MY NEW FRIEND Arjin, who lived in Zakho, agreed to give me a tour of her city. Unmarried and in her early thirties, with a face filled with cheekbones and interesting angles, Arjin worked as an office assistant and had an excellent command of English. She was also extraordinarily astute.
Leaving her home shortly after my arrival, we headed downtown, picking up her friend Pelsin on the way. Pelsin worked with Arjin and was in her late twenties, with wide gray-green eyes. She also spoke some English and, like Arjin, wore a calf-length skirt and matching jacket, no head scarf.
Nearing the city center, we passed more of the strange marble houses that I knew from Dohuk—the ones with the spindly columns and odd-sized bay windows, built by the nouveau riche. And here and there stood a surprising number of drab, sullen hotels. As a gateway leading to Turkey, Zakho was a businessman’s town and center for the illicit emigration trade.
We stopped into a tiny gold shop. Traditionally, gold and silver have played an important role in Kurdish culture—often part of the bride-price paid by the groom to the bride, and a way in which to store wealth, especially for women. A typically Kurdish style of jewelry is the queesh or parang, made of gold or silver coins on a chain hung around the neck or waist, or along the brim of a traditional hat or turban, once common among Kurdish women but much rarer now.
The storeowner was trained as a mechanical engineer, but he earned five or six times an engineer’s salary by running his gold shop, he said. Nearly half of his business came from renting out his jewelry, usually to customers who were attending weddings—the single most important occasion in most Kurds’ lives. One of his largest pieces, a flamboyant chest piece made of gold orbs, rented for 400 dinars a day, almost the equivalent of a civil servant’s monthly salary.
Puffy white Western wedding dresses could also be rented at a shop down the street, next to a photographer’s studio. Some Kurdish families rented the dresses, went next door to have their pictures taken, and then brought the dresses back. Others bought the “fake gold” that had recently become available. “This makes the rich people very angry,” Arjin said with a sly smile.
Descending a few steps, we entered a dank vegetable market, its tables piled high with cucumbers, zucchini, onions, green almonds, and unripe pistachios in pink skins. Arjin and Pelsin greeted a friend while I looked around, trying not to stare at several women shrouded in black from head to toe, their faces covered with thin black cloths, lacking even slits for eyes. I’d seen a handful of similarly attired women in Aqra and Amadiya, but their dress was still strange for me, as it was unusual in Kurdistan.
Throughout Greater Kurdistan, women’s clothing varies widely. In the villages of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, many wear either the traditional colorful Kurdish costume—which differs from region to region—or a dishdasha, the caftan. When going to market, these women often cover their heads, but not their faces, and go uncovered in their homes and fields. The long black abeyya or chador, enveloping the entire body and head, but not the face, is worn mostly by urban Kurds. In Iran, such coverings are required on the urban streets—though not in the villages, or the home, where most anything goes. In Iraq, they are voluntary and usually worn only by traditional older women. In Turkey, they are rarely seen.
Few women anywhere in Greater Kurdistan cover their faces, and when they do, it is generally only in the smaller and more conservative cities, and only when visiting the market or other public spaces frequented by strangers. Most urban Iraqi Kurdish women, young and old, dress modestly in knee- or calf-length skirts and blouses, or sometimes pants, with occasional head scarves. Fashions are somewhat freer in the liberal Iraqi city of Suleimaniyah, where many women wear pants; freer still in the homes of urban Iranian Kurds, where many wear tight-fitting T-shirts and jeans; and freest of all in the cities of Turkey’s Kurdistan, where women flaunt tightfitting clothes on the streets. I scarcely saw a single young woman in Turkey’s Kurdish cities in a skirt.
The face cloth is called the kheli, my new friends told me as we left the market, and the women could be wearing it because they were old and traditional, because they were shy, or because they came from a “high” or illustrious family. Pelsin herself came from a “high” family, and, though they no longer had much wealth or power, there was much consternation in her tribal community when she refused to wear the kheli.
