Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War

by Annia Ciezadlo

  I used to argue with her about this kind of thing for hours. I would point out that some of her closest friends were Shiites: she adored Usama, another young student at the Institute for War & Peace Reporting. And she liked Mohamad, especially after the hijab incident.

  Before we left Beirut, Umm Hassane had given me a black-and-gray polyester hijab for the car ride through Anbar and other situations where I would need to look Iraqi. As she showed me how to tie it beneath my chin, a crafty smile stole across her face. “Maybe you’ll like it,” she said, casting her eyes upward with a wistful sigh, “and you’ll start wearing it all the time.”

  I lifted an eyebrow in Mohamad’s direction. He replied with a baleful stare that said Over my dead body.

  Mohamad objected to hijab on philosophical grounds, but I suspect this reaction was also partly aesthetic. The minute I put on a hijab, a remarkable transformation occurs. As the telephone booth turns mild-mannered Clark Kent into Superman, so do I, in hijab, transform into a sullen Albanian peasant woman. My round face turns doughy and stolid, resentful, and stunningly ugly. Jowls emerge. I find myself hating men, all of them. I look so hideous in a hijab that everything I look at turns ugly too, out of sympathy. Mohamad hated this metamorphosis so much that after we moved to the Andalus I sometimes found myself in the feministically awkward position of arguing that I needed to wear the damn thing for safety.

  Roaa refused to back me up: she was completely on Mohamad’s side. “For an Eastern man, to not want his wife to wear hijab—this is something wonderful,” she exulted. “This is something really fantastic.”

  Roaa was a devout Muslim. She prayed five times a day, as she had done her entire life, and set her watch to give an alarm at prayer time. If we were working, she would make up her prayers in the evening after going home. But she was not conservative: her best friend was a guy her age, a Christian, and they talked on the phone almost every day. She didn’t wear hijab, and she dressed in jeans and bright, butterfly-colored shirts—pinks and yellows and light blues—that always matched her eye shadow. “Annia, for sure they can tell you are a foreigner, because you never wear enough makeup,” she scolded me once, laughing and rolling warm brown eyes that were dusted iridescent blue that day. “Iraqi women, we like to wear a lot of makeup!”

  Yet it was Roaa who taught me the proper way to wear a headscarf. We both put on headscarves and abayas before leaving Baghdad. In the car, Roaa showed me how to pull up one end of the headscarf and pin it to the side, so I could look like a good Muslim girl who wore it often enough to give it a little style. We needed to look as unobtrusive as possible: the road to Karbala was one of the most dangerous in Iraq, and people called the area it passed through the “Triangle of Death.”

  Roaa confessed that she had not been able to sleep at all the night before. I was nervous too: a week before Fern and Salwa had been killed, on the Shiite religious holiday of Ashura, Sunni extremists had launched nine simultaneous attacks in Karbala that killed about a hundred people.

  I had e-mailed a Coalition adviser from the Hilla office and told him I wanted to visit the center. He told me flatly that it was not a good idea to go to Karbala. I decided to ignore him: if you listened to the Coalition people, you would never go anywhere but the Green Zone.

  Before we left, I called my friend Manal Omar. She worked for Women for Women International, an aid group that helps women in war zones become self-sufficient. Fern and Salwa had been friends of hers. Manal warned me to be extremely careful on the drive. “We can’t get out there because of the security risk,” she said. “And it’s tearing me apart, because I know Fern and Salwa would have wanted us to carry on their work.”

  Manal told me to turn back if the military had blocked the main road, as they often did after attacks. “There’s a little road, a side road that you have to take when they block the main highway,” she said. “There’s a sign—I forget the name—but if the main road is closed, don’t take that road. Just turn around and come back.”

  I did not notice the signs. One minute we were on the main highway, which went through the small Sunni towns south of Baghdad. And then the main road was closed, and suddenly we found ourselves on one of the small side roads that wound through the lush irrigation canals of the Euphrates. I could not tell if this was the route that Manal had warned me about or not.

