Where God Was Born

by Bruce Feiler

“There is no doubt in my mind that I cannot succeed in this mission without the help of God,” he told the Catholic Standard soon after arriving. “The job is simply too big and complex for any one person.”

  “Would you say religion in Iraq is a greater or lesser force than you expected?” I asked.

  “I would say it’s about what I expected. Islam, of course, doesn’t make the kinds of distinctions that Judaism and Christianity make between the political side of life and the religious side of life. There is less separation between church and state.”

  “One of the goals in coming here was to make an example of democracy in this part of the world,” I said, “but Iran is in flux. Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia are not great examples. Can Islam and democracy coexist?”

  “I think they can,” he said. “They have for almost a century in Turkey. And in various forms in other countries, Jordan and Morocco. And I think people who say it can’t be done are essentially guilty of a form of cultural imperialism, saying only the West knows how to do democracy. I spent most of the 1990s working in China, and I can remember people saying Chinese culture is incompatible with democracy. But we have democracy in Taiwan. People said that Korean culture was incompatible with democracy. None of those democracies look exactly like ours, and that’s not surprising. French democracy is different from American democracy. But it’s democracy. I think there’s no reason to assume that the Iraqis are incapable of governing themselves.”

  “But Christian churches have been attacked,” I said. “The Jews are fleeing. And some fear the Shias would like to set up an Islamic theocracy, like Iran.”

  “My view is that probably less than 10 percent of Iraqis favor a theocratic government. A huge majority want a democratic government. Now they still have to learn what that means.”

  “The larger question in the world today is, Can the religions get along?” I started to say.

  He got my point and interrupted. “Certainly in Iraq during the last few years, religion was a weapon,” he said. “You had a dictatorship that stirred up sectarian disagreements with the Shia. The hopeful sign here is that since the liberation we have not seen the kind of retributive violence we might have expected. Nothing compared to what happened in France and Italy after World War II. There have been some isolated revenge killings, but even in the face of great provocations, like the bombing in the Shia capital of Najaf, we have not seen the kind of religious violence that the terrorists want to happen.”

  “I would like to turn, for a second, to a personal matter,” I said. “In some of your speeches you quote Jeremiah.”

  “Jeremiah 29, verse 11,” he said. “ ‘For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.’ ” This was the same verse Chaplain Munson had cited to me in Ur. “I actually use that verse in all my speeches,” Ambassador Bremer continued. “And it resonates with Iraqis, because they’ve had a rough couple of decades. They have embraced the concept of a future of hope. I like to invoke it because they have a rich country. It’s rich in land, water, and tourist possibilities. It is rich obviously in oil revenues, but it is richest of all in its people. If they can retain a hope about the future, they will achieve it.”

  “And how has this experience affected you personally?”

  “As a young boy—” he started to say, then he cut himself off. He paused for a second, then snapped back into diplomatic mode. “I don’t confuse my own beliefs with my job. My job is to try to realize the hope that I think most Iraqis have.”

  But in that instant, I felt I gleaned a truth about America’s foray in Iraq. Paul Bremer was a man of faith. His nickname, Jerry, came from his patron saint, Jerome, the man who translated the Bible into Latin. A framed sign on his desk contained a Latin inscription that he says is his guiding principle, NON SUM DIGNUS, “I am not worthy.” Catholics utter this phrase at mass before receiving the host, the manifestation of Christ. “What is significant about it is that every Catholic says it,” he later said, “even the pope.”

  In the same way that many Iraqis see their lives through the prism of religion, many Americans, including the ones most associated with the war in Iraq, do. This association clearly gave them strength and purpose, but it holds dangers as well. Jeremiah is a prophet and his message of hope universal, but he is not quoted in the Koran. Neither is Isaiah, whose invocation in chapter 49, “To the captives, ‘come out’—and to those in darkness, ‘be free,’ ” President Bush invoked at the close of his “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln.

