Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family

The earliest indications of a settled civilization in the world are found in the region that is known today as Iraq. Between the fifth and fourth millennia BCE, lower Tigris and Euphrates basin cities such as Ur, Uruk and Larsa emerged and stratified societies developed within them. Mesopotamia – as the Greeks referred to the region between the two rivers – covered roughly the central southern part of what is now Iraq. Mesopotamia was also the term used to describe the provinces of the Ottoman Empire that belonged to this region. The ancient history of Mesopotamia is now lost to us, but it was mythologized by the Sumerians in epics such as the story of Gilgamesh, which was first written down in around 2000 BCE and which is a story of kingship and heroism that has informed and inspired people ever since.

The region that corresponds to the north of modern-day Iraq was the birthplace of the world’s first empire. The Assyrians, descendants of the Akkadians who settled in the land of Sumer, engaged in what amounted to a conquest of the known world of their time – from Persia to Egypt. The Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians and later the Babylonians created what are, in effect, the foundations of civilization today. Our seven-day week, sixty-minute hour and much of our understanding of the constellation of the skies are the direct legacies of this defining period in human history. The mythologies of a large cast of gods and goddesses survived from this period too: Anu, the heaven-god of Mesopotamia, was the equivalent of Greek Zeus, while Ishtar or Inana was the goddess of love, war and fertility, and the precursor of Egyptian Isis.

The fortunes of Mesopotamia were largely dictated by its geography, in particular its position in relation to the frontier lands of the Graeco-Roman and Iranian worlds. The territory changed hands as part of the ebb and flow of the respective powers of these historical entities. Alexander the Great and Darius the Persian fought over the land, while many prophets passed through it, including Abraham and Mani, the founder of the ancient but now extinct religion of Manichaeism.

The Muslim conquest of the region in the seventh century CE reconfigured the coordinates of Mesopotamia, and the Islamic empire transformed this former frontier land into the centre of a global empire. The region became central in shaping the ensuing Islamic civilization. In the ninth century, the Caliph al-Mansur ordered the building of a round city with four gates, which grew into a dazzling capital: Baghdad. Baghdad was not only the capital of the Abbasids’ Islamic empire, but of a civilization. The Tales of the One Thousand and One Nights, many of which speak of Baghdad, represent a vivid example of the city’s fusion of cultures, mythologies and styles. The city also became an important trading centre on the Silk Road.

By the thirteenth century, Mesopotamia was a frontier territory once again after the Mongols’ invasion that left its cities and sophisticated irrigation system devastated. In 1534, the region was captured by Ottoman Turks, but from 1623 to 1638 it lay in Iranian hands. My father’s family originally came to Mesopotamia with the army of the Ottoman ruler Murad IV, Sultan of Sultans and God’s Shadow Upon Earth. Murad was a warrior prince, famed for his prodigious strength and the last Ottoman Sultan to command an army on the battlefield. His campaign against Persia led to the invasion of Azerbaijan and Armenia. And, in the last decisive feat of Imperial Ottoman arms, Murad recaptured Baghdad from the Persian Shah Abbas I in 1638. The city remained under Ottoman rule for nearly four hundred years.

The three Ottoman wilayets, or provinces of Mesopotamia, that were referred to as the pachalik of Baghdad included Mosul in the north (which comprised part of the high Zagros mountain range extending from Turkey to Iran), the Kurdish regions, Baghdad itself and Basra in the south, perched on the Persian Gulf. These were subject to various different forms of administrative rule after their conquest by the Ottomans, whose central government was based in Constantinople in Turkey. Most usually, the pachalik was administered through indirect rule, which meant that local families or tribes controlled the areas but paid taxes to the central Ottoman government. The system was changed in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the authorities in Istanbul decided to impose direct rule and sent an army along with a wali, or governor, to re-establish their authority over Baghdad and to collect taxes in the name of the Sultan. This diminished the power of many of the local leaders, especially amongst the tribes, who remained resentful of the central government in Istanbul.

By the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was contracting. It had lost control of the Balkans and earlier of Greece, and was gradually whittled down to half the size it had been in the sixteenth century. As in the rest of the Empire, there was a multi-ethnic and multi-religious population in the area of Mesopotamia that became Iraq, consisting of Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Persians, Lurs, Sunnis, Shi’a, Christians, Jews, Mandaeans and Yezidis, among others. The Iraqi dialect of Arabic had strong Turkish and Persian influences. The blend of cultures made for a rich, diverse but highly complicated society.