  Karbala is famous for sweet pudding, fesenjoon, and a story that dates back to the early years of Islam. After the prophet Muhammad died, a civil war broke out over who should become caliph—a relative of the Prophet, or one of his closest companions. The conflict between these two camps eventually divided Islam into the Sunni and Shiite sects.

  In the year 680, the Prophet’s grandson Hussein rebelled against Yazid, the caliph in Damascus. He set out with his family and a small band of followers for the southern Iraqi city of Kufa, whose people had promised to support him. Yazid’s army intercepted Hussein in the Iraqi desert. It surrounded Hussein’s caravan and cut it off from the waters of the Euphrates. After a bitter siege of ten days, during which the children of Hussein’s family begged for food and water, the caliph’s men killed Hussein and cut off his head. They took the surviving women and children back to Damascus, where the caliph displayed the captives and the severed heads in his court. But Hussein’s sister Zainab refused to acknowledge Yazid’s rule. In a passionate speech, she denounced him for killing her brother, the Prophet’s grandson. By secretly saving one of Hussein’s sons, she preserved the Prophet’s bloodline, and to this day millions of Shiites make the pilgrimage to the dusty town to visit the grave of Imam Hussein. Shiites believe that the blood of Hussein soaked into the soil of Karbala, leaving the very earth smelling sweet.

  When we got to Karbala, the shrine was overwhelmed with Iranian pilgrims. Most of them were women. They were wearing jeans. Their robes flapped open to reveal swaths of rainbow-colored fabric cinched around their waists. They wore the kind of headscarves that some of the more dogmatic Iraqi Muslims called al-hijab al-shaitany, “the Devil’s hijab”: filmy floral pinks and greens that floated far back on their heads, arranged to reveal swirls of artfully fluffed hair. They chittered in Farsi as they stalked through Karbala’s muddy streets. One teenage pilgrim wore skintight purple jeans and high-heeled boots.

  Roaa glowered at her from inside her black hole. “We are wearing these terrible things, and just look at the Iranian women,” she hissed. “While it is their fault we are wearing abayas!”

  At the Zainab al-Hawraa Women’s Center, named after the Prophet’s granddaughter, the Iraqi women who were supposed to be taking over the management felt isolated. They missed Fern and Salwa, who used to visit them almost every week, bringing falafels from the souq and other little gifts. They reminisced about Fern and Salwa’s last day: one of the Iraqi women at the center had made fesenjoon, the spectacular Iranian dish of chicken stewed in a sweet-and-sour pomegranate sauce thickened with ground walnuts, and the women had all eaten it together.

  Two weeks after Fern and Salwa were murdered, the women were under siege. They had not had many visitors, they said, because of the dangerous roads. All of them had received multiple death threats. Some of the threats came from mysterious callers, but others were from people they knew—local religious women who would call them at night, or come to their houses and warn them that the women’s center was run “by Jews” and it was not good for a woman’s reputation to go there. The latest death threat came that very day, delivered by a young clerical student who knocked on the door while Roaa and I sat speaking to the women inside. The manager tried to dismiss the incident, not wanting to alarm us, but the look of fear on her face was more frightening than anything she could have said.

  It was beginning to dawn on me that this trip was more dangerous than I had thought, not just for me but for others. I wanted to try the famous Karbala sweets, which Roaa and others had told me about. But we had to get out of the city before nightfall. And we had one more stop to make before we could go.


  A young Shiite cleric named Muqtada al-Sadr had been denouncing the American-led occupation from the beginning. In the weeks before the killings, Sadr’s clerics had been criticizing the women’s centers. I wanted to see what his representatives in Karbala had to say about the murders.

  The cleric who managed the office, Sheikh Khidayer al-Ansari, showed us into his visiting room. Pictures of Shiite martyrs hung on the walls, including Sadr’s father, a grand ayatollah who had been assassinated by Saddam’s regime in 1999. We took off our shoes and sat down on the floor with the sheikh.

  Sheikh Ansari approved of the women’s centers: they taught sewing and computer skills and this technology, he said, was good for the people. He condemned the murders. “I can’t see how this is helping,” he sighed, looking unhappily at the floor.

