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

by Annia Ciezadlo

  “We are a picture of Iraq,” said Sheikh Fatih, meaning: religion, tribes, and women. “And I like the way we are sitting.”

  Dr. Salama was sitting behind an enormous desk in a padded black office chair that was taller than she was. There was a large flat-screen computer screen at her back and a gold Quran in a green velvet case on her desk. Some newspapers lay open where she had been reading them. The two sheikhs—one religious, one tribal—sat before her like supplicants.

  Sheikh Shaalan laughed indulgently. “I’m not going to say anything about that, but I want things to go the natural way,” he said, in a tone that indicated the discussion was over. “Let’s see what happens. Don’t close any doors, and maybe women will take fifty percent!”

  (Consummate bullshitter, I noted.)

  But Sheikh Fatih was not willing to let the topic drop. “The twentieth century was a man’s century, and we had four or five wars,” he persisted. “Let’s give the twenty-first century to the women, and see what happens.”

  “Very well, but how many Dr. Salamas are there?” said Sheikh Shaalan frowning. “I’d be worried about how many are out there and how good they are.”

  “It’s true that many of the women that I work with don’t have political experience,” said Dr. Salama, who had been quiet up to this point. Her dark brown eyes were following the argument from side to side.

  Sheikh Fatih sighed and rolled his eyes. “Sheikh Hussein,” he said, using Sheikh Shaalan’s first name, “Nisrine Barwari, in the Ministry of Public Works, is worth ten ministers. I have experience with women all over Iraq—Basra, Amara, Kut—and you don’t have to worry, there are women even better than Dr. Salama all over Iraq. If I was an extremist, I would call for sixty percent!”

  “Forty percent will be a social shock that society isn’t ready to accept,” said Sheikh Shaalan. He was not smiling anymore.

  “Sheikh Hussein, in the current crisis, in Fallujah and Najaf, who is losing? The loser is the women.”

  “No, it’s the entire society.”

  “No, let’s be honest: it’s the women,” said Sheikh Fatih, whirling his prayer beads, almost shaking them at his friend. “Who is the social base who will be pressured the most? The woman. She has to balance between her child, her house, and her cause.”

  “We should have a bigger debate,” said Shaalan, flicking the conversation away with his hand, smiling a smooth urbane smile that seemed to say Enough of this nonsense, let us men move on to the real issues.

  But Sheikh Fatih still wasn’t ready to let it drop. “We’ve talked about this a lot!” he said, leaning forward for another round.

  I looked at Dr. Salama. Her mouth held a watchful, nearly imperceptible smile.

  She has a thing or two to say about this, I thought. But she’s going to let them wear themselves out fighting each other first.

  There was an analytical hum to her quietness, a sense of wheels churning beneath the surface, that reminded me of Mohamad. And Sheikh Fatih, unwilling to let an argument drop until he had convinced his opponent, or at least browbeaten him into submission, reminded me a little of myself.

  Our first meal with Dr. Salama and Sheikh Fatih was a working lunch. A week or so after we met, she invited us for masquf in her office. They spread a tablecloth over one of her work tables, and we ate masquf and talked about Sadr’s uprising.

  It was a challenge to pick tiny bones out of the smoky fish and write notes at the same time. But as we discussed the upcoming “transfer of power” to a transitional Iraqi government, and the awful living conditions in Sadr City, I had a strangely comfortable feeling of déjà vu. Dr. Salama was talking about the same things people talked about in Buffalo, Chicago, or any of the other places I had lived: toxic waste dumps too close to people’s homes, bad sewer systems, the need for better schools and hospitals. They reminded me of civic leaders I knew back in the United States, of church basements and mimeographed flyers and community meetings; except the community, in their case, was Sadr City.

  Salama Hassoun al-Khafaji’s father was a carpenter—a religious man, but self-educated, a reader. He loved logic, and taught his daughter the importance of reading books and asking questions. At the age of fifteen, she started wearing the hijab, which was frowned upon by the secular Baath regime. She did it anyway. “I was not a calm woman,” she told me once—speaking calmly, as she usually did, but with a firm expression that made me believe her.

