Return to the Marshes

by Gavin Young

  Return to the Marshes

  GAVIN YOUNG

  This Book is Dedicated to

  Ajram bin Haji Hussein, Hasan bin Manati, Amara bin Thugub, Sabaiti, Hasan bin Muhaisin, Sahain bin Kadhim and his sons Warid, Bani and Mohammed, Falih bin Jasim al Fartusi, Nasaif bin Jasim, Chethir al Faraigi and his brothers Sfair and Ahmed, Sayyid Sarwat and all his sons, Jabbar bin Dair, Farhan bin Saghair and his brother Idan, the sons of Yasin bin Adan, and all the others;

  and to the memory of

  Sahain’s brother Hafadh bin Kadhim, Yasin bin Adan, Haji Yunis of Al Aggar, Jasim bin Faris of the Fartus, Falih bin Majid Al Khalifa of the Albu Mohammed;

  and to

  Wilfred Thesiger, who first took me to the Marshes;

  and to

  H. E. Sayyid Tariq Aziz, who made it possible for me to go back to them

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  1 On the Brink

  2 In the Beginning

  3 From Sumer to Islam

  4 The First Europeans

  5 The Coming of the British

  6 Dreams of a Shipping Clerk

  7 The Last of the Sheikhs

  8 The World of the Marshes

  9 Two Marriages, and a Decision

  10 Wild Beasts, Cattle and Creeping Things

  11 Return to the Marshes

  12 The Marshes Today

  A Blessing

  Epilogue

  Bibliography

  Index

  Map

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  It is nearly thirty years since Wilfred Thesiger, the European who ‘discovered’ the Marshes, left them for the last time. It is exactly thirty years since the late Gavin Maxwell spent some weeks there in 1956. Both of them wrote books about their experiences. This book tries to describe what happened next; how changes in Iraq have affected the Marsh Arabs who live in this most beautiful region, both collectively and, in some instances, individually.

  I spent a good deal of time in the Marshes in the 1950s; and since 1973 – after a gap of nearly twenty years – I have been back there several times, travelling, as before, in canoes and living with the Marsh people as they live. So this is primarily a personal book; I feel it to be a kind of memorial to my Marsh Arab friends.

  I am not a scholar or a specialist. I am not a professional historian, any more than I am an anthropologist, or ornithologist, or any other -ist. But there are chapters of history here too, going back far beyond the battles of the British and Turks, the coming of Islam, the invasions of the Greeks, Persians, Mongols, Medes, Assyrians and the rest, to the time of Ancient Sumer – and even to the beginning of the world. So I am deeply indebted to Dr Edmond Sollberger, Keeper of the Western Asiatic Antiquities Department of the British Museum, for checking my chapter on Sumer and Gilgamesh, for his advice, and for his permission to take photographs in the Museum. I am equally indebted to Professor Charles Beckenham of the London School of Oriental and African Studies for his eagle-eyed perusal of my chapter on the coming of Islam. I owe much to Dr Fuad Safar of the Iraqi Directorate-General of Antiquities in Baghdad for his assistance and advice, and to the staff of Baghdad’s superb Iraq Museum for their courtesy.

  I also wish to thank Brigadier Stephen Longrigg for taking time to tell me what it was like to be in Mesopotamia in the days immediately after World War I; he was a distinguished member of the British administration of those days. His historical books on Iraq remain invaluable and irreplaceable. I am very grateful, too, to Mrs S. E. Hedgcock for recalling for me her happy days in the Amara area where her late husband was Political Officer in the early 1920s. She remembers with affection the people about whom they wrote – using the pen-name ‘Fulanain’, and initially for Blackwood’s Magazine – in the vivid stories that were eventually gathered together in their book Haji Rikkan: Marsh Arab.

  In transliterating Arabic into English I have tried to make things easy. I have dropped, for instance, the Arabic letter ain (’) completely. I often use the word ‘Madan’ for ‘Marsh Arabs’ because that is what they call themselves. I use it without explaining what it means for the good reason that they themselves have not the faintest idea how the name originated, and because, despite the fact that the great Arab traveller of the fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta, mentions the term Madan, neither he nor anyone since that early time has discovered its meaning.

