Return to the Marshes

by Gavin Young

  On the whole the Old Basra Hands were a boozy, warmhearted lot, enjoying life as best they could in an uncomfortable climate, and working hard for their pensions. Some of them lived in houses that were over-grand. All had cars and servants. But for six summer months a year Basra is a cruel place to live in, even now, in a time of universal air-conditioning. If they chanced to meet them, I think most of the British of Basra liked Iraqis – it is easy to do so – though perhaps an unwieldy sense of paternalism and condescension blurred any true affection. Some Old Hands had even learned Arabic, encouraged by an annual bonus from their firms if they did so; not just kitchen Arabic but fluent Iraqi in which they transacted business at the office.

  Nevertheless, to spend much time with ‘the locals’, leave alone tribesmen, was regarded as totally unnecessary, possibly unhealthy, and even obscurely disloyal by the bluff, pipe-smoking bosses of the big shipping and date-packing firms, the bankers, the insurance agents. Hospitable, jolly, gregarious men, they felt vaguely insulted if a newcomer showed that he could do without them and their elaborate programmes of club entertainments – the Bachelors’ Balls, the St George’s, St Andrew’s and Burns’ Nights, New Year’s Eve Dances, the fancy-dress at Hallowe’en.

  Their wives – the memsahibs – having far more time on their hands to give to considerations of status and their committees, were even more insistent on strict adherence to the Law of the British Club and Community. Outside that Law dwelt, if not lesser, at least highly dubious breeds of men. So the British matrons’ social contact with Iraqis, of whom they saw few at close quarters except their servants, was virtually non-existent. In 1954, only four years before the revolution that for ever destroyed the monarchy in Baghdad, I remember a rumpus in the Club that split the small British community into two furious factions.

  A young member of the Club’s committee made a suggestion never made before: Why not, he daringly asked, as a gesture of goodwill, invite the Iraqi Governor of Basra and the Chief of Police – grand persons who, of course, controlled our lives since we were all licensed dwellers in their country – to look in at the New Year’s Eve frolics at the Club? He might as well have thrown a thunderflash into the Club on Bridge Night. Some cried, ‘Oh come now!’ and others, ‘Young puppy!’ And while inadequate and ancient ceiling fans stirred air as wet and heavy as damp muslin, people crowded into an Extraordinary General Meeting in the bar with its fly-specked copies of Punch where old Gopal, the irritable Goanese barman, poured whisky and soda with extreme ill grace. There they heard this cautious gesture of international goodwill ruled to be ‘preposterous’, and a stern lady denouncing it as ‘a dangerous thin end of the wedge’.

  So the matter rested – until four years later the revolution of 1958 transformed the question quite suddenly from whether Iraqi officials should be admitted for two hours a year to the Club into whether any British men and women would be allowed to remain in Iraq at all.

  It was a shame, this deliberate desire of the British community to cut itself off from Iraq. It was also something that the British military and political officers who sweated in huts, tents or inadequate offices to administer the country after the expulsion of the Turks and who nearly all came to love it, would have found incomprehensible. As I described earlier, good, bad or indifferent as administrators they may have been (most seem to have been pretty competent), but these mostly middle- or upper-class Englishmen had immersed themselves in the lives and customs of Iraqis in cities, towns, villages, in mountains or on the edge of the mosquito-ridden swamps through choice and with enthusiasm. A special glow illuminates Gertrude Bell’s letters when she writes home about the personal relationships with Iraqis she always sought and often attained.

  But things had changed by the 1950s. I was outstandingly lucky to meet someone in Basra who was, by then, an exception – though he would not have been perhaps thirty years earlier – to the general run of foreigners.

  As I have said, Wilfred Thesiger is made from the formidable mould of Richard Burton, Gertrude Bell and Charles Doughty. I have briefly described his wandering life before I met him. Immediately before coming to Basra he had spent a season or two with the Kurds. Then he journeyed south. It seems incredible now that, if he had not, my life might have side-slipped the Marsh Arabs who are now my friends and I might never have known the enchantment of their rough and ready paradise.