  Like practically every Iraqi I met, she had wanted to be an artist. As a young woman, she also wanted to be a doctor or an oil engineer. When the Baath educational system had ruled out those ambitions, she had studied dentistry instead. “I found myself in it,” she said, “because I like sculpture, and dentistry requires sculpting and taking a picture.” She got married and had four children.

  But every week, wrapped in her black abaya, Dr. Salama would slip out of the house without telling her husband where she was going. If he asked, she would say she was visiting a friend’s house for lunch or tea. Finally, one day, he demanded to know what she was up to. Lowering her eyes, she gave him the enigmatic reply, “I am doing what is right.”

  She was studying in an underground hawza, or Shiite religious academy, for women. Informal salons and study groups have been a tradition in Iraq for centuries; during the Abbasid caliphate, philosophers would meet in the mosques of Basra and Baghdad to drink tea, steal food from each other’s plates, and debate the latest translation of Greek philosophy. But under Saddam, the practice went underground, and by the time Dr. Salama started attending it was extremely risky. She did not tell her brothers or even her husband where she was going, “because I was afraid that someone might ask my child, and we would be in great danger.”

  The women who studied with Sheikh Fatih and his mother, Dr. Amal Kashif al-Ghitta, told their husbands, brothers, and children they were going to ladies’ luncheons—harmless gatherings where women ate and gossiped and drank tea. Instead they were studying economics, social sciences, logic, rhetoric, humanities, comparative legal systems, and Islamic law—a kind of book club for religious women.

  “We didn’t hide the fact that we were gathering, we didn’t hide the fact that we were students,” she told us. “But we would do things like say ‘Today, we are going to have lunch’ at one person’s house. Another day we would have tea at another’s house.”

  It was the mid-1990s, at the height of Saddam’s “faithfulness campaign.” After the first Gulf War, Saddam began courting Islamic hardliners in a bid to shore up support. The Baath Party was still nominally secular, but Saddam became a master at using Islam as a tool of political repression. He beheaded women—in many cases, apolitical women whose male relatives were accused of belonging to banned political parties—under the pretext that they were “prostitutes.” Many men responded by keeping their wives, daughters, and sisters locked in the kitchen. Such women often turned to religion: it was an identity their men couldn’t criticize. (I suspect they also wanted to be able to quote the Quran and its interpretations back to husbands and fathers who told them such-and-such was Islamically ordained.)

  But Shiite women were at a disadvantage when it came to learning their own religion. Public academies taught only government-approved Sunni doctrine. Saddam could not close the Shiite religious academies, which had been the center of Shiite learning for centuries. But the hawzas did not admit women. And anyone who taught Shiite principles in private places, even at home, risked imprisonment or death.

  Despite the danger, Sheikh Fatih and his mother decided to teach women at their home. Their informal hawza was grounded in the Shiite seminary tradition of studying a wide range of fields as part of a religious education. They followed the same course of study that men followed at the Hawza al-Ilmiya in Najaf, where most of Shiite Islam’s grand ayatollahs had studied. So dangerous was this knowledge—philosophy, rhetoric, logic, history—that Sheikh Fatih would teach the women from behind a screen or through a microphone from another room to protect their
identities. They would ask him questions “because in our hawza, questions are more important than the lessons.” But he never saw his students, and they never saw his face. “I didn’t want to know who my students were,” Sheikh Fatih told us. “Because under torture, I would be forced to give their names, and I didn’t want to do that. They would have captured all of my students.”

  Despite all these precautions, Sheikh Fatih got caught. In 1998, he was arrested and sent to Abu Ghraib prison, charged with instigating opposition to the regime. Dr. Amal continued the lessons for a while, but eventually she had to stop. She was living confined to her home, subject to constant surveillance, and she worried that the Baath Party would execute her son if she caused trouble. She passed the time by writing books.

