Bibi sighed. ‘No, no, that must be Salim. Please show him in.’
Salim walked onto the terrace looking dishevelled and unshaved; Bibi knew that he was on the run from the Iraqi authorities because of his involvement with the Communists. She took one look at him, and told him she wouldn’t talk to him until he had taken a shower and changed his clothes.
Washed and dressed in one of Hadi’s suits, which was far too big for him, Salim returned to the terrace. Their conversation was brief. Bibi chided him about leaving his children behind in Iraq, and told him firmly that his wife was sick with worry for him. She added that his familial duties were far more important than the ideological battle he had committed his life to.
Salim listened to her as he heaped food onto his plate; he was starving. Finally, he cleared his throat and explained that he needed some money. Bibi agreed that by the looks of him he clearly did, and asked how much he wanted. He told her that 150 Lebanese pounds would probably do the trick, to which she replied that she would arrange for him to have two hundred monthly that he could collect in Beirut.
Salim shook his head. ‘No, I only want 150. Seventy is for me, and sixty for the Party. If you want to give me more, the rest will go to the Party as well. It’s up to you.’
Bibi nearly choked on her toast. ‘Me, contribute to the Communist Party, to that murderer Stalin? You must be joking. Suit yourself, take 150. But at least stay here until you’ve rested. I’m sure your cousin will want to see you.’
Salim stayed for another day; neither he nor Hadi mentioned the past, or the dangerous rumours that had been circulated about Hadi. At lunch the next day there were some Lebanese guests. Salim feigned deafness every time anyone asked him about the Communist Party, or leading Communist figures. He clearly felt he was among ideological enemies, and the less he said the better.
One afternoon, as they were sitting on the veranda enjoying the cool mountain breeze, Hassan announced to his mother and his sister Raifa that he wanted to marry Jamila. He asked if Bibi would buy her a ring and ask for her hand on his behalf. Bibi was delighted.
Hassan, however, had reservations about marrying Jamila. Some months earlier, she had had a hysterectomy. A life with her would be a life without children. He also knew that she remained torn between her love for him, her Christian faith and her family. When they had spoken of marriage, she had asked him what she could offer him as a wife that she wasn’t offering him now.
A week later, Hassan told Bibi not to worry about the ring, because he had changed his mind. He refused to explain why.
In May 1953 King Faisal II turned eighteen and took over the throne from his unpopular uncle, the Prince Regent, Abdul Ilah, who became the Crown Prince. Heads of state from around the world were invited to the coronation, but there was a lack of state-owned luxury accommodation for them. The royal family, who had always been modest in appearance and lifestyle, asked several leading families if they could accommodate visiting dignitaries. The Saudi royal family stayed with Thamina and her husband Saleh Bassam in their house on the riverfront, and the government came to rely on Hadi’s hospitality whenever a visiting head of state came to stay, asking him to throw many parties on its behalf over the years.
Hadi’s relations with Andrew Weir & Co. were gradually winding down because of the company’s decision to divest in Iraq in the late forties, as its trade had been affected by the dismantling of the British Empire. However, Hadi was a shrewd businessman, and by 1954 he was at the peak of his wealth. He shared his wife’s attitude to money, and started to invest in large-scale philanthropic projects, such as a modern children’s hospital in Kazimiya.
Aware of the rising value of land and the limited space available in Kazimiya, he purchased large plots on the outskirts of the town, which he then subdivided and sold at half their market value to people in need of new homes and shops. He also built a large mosque there that he bequeathed as wakf, religious trust. The area became known as Hadi City.
One day he was approached by Weir & Co. on behalf of its Chief Director, Lord Inverforth, who wanted to sell the company’s largest property in Iraq, a 25,000-acre cotton plantation called Latifiyyah Estate which was situated between the Tigris and the Euphrates, bordering both rivers. It had been bought by the company three decades earlier, and although they had invested in it, using the latest farming techniques and technology, they had struggled to make a profit from it. Now they were offering to sell it to Hadi for £750,000 (approximately £30 million today).