  But he grew angry when he remembered how L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy in charge of Iraq, had inaugurated the center the previous month with an elaborate photo op. “When Bremer opened this center, we heard that Bremer said, ‘We intend to give Iraqi women their full freedom,’” he said, and added ominously, “and you can put two lines under ‘full freedom.’”

  During this conversation, he kept his eyes on Roaa, who was translating, and I could see that his relentless stare was making her nervous. “They pretend that they have freedom and democracy and they brought it for women,” he said angrily, “and that is a lie because they have not permitted democracy to this day.”

  That was hard to argue with. In the summer of 2003, occupation authorities had canceled local elections, which most Iraqis desperately wanted, and installed former Iraqi military and police officials as local leaders instead. Then U.S. authorities started setting up women’s centers—many of them, like the one in Karbala, in former regime offices that Iraqi political parties coveted for themselves. In Karbala, American authorities had kicked a local Shiite political party out of the building, and later sent Bremer to be photographed with Iraqi women at the center’s opening. To men like the sheikh, the message seemed clear: women’s freedom came at the expense of Iraqi society. That the women were the society was something no one but Iraqi women—and a few rare outsiders, like Manal Omar and Fern Holland—ever understood.

  Suddenly the sheikh thought of a way to illustrate his point. Sitting up straight, he placed one hand on his knee, and unfurled the other hand theatrically in my direction.

  “Ask her this,” he said intently, still looking at Roaa. “Do you know why Marlene Monroe killed herself?”

  It had been a long, depressing day. The road from Baghdad, which we would have to take back, was lined with graffiti saying TO THE JIHAD, O MUSLIMS, and whoever had written it did not intend jihad in the sense of “struggle” or “striving.” When the women heard that we had driven down from Baghdad on our own, they looked at each other with alarm. One of them had lost a nephew on the same road earlier in the week. They told us to get back as soon as possible. The sun was slipping down toward the horizon. It was time to go. And now Muqtada’s man in Karbala wanted to talk about “Marlene” Monroe.

  “No,” I said. “Please tell me.”

  Settling his thighs into the floor, he began what was clearly one of his favorite stories.

  “Marlene Monroe had many fans,” he recounted, in the singsong storytelling cadence of classical Arabic. “And these fans, they would write her many letters. These fans would ask her questions like ‘How did you become a star? What did you do to become so famous?’”

  One fan, said the sheikh, got a letter back from Marlene. On the envelope the movie star had written instructions to open it only after she was dead.

  After she committed suicide, the faithful fan, who had obeyed her wishes, finally opened the letter. This, according to the sheikh, is what it said:

  It is true, I am a star, and famous the world over. But all I ever wanted was a family. I tried to raise a family decently, and with honor, and I failed. So do not forget this: Fame is not worth it if you lose your honor, and lose Paradise.

  He looked at us in triumph.

  “These women’s centers are very good for women, but the most important thing for Iraqi women is to raise a family with honor,” he concluded, in case we had missed the point. “The Iraqi woman should keep her honor—she shouldn’t lose Paradise and throw away her whole life for what they call ‘freedom.’”

  Politely, we thanked the sheikh for this lesson. Adjusting our abayas, tucking away every disobedient hair, we headed back up the road to Baghdad.

  Chapter 14

  The Free One

  BY APRIL, AMERICAN troops were battling two rebellions in Iraq: one by Sunni militants in Fallujah, and the other by Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia. He named it the Mahdi Army, after the Shiite imam who vanished mysteriously in the ninth century, and whom many Shiites believe will return on Judgment Day. On April 3, the U.S. military arrested one of Sadr’s top lieutenants. The next day, Sunday, the cleric’s supporters poured into the streets in cities all over Iraq. Eight U.S. soldiers were killed in clashes in Sadr City, a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad that was home to almost half the city’s population. In Firdous Square, just down the street from the Andalus, hundreds of young men began to gather.