  The beliefs in freedom, social justice, law, and God are the creations of Mesopotamia that live on most strongly in American life. The United States embodies those ideals today in ways that the heirs of Babylon have not for some time. But as much as the religious mind-set informs the heroic service of many Americans, it risks coloring our every action by imposing our biblical view of the world onto geopolitical situations where it may not belong. Sitting in Ambassador Bremer’s office, I had no way of foretelling the future of Iraq, though my experience watching nascent pluralism take hold left me more hopeful than I had expected. But I also believed that when the history of American intervention in Iraq is written, the religious motivations of U.S. leaders would prove to be equal to—if not stronger than—those of the enemies we were fighting.

  “So Sumer, gone,” I said to Ambassador Bremer. “Nebuchadnezzar, gone. The British, gone. Saddam, gone. And now Bremer . . .”

  “I’m not sure I want to be on the same list as Nebuchadnezzar,” he said, and we both chuckled. “But of course this is the oldest question in history. Empires come and go. I think the American experience shows that if you can create a government that rules with the consent of the people, it has a lot of staying power. We’ve been through a lot, including civil war. We’re still at it. So I think our system has a lot of stability. And it’s certainly the case that democracies are less likely to go to war with each other than nondemocracies. So if you want to think about a more stable international system, it is in our interest that this should be a more open and representative government. I’m optimistic about Iraq.”

  Hikmat, Bijar, and I stepped up our precautions for the last leg of our trip. We left before dawn so we could pass through the perilous Sunni triangle before daybreak. We tinted our windows, so no one could eye my foreign features. And Hikmat brought a red-and-white checkered kaffiyah to wrap around my head. The comfort I felt in Baghdad slipped away as we edged north, toward Mosul, and two of the richest biblical sites in Iraq, Nimrud and Nineveh.

  We passed by Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit without incident and made a brief detour to Hatra, a well-preserved temple compound from the first century B.C.E. Sheep wandered in the Temple of the Sun. Originally an Assyrian settlement, Hatra grew to stature under Arab rulers who controlled the area in the centuries around the time of Jesus. Along with Palmyra in Syria and Petra in Jordan, Hatra was a rest stop on the famed Silk Road from China.

  After a while I began to notice a certain insignia carved into many of the walls. At first the curlicue letters, like Victorian monograms the size of my hand, reminded me of the carvings I had seen in Babylon, only smaller and more ubiquitous. Some of the walls had just a few, but more had a huge rash, sometimes hundreds on a thirty-foot span, like chicken pox on a five-year-old. I asked Hikmat if he knew what they meant.

  “They’re from Saddam,” he said.

  I didn’t understand.

  “The first letter is Sad,” he explained, “that means ‘Saddam’; the second is Ha, that means ‘Hussein.’ Saddam Hussein had his initials carved on this monument. He did it all over Iraq.”

  I was flabbergasted. “You mean nobody said, ‘You can’t put your name here’?” I asked.

  “Nobody can say that. They will be hanged.”

  I noticed that he still spoke in the present.

  The farther north we drove, the greener the scenery became. Hills began to undulate up fro
m the flats, sheep grew plumper, ravens plucked at fields brimming with vegetables. Iraq may not be Eden, but it has epic geographic diversity.

  By late morning we arrived at the outskirts of the third great Mesopotamian seat of power, Nimrud, capital of ancient Assyria. If Sumer was the first city-state in the region and Babylon the first nation-state, Assyria was the first empire. Once again, a ziggurat stood proudly at the entrance, though this one was covered with grass, a Green Monster on the banks of the Tigris. Nearby, two eight-foot statues with the bodies of lions, wings of eagles, and faces of kings stood guard at the Northwest Palace. These griffinlike creatures designed to scare away evil spirits and thieves may be the most visible face of Mesopotamia in the West.

  Though this area was populated in the third millennium B.C.E., Assyria, named after the Akkadian city of Ashur, did not come to prominence until the thirteenth century B.C.E. It reached its apogee with King Ashurnasirpal II, who in 833 B.C.E. began leading military expeditions every spring. Ashurnasirpal boasted of his torture. “I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted,” he wrote of one battle, “and I covered the pillar with their skin.” Of the captives, he said, “From some I cut off their noses, their ears, and their fingers, of many I put out the eyes.” But he brought some of these captives back to Nimrud, which he called Kalhu, and constructed one of the most spectacular cities ever built.