  The sahibs of the British community watched askance Thesiger’s tall, lanky figure (and later my own) striding about the suqs of Basra on the rare occasions he went there to buy supplies or medicines. They raised disbelieving eyebrows at the two or three long-cloaked and rather grubby Marsh Arabs flip-flopping in sandals beside him; they were deeply perplexed. In their eyes Thesiger was clearly an eccentric, yet they couldn’t help respecting him for his brilliant war record, with General Orde Wingate in Abyssinia and with Special Air Service behind the German lines in the Libyan Desert, and for his DSO. Once Thesiger lectured on the Marsh Arabs at the British Club and people were cautiously interested.

  Far from making light of the discomforts of the Marshes – the dirty water, the cheek-by-jowl communal living, the sweat, the fleas – Thesiger gave it to them straight, and you could see their bewildered disapproval of our sort of life. ‘Why don’t you do something useful?’ a nice bank manager said to me, a man who, oddly enough, apart from being a jovial pillar of the Club and the (all-British) Basra Amateur Dramatic Society, enjoyed travel books and admired eccentrics like Orde Wingate (although he was a soldier which, I suppose lent him an officially sanctioned and therefore acceptable eccentricity.) ‘You mean, like becoming a bank manager?’ I asked irritably. ‘Well … yes,’ he said.

  When, later, I had visited the Marshes once or twice, Marsh Arab friends regularly came down to Basra to see me at home. They came from Mejar squeezed into the crowded, ramshackle buses with the springs sticking painfully out of the seats, braving a strange city and rude townsmen, clutching presents for me of eggs wrapped in little baskets made of raffia, or even a scrawny chicken or two, their eyes glazed from being dangled head down for several hours in the heat. Suddenly oddly pathetic figures out of their own environment – in which they assumed a striking dignity and great natural grace – they appeared grinning on the steps of my Basra shipping office, to the quiet amusement of the astonished clerks.

  My Greek boss, George Pavlides, a rough and ready but humane and sensible man, took to them at once; he would lead them in and sit them down in our tearoom and tell Salman, the tea-boy, to get a move on and start brewing up. Sometimes, if the office was closed, I would hear tapping at the window of my small house and look up to see two or three figures in off-white dishdashas, black and white headcloths and flimsy black or brown cloaks peering anxiously to see if I was there. If I was out and the cook, who had orders to let them in at any time of day or night, was also away in the bazaar, they would settle down on their haunches on the front doorstep and calmly wait for me to return. I had no beds for them, but they curled up happily on rugs on the floor; and as soon as he saw them Jassim, my good-natured cook, would hurry unbidden to the market to buy food for them if we were short.

  Now and again, of course, someone else would come to call – an acquaintance in one of the British trading companies or a date-packing firm, or worse still a British wife – and find these friendly, innocent Arabs grinning and chittering at them from the doorstep. After encounters like that, the furtive or accusing glances in my direction on Club Nights would multiply: I was obviously ‘going native’.

  Luckily for my morale, in the British Consulate-General things were different. There we had the amused understanding of the Consul, the late Mark Kerr-Pearse, whose luncheon invitation had led to Wilfred Thesiger’s casual but, for me, momentous remark, ‘I’ll be back in six weeks for a bath. Why not come up for a week in the Marshes then?’ – and so to my stepping ashore from the great war-canoe in the shadow of Sheikh Falih’s mudhif on that sun-bathed day in 1952. The arched entrance of that mudhi
f had been Thesiger’s gateway to the Marshes, as it was to be mine. And, as it happened, that particular gateway very soon ceased to exist.

  7 The Last of the Sheiks

  As the early 1950s saw the last flickerings of British raj attitudes in Iraq, so they saw the twilight of the great tribal sheikhs of the south. The first of the sheikhs I met in Iraq, as I have said, was Sheikh Falih bin Majid el Khalifa. Thesiger had made friends with him a year or two before and Falih, though at first baffled by Thesiger’s longing to actually plunge in amongst the Marsh Arabs and suffer the flies and fleas and heat, had good-naturedly lent him the canoe and canoe-men with which to do so. The first real Marsh Arabs, therefore, that Thesiger (and later I myself) encountered, were Falih’s vassals. From time to time, Falih himself liked to hunt the monstrous wild boars and shoot the wildfowl that teem in the marshes, but he would never have spent more time than absolutely necessary there, and shuddered at the thought of staying the night in a Marshman’s house.