By the time they were exiled in 1958, as a consequence of a revolution that overthrew the monarchy, my family had become firmly entrenched in Iraq’s political life and society. Over the course of three centuries they had transformed themselves from warriors into administrators and the confidants of the ruling family. They had arrived as Sunni Muslims, but they left as Shi’a Muslims. They became the administrative rulers of Kazimiya, where they lived, which lay across the Tigris to the north of Baghdad, but which is now a part of the city itself. With the Ottoman reforms, the family’s administrative role in the town came to an end by 1865. However, they retained their high standing in society.

Across the region, the Sunnis were dominant, with the exception of shrine cities such as Kazimiya. Generally excluded from political power, the increasingly disenfranchised Shi’a populations of these areas immersed themselves in learning and religion, criticizing their Sunni overlords from the high ground of their religious authority. As Shi’as who were deeply involved in politics, my family was caught between two worlds. They were both insiders and outsiders.

The rudiments of my family history, with its tale of loss and privilege, were relayed to me principally by my uncle Hassan over the course of a few years in Beirut and London. The story whose seed he had planted in my seven-year-old head gave Iraq a status that grew inside me as I grew, and slowly came to embody my sense of the future: I created the country in my mind long before I ever saw it. Its importance was heightened by the impact Iraq had on my family once my father entered the world of politics in opposition to Saddam Hussein’s regime in the early nineties, adding a layer of gravity, urgency and uncertainty to our daily life. Iraq came to dominate my thoughts, and I poured my imagination into this mythical place.

I first found a doorway to my Iraqi inheritance through learning about Iraq’s culture and history. I imagined a place of scholars and antiquities, music and poetry, a multicultural haven of different peoples – Arabs, Kurds, Turks and Persians – and languages mixing together peacefully in a green and lush land by the riverbanks. This vision defied all the horrors of the country that I read about in the news.

But it was really anger that triggered me to write this book. My anger grew out of my experiences in Iraq in the aftermath of the war in 2003, with the US occupation of the country and the new political powers that were in place. I was angry at what I perceived initially as a country hurled back to the Middle Ages through misrule, neglect and sanctions, and a beaten people who had lost their voice long ago. I was also angry about what I saw as the expropriation of those people’s silent voices, and of Iraq as a land by the US civil administration and the international press to serve their own agendas, political and otherwise. They became the designated spokespeople for an Iraq they barely knew and didn’t care about, in the shadow of a greater preoccupation with the role of America in the region. They reduced Iraq to a desert of tanks, screaming women and barefoot children. The country’s ancient history and cultural output over millennia meant nothing to them. I tried to understand the silence of the Iraqis themselves – perhaps it was the consequence of enduring fear, or a habit developed as the result of decades of oppression; perhaps it was their unfamiliarity with the latest means of communication owing to those long years of sanctions, I didn’t know. One of Iraq’s burdens has always been the way it is presented to the outside world as patchy, Manichaean, extreme. It is a nation that is portrayed either through its politics, most notoriously through Saddam and his regime, or through its ancient and glorious history, but never through its people.

The Iraq that I witnessed in person for the first time challenged all my preconceptions. It continues to do so, throwing back at me contradictions and tangents just when I think I am beginning to understand it, raising as many questions as it provides answers. It makes me wonder why there should be such a strong attachment to the country in my family. What does this attachment suggest? Does it represent a refusal to move on, to grow and embrace the world?

In the wake of what I saw for myself in their homeland, my family and their stories made me wonder anew about my own origins. Writing about their experiences challenged my notions of language, as I tried to render an Iraqi Arabic with all its idiosyncratic nuances into English. Most of all, it made me wonder about the very concept of Iraq: as a modern state, an ancient land, a nation, a word, a song, a river, a grave, a shrine, a statue of a deer.