  Eventually Shekih Fatih was sentenced to death. Dr. Amal and the hawza students pooled what money and jewelry they could scrape up, including about a pound of gold. It amounted to $20,000, about $8,000 of which went to bribe the judge and the rest to other officials. The money didn’t get him out of prison. But it was enough to buy his life.

  “He’s worth it!” Dr. Salama exclaimed, as they told us the story. “He’s worth more than that. One lecture from him is worth that.”

  “Well, everyone is worth that,” Sheikh Fatih said gently. “Many others have died in Abu Ghraib, and they were worth that too.”

  In December 2002, as the U.S. invasion loomed, Saddam granted an amnesty to some political prisoners (except for those he executed). The day Sheikh Fatih was released, Dr. Salama went to the prison with Dr. Amal and three other students. But they did not actually meet face-to-face until after the fall of Saddam; she saw him walk out of Abu Ghraib, but he did not see her watching in the crowd.

  Dr. Salama and Dr. Amal still held the hawzas. No longer clandestine, they were more like book clubs now—talking circles where women discussed ideas, politics, and everything else. In early May, Roaa and I attended one of the sessions.

  Sheikh Fatih and his mother lived in Hayy al-Jamia, the university neighborhood, in a house surrounded by a garden of palm trees and flowering shrubs. We sat in the living room while eight women, ranging from their twenties to the sixty-year-old Dr. Amal, discussed jobs, politics, elections, and how they didn’t feel safe in the universities or anywhere else. One woman shared the kind of story that was becoming commonplace: her brother was an Iraqi policeman. He had shot a thief who was trying to escape, and now the thief’s family was demanding blood money under tribal law. “We must have a system that protects the police,” said one of the women firmly. A woman in her late thirties got into a fight with a young civil engineer who did not believe hijab should be compulsory. They all agreed on the need for more education, especially for women. Dr. Amal gave a short lecture defending freedom of thought, which she illustrated with an Iraqi-sounding version of the Watergate story, in which Nixon was an unjust ruler led astray by wily advisers.

  Afterward the women clustered around Dr. Amal, addressing her as Sheikha. I asked her about the books she had written.

  “My favorite is Torn Bodies,” she said. “I wrote this while my Fatih was in prison. I was inspired by Franz Kafka—do you know Kafka?—and Edgar Allan Poe. It is narrated by each of the parts of a man’s body: arms, legs, and, excuse me”—here, she assumed a severe expression—“sexual organs. It is a metaphor for the Iraqi society.”

  She disappeared and came back with a copy of one of her books. She pressed it on Roaa.

  “Next time I see you,” she said sternly, “I want you to discuss it with me.” Roaa nodded and looked terrified.

  We went outside and got ready to leave. Dr. Salama and I stood in the yard under a palm tree with her daughter, a shy thirteen-year-old with her mother’s moon-shaped face. Dr. Salama and I were discussing the legacy of fear left behind by the old regime.

  Her daughter tugged at her sleeve. “Mama,” she whispered anxiously.

  “What is it?” Dr. Salama asked, turning to her and leaning her head down to listen.

  “What is this regime? Will it help me lose weight?”

  Régime, a French word people often used in Iraq, can also mean diet.

  Dr. Salama burst out laughing. She put her arms around her daughter and hugged her, drawing her close into the billowing black fabric of her abaya. “No, my dear,” she said, smiling, “that’s not the kind of regime we’re talking about.”

  Dr. Salama was a conundrum to me. She was intelligent, outspoken, and independent. She opposed wilayat al-faqih, the doctrine of absolute rule by the clergy that is applied in Iran. She defied the Iranian-influenced Islamist parties to endorse Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite secularist, for prime minister. (He lost.) She and Sheikh Fatih consistently pushed for a more democratic transition of power, for more female ministers, and for more political representation of Sadr and his followers (a tactic that could have defused some of the momentum of his uprising if it had been pursued at that time). And yet she supported Resolution 137, a proposal to replace Iraq’s 1959 Personal Status Law with a decentralized system that would allow religious authorities to control personal matters—including family law like divorce, marriage, child custody, and inheritance rights.