“I told them, okay, maybe if I just went to the market once or twice a week, I would wear it,” Pelsin said. “But I work in an office, I go out every day. And finally they accepted that. But they still don’t like it that I wear jackets and skirts—they want me to be completely covered.”
“I myself tried to wear the kheli to the market a few times,” Arjin said with a mischievous grin, “but every time, I tripped and fell down.”
As we walked, I learned more. Pelsin’s neighbors were also peeved that she worked, was often not home to receive them, remained single, often refrained from gossip, and took taxis by herself—something few Iraqi Kurdish women do. As a member of an important family, she was expected to set impeccable standards by dressing ultraconservatively and comporting herself ultrademurely. Most of all, she was expected to keep herself well removed from the public eye; heaven forbid that she should ever think of taking a higher-profile job or a position in the government, as a handful of other Kurdish women had. And why in the world didn’t she wear the dishdasha around the house like everyone else?
Talk. Gossip. It is the oppressive bane of the Kurdish woman’s existence. What is she wearing? Where is she going? How much did she pay for those shoes? How often has she spoken to that man?
In an earlier era, and in many parts of traditional Kurdistan today, Kurdish women drifted out of their homes in the late mornings or afternoons to sit in their doorways and talk. For many, it was the high point of an otherwise backbreaking day spent cleaning the house, preparing the meals, caring for the children, hauling the water and firewood, tilling the fields. Traditional Kurdish women worked—and work—far harder than the men. Times have changed, and people are changing, but the tradition of gossip is dying hard.
Arjin, Pelsin, and I meandered out of the downtown and down wide empty streets to the one-thousand-year-old Pira Dellal Bridge. Built of cut limestone blocks fit so tightly together that they appeared to be welded, the bridge rose to an arched peak about thirty feet above the Khabur River. The bridge’s incline was so steep that it was hard not to imagine horses and people slipping and sliding over its smooth, guard-less sides in inclement weather.
“Do you notice that there are no other women alone together here?” Arjin said as we stepped onto the bridge.
She was right, although I did notice a few women together with their families.
“Women do not go out by themselves in Zakho, except to the market. Zakho is a very conservative city.”
The Khabur River rushed below us, a churning brown current running high with the spring.
“After the uprising, some women did come here alone with other women,” Arjin went on. “We had more freedom then, everyone was so happy Saddam was gone. But now that time is finished. Now is the same as before. Only men and families come here.”
So the old order has reasserted itself, I thought dispiritedly. Throughout the traditional Muslim world, public spaces are dominated by men, while women are relegated to the private spaces of the home. Why had Kurdistan reverted to the old order? And why so soon? Was it simply because in the face of much upheaval, people needed familiar touchstones? Or had an early disillusionment already set in? When and how does change become permanent and true? How much of change comes from above and how much from below?
On the other side of the bridge, we walked along the riverbank. The bridge was more beautiful from this angle, with the late-afternoon rays of the sun warming the limestone into gentle pinks and tans. A wash had been thrown over the world.
The one-thousand-year-old Pira Dellal Bridge
“I never went to the bridge until I was fifteen or sixteen y
ears old,” Pelsin said, breaking into my reverie.
“What?” I said, startled. The bridge is Zakho’s primary historic attraction, the focal point of an otherwise scraggly architectural landscape.
“As a high family, we never went out in public places.”
I blinked hard. I didn’t know what to say. To be of a “high” family in Kurdistan sounded like more of a curse than a blessing.
“Life must be very difficult for you here,” I finally said, wishing that I could somehow change things. My new friends seemed so capable, so intelligent, so buried.
They shrugged, exhibiting the Kurdish stoicism that I noticed so often. “It is okay. Sometimes we are depressed, but little by little, things are changing.”