At about the same time another proposal was put to him. A very different piece of property was on offer from Richard Costain Ltd, a British construction company that also operated in Iraq. The estate in question was Dolphin Square in London. It had been completed in 1937, and was thought to be the largest block of flats in Europe, with 1,250 units. Rushdi had had business dealings with Costain, and felt strongly that his father should buy up Dolphin Square without a moment’s hesitation. Hadi went to London with his manager, Salim Tarzi, to see Dolphin Square for himself, and to meet the directors of the company who were selling it.
Rushdi couldn’t contain his irritation at his father’s caution, and vented his frustration to his mother. ‘I can’t believe he’s done this! Can’t he see beyond his own backyard? Doesn’t he know a good business opportunity when he sees one?’
Bibi shook her head. ‘Well, he’s very fond of this country. What do we know? Perhaps he knows best.’
‘Best?’ exploded Rushdi. ‘He’s so narrow-minded it’s beyond belief!’
Bibi tried to calm her favourite son down, promising him that she would have a word with Hadi when he came back. In the event, there seemed to be no need: Hadi’s trip had gone well and he had decided to buy Dolphin Square after all, despite his preference for agricultural projects. However, when word reached Weir & Co. about his interest in the London property its directors appealed to Nuri Pasha to persuade him to buy Latifiyyah instead. At an informal meeting in his drawing room, Nuri told Hadi that it would be in everyone’s interest to see Iraqi capital invested in such a large asset, and that he was the only person who could do it. Over cups of sugary tea, the fate of Latifiyyah was sealed.
Hadi bought the land, and received as a token of gratitude from Lord Inverforth a large engraved silver box from Aspreys. Rushdi was furious with his father for the rest of his days. He could never forgive him for missing such a golden opportunity. Yet for all his bluster, he would never match his father’s business acumen.
For Hadi, Latifiyyah had possibilities that went beyond agriculture. Baghdad was expanding rapidly, and the property was only twenty miles south of the city. His plan was to keep the prime agricultural land for himself, and to divide the rest of the estate into residential plots and small farms which he would sell off.
Latifiyyah became Hadi’s passion, and he spent as much time there as possible, overseeing the many aspects of its management. In addition to the farmers who worked for him, the agricultural land and its requirements, the irrigation canals and their continuous maintenance, there was the sale and delivery of the produce. Many people lived in Latifiyyah, and their welfare was very much a part of Hadi’s responsibility. Besides all this, he needed to maintain good relations with the tribes in the area. As a consequence, many of the family’s weekends were now spent in the main estate house at Latifiyyah.
Rushdi was distracted from his disapproval of his father’s investment choices when he was appointed Deputy Minister of Agriculture in late 1954. Nuri Pasha wanted to test him, to see if he was able to handle responsibility before giving him more. Within a few months he became a fully fledged Minister. Rushdi recruited many young Shi’a men to the various ministries, especially from Kazimiya, which was now his parliamentary seat as well as his ancestral home. Not unlike his grandfather in the early days of the Iraqi state, he tried to redress historical imbalances by taking immediate action. He established a rapport with some unlikely people while in office. One of them was Hamed Qassim, a grain mer
chant and one of many small suppliers whom Hadi had dealt with over the years. Hamed took to visiting Rushdi at the Ministry, and over cups of tea he secured a job for his son through him.
In developing Latifiyyah, Hadi was following a trend in the country. Oil money was being channelled into building projects through the newly established Development Board, whose members were determined to fulfil their vision of Baghdad as a pioneer in the region, reclaiming its ancient prestige. With the support of American and British experts, the Board commissioned leading architects to redesign the capital city.
A master plan was drawn up, with plans for new bridges and civic buildings, and expanded avenues. Hadi’s son Hazem, who was still at Cambridge University, enthusiastically followed the news of his home city’s blossoming. His father’s cousin Abdul Jabbar Chalabi was a member of the Development Board, and wrote to him of the various plans, including a campus designed by the leading Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius for the newly founded Baghdad University; a sports stadium by Le Corbusier; ministry buildings by Gio Ponti; a national art gallery by Alvaar Alto; and new parks and roads. The celebrated Greek urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis designed public housing to replace the shanty town that had grown to the east of Baghdad, and later created a plan for the city as a whole. Perhaps the most dramatic of all the commissions was given to Frank Lloyd Wright. Although Wright was in his early nineties, he was carried away by Iraq’s rich history, and designed a vast opera house which was to be built on the empty islet in the middle of the Tigris.