  Mr Naji Al-Hadithi encouraged me with the book; and without the indefatigable assistance of Miss Gritta Weil I doubt if it would have been ready on time. Nor could I possibly have written it if Mr Donald Trelford, the Editor of The Observer, had not most kindly agreed to give me the time off in which to do so.

  1 On the Brink

  Now it seems to me that I have known the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq all my life, yet six weeks before meeting them I was hardly aware of their existence. That first meeting took place in the Marshes on a sunny day in 1952, but I had not meant to go there at all. My aching ambition at the time – it was intense and, I thought, irreversible – was to ride a camel across Arabia from the Gulf to the Red Sea.

  I was learning Arabic. I had plunged into the writings of famous desert adventurers, and had already snapped up all of T. E. Lawrence, Bertram Thomas and Gertrude Bell, some of H. St John Philby and much of Charles Doughty. I was determined to follow their example at any risk. So when Wilfred Thesiger, who is certainly the last of the great Arabian travellers, came to Basra where I lived and worked in a shipping company, I made sure I met him. I wangled a lunch date from the British Consul and over the meal confidently told Thesiger of my Arabian dream; I was quite sure that such a man would be completely sympathetic to my ambition and offer nothing but encouragement. I was rudely rebuffed. To my intense surprise and utter dismay, Thesiger suggested forgetting the camel.

  ‘You’ll never get a visa to enter Saudi Arabia,’ he said, flatly: ‘So that’s that.’

  I had completely forgotten – if I had even noticed – that some political dispute involving Britain and Saudi Arabia had set, for the time being at least, an unbridgeable diplomatic chasm between myself and my Arabian camel. The dishes on the consul’s table became a blur; the chilling vision I had been fighting off for months, that of myself writing out bills of lading in a shipping office for the next thirty years, settled on me like a shroud; I felt the weight of my dead dream plummeting to the pit of my stomach to join the consul’s undercooked suet-pudding. This, surely, was the end of my ambition. But suddenly Thesiger, who had been about to leave the room, paused in the doorway. ‘As an alternative,’ he said, in his solemn voice, ‘you might consider having a look at the Marshes. I am going up there tomorrow morning, but I shall be back here in six weeks’ time for a bath. I could take you up then if you can get some time off from your office.’

  At this point I think it is time to say a few words more about this remarkable and incomparable man. Wilfred Thesiger was then in his early forties, but then, as now, there was a timeless quality about him. He was born in Addis Ababa, where his father was the British Minister, and had had an Ethiopian foster-mother. Since then he had explored the remoter parts of the Near and Middle East from the wild Danakil country of Abyssinia to the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams and Nuristan. He had accompanied the Kashgai on their annual migration across the plains of Iran; he had travelled with mules across northern, mountainous Persia and found, among other things, that he liked and respected the Arab tribes, with their warmth of character and hospitality, a good deal more than the stingey and even churlish Persian hillsmen. I suppose no man alive knows more about tribal Arabs than Wilfred Thesiger. He had already, when I first met him, spent
years travelling in the Arabian ‘outback’, through the humid Tihama coastal plain on the Red Sea, through the high, cool, well-watered valleys of the Asir province in the lower Hejaz range. His towering achievement had been his double passage (across it and back), on foot and camel, of the vast waterless deserts and dunes of the Empty Quarter of Southern Arabia – only traversed by two other non-Arabs, Bertram Thomas and H. St John Philby, both of whom started their life with Arabs in the post-Great War British administration in Iraq.

  The man I saw at the consul’s table in Basra all those years ago was tall and gaunt with a long, creased, sunburnt face, deep-set, probing eyes and large, sinewy, sunburnt wrists and hands. I found later that he was amazingly strong. He had been a successful light-heavyweight boxer at Oxford – but he had a strength quite different from that of a run-of-the-mill undergraduate bruiser. The Marsh Arabs, who naturally admire physical prowess of any kind, were awed by Thesiger’s ability to pursue the wild boars of the region on the saddle-less back of a temperamental Arab mare, with the reins in one hand and unerringly shoot the pigs dead, holding his Rigby ·275 rifle in the other hand like a pistol. Anyone who has tried to aim such a relatively heavy rifle one-handed, let alone fire it accurately, will know what special strength of forearm and shoulder this feat requires.

