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.’
Over the next couple of hours Abdul Hussein listened carefully to a torrent of requests and concerns, at times instructing his clerk to note down information for him to follow up. His visitors were more than living up to the locals’ reputation for cool nerves and slow conversation. The Kazmawis, the townsfolk of Kazimiya, were not nicknamed ‘cucumbers’ for nothing.
Finally his steward Sattar burst into the room to tell him that he was awaited at the shrine, where he had promised to be by noon. Abdul Hussein apologized to the remaining men in the dawakhana. All nodded knowingly; when the shrine called, everyone heeded. The men rose in unison to say their goodbyes.
The Baghdad–Kazimiya tram, circa 1910.
Abdul Hussein went to the shrine with Sattar on foot. The ten-minute journey would have been difficult to negotiate in his preferred mode of transport, his Landau carriage. Instead, the two men manoeuvred their way through dark unpaved alleyways until they reached the first fruit and vegetable stalls on the fringes of the main square. An old woman was selling baklava, struggling to bat away the flies that buzzed around her tray of wares. The overpowering smell of the market assailed them, the stench of the dirt on the ground mixing with that of the running water in the open culverts.
There were a good many foreigners in the vicinity, and a medley of languages filled the air. Many Persians were milling around, others sitting on the ground to sell their goods, mostly foodstuffs. The locals relied on the steady influx of these visitors, who sold important supplies of Persian specialities, particularly the much prized saffron. The market was also busy with Indians dressed in their salwar kamizes, Afghans in heavy coats and curly-moustachioed Iranians. There were as many types and styles of hat as there were people – the charawiya, the yashmak, the arakchinn, the keshida, the saydiya, the fina, the ’igal. There were even a few travellers from as far away as Rangoon. The horse-drawn tram had just made its final stop at Kazimiya station, which lay close to the shrine, and people were pouring out of the double-decker carriage, old women complaining loudly as they were jostled by young boys.