  We went outside to see what was happening. A crowd of men dashed down Saadoun Street shouting Muqtada! Muqtada! Shots rang out from the direction they were running in, and the men turned and ran back, much faster this time, not shouting anymore. An open truck thundered past with several dozen men in the back of it, all dressed head-to-toe in black and holding black banners, shouting and heading toward the gunfire. I had seen riots before, back in America, but nothing like this. Nothing where people would drive into gunfire.

  Two days later, the U.S. military surrounded the city of Fallujah. That same day, occupation authorities announced that they would arrest Sadr for his involvement in the killing of another Shiite cleric a year earlier, in April 2003. Three members of the Iraqi Governing Council threatened to resign. One of them was a woman, Dr. Salama al-Khafaji.

  On April 9, the one-year anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, a Humvee circled Firdous Square all day, blasting a curfew warning in Arabic at psyops-level volume: “THIS IS A MILITARY AREA. THIS AREA IS CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE COALITION FORCES. IF WE SEE ANYONE ENTERING THIS AREA, HE WILL BE INSTANTLY SHOT.”

  Then, in case that seemed unlikely to win Iraqi hearts and minds, the voice of America added: “IF YOU ARE ANGRY TODAY, YOU SHOULD BE ANGRY AT THE MAHDI ARMY, BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE IRAQI PEOPLE AT HEART.”

  That day, Mohamad and I went to Sadr City for Friday prayers. Mohamad and Abu Zeinab went to the mosque. I went around interviewing people with Usama, a young journalism student we had hired as a translator. Everybody mentioned Dr. Salama, as they called her. “She is braver than many men,” grizzled men would say, in admiration. “Her shoe is worth more than the entire Governing Council,” one of Sadr’s aides thundered to tens of thousands of supporters during prayers at the mosque.

  Dr. Salama was Iraq’s most popular female politician, according to one poll, which also ranked her as the tenth most popular figure overall. Because she had wide support among Sadr’s followers, she was mediating between them and the U.S. military—an essential but extremely dangerous form of shuttle diplomacy. Not long afterwards, Sheikh Hussein Ali al-Shaalan took Mohamad and me to meet her.

  We sat in Dr. Salama’s office with her adviser, a Shiite cleric named Sheikh Fatih Kashif al-Ghitta. The two sheikhs were friends, but as soon as we sat down they launched into an argument over women’s rights.

  Women were demanding a 40 percent quota in the new parliament, the legislative body that would succeed the Governing Council. The idea of women holding political office had wide popular support, particularly in Shiite areas. But some politicians were objecting to the quota in the name of tradition. Our friend Sheikh Shaalan, unfortunately, was one of them.

  “I want for women in Iraq what exists in other countries, but withi
n Islamic bounds,” argued Sheikh Shaalan, leaning back in his chair. He was resplendent, as usual, in a robe of rich dark brown wool.

  He pointed out, quite accurately, that most of the countries in the U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” had only a handful of women in their own governments.

  “How can we possibly exceed those countries that are coming in with their rhetoric of freedom and democracy and human rights,” he asked, smiling, “when in those countries, women’s political participation barely exceeds twenty percent?”

  Crafty bastard, I wrote in my notes. Mohamad was translating most of the conversation, although Dr. Salama and Sheikh Fatih occasionally switched into English, and I was taking notes for both of us.

  “The system that I would like to see, personally, would be one where the person who is most able—regardless of sex or religion—would be the one in government,” said Sheikh Shaalan. “Of course, taking into consideration that we’re an Eastern society. I don’t call for backwardness, or being frozen in time. But I also don’t favor a wide openness that would lead to confrontation, and lead to a society that is not an Eastern society, nor a Western society, but a society in turmoil.”

  Sheikh Fatih looked at Dr. Salama. She smiled.

  Sheikh Fatih was wearing a long robe and the white turban that identified him as a Shiite cleric. The fleshy face under his turban ended with a trim, graying beard. The deep grooves under his eyes gave him the weary look of a man whose health you might worry about. But when he smiled or made goofy puns, which he did often, he resembled a genial college professor.

  Dr. Salama’s eyes usually held an expression of patience, with the slightest hint of humor. With her oval face and hooded abaya, she looked like a black-robed madonna. She was forty-six years old.