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