  I was only to know Falih a very short time. The following year he was killed by a careless nephew in a shooting accident. After my first visit with Thesiger I, too, stayed in Falih’s guesthouse and benefited from his enormous hospitality, and went pig-shooting with him. After his death I was entertained in the same mudhif by his son, Abdel Waned. Though Falih could deal harshly with disobedience, he was in many ways an admirable man. When he died, Amara and Sabaiti, Thesiger’s boatmen, wept; and Falih’s name awoke respect and regret from Nasiriya to the eastern Marshes. And that thought leads me to say something about sheikhs of southern Iraq in general, many of whom where not admirable at all at that period but little despots straddling land which, with its periodic droughts and floods, was a hard enough taskmaster in itself for those who worked it. The word ‘sheikh’ has been translated ‘lord of the manor’ and ‘squire’, but both expressions are misleading. The tribes of southern Iraq, including the Madan, were, and are, closely related to the nomadic tribes in their black tents east of the Euphrates. They cherish the traditions of the desert Arabs. So the sheikhs were merely the first among equals. Chosen by common consent, sheikhs were accepted and respected only as long as they effectively shouldered their responsibility for the well-being of the tribe in peace and for leading it into battle in war. A sheikh’s title could be transferred and tribesmen would desert an unsatisfactory sheikh for another of his family. These natural aristocrats – through in-breeding their blood was the purest in the Arab world – followed a democratic code. The influx of these thoroughbred tribesmen into southern Iraq over the centuries and their co-mingling with the already resident cultivators meant that this code had taken sturdy root there. The peoples in and on the edge of the Marshes had entirely adopted it. The early twentieth century war-leaders, Saihud of the Albu Mohammed and Ibn Madhkur of the Beni Lam, were two examples of tribal leaders in the Amara area who were regarded, and behaved, according to immemorial Arab tribal tradition.

  Bertram Thomas describes how in his day one had to address an important sheikh in the baroque phrases evolved by oriental protocol:

  ‘O Sheikh Mohammed, you know that Government is strong to punish wrong-doing, and generous to reward faithful service?’

  ‘Government is a father. First Allah, then the Hukuma (Government).’

  ‘Well said, O Sheikh! But a father is angered with a slothful or unwilling son.’

  ‘God destroy the house of the father of sloth.’

  ‘I have come to you in the Hukuma’s name. Government has need of 200 men of the Beni Said, and wants them today.’

  ‘I kiss your hand, but….’ And so on, for perhaps an hour or two.

  The war-canoes – the taradas – such as the one in which I arrived at Falih’s house, symbolize heroic days of major tribal warfare in southern Iraq. Days of tough, flamboyant but in some sense popular leadership; days of great bloodshed that began to dwindle in ferocity after the First World War. The tribes learned a grim lesson from the long struggle between the Albu Mohammed and the Beni Lam in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was like the Hundred Years War between England and France in miniature. Year after year, the sheikhs planted their war-flags at their mudhif doors and sent messengers to call in the tribesmen for battle. It is said that 10,000 died. This figure may be an exaggeration, but undeniably hundreds were killed before Saihud and Ibn Madhkur wisely put a stop to the mutual slaughter of their tribes.

  Blood feud and killing still occur in the Marshes as we shall see later on, but on a lesser scale, I should think, than the violent crime rate of London or New York. In any case it is utterly insignificant in comparison to the great battles of the past that involved sometimes hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of men. An old man of the once war-going Albu Mohammed confederation of tribes was right when he said, half-mockingly, of his own people today, ‘Their swords have become swords of lead; they glitter but cut not.’ And wars, more than peace, produce leaders who lead.

