The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  “Working for the Americans?” I was incredulous.

  “I know things,” he hinted darkly. “I want a job. For my future.” He said he had put his name on the list but they had not called him. Some former colleagues of his had already been called and he was worried he was being ignored. He wanted me to put a word in with someone, to get his name moved farther up the list. I told him I had no particular contacts with the Americans in the GreenZone and no way to do this. He went cold and repeated his request. He told me that any further conversations were connected to this favor. I repeated that I was only a journalist and powerless. He sneered, leaned back in his chair and clicked his fingers for the waiter to bring the bill. We never spoke again.

  Chapter 11

  MOSQUE

  JUST AS HE WAS PUBLICLY EQUANIMOUS AS GOVERNOR, so Kamel Sachet had no choice in his appointment to his new position in the Presidential Office. He had long rescinded his pride in such matters and did not care about the outward appearance of demotion, but the constrictions and suspicion of Saddam’s court strained his conversation and his mood. He went to his office every day, competently organized the sale of government cars and other extraneous items—an attempt by the government to raise some cash in the strapped time of sanctions—and spent the balance of his time building mosques.

  The first mosque he built was in Baghdad, in Saidiya, not far from his home, on a plot of land which Sheikh Khalid al-Janabi helped him to purchase. He built a plain concrete cube without a minaret—he did not believe in wasting money on decoration—and named it after one of his victories, which had also been the name of one of the divisions he had commanded, the Sadiq Mosque.

  The mosque was pared back to the utilitarian; Kamel Sachet insisted on simplicity and reverence. He made sure that the gate was separated from the door of the mosque by a path, so that people could spend a few moments contemplating the distance from the earthly street and their quotidian cares to a clearer-headed godliness. He did not allow shoe racks inside the mosque, as was usual; he said that shoes had no place in the mosque at all, not even carried in by hand, but must be left farther away by the entrance. Inside, the walls were unadorned except for a few surahs, the carpet was industrially woven and there was no air-conditioning which might have required the additional cost of a generator. Harith al-Obeidi, the young Islamic scholar Kamel Sachet hired as the imam, suggested he plant a small garden, something green and serene, but Kamel Sachet said he did not want to spend money on something that would be a distraction.

  “His military character imposed itself on his religious behavior,” Harith al-Obeidi told me, complaining. I met him in Damascus in the summer of 2007 for tea on a restaurant terrace in the old city. He had become an MP in the post-Saddam era and he explained the state of political disintegration in the Baghdad that he had just left. The Sunni political tide had turned against pretending cooperation with the Shia parties and his Sunni faction had pulled out of the Maliki government. He threw up his hands, exhausted with cynicism at all the bombs, the militias and Iranian ambition and American short-sightedness…

  “An officer will always be an officer,” he said of Kamel Sachet, reverting, more comfortably, to reminiscence. “I saw him once throw the shoes a man had carried in to pray outside the mosque. And he was obsessive about cleaning the mosque himself. He came every Thursday evening to wash the floors on his knees. Sometimes he brought his elder sons with him. And about paying for the upkeep. He did not like to receive donations. He would say, ‘We’re not in need; I wont accept charity!’ He didn’t even like to replace worn-out furniture. The only important thing for him was to fulfill his religious duty.”

  Harith al-Obeidi had studied at the Baghdad University School of Sharia, completed his MA in Islamic Science and Comparative Philology and written his Ph.D. thesis on the Rules of a Traveler According to Sharia. He described himself as a moderate, a man who preferred dialogue and who found the dictations of Kamel Sachet’s extremism confining: “He was practically Salafi!” God was the only sanction, the Koran the only guide. Kamel Sachet would not allow him to counsel those who came for advice or with domestic troubles. According to him, a mosque was for prayer, not for pastoral care and community projects. He attached great importance to the memorization and recitation of the Koran and classrooms were set up to teach young boys, but he didn’t allow the mosque to sponsor a youth soccer team, as some mosques did: soccer had nothing to do with the worship of God.