When Hazem returned home in the summer of 1957, he was amazed by the changes he saw. The new roads were busy with Chevrolets, Pontiacs, Chryslers and Buicks, driven by Iraq’s burgeoning middle classes. The horse-driven tram from Kazimiya to Baghdad had been replaced by the motorcar. Between Rashid and Ghazi Streets, Queen Alia Street had opened as a new commercial area, where fashionable young women mingled with the black abayas on the walkways. There was a new international railway station, a large cubist building with a high-domed central hallway and tall pillars that looked like a modern brick temple.
Alongside the innovations in architecture and town planning, intellectual and cultural activity was flourishing along the banks of the Tigris. The new literary and artistic scene in Baghdad was pushing the limits of experimentation.
Iraqi culture had always been heavily reliant on the word; indeed, the first system of writing in the world had been devised by the Sumerians in southern Iraq 5,500 years earlier, and the oldest known epic in the world is the Mesopotamian story of Gilgamesh. Baghdad was in many ways a city dizzy with the glory of the word, with a rich poetic tradition. Whether written or spoken, from the golden-age verse of Haroun Rashid to the modernistic free verse of the contemporary poetess Nazik al-Malaika, poetry was part of the lifeblood of the people.
Ahmad (in hat) with, from left, his nephews Ghazi, Ali and Mahdi. Standing behind are Jassim Muhammad (Hadi's guard's son), Ni'mati's son Muhammad and Rijab.
Besides poetry, there was a long oral tradition which manifested itself in the gossip of the cafés and literary salons, through the cries of the Ottoman drummers, the rhetoric of the mullahs, the lamentations of ’Ashura, lyrical maqams and love songs. Words were the key means through which people sought to express the complexity and variety of life in Iraq. A famous Arabic saying is: ‘Cairo wrote, Beirut published and Baghdad read.’ A great deal of translation was taking place from Russian, French and English into Arabic. For the first time many of the great European classics were made accessible to university students in search of the novel and subversive.
Even the younger generation, Ahmad and his eldest nephews Ghazi, Mahdi and Ali, enjoyed the literary flowering, becoming regulars at the Coronet bookshop and at McKenzie’s on Rashid Street, where comic books captured their imagination – Plastic Man, Superman, Batman, Archie, Donald Duck, The Adventures of Tintin among others – as well as Life Magazine, Time and the Saturday Evening Post. The power of the word would soon also come for them in the form of the 45 rpm records that would begin to become available in Baghdad. The boys would acquire an extensive repertoire of pop trivia knowledge during their summers in Lebanon, where rock and roll was shortly to arrive in a big way. Together with Ahmad and his cousin Leila, Ghazi would scour the bookshops and the few record shops in Baghdad for the latest hits. His father had acquired a Telefunken gramophone with huge ivory knobs which Ghazi would turn up to high volume to listen to the songs of Paul Anka, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley and the Comets, and most importantly Elvis Presley, whose transliterated name ‘Elbis Bridgley’ meant ‘I wear my shoes’ in Iraqi. Universal favourites were Mambo Italiano and Shish Kebab.
Images were also important. In 1951 the sculptor and painter Jawad Salim had established the Baghdad Modern Art Group. Considered the father of modern Iraqi art, Salim had been educated in France and Italy, and later in England under Henry Moore. Inspired by Picasso, he revisited Iraq’s diverse and ancient heritage in order to develop a fresh language with which to express the nation’s artistic identity. His work became a continuous exploration of traditional motifs married to new forms, materials, colours and landscapes – a new art for a new country.