  For all this, even in the 1950s I found simple, hard-working sheikhs among the Madan, chosen only for their personal quality; and these dutiful men received few rewards for their pains and indeed were often quite poor. But the successors to the great Saihud had often degenerated into mere feudal landlords who made personal fortunes from vast estates, lived on the dry land in forts of concrete houses, and probably owned a large American limousine and a mansion in Baghdad. Their powerful presences loomed over the region casting as great a shadow over those who lived there as the government itself. In fact, they often treated government officials as if they were there to be ignored. Now and again, it is true, tribesmen preferred – and who can blame them – to risk local justice and punishment by unsatisfactory sheikhs in familiar surroundings to undergoing an often Kafka-esque experience in government police stations or jails amongst contemptuous strangers. But still, in pre-1958 days, tribesmen were utterly at the mercy of too many extortionate bullies with gold braid on their robes extending hands to be subserviently kissed. They were one reason for serious, large-scale emigration of land-labourers from the Amara area to the imagined Eldorados of Baghdad and Basra in the early 1950s, an exodus that threatened a dangerous setback in agricultural production in a nation largely dependent on it.

  In theory, all land belonged to the Iraqi State, but only in theory. The fact was that land-owning sheikhs in southern Iraq had been able to lease great tracts from the government and had then proceeded to run them with as much bare-faced confidence as if they owned them by right. Most of these lands were cultivable, but some fiefdoms spilled over into the permanent Marshes and enveloped purely Madan villages and the Madan tribes that inhabited them. Falih’s father, Majid, was master of one of these sprawling fiefdoms and one of the two paramount sheikhs of the Albu Mohammed tribes near Amara. I met him only once. He waddled into Falih’s mudhif one day, a sweating, cross old man, with eyes too small and a midriff too gross, barking orders to a small crowd of terrified attendants and slaves. He lowered himself to the ground with difficulty as if – as many did in this region of water and humidity – he suffered from rheumatism as well as sheer gluttony. He asked me if I could arrange to sell him a smart, modern launch that would run him up and down the Tigris. When I said I couldn’t, he lost interest in me. Soon the mudhif was alive with chatter and people bustling in and out – bringing accounts, and men reporting on the state of the crops or a problem of irrigation or the need for more water-pumps, and a host of petitioners of one sort or another. Majid was not a permanently absent landlord as others were.

  Majid was a millionaire and his tribesmen could be better described by then as peasant labourers, working desperately hard for a precarious and certainly none too generous share of the sheikh’s crop of rice or winter wheat and barley. Majid was therefore no longer a traditional kind of sheikh, but simply a feudal landlord. Of course, it was in his interest to be an efficient landlord, to see that each parched acre received its quota of water – although not all landlords, some of them notoriously absentee, did e
ven that. But the security of his share-cropping labourers, and their wives and many children, depended to a very great extent on the whim of this rheumatic old curmudgeon who spent very little time pondering their welfare. Thesiger, in his book on the Marshes, recalls Majid’s anguished cry at the mourning for Falih, his son, ‘My land! Now, when I die, what will happen to my land?’ And Thesiger comments dryly, ‘I thought it sad at the time that he put his land before his people.’

  Perhaps young King Faisal’s ministers in Baghdad saw the sheikhs as a safeguard for the régime – the King himself, a sophisticated youth, educated at Harrow School in England, would hardly have felt much at ease with people like Majid. Majid’s tribe numbered about 120,000 which meant he could mobilize, say, 25,000 armed men on the instant: a sizeable force. Furthermore, the city of Amara at that time was thought to be politically unstable – it was leftist, largely in reaction to the surrounding feudalism. So the government may have thought that such a private army was a useful weapon lying so close to such a potential political trouble spot. Whatever else, Majid would certainly have done his best to uphold the monarchy.

  The Albu Mohammed villages were dotted along the irrigated, or flooded, lands on the Tigris and the tributaries of it which meandered into the Marshes. The people were fellahin (peasants), for the most part, not Madan. But Falih and Majid claimed ruler’s right over real Madan villages too, rights that obliged the inhabitants to hand over a share of the rice crops, and provide reeds and labour for the sheikhs on pain of beating or fines. Their headmen were responsible for prompt delivery of whatever was ordered.