Muhammad Ali and Ibrahim in a studio shot.
Hadi was curious about the Germans’ motives in posting these officers to Baghdad. He wondered why they were here, fighting with the Sultan in Mesopotamia, rather than fighting the British in their own country. Although he listened carefully to his father’s explanations, and to Uncle Abdul Ghani’s arguments about fighting the infidel, he wasn’t sure if he understood why this war was being fought at all. And if what his uncle said was true, then surely the Ottomans shouldn’t be fighting alongside the infidel here, in Baghdad.
He hadn’t witnessed many encounters between men of the East and Europeans, and he found the interaction between Goltz and his Ottoman colleagues absorbing. When irritated, Goltz would take off his round spectacles and wave them around, while his face turned very red, and he would lift his hands up to his hair and down again in rigid, mechanical fashion like a wind-up toy. He was especially impatient with his local staff, reprimanding them in his pidgin Turkish for the slightest mistake. Hadi once witnessed the flogging of a tea boy who had accidentally dropped a glass on one of Goltz’s documents.
One day, while walking back to Headquarters, Hadi spotted Goltz patting his handsome pair of Turkish Kangal sheepdogs. The way he fussed over them, murmuring to them and affectionately stroking them, was in complete contrast to the way he treated people.
Whatever his personal idiosyncrasies, Goltz earned his military reputation. He was regarded as a hero by many for his successful planning of the famous siege of Kut in Mesopotamia in 1916, which inflicted a humiliating defeat upon the British. All the same, having seen how he treated his staff, Hadi wasn’t sure if Goltz really cared about the fate of the Arab people.
The fighting continued unabated as the British pushed north towards Baghdad. The sound of weeping became a constant in the streets as women feared for the safety of their conscripted sons, husbands and fathers. There were shocking reports of children dying of starvation, of women selling themselves in order to survive, and of harsh reprisals by the Ottoman military authorities. Hadi knew the last of these to be true, as he had seen for himself the bodies of army deserters left to rot on poles in several of Baghdad’s squares.
One morning, a woman approached him as he stood outside the Citadel talking to a friend. In spite of her youthful voice, she looked old. She was haggard with worry, and had barely started talking when her tears welled up. Both her sons had been conscripted a year earlier, she explained, and she hadn’t even seen them go as they had been forcibly carted away from their shop in the soug al saffafir, the metal market, where they were coppersmiths. She begged Hadi to find out where they were, as no one had responded to her many pleas. He wrote down their names and told her he would do his best.
Hadi approached some of his colleagues, who simply shrugged their shoulders and said that it was probably lucky the boys’ mother didn’t know their fate, as they had most likely perished on the Eastern Front in Russia. Unable to give the woman the news she wanted, instead he started to give her food secretly, which he could arrange fairly easily as he was delivering supplies to the officer at the Deer Palace. She took the food gratefully, especially as the price of staples such as sugar and wheat had risen drastically in recent months. Yet the look of hollowness in her eyes never left her as she waited for her sons to return.
The horror of the war was never far away. A constant flow of wounded soldiers streamed into Baghdad; the bodies of the dead lay in flimsy open coffins, attracting swarms of flies. There were never enough doctors or medical supplies, and many of the wounded died unattended. These sights terrified the local population, who could only assume that their conscripted loved ones suffered similar fates on more distant fronts.
The Ottoman military casualties on the Mesopotamian front amounted to approximately 38,000 lives out of an estimated total of 305,085 lost Empire-wide. Civilian casualties were even higher. There were increasing numbers of destitute women begging on the streets, many with infant children, who had escaped from the ravaged villages south of Baghdad where the fighting continued, or whose menfolk had been taken to the front, leaving them to fend for themselves. Some were even imprisoned by the authorities for their husbands’ desertions. The plight of these women moved many, including a leading poet, Ma’ruf Rusafi, who wrote:
He died, the one that gave her safety and happiness
And fate, after his absence, lumbered her with poverty …
Walking, she carried her infant on a tear-covered breast;
His swaddle from rags, repelling any onlooker.
No man, but me did I hear her
Pleading with her God, her suffering life …
3
All That is Good Will Happen
A Marriage Prospect
(1916)
THE INSANITY ON the streets outside afflicted Hadi’s grandmother, Khadja. Gossip abounded about the general state of moral turpitude in Baghdad, now that the city streets were awash with refugees, and Khadja was concerned by the long hours her grandson spent at Military Headquarters, adrift in a sea of corruption. At home, she had caught him stealing interested glances at several young women who had come with their mothers to visit her; she also suspected him of flirting with their pretty new maid. She concluded that it was time for Hadi, now aged eighteen, to marry.
Ensconced within her own quarters in the large Chalabi house, Khadja had outlived her husband, Ali Chalabi, and her robustness and energy were boundless. She had a reputation as a domestic tyrant who never had to repeat her decrees more than once. A fair-skinned woman with small eyes and a delicate physique, she occupied herself by matchmaking and initiating divorces between couples, applying equal effort to both activities.
Summoning her three eldest daughters, Munira, Amira and Shaouna, and her son Abdul Hussein, Khadja delivered her verdict with respect to Hadi. Hadi’s mother, Jamila, was excluded from the meeting on the basis that she was an outsider. Although she had been married to Abdul Hussein for many years, she was still disliked by her sisters-in-law because they had originally wanted another wife for their brother, believing he was too good for her.
An oil portrait of Jamila, Abdul Hussein’s wife.
Khadja was so feared that no one else dared approach her kursidar, her private sitting room, unless invited, except for the servant who brought them the tea at the beginning of the meeting. Resplendent on her satin-covered seat, Khadja smoked her nargilleh and ran through the list of potential brides for her grandson.
The name Bibi Begum was mentioned a few times. Although she was personally unknown to the family, the girl was the niece of the wife of a distant cousin of theirs and the daughter of Sayyid Hassan al-Bassam, a respected merchant who had died five years earlier. They also knew her mother Rumia well. Rumia was a highly regarded, God-fearing woman, famed for her culinary talents and her lineage – her mother was a granddaughter of the Persian Qajar Shah, Fath Ali Shah. She came from a well travelled and erudite family, the Postforoush from Azerbaijan, who had settled in Kazimiya several generations earlier.
For hours the three Chalabi daughters discussed the advantages and disadvantages of such a union. Munira preferred another family, the Qotobs, whose daughters she thought much prettier. Amira disagreed, considering them too haughty. But finally and inevitably they agreed with their mother, settling on Bibi.
When he came home later that day, Hadi was informed of their decision. He knew that he was expected to get married; it was a part of life.