorate the massacre at Karbala. As we drove through the streets, he began to chant softly along to the tape. Mohamad and I looked at each other and wordlessly took each other’s hands.
At the house, the bodyguards drove through the gate, closing and locking it carefully before we got out. A crowd of more security guards stood in the grassy courtyard outside.
Sheikh Fatih met us at the door and showed us into the sitting room where the ladies’ meetings had taken place. The Kashif al-Ghittas came from a long line of clerics, an old religious family whose name means “uncovering that which is covered,” and Dr. Amal showed us portraits of relatives from Najaf and a beautifully painted family tree. We sat and talked politics in Sheikh Fatih’s study, which was lined with books, and then we went down to lunch.
The table was heaped with food: steaming trays of fluffy golden rice. River fish baked in a sauce of tomatoes. Chicken roasted with saffron. Tebsi baitinjan, my favorite Iraqi stew—eggplant, tomatoes, potatoes, bell peppers, and spices, meant for pouring over rice.
“Try this,” said Sheikh Fatih, holding out the platter of fish. “It’s a Najafi specialty, something we learned from there. It is very delicious.”
Like so much southern Iraqi food, this meal was heavily influenced by Persian cuisine—the saffron flavoring the chicken, for example. For dessert, we ate sohan, the burnt-sugar pistachio brittle from the ancient Iranian holy city of Qom. The food and religion of Iraqi Shiites are so bound together, in fact, that Saddam’s father-in-law once contemptuously called them ahl al-mutah wal fesenjoon—“the people of temporary marriage and fesenjoon.” (Had he been lucky enough to enjoy either, he would have realized that this was a compliment.) You co
uld not find this kind of food in Baghdad’s restaurants. Sheikh Fatih’s wife made this meal especially for us and our friend Moises, a Spanish photographer whose nationality summoned a sudden recollection from Sheikh Fatih.
“I was in Spain once, many years ago,” he confided, ebullient. “It was a wonderful place.”
Like his mother, Sheikh Fatih had studied science and philosophy along with Islamic jurisprudence. He had traveled in his youth: Spain, Switzerland, Italy, and Lebanon. In Rome he had eaten spaghetti. In 1978, at a photography exhibit in Switzerland, he had seen a picture of a man kneeling before the Yugoslavian dictator Tito and tying his shoe. He never forgot the image. “It taught me the beauty of ugly things,” he told us, “something which is very complicated but which helps you understand.”
In Spain he had eaten Spanish food at a restaurant. “I remember, I had a very excellent drink there,” he mused. “It was very delicious. I believe it is a sort of national drink of Spain.”
He smiled and wrinkled his forehead, looking toward Moises. “What is it called, this national drink of Spain?”
Nobody said anything. I could tell from Mohamad’s face he was thinking the same thing I was: Sangria. If the sheikh had drunk wine without knowing we did not want to call attention to it. Silently, we telegraphed Moises the urgent message: Please, Moises, don’t say sangria.
Moises was quiet, a little hung over maybe, hunched above his plate. “The national drink of Spain is wine, man.”
Sheikh Fatih laughed indulgently. “No, no, it was not wine!” he scoffed. “It was sweet! Very sweet, very delicious.”
Maybe it wasn’t sangria after all. Maybe it was horchata, or something else. Maybe there’s some other national drink of Spain.
Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Page 18