In writing this book, I have been fortunate to have had access to a wealth of material: oral histories, archive materials, newspapers, buildings, relics, memoirs, music, interviews and photographs. This book is my attempt to make the unruly disciplined, to assemble the disordered, unorganized parts of the past into a cohesive narrative. As Iraq has an ancient oral tradition, and a great deal of this story was transmitted to me orally, I have tried to respect those elements, and to remain faithful to and respectful of the memories my family have entrusted to me. The timescale of memory is not the same as the timescale of history. Major periods of history can be summarized while minor periods can be expanded. This was certainly true of my family, who when speaking to me dwelled on their happy childhoods in Iraq, but for whom the revolution and many of the years following it passed in a blur. My family’s stories of Iraq are more personal and intimate than a dispassionate and neatly constructed history. They show the country through the lives of people who have loved it.

BOOK ONE

Fallen

Pomegranates

DECEMBER 2007

I am walking through Kazimiya’s alleyways, exploring the crumbling houses with Fatima, a friend from the town, and looking for the old family home. We are following the directions of an elderly historian who is too frail to show us the way in person. He has directed us verbally: turn left by the old train station, right at the donkey stables and left again by the old water pump. Because Kazimiya is a shrine town, and therefore quite conservative, I am wearing an abaya – a long over-garment – which keeps slipping off my head.

Narrow channels of water flow through the middle of the cobbled streets we walk along. Children play and old men sit in their shop fronts, watching us and muttering to each other as they wonder what these strangers are looking for. I wince, thinking about the century that has passed since my grandmother walked these same streets as a little girl, a daughter of this town, and of the many waves of people who have passed through this frontier land, contested between the Ottomans and Persia over many centuries, and later between the British and now the Americans. My grandmother was born an Ottoman subject, just like a native of Istanbul or Izmir, and here I am trying to find remnants of that time and place. She certainly wouldn’t have struggled with the abaya as I do now, nor needed directions to find the main square.

We head towards the side gate of the shrine, Bab al-Murad, said to have been designed by the angel Gabriel, where my grandmother and many others once gave offerings to the poor in gratitude for prayers answered by the seventh Imam. I stop and do the same as I wait to go inside to make my wish.

1

Duty Calls

A Busy Day for Abdul Hussein

(1913)

ABDUL HUSSEIN CHALABI rose early, performed his ablutions, uttered his prayers unto Allah and the Prophet, then sat down to a large breakfast of his favourite food in all the world: fresh gaymar, cream of buffalo milk, velvety-smooth in texture, spread over just-baked bread and crowned with amber honey from the Kurdish mountains.

He was still tired. He had slept poorly and his troubled dreams had been of his dead sister. In them, she had stood silently before him, her eyes burning with reproach. He had tried his best to appease her, to explain that the family’s decision had really been for the best. She had opened her mouth as if to speak, and then he had woken with a start. Alone in his bedroom, he had taken a few minutes to recollect himself before rising.

Feeling better for having eaten, he adjourned and sat with his head thrown back while his butler shaved his plump face. He could hear his mother, Khadja, barking orders at her servant across the long corridor that led to her quarters. Once shaved, he dressed as always after breakfast – never before – so that the belt of his cloak would not cramp his enjoyment of the best meal of the day. At the age of thirty-seven, Abdul Hussein remained very particular about his appearance, forever sending the servants into panic attacks with his complaints of poorly-ironed shirts and badly-polished boots.

He wore the typical attire of a sophisticated urbanite: a traditional robe tailored in Baghdad from sayah, a delicate striped cotton material bought in Damascus, over white drawstring trousers. On his head he wore a fez, decreed by the Sultan in Istanbul to be the appropriate headgear of the modern Ottoman Empire. Abdul Hussein not only embraced this symbol of modernity; he believed that it suited his full face rather better than the old-fashioned keshida still sported by his eldest son, Hadi. A cloth wrapped around a conical hat, the keshida was also much more cumbersome than this new headgear. As a final indulgence to vanity Abdul Hussein smoothed the hairs of his moustache with a small bone comb he had purchased in Istanbul.

Oil portrait of Abdul Hussein Chalabi.

As for any powerful and influential man, his day was ruled by a rigorous schedule. He barely had time to browse the morning papers before a servant came to inform him that at least ten people awaited his presence in the dawakhana, the formal drawing room in the men’s quarters of the large yet overrun house.

As a mark of his status it was Abdul Hussein’s lot to sit and receive men all morning in the dawakhana, a ritual chore inherited from his father and from the grandfather he had never known. Men came to him in need of services, favours and assistance. They presented him with their problems concerning their lands, the government, the tribes, the mullahs, the weather, even – on occasions – God Himself. Abdul Hussein would sit in a wooden armchair and listen carefully as the chaiqahwa, the tea-coffee boy, made his rounds of the assembled visitors.

