At her weekly meetings, Manal noticed that women began to sit separately: the veiled in one corner and the unveiled in another. Manal had gravitated to the veil as a teenager as a way to stop people from judging her by her looks, but now she was finding the world of veiled women to be just as judgmental as, if not more than, the alternative. Even among the veiled women there were divisions between those who wore plain black veils or patterned, colored ones; between those who covered themselves not just with the veil but with gloves and socks, versus those who wore makeup, jewelry, or high heels under their veils. Manal’s efforts to steer the veiled and unveiled women onto issues that they could agree upon, like health care, education, and participation in government, were futile.
As Manal saw it, for every self-righteous Islamist covered from head to toe there was a self-righteous secularist with a feminists-don’t-veil mentality. Manal was in the middle, a progressive, liberal woman who also veiled. But her nuanced position was lost in the rhetoric. The veil was becoming to the Iraqi women’s rights movement what abortion rights was in the 1970s to American women—the single polarizing issue that divided the movement in half and turned each side against the other. Without unity, we will never get anywhere, Manal tried to tell them.
Even Manal herself was not immune from the judgments, she discovered one day.
“Manal, it’s good you wear a hijab but why do you wear trousers?” a veiled woman interrupted the meeting to ask. “Why not wear a skirt and be complete?”
With that, the unveiled women in trousers went into an uproar. “What does a skirt show?” said one. “A skirt is a piece of cloth. It’s not religion.”
When the uproar that followed finally died down, they turned back to Manal. “It is good that you have come all this way to help us,” one said. “But who is taking care of your children in America?”
“Oh, I don’t have children,” Manal replied. The women studied her face, and Manal knew they were trying to guess her age. Clearly, she was of an age at which she should have children, they decided, and looked at her with suspicion: Would this women’s center discourage women from having children? Manal knew she was up against Arab women’s stereotypes about loose, single Western women who were “antifamily.” She realized her personal life was becoming a distracting focus of controversy. Until then, she had been viewed not as an American, or a Western woman, but as a Muslim woman who looked like them, observed their customs and holidays, and spoke their language, albeit with a Palestinian accent. She didn’t want to lie, but she also didn’t want to hurt the burgeoning plans for the women’s centers. The next time a group of women asked her a personal question, she offered a more diplomatic answer.
“Doesn’t your husband mind you are here?” some woman asked her.
Manal shook her head. “Id’eelee,” she said, Arabic for “Pray for me.”
“Oh yes, yes.” The women nodded, satisfied that, at the very least, Manal agreed she should have a husband and children.
They promised to pray for her.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DAYLIGHT STREAMED AROUND the curtain’s edge as Nunu watched Zia and Mamina prepare for a trip to the goldsmith’s shop. Zia’s $500-a-month salary was a lot of money, and the family needed some safe way of storing it. That wasn’t easy to find: many families had lost all their money when the banks were looted after the invasion. So far, they had been hiding Zia’s cash in a plastic Tupperware box in the refrigerator and in rice boxes in the cupboard, but, as word spread that Zia worked for the Americans, Baba worried they might be burglarized. Given the rising inflation, Baba suspected the currency would soon become worthless, and decided that gold jewelry was always a safe investment. The family goldsmith, Ali, had a tiny storefront in a neighborhood across town in Khadamiya that Mamina, Zia, and Nunu all used to visit together before the war.
Nunu didn’t want to go with them today, since she didn’t really feel safe out in the city these days, but she knew if she’d asked, Baba would have said no. He didn’t try to stop Zia, though. It was a mark of increased respect for her, which surprised and pleased both sisters. Zia was the family’s main breadwinner now, and this had boosted her status among their father and uncles. Each month, she bought the family a new gift—an air conditioner, a generator, Nunu’s beloved television. “Not even a fifty-year-old man with a PhD could earn this salary,” Zia proudly confided to Nunu, and she was only twenty-two. Zia would never directly disobey her father, but she did take advantage of the changing dynamic. Now when Umar visited, Zia sat in on the meeting and spoke with him as an equal, while Nunu stayed on the sidelines, where she’d always been more comfortable.
However, while she could work, drive, and financially sustain the family, Zia still could not tell Baba about Keith. Nunu and Mamina loved to hear her talk about Keith, though, and their evening ritual was to huddle in the bedroom after dinner and hear Zia’s stories about her day among the Americans. Each night Zia entertained them with jokes Keith told, emails he sent, or the interesting insights he gave her into the occupation. When they heard Baba pass by the door, they lowered their voices. The three women knew there was nothing shameful about the friendship, but there was no way to know how Baba would react. In his heart, he might be okay with the idea, but society would pressure him not to accept it. Just as they had condemned Ehdaa’s marriage to the soldier months ago, the shopkeepers, neighbors, and even Baba’s friends would gossip and maybe even threaten the family if news spread that his elder daughter was romantically involved with an American. No one knew how Ehdaa’s story had ended, but Zia assumed her family had caved in to pressure to punish her. Baba, too, would feel pressured to act. He would never lay a finger on his daughters, but he might force Zia to quit IMN, condemn her to the house, and maybe never speak to her again.