Baghdad Radio, the Arabic BBC which broadcast from Cyprus, had a large following. But one of Abdul Nasser’s more effective exports from Egypt to Iraq was the radio station Sawt al-Arab, ‘The Voice of the Arabs’, launched in 1953, which devoted two programmes a day – one in the morning and one in the evening – to attacking the Iraqi monarchy and regime. These quickly became the most popular radio shows in the country, and Sawt al-Arab the most popular station, railing daily against King Faisal II and Nuri Pasha, inciting Iraqis to kill them and ‘overthrow the colonial yoke of dictatorship’. Nuri’s name became synonymous with ‘British agent’, while the King was portrayed as a meek British pet.
Expressing the anger and defiance of the masses, Nasser stood up to the French, the British and the Israelis by claiming back what was ‘legitimately’ Egypt’s. The impact of his broadcasts became clear in 1953 when protests erupted in Baghdad against a backdrop of inflation and the government’s continued pro-Western stance. The army had to be called in; however, many of the soldiers appeared to be sympathetic to the demonstrators’ cause. The government succeeded in regaining control of the city, but as the protests had taken place so soon after Egypt’s coup d’état, they sent shivers up many spines.
‘Turn it off, turn it off!’ Bibi would cry to Hassan whenever Nasser’s voice came over the radio. ‘Lies, lies, lies. He’s just a rabble-rouser.’
Bibi’s anti-Arabist views were shared by many other Iraqis. Although her privileged position inevitably helped to shape her political opinions, her stance was rooted in her sense of identity as a member of a religious minority. Many of the Shi’a viewed talk of Arab nationalism as thinly veiled Sunni propaganda aimed at controlling them, in much the same way that Kurds viewed it as Arab propaganda intended to subjugate them.
Hassan shared Bibi’s dislike of Nasser. ‘Egypt was such a beautiful place. No one can speak or criticize the establishment there now,’ he said one day while he was sitting with her and Rushdi in the andaroun. With regret and nostalgia, he told them that he had heard the university’s name in Cairo had even been changed in order to erase any trace of King Farouk. He felt that the country had become cut off from the world, all in the name of nationalism. All the same, he did wonder if Nuri Pasha had taken his Communist vendetta too far; he couldn’t see why Iraq had to be at the forefront of the global battle against Communism when there were more important local matters to be dealt with.
Rushdi disagreed with him, arguing that Nuri’s policies and the plans of the Development Board demonstrated the progress that was being made in Iraq. ‘You can’t build a new country overnight,’ he insisted. Hassan countered that reform and social development had to go hand in hand. When Rushdi reminded him that half of the Iraqi Communists who supported Stalin and Nasser owed their education to the government, Hassan
said that the new Ba’athists, with their talk of Arab rebirth and revolution, bothered him far more than the Communists.
Rushdi remained adamant that Iraq was leading the region in democratic progress. He argued that the NDP’s opposition newspaper, al-Ahali, wouldn’t be published every day if the government was as oppressive as Hassan claimed. Hassan retorted: ‘Do you think what happened in Egypt can’t happen here? Nuri might just save the day yet again, but he has to heed public opinion, even if it’s at the expense of his foreign policy. I wish I could tell him myself.’
Bibi was a supporter of Nuri Pasha al-Said. She had often heard Hadi talk about his political insight and his achievements in the halls of government, but she had come to know him in a less formal setting. She had visited his home many times, playing cards there with his wife and other friends. If they played late into the evening, Nuri would often come in from work and chat with them. Bibi had developed a rapport with him that reminded her of the banter she had once enjoyed with her late father-in-law, Abdul Hussein, although she wasn’t about to discuss politics with him.
Like the rest of her family, Bibi was terrified of Nasser’s influence on the Iraqi streets, and feared that it would bring about a coup in Baghdad. Hadi decided that it would be prudent to send some of his money abroad, and worldly-wise Rushdi suggested that he transfer it in his name. Hadi also bought a building in Beirut as an investment, and started building a villa in the mountain resort of Bhamdoun.
As far as Hadi was concerned, the opinions of his sons carried no weight if they lacked practical application. While it may not have been in his power to change the political system, he poured as much energy and money as he could into private projects with a view to improving people’s lives, creating jobs and homes for them.
Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family Page 28