  For the next two hundred years, Assyria dominated the Fertile Crescent, extending its influence from Persia to Egypt. This reign of terror coincided with the internal decay of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Around 733 B.C.E., Israel pleaded with Assyria to protect it from Egypt. The Assyrians responded by sacking Israel and dispersing its population across the region. Some people refer to these vanished Israelites as the lost tribes of Israel. “Ha! Assyria, rod of my anger,” God says in Isaiah.

  In whose hand, as a staff, is my fury!

  I send him against an ungodly nation,

  I charge him against a people that provokes me.

  The walls of Ashurnasirpal’s palace have been mostly reconstructed with brick. Henry Layard excavated here in 1845, but the bulk of the work was done by Max Mallowan after he was kicked out of Ur. Inside, Sakina Welly, an Iraqi conservator at the museum in Mosul, was inspecting the head of a bas-relief of the king that some looters had attempted to chisel off during the war. Welly is a short, stout woman who was wearing a red dress and spectacles; she had to stand on the toes of her practical shoes to survey the damage.

  Like their Mesopotamian forebears, the Assyrians were extremely sophisticated. They used the first known lock and key, and Ashurnasirpal II’s palace had an air-conditioning system of vents cut into the walls. But the Assyrians were also brutal. Unlike the Babylonians, who drew most of their wealth from agriculture and trade, the Assyrians used wars to fatten their coffers. Alabaster reliefs depict slaves in handcuffs offering tribute. Also, the Assyrian kings elevated themselves over the gods. Few carvings depict them interacting with the deities; more show them indulging in secular activities, like picking fruit or hunting. The Assyrian kings were indulging in profane arts at the same time the kings of Israel and Judah were presiding over the moral breakdown of their realms, which suggests a growing tension in the early first millennium B.C.E. between secular and religious worldviews.

  Finally, the Assyrians loved money. Sakina led me into a darkened room and the mouth of a tomb, about the size of a coffin. “Do you have any paper?” she asked. I ripped out a piece from my notebook. With admirable pluck, she lowered herself through the opening into a small chamber below. I followed, and she let me into a second chamber, no bigger than a bathroom stall. She lit the paper and held it against the stone ceiling. “This was Ashurnasirpal’s tomb,” she said. “This is where we found the crown jewels.”

  In 1988 Sakina Welly was part of the team that discovered a trove of Assyrian royal jewelry, including bracelets, rings, and necklaces made of gold and semiprecious stones. To protect them from bombing during the first Gulf War, the jewels were hidden in the basement of the Iraq National Bank, where they remained for the next decade. But the bank was bombed during the second Gulf War, and the fate of the jewels was for a time unknown. A conspiracy theory circulated that Saddam’s younger son, Qusay, had lifted the jewels when he purloined a rumored $900 million from the bank. Looters didn’t buy this account and tried to crack the vault. One man was killed when he fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the door from less than ten feet away. In early June 2003, U.S. personnel arrived and discovered that the vault was flooded. They drained 640,000 gallons of water, removed five waterlogged crates, and recovered all 613 pieces of jewelry.

  Sakina confessed that she had tried on some of the jewelry. So how did it make her feel?

  “Like one of his wives.” She giggled.

  “One of?” I said.

  “Oh, he had many wives. I think the jewelry was for whichever one would join his celebrations.”

  I mentioned that many of the most treasured items from Nimrud, including a number of the human-headed lions, had been transported to museums across Europe and America. “Part of me feels sad that they are not in Iraq, for Iraqi scholars to study them and the Iraqi people to enjoy them,” I said. “But another part of me is relieved that at least they are safe.”

  She nodded for a second as if to agree, then smiled. “So when our new Iraqi government will be formed in Baghdad, they can ask American troops to bring these things back home?”

  I bowed at her expert parry. “Maybe if they put you in charge,” I said.