  The Sadiq Mosque existed within the lines of Kamel Sachet’s own design. It was the place he felt most at peace and relaxed. The moment he stepped across the threshold a smile spread across his face: grace of autonomy or God’s space, free from any autocrat. He was, perhaps, even happy. Those around him knew that in these moments, anything they asked for, he would give.

  I ALWAYS IMAGINED Kamel Sachet’s relationship with Islam was personally defined, a private solace, interior world, retreat. Although he was more extreme than most he was not alone in his reversion. During the eighties and nineties there was a general trend toward the practice of conservative Islam in the Arab world. Women donned headscarves, bars were closed, public immodesty frowned upon and vilified. In some ways Islam seemed to become a shelter from reckless and unjust dictats of rulers and corrupt officials: a reaction against the secular regimes—of Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Morocco, Indonesia—as well as a rebuttal of the Western examples, of either communism (which had collapsed under its own weight) or the democracies of Europe and America which preached human rights and supported the monarchs and dictators who oppressed them. This upswell of Islam became a new kind of Pan-Arabism, a way to reclaim culture, morality, values, identity.

  Dr. Laith’s wife, Bushra, had taken up wearing the hijab late in life, but she could not explain exactly why—it was something sunk deep out of explanation. She said it just felt more comfortable. Um Omar had grown into her thirties following Western fashion and hemlines, but had bowed to the wishes of her husband and the justifications of her belief. Whenever I asked to see Iraqi family albums, the pictures would illustrate this progression: miniskirts to seventies feathered fringe and floaty sundresses to a headscarf and a full length coat; over two decades women had retracted into the safety of the enveloping hijab.

  Saddam himself was always sensitive to his costume. In the seventies he had been known for his fine tailored suits and Italian shoes, the international man of sophistication; in the eighties he was rarely out of uniform (which he wore plain and unadorned in the manner of Napoleon and Stalin, other rulers who understood the necessity of theater), by the nineties his portrait, rendered in ceramic tiles, paint, plaster, ink screen or sculpted in bronze, wore whatever the scene demanded: a mortar board outside a university, a stethoscope outside a hospital, rich tribal robes on the highway to Amman, battledress next to a parade ground, even, apparently without irony, Kurdish dress, complete with baggy pantaloons, at the entrance to Kirkuk.

  Saddam went along with the new wave of religious conservatism, crafting rhetoric and ordering props in line with the tenor of the times. He initiated construction on the Mother of All Battles Mosques in Baghdad to be the largest mosque in the world, he redesigned the national flag to include the inscription Allahu Akbar, God Is Great, and had a Koran written in blood, which he claimed was his own. But it was as if he were trying to have dominion over the sea. Prayer is collective and Friday sermons occasions for opinion. As much as the new religious mood washed the public shore with a soothing lap, it also swelled into opposition. Islam politicized, became an ism, into Islamism. And mosques were the natural meeting places.

  Young men came to Friday prayer to listen to imams preach an Islam that was enshrined in Sharia godliness and therefore purer and higher than that of man-made secular authority. During the week they went to prayer after work and then hung around in the courtyard until the final evening, talking among themselves. They discussed Islam and Sharia and studied the Koran and the Hadith, the life of the Prop
het that accompanies the Koran, grew their beards, wore the traditional dishdasha instead of foreign modern trousers; some even wore it deliberately short, above their ankles, in the fashion of the early followers of the Prophet Mohammed. The security services sent undercover agents to infiltrate congregations. Obeidi laughed, “But everyone knew who they were because they were the ones wearing short dishdashas but on their face they only had a mustache.”

  During Ramadan in 1993 Kamel Sachet asked a famous and controversial cleric to lead the prayers at the Sadiq Mosque. Banners advertising his arrival were put up all over the neighborhood and on the appointed Friday the mosque was full and the streets around overflowed with hundreds who unrolled their prayer maps on the tarmac and squatted by the curb to listen to the sermon through the loudspeakers. The cleric, from the same tribe as Kamel Sachet, had been recently denounced by the government and removed from his position on the Islamic Committee; and his popularity was in proportion to his dissidence. His tannoy words were clarion and boomed across the nodding crowd: One day the end would come for secular regimes! Islam was the only right and correct way! Sharia was every man’s obligation before God! It was the duty of the youth to stand up, to obey their religion and their God and to follow in the example of the Prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him)!