Today, his enthusiasm for the job in hand was at a particularly low ebb. He was still unsettled by reports of the Ottomans’ latest defeat in the Balkan war and the subsequent loss of the majority of the Empire’s European provinces. At a meeting in Baghdad the previous day, the Governor had broken the bad news to the Mejlis-i-idare-i-Vilayet, the advisory council for the Baghdad Vilayet, of which Abdul Hussein was a member. The prognosis was dispiriting; the Ottoman Empire was in decline.

A servant interrupted his thoughts with a message from the house of his sister Munira. She was married to Agha Muhammad Nawab, a wealthy Indian Shi’a notable who, Abdul Hussein learned, had just returned from a long trip to India. Abdul Hussein read in the note that Munira had recently taken delivery of a new arrival, which, the Nawab promised, would interest him greatly. He sent his sister a reply to let her know to expect him for lunch. Today’s challenge would be to discharge his duties as swiftly and shrewdly as his wits would allow him so that he would be free to call on the Nawab in the afternoon.

The dawakhana began with the usual exchange of greetings. Ibrahim, the wiry manager of one of Abdul Hussein’s estates, was waiting to give him his weekly report on the progress of the crop in one of his citrus and pomegranate orchards, which lay north by the river. Although Abdul Hussein had visited the land only a few days earlier, he could always rely on Ibrahim to show up with something fresh to complain about – any excuse to visit the dawakhana. Addressing Abdul Hussein as hadji in reference to his recent pilgrimage to Mecca, Ibrahim began to explain the reason for his presence.

He complained that the Bedouins were cutting the telegraph lines again – he had even caught one them using the lines to tie goods to his donkey – and that his men were having to waste their time throwing the nomads off the land, while the authorities did nothing to tackle them.

Abdul Hussein knew his manager was right – that over the past few decades the area’s administrators had fallen into slipshod ways; the vandalism of the telegraph lines was only part of an ongoing problem which the Ottoman Governor had not been able to resolve. Whenever there was a lull in security, the desert tribes attacked the towns. Lying a few miles to the north-west of Baghdad, across the River Tigris, Abdul Hussein’s home town of Kazimiya’s proximity to the open desert to the north made it vulnerable even though, like Baghdad, it had walls and gates that were meant to protect it.

Abdul Hussein felt frustrated that he could not do more himself to maintain public order. But the grand old days when his family had been Kazimiya’s rulers had passed. The family surname, Chalabi, was an honorific title that came from the Turkish Çelebi, a term which had several meanings, amongst them ‘sage’, ‘gentleman’ and even ‘prince’. It had been bestowed on the family when they had administered the region for the Ottomans. As direct rule had been imposed on these parts by Istanbul some decades earlier, the Chalabis no longer performed those duties, although they remained at the heart of Kazimiya’s political and social life.

Ibrahim’s father had worked for Abdul Hussein’s powerful father Ali Chalabi, and Ibrahim had grown up hearing stories of the latter’s iron fist and courage. Ali had been feared in Kazimiya, even hated by some, but he was admired by Ibrahim: this much Abdul Hussein knew. And so Abdul Hussein could hardly object when Ibrahim decided to share with the dawakhana a story he had heard concerning Ali’s ingenuity.

Abdul Hussein’s younger brother Abdul Ghani joined them as Ibrahim began to tell their guests how, one day many years ago, news reached Kazimiya of a plague of locusts that was approaching the city from the north. The sight was terrifying: a cloud of dark green insects rolling towards them at startling speed. No force on earth could push them back, making the townsfolk panic as they prepared to ride out the attack behind locked doors. Many had already resigned themselves to losing their crops, and with them their annual profit, but not Ali effendi. That year he had decided to plant a new crop of tomatoes. Determined to save them, he summoned the farmers to discuss what could be done. Then he threw his camel-hair cloak, his abaya, to one side and paced up and down his land for two days in his muddy boots. His guards followed him, their rifles on their backs. Shaking his head, Ibrahim said, ‘None of his employees had ever seen him behave like this.’