  Mosul was a lawless, scary place. Iraq’s second-largest city was never fully secured during the war, in part because the Coalition was not allowed to bring in troops from nearby Turkey. Uday and Qusay sought refuge here, where they were eventually killed. Today, vehicles swarmed around traffic circles, honking and butting against one another like bumper cars. Fistfights erupted on street corners. A foot patrol of U.S. forces closed off the main thoroughfare. “There was an explosion,” an officer explained, “but no one was hurt. We get mortared all the time, but nothing comes of it. They don’t have good aim.” In coming weeks their aim would improve and dozens of U.S. troops would be killed.

  The one oasis of calm was a huge, green void in the middle of town, the tell of Nineveh. Built on the banks of the Tigris, ancient Nineveh was an enormous city, covering eighteen hundred acres, seven times larger than the Old City of Jerusalem. It reached its apogee with Sennacherib, who assumed control of the Assyrian empire around 705 B.C.E. Sennacherib reinforced the city walls, constructed a palace, and built what he called “paradise,” a huge park in the center of town where he grew trees, plants, and flowers from all over his empire.

  Sakina Welly led me up a grassy incline to Sennacherib’s “palace without rival.” Its eighty rooms were mostly in ruins now, their treasures long since shipped off to the West. Only one winged bull was discernible, and its head was lopped off and its body decomposed, like a melted ice sculpture. Sakina pointed out the doorpost where Henry Layard found an inscription detailing Sennacherib’s sacking of Judah and his siege of Jerusalem, events described in II Kings. Though the Assyrian account differs from the biblical one, the similarities suggest that the Israelites’ fear of their northern neighbors was well founded.

  This fear is encapsulated by the most dominant structure visible from the palace. On the far bank of the Tigris, on the highest hill in Mosul, sits an enormous white stone building with a minaret. The mound once held an Assyrian temple, later a Christian church, and now a Muslim shrine. Inside is a whalebone and a tomb that Muslims and Christians still visit. “It’s my favorite place in Mosul,” Sakina said. The site is even referenced in chapter 83 of Moby-Dick. It’s called Masjod Jami Nebi Yunus, the Great Mosque of the Prophet Jonah.

  I pulled out my Bible. With only four chapters, Jonah is the fourth-shortest book in the Hebrew Bible, totaling 48 verses, compared with 1,292 for Isaiah, 1,533 for Genesis, and a whopping 2,461 for the Psalms. But the book,
which scholars believe was one of the last to be written, contains many references to other biblical events. Jonah is a mini-Deuteronomy, or repetition, a retelling of many stories from Creation to the Exile.

  The book opens with an immediate echo of Abraham, as God, unintroduced, calls out to Jonah, the son of Amittai: “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim judgment upon it; for their wickedness has come before me.” Though Nineveh’s link to the destruction of Jerusalem is not articulated, biblical ears would have recognized it. But Jonah, for no discernible reason, refuses and flees to Tarshish, in Spain. He boards a ship, prompting God, in an echo of Creation, to send a mighty wind over the sea. Jonah’s shipmates jettison their cargo while Jonah goes into the hold to sleep. The men cast lots to assign blame for the storm and settle on Jonah. “I am a Hebrew,” Jonah declares. “I worship the Lord, the God of Heaven, who made both sea and land.” Showing sudden confidence in God, Jonah recommends that his shipmates toss him overboard. Though pagans, they pray to God, “Oh, please, Lord, do not let us perish,” and heave Jonah into the water. The sea calms.

  In the story’s most famous scene, the Lord then provides a “huge fish” to swallow Jonah. The Hebrew term for the beast, dag gadol, literally means “huge fish” and not whale. Modern science considers a whale to be a mammal, of course, and not a fish, though that distinction was not known in biblical times. The usage of whale today comes from the King James Bible, which properly translates the references in the Book of Jonah as “huge fish” but translates a reference to Jonah’s captor in the Gospel of Matthew as “whale.” This reference was adopted by popular culture. The Greek term used in Matthew, ketos, actually means “sea monster.”

  Whatever the beast, Jonah remains in its belly for three days and three nights, during which he prays to God.

  In my trouble I called to the Lord,

  And he answered me;

  From the belly of Sheol I cried out,

  And you heard my voice.