  Harith al-Obeidi said he himself also began to use the pulpit as a challenge. He stopped leading with a prayer for the life and health of Saddam Hussein and often took the risk of delivering sermons without first receiving the required permission from the official Islamic Committee. “If I was preaching at another mosque I would arrive just before I spoke and leave directly afterwards to avoid the Mukhabarat.” But it was always risky; several times Mukhabarat agents came to the Sadiq Mosque with questions and intimidations.

  “Why do you not offer prayers for the President?”

  “Come to the office to answer some questions.”

  “Why do so many young men come to your mosque?”

  “Does Kamel Sachet know there are so many?”

  “Who are they?”

  “The mosque should not be open between sunset and evening prayers.”

  When al-Obeidi told Kamel Sachet about their visits, he cursed their intrusions and called them dogs.

  It was difficult to tread the line between the accusation of opposition and the justification of the sanctity of worship; but it was an equally hazardous balancing act for Saddam: the fatal car crashes and ambushes by “unknown assailants” of popular imams blew into riots. Kamel Sachet never allowed his outward mask of fealty to slip, but in court circles, among men like Aziz Salih Numan, Hussein Kamel and Ali Hassan al-Majid, Kamel Sachet was openly called a Wahhabi. Reports were written accusing him of having treasonous Saudi connections and receiving Saudi funds for his mosques.

  After a couple of years Harith al-Obeidi resigned from the Sadiq Mosque. Perhaps he felt too exposed, perhaps, as he said, he had grown tired of Kamel Sachet’s interferences and his iron stricture. “I don’t like radicalism,” said Obeidi. “Kamel Sachet imposed too many of his own personal opinions on me and on the mosque.” The imam who had spoken during Ramadan fled the country not long afterward and was sentenced to death in absentia. Unfavorable reports piled up in the file of Kamel Sachet.

  Chapter 12

  HIS SHEIKH

  IN THE PREHISTORY OF ARABIA, BEFORE THE DAWN of the Prophet, there was a Christian tribe of Yemen called the Kelbi led by a poet called Zuhair bin Janab. As Islam established and spread victorious, the Kelbis migrated north and merged with the Muslim conquests of Syria. Mo’awiyah, the fifth caliph, founder of the Umayyed dynasty, conqueror of Syria and Egypt, had a Kelbi wife. His son, Yazid, victor of Kerbala, slayer of Hussein, the martyred grandson of the Prophet (and thereby villain of all Shia), also took a Kelbi woman as one of his wives. Yazid died without issue in 683 and the dynasty passed to another branch of the clan; the Kelbi ran out of favor and retreated south along the Euphrates.

  Lost in the vagaries of desert life, sand blown over gaps of dry centuries, over a thousand years the Kelbis became the Janabi tribe. Nomads, sheep herders, camel traders, they settled where they could find grazing and moved according to topography and war. They stretched from Ramadi and Fallujah to Hilla; and south, Mahmoudiya, Latifiya, Iskandariya, to Jurfa Sakr, west of the Euphrates. Some settled in Baghdad and wrote Janabis into documents and records, some settled near the shrines of Najaf and Kerbala and married and converted into Shi’ism. In the nineteenth century they sold food to the Ottoman armies, in the early twentieth, they dug canals for the British, in the time of Saddam they filled the security services and the official ranks of the Iraqi state. The Janabis grew in number until they were a quarter of a million.