The rumour spread around Kazimiya that the great Ali Chalabi had gone mad. Witnesses described how he would stop in his tracks, scratch his dark beard, look up to the sky, turn around and resume his pacing. By the second day, his guards were wilting in the heat and gave up marching after him, yet Ali was so distracted he didn’t even notice. Suddenly, they heard him shout, ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it!’

Ali Chalabi, seated centre, holding his youngest daughter, surrounded by family and friends.

He ordered his men to go to all the markets and buy every single mud pot they could find. ‘And don’t you dare tell anyone what you’re buying the pots for!’ he added. Intimidated, his men scoured every market in Baghdad. As soon as one returned with a batch of pots, Ali would send him off to buy more. When he had laid his hands on every pot in the area, he ordered the farmers to take them and cover every single tomato plant, hiding them from the locusts and making his fields look like a pockmarked sheet of baked mud. No one else in Kazimiya had thought of the idea, and when the locusts arrived the next day all the crops were ruined except for Ali’s tomatoes. He made a fortune.

‘Allah Yirahamah, may he rest in peace. We need men like him today to guide us through these changing times,’ Ibrahim concluded. Abdul Hussein had never approved of his father’s severe nature, but he knew what Ibrahim meant. The teetering Ottoman government had been radically transformed in 1908, when a group of nationalist Turkish army generals – the ‘Young Turks’ – had seized the reins of power from the Sultan in Istanbul, limiting his role and facilitating a new constitutional era. The events of 1908 had at first brought with them a new energy, promising freedom and equality for the many multi-ethnic communities of the Empire. But gradually it became clear that the Young Turks were promoting a European-style nationalism, with Turkishness as its main identity. The Arab people of the Ottoman Empire had begun to feel increasingly marginalized and disadvantaged as swathes of secular modernity swept through the Empire to the west of them.

Abdul Hussein had entertained certain hopes for the modernizing projects proposed by Istanbul. On paper, the proposed German-engineered Berlin-to-Baghdad railway had been more exciting than anything the locals had dreamed of … but now, what of it? The Germans were still viewed positively as an advanced industrial people who had come to help develop Mesopotamia, yet very little track had actually been laid since the project’s inception a year ago. Many pieces of machinery already lay abandoned, surrounded by rubble, collecting dust or rusting. To Abdul Hussein it was a source of bewilderment that even deepest Anatolia had already been linked up to the rest of the world by rail. Why not us? he wondered.

He could see that new ideas did not grow as freely or as quickly in Baghdad as in Istanbul, for all the new cafés, newspapers and government schools that were now springing up. Kazimiya was even slower to embrace change, partly because it was a Shi’a shrine town and therefore more religious in outlook. Abdul Hussein felt as many did that this backwardness was enforced from above, as a consequence of the town’s predominantly Shi’a character: under an Ottoman system dominated by the Sunnis the Shi’a were never going to receive their proper due. Politically they were weak, and everybody knew it.

He sensed a haughtiness and disregard among Ottoman officials when it came to his people and this land. Midhat Pasha had been the only governor to do anything for Baghdad, but he had left the area in 1873, three years before Abdul Hussein was born. The new constitutional reforms, with their accompanying bureaucratic language, threatened to alienate Abdul Hussein from his own heritage. And now he had to shed his claim to it, because in the eyes of central government he was an Arab from Kazimiya. Yet he considered himself every bit as Ottoman as any Istanbuli, whether they liked it or not.

Next, an anxious young man introduced himself as coming from Baghdad and explained that he was visiting the dawakhana with a common acquaintance. Clearly upset and frustrated, he said that he had been attacked earlier that morning by some robbers in Agarguf, an archaeological site located in the desert outside Kazimiya. Like Ibrahim, he blamed the government, and complained to the dawakhana about poor security, poor governance … Abdul Hussein soothed the man, and called one of the servants to attend to him and, when he had rested, to hail a rabbil, a carriage, for him from the station down the road.

No sooner had Abdul Hussein turned around than another man raised his voice to air his grievances. His brother had broken his shoulder in an accident the previous week, and he wanted to claim compensation from the trammai company, in which Abdul Hussein and his family were major shareholders. The tram tracks were now more than thirty years old, and – like all else in the locality – suffering from government neglect. ‘May God heal your brother!’ he reassured the claimant. ‘We will give him compensation, don’t worry.’