BEHIN DZAKHO ROSE a range of dry, rugged, elephant-skin mountains, followed in the distance by the higher icy peaks of Turkey. Gazing out of Arjin’s bedroom window later that day, I felt at the edge of existence, close to the land and the sky. Children were playing in streets nearly empty of traffic, and Arjin and I had just returned from visiting her sister, who lived next door. She had recently been ill and was receiving thirty or forty visitors a day, every day. The city around me notwithstanding, I was in a village.
Arjin’s family home was big and dark and sparsely furnished, with an inviting garden lined with flower beds out back. In the house lived about a dozen people, including Arjin’s frail mother, several siblings and cousins, and the wife of a brother who was living in England. Pale, silent, and pregnant after the brother’s most recent visit, the wife had been waiting for five years to join her husband.
Arjin, one of her sisters, a teenage niece, and I had gathered in the small upstairs bedroom to talk and giggle, look at pictures, and munch on baklava. Arjin’s sister spent a long time studying herself in a handheld mirror, while the teenage niece, who had just started covering herself, took time out to say her evening prayers. None of the other under-forty women in Arjin’s family wore the head scarf.
“Many young women are starting to cover themselves more and more,” Arjin said as we watched her niece, and I remembered Bayan, my bright-eyed, tightly covered translator in Dohuk. “I think because after the uprising, we went a little crazy. We were like teenagers, we did like Westerners do. So maybe now, without realizing, we want to return to our own culture. We are Muslim.”
What parts of one’s culture to keep and what to leave behind when moving from one era into the next? How to know what losses to mourn, what changes to embrace?
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I awoke to the sounds of sheep baaing, birds singing, chickens cackling, people hammering, and men slapping loaves of bread into shape in a bakery down the street. On the rooftops around me, between satellite dishes, women were stringing laundry up on clotheslines.
Arjin and I breakfasted on typical Kurdish fare—the flat nane tanik, white cheese, yogurt, honey, tea—and then Arjin handed me the keys to the family car. We had places to visit, but Arjin couldn’t drive and assumed that I could. Like many Iraqi Kurds with limited firsthand knowledge of the outside world, she imagined that Westerners, and especially Americans, were proficient at everything. If they only knew!
Arjin badly wanted to learn how to drive, but to do so would have meant undertaking a difficult and exhausting campaign against public opinion. Most women in traditional Kurdistan do not drive. Cars are regarded as the province of men, and women who trespass risk being viewed as immoral. Most traditional Kurdish women also do not travel by themselves or spend the night away from home unless in the company of male relatives.
However, these mores—which do not necessarily apply to urban Kurdish women, especially in Iran and Turkey—are changing. Many in Iraqi Kurdistan told me that women’s lives have greatly improved over the last two decades. And I had already met several women from traditional families who drove, lived in school dorms, or held jobs that involved extensive unaccompanied travel.
Whether or not a woman was allowed to drive, travel, or spend nights away from home without a male escort all depended on her family and where it stood vis-à-vis the hoary question of honor.
Honor is a central value in Kurdish society, affecting everyone, but it is women who are the most burdened. It is they who must maintain their family’s reputation by keeping both their behavior and all perceptions of their behavior above reproach, especially in poorer communities, where a young girl’s virginity may be her family’s only commodity. Women must therefore not only refrain from pre- and extramarital sex, flirting, and seductive dress, but they must also take care not to be spotted with an unrelated man once too often, spend too many unaccountable hours away from home, or go out without family after a certain hour. Such strictures lead to women keeping unnaturally tight reins on themselves. Yet they can scarcely afford to do otherwise, as the price for mistakes is extraordinarily high. The specter of honor killings is always lurking.
Many Kurds I met were quick to blame honor killings on fundamentalist Islam, but the practice is feudal and patriarchal in origin, not Islamic. Sharia, or Islamic law, calls for the stoning of both men and women for adultery, but only when there are four witnesses and when the punishment is carried out by the authorities. Taking the law into one’s own hands, as some Kurdish families do, is not condoned by Islam, and sex between an unmarried man and unmarried woman is not a capital offense under sharia.