  Thesiger, by this time, had established himself through his unmatchable journeys as the greatest traveller of his time, and possibly any other. Of course, he was aware of this. And although he was by no means an offensive prima donna, he had a tart tongue in private for some well-known British Arabists who based pretentious claims to great courage and adventurousness on relatively easy and riskless journeys. Of one such ‘intrepid’ traveller, he said scornfully, ‘Oh, So-and-So! She’s never been anywhere one couldn’t go by taxi.’ And of another inflated reputation he wrote in a book review, ‘What’s-’is-name is not so much the last of the Arabian travellers as the first of the Arabian tourists.’

  These were harsh criticisms, but reasonable, coming from such an uncompromising and genuine man as Thesiger. He hated the intrusion of cars and taxis into beautiful and unspoiled areas of the world and steered as far clear of them as possible (you could take a taxi to the edge of the Marshes but from there on firm land ceases to exist). He had – and has – strict standards of conduct for travellers. He believes passionately (and taught me to believe) that between outsiders and tribesmen stand natural barriers of colour, language, religion, race, upbringing and so forth that are already formidable enough; that no real understanding of people like Marsh Arabs is possible if you add artificial barriers – canned food, mosquito-netting, campbeds, boiled water. And, of course, it is a crime to press alcohol on tribesmen brought up to scorn it. One might say that he is old-fashioned and he would not deny it. The men whose tradition he followed were Richard Burton, Speke, Mungo Park, Doughty, and Lawrence, to pick random names from a noble list. He travelled – and, I am glad to say, still travels – for love; for the love of remote and beautiful peoples in wild and beautiful corners of the world, and for the serene grandeur of desert, river and mountain regions and the wild animals and birds that inhabit them.

  Since 1950 Thesiger had been studying the Marsh Arabs in their mysterious and virtually unknown marsh world sixty miles or so north of Basra, living as nearly as possible as one of them, without any artificial aids to comfort, despite heat, insects and stagnant drinking water. As for me, I had no idea what the Marsh Arabs would be like, although I knew vaguely that they lived in the ancient flatlands of Sumer, where civilization was born between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. But I was still determined to be an explorer despite my disappointment over the camel; and when Thesiger invited me I did not hesitate. I begged a week’s leave from my shipping company and presently I was speeding north, braced in the corner of a ramshackle taxi that careered erratically along the uneven asphalt from Basra to the tiny riverside town near Amara that Thesiger had named as our rendezvous.

  After three hours of this ‘main road’ the taxi swung off it, jolted over a rutted mud track until that frayed out into nothing near a wide water-course, and there rocked to a halt. ‘Well, here we are,’ said the driver genially, and spat through the window. I saw a slender black canoe a few feet away in the water; it rode there majestically, a king of boats, amazingly long and sleek – thirty-six feet long I discovered later – and very beautiful. Thesiger stood beside it and raised a welcoming hand. Four young Arabs with him, wearing black and white check headcloths bound round with thick head ropes, stepped forward grinning and shook my hand, and two of them took my small bag and shotgun – all I could bring, Thesiger had insisted – and loaded them into the canoe. ‘I hope that bag isn’t too heavy,’ Thesiger said, anxiously. He indicated the Arabs – ‘These boys are Marsh Arabs. They’ll look after you. Step into the dead centre of the canoe or you’ll have it over.’ I sat crosslegged and too terrified to move in the flat bottom of this work of art, this wonderful boat, so delicately balanced and so low in the water that it seemed bound to capsize. I tried to take comfort from what I read – that these craft had proved superbly efficient for 5000 years – but the effort failed. By now, two Marsh Arabs had hitched their long shirts round their hips and taken up paddles in the high-curved bow, while the other two crouched with their paddles raised in the stern. ‘Let’s go,’ said Thesiger. The four Arabs dipped their paddles together into the pale brown stream, gave them a quick muscular flick of shoulders and arms, and with a lurch that lapped the water to the lip of the gunwales, we shot away.