  Most Westerners made the mistake of classing Dr. Salama with the hard line Islamists. (Hillary Rodham Clinton once denounced her as “ultra-conservative.”) But the reality was more complicated.

  The majority of Iraqis were Shiites. Thanks to years of war and mass killings of men, the majority of Iraqis—some estimates went as high as 55 percent—were also women. Shiite women were the face of Iraq, the largest demographic group in the country. Most Iraqis supported some form of Islamic law; at the same time, most Iraqis also supported women’s rights to work, education, and political power. In July 2004, Gallup released a poll finding that Iraqis supported women’s right to hold national political office by a two-to-one margin (except in heavily Sunni areas, where support for women’s rights was much weaker). Like many Iraqi women, Dr. Salama believed that Islam allows women to wield power in the public and private spheres.

  In theory, this is true. One of the uncomfortable truths in Iraq, as in much of the Muslim world, is that women don’t have the status that the Quran says they should. Political and religious leaders invoke Islam—often using misogynistic interpretations of ambiguous and highly contested Quranic passages and hadiths—to justify pre-Islamic tribal practices such as honor killings and genital mutilation. Ira Lapidus, the respected Islamic scholar, put it best in his definitive book A History of Islamic Societies: “The Quranic ideal and Muhammad’s example,” he wrote, “were probably much more favorable to women than was later Arab and Muslim practice.”

  In 1959, when Iraq passed its landmark Personal Status Law, Iraqi women got civil protections that were among the best in the Arab world. But the Baath Party weakened those rights in the 1960s, and Saddam eroded them even further during the faithfulness campaign of the 1990s, when he segregated schools and decriminalized polygamy and honor killings. For many Iraqi men, Saddam’s repression provided a convenient justification for the disparity between women’s status on paper and in practice. Once that excuse was gone, Shiite women wanted to reenter the public sphere. They saw Islam as their way in.

  There was some precedent for this idea. In Morocco, feminists had pressured the government to work with Muslim scholars on reforming the country’s restrictive family law. The result was a new Islamic family law that promised women more rights than previous interpretations of shariah. But the question, in both countries, was whether women would ever get those rights in practice.

  I called Amira Sonbol, a Georgetown University professor who has written several books on women and Islamic law, history, and society. “I’m one of the very first to advocate the Islamic discourse to change the law,” she said. “It’s the only hope for Muslim women in the future. But it has to work under conditions where women really have a chance. And women in Iraq right now really don’t have that chance, because of the political situation in I
raq.”

  Sonbol predicted that women’s rights would end up being a bargaining chip in negotiations between male-dominated political parties. “The waves pull you where you don’t want to be pulled,” she said. “The Shiite women in Iraq do not know that they are going to be a pawn in the division of Iraq, and that they are going to be expendable.”

  Around that time, Roaa got a job at Al-Hurra, “The Free One,” the Arabic-language satellite channel set up and funded with American tax dollars. She was making real money—$800 a month, an excellent salary (even with the six-day work week that was common in Iraq). She covered car bombs and political meetings and did street reporting for stories about daily life. Our poet friend Ali, from Laylak’s birthday party, which seemed like years ago, was appointed news director a few weeks after she started; he would be her new boss. This was the career she had always wanted.

  During those months, we would meet for coffee and have the kind of career-girl conversations I would have with my girlfriends back in New York: we would complain about bosses and boys, talk about marriage and relationships, confide our ambitions for the future.

  Like Layla, Roaa longed for the days when boys and girls could spend time together as equals, without gossiping tongues ruining their reputations. But unlike some of her friends, she didn’t believe in premarital sex or even premarital kissing: freedom, for her, meant freedom to explore the world and different ways of thinking. “It’s not that I’m liberated,” she said earnestly (this made me smile), “but I have a hard time finding someone who thinks the way that I do. I have my own ideas. I have male friends.”

  Being a young Muslim woman with independent ideas was lonely. Added to that were all the usual barriers to marriage for young Iraqis: lack of money, instability, and the fact that as a Kurd, it would be difficult for her to marry an Arab. “This is the problem,” she sighed. “I’ve never had love!”