As elsewhere in the traditional Muslim world, most Kurdish women live under many other strictures as well. Women must marry, preferably before age thirty, if they wish to gain respect and a three-dimensional, quasi-independent life. Unmarried women usually live with their parents or married siblings, where they are expected to shoulder much of the housework, and remain virgins until they die. Divorced women are usually forced to return to their parents’ or a sibling’s home, as they have no other means of economic support, and they are often treated as objects of great shame by their family.
Men are also expected to marry. A bachelor garners little respect in traditional Kurdish society, where a man needs a wife to provide him with everything from food to sex. Prostitution was almost unknown in the strongly family-oriented Kurdish communities until recent decades, and is still often regarded with unmitigated horror, as I learned for myself one evening, when a male friend of Arjin’s family took us up a mountaintop for a scenic view of Zakho. Dusk was settling in, a blue haze descending, and bushes were jumping out of the darkening landscape like fat black sheep. From one spot on the mountain, the friend pointed out the site of a former “casino,” once filled with Egyptian prostitutes imported by the Baathists to distract the Kurds from their cause, he said. But the peshmerga had successfully bombed the casino one day, killing all the “evil” women inside. He beamed proudly, seemingly not suspecting that there might be another way to view the matter.
Once married, Kurdish women were traditionally expected to produce as many children as possible. Many middle-aged Kurds I met throughout Greater Kurdistan had ten, twelve, or even more siblings. But today’s families are considerably smaller, with many younger village families raising only three or four children, and educated families, only two or three. However, especially among villagers, boy children still tend to be more prized than girl children, and, as elsewhere in the Muslim world, if a wife does not bear a son, her husband has grounds to take a second wife.
As Muslims, Kurdish men are allowed to have four spouses, while Kurdish women can have only one. But a man can take another wife only if he is financially able to do so. “Marry of the women, who seem good to you, two or three or four; and if ye fear that ye cannot do justice (to so many) then one only,” reads the Quran (4:3).
Not surprisingly, the taking of second wives was not a subject about which most Kurds felt comfortable talking to me. And many insisted that with modernization and the deterioration of their agricultural society, in which many children were needed to harvest the crops, the practice is dying out. But in the absence of any hard data, I remain unconvinced, at least as far as Iraqi Kurdistan
is concerned. I met a number of powerful men under age forty-five who had two wives, and some women told me that they believed the custom was becoming more, rather than less, common, due to the shortage of eligible men post-Anfal, coupled with Kurdistan’s increased oil-for-food wealth.
In Iraqi Kurdistan, both men and women were always pointing out to me how liberal their society is, compared to other Muslim societies, in its treatment of women. Educated Kurds often referred to the writings of early Western travelers and scholars—most male—who commented on the relative freedom of Kurdish women. And in some ways, the early visitors’ observations hold true: many Kurdish village women cover only their heads, many have much authority in the home, men and women mix somewhat in social settings, and Kurdish women are often much more outspoken than are their Arab counterparts. Throughout history, too, Kurdish women have occasionally held high positions in politics and the military.
But from what I saw, the typical Iraqi Kurdish woman’s so-called “greater freedoms” were limited and far from widespread. Though change is under way, most traditional Kurdish women’s lives remain highly circumscribed, sometimes in ways that are more extreme than in some other parts of the Islamic world. While in Iran in 1998, for example, I met many women who, despite the mandatory covering, drove cars, took taxicabs by themselves, owned businesses, served in government, worked as professionals, and went out alone with other women at night, at least in the larger cities, without anyone blinking an eye. Honor killings are also rarer in Iran, as it is a more sophisticated society, further removed from its tribal past. But many Iraqi Kurds I met did not want to hear this; they were too intent on proving their moral superiority over their hostile neighbors. To them, Iran was an enemy state and, ipso facto, more antifemale.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 14