Yet, despite the possible consequences, Zia’s relationship continued. Nunu loved hearing about this kind and chivalrous American—she knew that Zia secretly enjoyed the thrill of rebellion and forbidden romance. Each week, Zia and Keith saw more and more of each other. They made excuses to meet up for lunch, to take a stroll, or to pass each other in the corridors of IMN. When they didn’t see each other they exchanged flirtatious emails or spoke on the phone. Zia made clear, though, that it was strictly platonic. She told Mamina that if Keith tried to hold her hand, she pulled away. He didn’t dare try to kiss her, as she emphasized that Iraqi women had no physical contact before marriage. She admitted that she wasn’t sure how Keith felt about this: sometimes he would say, with wonder in his voice, “This is the first time I’ve been only friends with a beautiful woman.” This made Nunu giggle. It was clear to everyone that the unfulfilled desire only strengthened the magnetic pull between them.
Finally, Nunu began to tease her big sister.
“Ohhhh, Keith this and Keith that.” She laughed. “You always find a reason to bring him into your stories.”
Mamina nodded, smiling. “When you speak of him, your eyes shine.”
Zia rolled onto her back and looked at the single exposed bulb that lit up the room. “He is wonderful, Mama.”
“You love him!” Nunu exclaimed, delighted. Zia didn’t deny it.
NUNU WAS SETTLING onto the sofa with her university books, in her favorite comfy spot, legs tucked under her, as Mamina and Zia finished preparations for the trip to the goldsmith. Mamina handed Zia a long shawl, which she draped around her head, wrapped around her neck, flipped back over her head, and pinned snugly below her left ear. Mamina did the same.
“Uh, I look like I’m from Najaf,” Zia complained.
“You do,” Nunu agreed from the couch. She hated seeing her mother and sister that way.
The sisters had only ever veiled when they visited conservative Iraqi places such as the holy Shia city of Najaf in the south, where it would be scandalous not to. They didn’t like the pious, severe look of the hijab, and their family didn’t believe the Quran mandated it. The Quran instructs women to dress modestly, saying a woman should “
draw a scarf across her upper chest,” but its translation is disputed; some Muslims believe that means only that women should not reveal their breasts, while others say the Prophet wanted women’s bodies hidden completely under abayas. Another section in the Quran, invoked to pressure women to veil, states, “The wives and daughters of the Prophet and the women of the believers should draw a cloak close around them.” But some people argue over the translation, believing that the Prophet did not say a cloak, but meant a curtain—like a door—to be drawn to give privacy to his wives when the husband’s associates visit the house. Across the Muslim world, different societies interpreted the Quran differently, as exemplified by the vast array of different headscarf styles: some women show the tops of their hair and their necks, while others cover their face or even their eyes. Mamina had raised her children with a more liberal view of the veil as a symbol. “Islam is not a cloak you wrap around you. It is in your heart, and it is your character.”
But since the invasion, more and more women in Iraq had donned the veil as a simple, practical safety measure. It also covered the streak of hair Zia had dyed blond years earlier. Ironically, such a symbolic adoption of Western trends was safer under Saddam than the U.S. occupation. Today, since they were traveling into volatile neighborhoods where Muqtada al-Sadr had supporters, any visual indication of loyalty to the USA was dangerous, even a streak of dyed-blond hair. Furthermore, Mamina didn’t want to chance running into a gang that might try to kidnap her beautiful daughter. The anonymity of the veil, the way it hid any marker of femininity, was a layer of protection.
When they were finished, as they headed out the door, only their fingertips and faces showed.
Nunu watched them go, uneasily. “I’ll make dinner,” she said, waving goodbye as cheerfully as she could.
After they left, though, Nunu couldn’t keep her mind on her texts. She was supposed to be studying poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and she had an exam coming. Usually Zia helped drill her, but she had been too busy lately. Nunu still felt unsettled at seeing her sister don a veil—even under Saddam they had rarely had to do so. She had certainly never imagined that women in the new Iraq would be forced to veil, and the thought frightened her.
Nunu tried again to focus on her texts, but studying felt unimportant these days—as did everything else. There was very little meaning or direction to her days. Since the new school year began, classes had been erratic. On a typical day, when not in school, she studied, cleaned the house, did the laundry, arranged the clothes in the closet, and took a nap. If Mamina and Zia went to the market, Nunu cooked. When her father returned home, he switched on the generator to watch the daily news, which was increasingly about attacks against soldiers and other Iraqis, or a helicopter downed, a building bombed. Many incidents occurred within miles of their house. The nerve-racking events unsettled Nunu.
On campus, things were changing too. When Nunu arrived in October, she was a little disappointed that everything looked the same. She had imagined new state-of-the-art facilities under construction, shiny textbooks from America, and laptops with Internet access in all the classrooms. Instead, it seemed worse than it had been before. Instead of laptops, the classrooms had no lights. The fans still didn’t work, and the same wooden blackboard was on the wall; many things they used to have had gone missing during the looting. Student records had been destroyed, so confusion dominated the first few weeks of registration.
