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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.
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