  This branch of the Tigris – the main river has already flowed down from Armenia – whirls deep and strong between its sharp-edged mud banks, slopping water into irrigation channels at intervals and spilling what is left into the Marshes a few miles further on. It often seems to give little to the surrounding land, which is flat and dry and cracked for much of the year. But, at other times, irrigation with pumps ensures crops of rice, sugar and barley, and then as far as the eye can see wide green swathes cut through the dusty, dun-brown flatness. The land of Sumer outside the Marshes is a monotonous prospect interrupted by isolated figures of long-robed people, a man or two on horseback, many birds, and clusters of cattle. Here and there, a distant clump of trees signals a village strung along one of many water-channels. Otherwise the flatness of Mesopotamia prevails. The houses here are made, Marsh-fashion, out of reeds. But these villagers are tribesmen-cultivators; peasant fellah, not Madan (Marsh Arabs) like our canoe-men, though they are experts at handling canoes which are the indispensable transport of the waterways.

  The major side-channel we were on, called Wadiya, led us through low, level land only occasionally varied by willows whose branches scores of black and white pied kingfishers used as springboards for diving after fish. Sometimes we met men cloaked and robed, in canoes like ours but smaller, who murmured to us ‘Salaam aleikum’‚ touching their foreheads with their open palms, as we did in return. The world of my conventional British upbringing, the shipping office, Basra, clubs, motor-cars, and whisky and soda, seemed a million miles away. I glanced back, but by now even the waterside town at which we had recently embarked had vanished into the distance. We had entered a new, perceptibly more tranquil and, to me, magical world. Despite the scattered human figures, this drowsy landscape breathed an extraordinary solitude of peace. Even today, with visible evidence of a more intensive agriculture and the occasional jet aircraft overhead, it unfailingly does so.

  So it seemed a long dreamy haul before the first man in the prow said something and pointed ahead. Our canoe-men picked up the stroke and, as we turned a corner, I saw a great reed house – a house like a reed church – on a fork of the waterway. A few men in Arab dress stood by this dramatic structure. ‘Here we are,’ said Thesiger. ‘That is Falih’s guest-house,’ and the boys deftly steered the canoe alongside the low bank. Falih bin Majid Khalifa was the son of an outstandingly powerful sheikh of the region. Thesiger had stayed with him many times, and Falih had lent him
his own war-canoe and canoe-man when he first set out to penetrate the deep, permanent Marsh. Later Falih presented him a brand new war-canoe, specifically and expensively built for him in the Marshes by master-craftsmen – the sleek, beautiful, thoroughbred thing we sat in now. I stood up; the canoe-boys steadied the tremulous boat by gripping grass tufts on the bank; I stepped ashore. I remember – the scene is fixed in my mind like the frozen frame of a film – that a thick-set man with a black and white headcloth and a small black moustache gripped my hand and that he said something to Thesiger and smiled with great warmth. Others followed Falih and took my hand: one or two stooped old men with grey, stubbly beards (one irregularly dyed black), a sallow-faced sayyid (one of many venerated men accepted by the Muslims in these parts as descendants of the Prophet Mohammed), some smooth-cheeked youngsters who seemed from their gold-braided, cloaks to be specially related to the sheikh, and several muscular and bandoliered retainers with bolt-action rifles who squeezed my hand solemnly and painfully in strong, rough palms. Behind those hovered one or two servants in white robes, and I noted on their darker faces the pronounced Negroid features of ex-slaves. Behind them, several dangerous-looking heavy-set dogs prowled and growled, and two fine chestnut Arab mares stood hobbled and covered with blankets. Thesiger’s canoe-men carted my modest bag and my gun in through the high, arched entrance of the guest-house, the curving reed columns of which were turning a mellower honeygold in the slanting afternoon sunlight. ‘The Marshes are just over there,’ Thesiger said, and I strained my eyes hopefully at the skyline. I saw, not the Marshes, but a vague line of palm trees and the blood-orange disk of the sun sinking into a low evening haze. Yet in the years that followed I came to recognize the new feeling that possessed me at that moment: the exquisite thrust of excitement under the breast-bone, as keen as indigestion, that only tranquil end-of-the-world places – deserts, mountains, seas and these marshes – can induce. I suppose many others feel it, too; I felt it then at Falih’s. Today when I pass the place where his house used to be (you can see nothing there now except scrub and a dancing cloud of midges and, if you are lucky, a solitary heron fishing) I am convinced that I can smell the waters of the lagoons in the Marsh’s heart, and even think that I can see – although they are much too far away – the waving white plumes of the first giant reed-beds. But at that moment I simply saw that, without any possibility of doubt, I was on the brink of a great adventure.