  History came down in epics and poems, battles and heroes and feuds, folklore, shadow plays, the whispers of old men and grandmothers. A son was always taught ten generations of ancestors. Adnan Janabi, Sheikh of the Janabis, recounted to me fourteen with ease, his name long with antecedent:

  “Adnan Abdul-Munim Rashid Ali Khalaf Ouaid Khattab Mohammed Alloush Mohammed Noufal Mohammed Ali Ougab…”

  He remembered the death of his grandfather’s last camel. It was 1945; he was five years old—he didn’t remember why the beast died, just that it was the last camel, long useless, and its carcass made a shadow on the ground. Afterward his grandfather used the saddle to rest his elbow against Bedu tradition during tribal assemblies in the mudhif, the traditional meeting house built of reeds.

  He told me about a vast bronze tray that he had inherited, 200 years old, capable of holding 250 kilos of rice, 4 whole rams and a baked bull. Adnan liked to use it every year at the Eid of the Haj, the time when sheep were slaughtered as festival sacrifice and their meat distributed to the poor. He had it re-plated with chrome because untreated bronze could react poisonously with food. It needed fifteen men to carry it so he had a special trolley made so that it could be more easily maneuvered.

  Adnan laughed. “I mechanized it,” and he bobbed his head back from inhaling a long draught of narghila to watch Tunisia score against Spain in the World Cup. It was June 2006, we were sitting in a café in Beirut, marble and aged mirror, clattering backgammon, TV screens for the soccer, glasses of milky arak and plates of pistachios. Adnan had moved to Beirut because Baghdad was too dangerous; he was a moderate and therefore found himself condemned by both sides: Sunni insurgents linked to al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and Shia revengists and their Mehdi army militias. “I am on all the best death lists!” Adnan did not look like a sheikh, he lacked the usual Iraqi belly, dyed black hair, mustache and swagger. Instead his frame was slight, his head was bald, his face clean-shaven and he carried the intelligent air of an ancient sage as he considered the soccer players sprinting up and down the green pitch. “Now Spain will come back, you see the Tunisians were lucky too early, the Spanish are stronger and they will win.” Adnan had a glass of wine before him, its level had fallen and he ordered another bottle and mocked his own indulgence: “And forty years ago I was a communist!”

  In fact Adnan was, practically, an Iraqi anomaly, a leader without agenda, ideology, prejudice or hatreds. He felt an almost overwhelming helplessness in the surge of violence in Iraq; he tried when he could to broker kidnap deals, protect journalists investigating atrocities; he urged restraint, alliance, negotiation—but the bloodshed was out of control, the contents of Pandora’s box had been tipped into hell. Every day the newspapers printed arbitrary statistics: 23, 42, 59, 130, 168—so many that the figures of the dead were lost in the numbers. The car bomb scenes of black smoke, white ambulance, red blood pools on the tarmac became as if by rote and went increasingly under-reported. Headlines were spiked with gore and vile innovation: decapitated heads wrapped in black garbage bags, bodies dumped by rubbish heaps with their hands bound and their skulls drilled, a daring kidnap raid that took over a hundred employees out of a ministry, a new type of car bomb that released clouds of poisonous chlorine gas.

  Adnan anal
yzed the situation perfectly correctly: he said law and order only existed when the central authority, the government of the state, maintained its monopoly on violence. In Iraq everyone had a gun and every political leader, sheikh and neighborhood don had an army/bodyguard/militia. This anarchy was the result, and as long as neither the Americans or the Kurds or the Sunna or the Shia were willing to cede to a monopoly, the anarchy would continue. “I am a realist. What I’ve learned from this life is to be realistic.”

  During the World Cup Beirut was decorated with multinational flags: each household had picked a different country: Brazilian banners, the English cross of St George hung over balconies next to French tricolors and pizza places daubed in red, white and green. At night, when the bars let out after the matches, it was a carnival, cars streamed through downtown fluttering blue and white Argentine colors or the red flag of Morocco or green for the Sunnis who liked to support the Saudis. It was a parody of divided Beirut, a weird blast of irony, as a tooting cavalcade drove past the window while Adnan and I discussed the sectarian fighting in Baghdad. I told him I remembered the black Shia flags hung up in Baghdad to commemorate Ashura in 2004, the month of mourning, which were then never taken down so that they became, in effect, territorial markers.