Even the joy of seeing the soldiers patrolling over the summer had faded. They visited less and less often, and when they did, they no longer waved.
“They never even look at us anymore,” Nunu had complained to Zia.
“That’s because the female civilians have arrived at the palace now from America, and they’re prettier than we are,” Zia explained.
“Oh,” Nunu said glumly.
So she stopped waving at them, too, and the distance grew. Male students on campus didn’t like the soldiers, and they glared at girls who waved to them.
One day recently, Nunu had been sitting on a stone bench with Noor and other friends, all in long skirts, with books on their laps, when three soldiers passed across the campus pavilion. Nunu watched them, thinking that, should robots drop from outer space, they would appear no less incongruous: their round helmets and steel-plated vests, their grenades, rifles, and ammunition, their big boots and camouflage pants, and their Humvees in the distance. Suddenly she was feeling uncertain about the military presence.
As she looked on, though, an older male student approached the soldiers and spat at one of them.
Nunu inhaled sharply, along with all the other nearby students, who froze in fear. Nunu considered running away, but she was too scared. The soldier stopped in his tracks and turned around. He eyeballed the Iraqi man, who stared back at him with hatred.
“He’s dead,” Nunu whispered to her friend. “The American will kill him right now.”
Instead, another soldier said something and patted him on the arm. They walked away.
The story of the incident spread over the campus and the student was heralded as a hero. “The American soldiers are weak,” the male students cheered.
Nunu and her girlfriends disagreed, however. “No, he didn’t shoot him because he didn’t want to hurt any innocent people standing nearby.”
But the young men insisted. “They are afraid of us.”
ZIA DIRECTED THE taxi to the goldsmith’s shop in the Khadamiya neighborhood. To get there, the taxi would first pass through Adhamiya, a predominantly wealthy Sunni neighborhood that had emptied right after the invasion, as all the ex-Ba’athists had fled the country. In recent months, though, they had returned, and now the neighborhood was known among Baghdadis as a stronghold for Sunnis who opposed the Americans.
Zia settled back into her seat. Before she had left, she had been careful to empty her purse of her laminated badge that read U.S. COALITION FORCES. In recent months, Adhamiya had become a mecca for the irhabeen, slang for insurgents or terrorists, although the locals called them “jihadis,” a more heroic term. Ex-Ba’athist families living in the plush homes, with gated driveways and inner courtyards, took in these fighters and helped organize through Syria a pipeline for arms and money to fuel resistance across Iraq. When unemployment skyrocketed after the Americans disbanded the army, government ministries, and state-run industries, the insurgency had become a kind of employment center, where a former soldier could earn twenty-five dollars for helping to lay down a roadside bomb or shoot a rocket-propelled grenade.
Zia was so busy with her job that she had spent very little time outside the Green Zone lately. Now, as she passed through the city, she felt depressed. The Green Zone always had electricity, clean streets, bottled water, and ample food. The feeling of upward momentum and progress was in the air as everyone talked excitedly about their democracy projects and the millions of dollars at their fingertips. But life outside the Green Zone, she was realizing, felt as stagnant as the brackish water pooling in the alleys. Rubbish piled up uncollected, and young men sat idly with worried faces. A trip through Baghdad that had once taken about twenty minutes could easily take an hour or two. Power outages meant the traffic lights didn’t work, and many of the traffic police hadn’t returned to the job. She didn’t want to think that the occupation wasn’t going well. It was easier to arrive early and stay late at work, safe in the bubble of the Green Zone.
Yet she had to admit to herself that even the Green Zone felt less safe lately. The growth of the insurgency was having a huge and worrisome impact on U.S. efforts in Iraq. Stories abounded of convoys attacked as they left the Green Zone, of roadside bombs and ambushes. No longer did anyone drive out of the Green Zone to have lunch or attend a meeting—that was considered too dangerous. The kind of lunch date that she and Keith had enjoyed only a month earlier might be too risky now, for fear that an insurgent waiting outside the gates could follow them and shoot into their car. Even inside the Green Zone, a siege mentality had started to ta
ke hold. Just last month, Iraqis pulling a donkey cart had launched thirteen rockets over the walls of the Green Zone at the Rashid Hotel, where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had been staying. One American colonel had been killed. Ever since then, several rockets a week were lobbed from outlying neighborhoods into the Green Zone. No one else had been hit, but the effect was unnerving.
Zia understood the enemy: tens of thousands of Sunnis still loyal to Saddam were launching the attacks, and they lived in neighborhoods like Adhamiya. They were joined by foreign fighters from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, who had volunteered to be martyred in what they believed was an American-led Christian crusade against Islam. But few of her American colleagues understood what was going on, or even knew which neighborhood was Adhamiya. Many Americans had unknowingly hired ex-Saddam employees as translators and advisers, who intentionally gave them bad information, pointing the finger at Shia neighborhoods. New to Iraq, with no knowledge of Arabic, most Americans didn’t understand the layers of Iraqi society, the allegiances, the religious loyalties, or the neighborhood affiliations. They didn’t know whom to trust or what to believe. They saw only two groups: themselves and Iraqis. Us and them.
Sisters in War Page 15