Where God Was Born

by Bruce Feiler

  And to prove his commitment, God offers his exiled people the ultimate reward: He will send them back to Creation. He will return them to Eden. “You were the seal of perfection,” God says in Ezekiel,

  Full of wisdom and flawless of beauty.

  You were in Eden, the garden of God.

  Every precious stone was your adornment:

  Carnelian, chrysolite, and amethyst;

  Beryl, lapis lazuli, and jasper;

  Sapphire, turquoise, and emerald;

  And God beautifully wrought for you . . .

  You walked among stones of fire.

  You were blameless in your ways,

  From the day you were created

  Until wrongdoing was found in you.

  Now I have struck you down, God says. I have destroyed you. But I will not surrender you.

  I will save you. “When I have cleansed you of all your iniquities,” God continues, “I will people your settlements, and the ruined palaces shall be rebuilt, and the desolate land, after lying wasted in the sight of every passerby, shall again be tilled. And men shall say, ‘That land, once desolate, has become like the Garden of Eden.’ ” This is the unforeseen goodness of going into exile. Babylon will not be the end of Israel. It will be its redemption.

  The surest route to salvation is traveling through the pit of desolation.

  About twenty minutes from Baghdad, Flight 51 began its descent. My ears popped. The passengers shifted edgily. The plane started to bank from side to side, and the wings fluttered, like those of an agitated pelican preparing to dive for a kill. We were descending more rapidly than a commercial craft, and the extra G’s were tangible. The corkscrew landing was designed to avoid being hit by shoulder-launched missiles. At the back window, a spotter bobbed rapidly up and down, struggling to eye any ordnance harpooning our way.

  The last few seconds were like a frightening elevator plunge, and we hit the ground with a loud crunch. I expected a sigh of relief, or applause. Instead the landing was greeted with grim-faced resolve. The plane ride was over. Now the real test began.

  On the tarmac we were surrounded by huge ground-moving equipment, attack helicopters, and F-16s. The air was moist and slightly chilly; it smelled of diesel and spoiling fruit. The sun had set, leaving the sky a dishwater lavender. This timing created a problem. Our takeoff had been delayed so long we risked breaking the first rule of survival in Iraq: never go out at night. “Act with haste,” said Captain Monica Walden, a cheery African American who had offered to drive us into town.

  A forklift arrived with the crate containing our luggage, and the passengers swarmed over the mound like ants over a cake at a picnic, tearing at the camouflage, yanking out bags in mild hysteria. “Put on your armor,” Captain Walden ordered. I reached into my duffel to retrieve my helmet and promptly dropped my vest into a huge puddle of mud, splashing my clothes and dousing my vest. Dry cleanable? My armor was sopping wet.

  We piled into an SUV and headed into town: a Hummer in front, a Hummer behind, exactly the kind of convoy I had seen attacked nightly on television. “Sorry, this is going to be a chilly ride,” Captain Walden said, as she and her colleague, another African American woman, rolled down their windows and stuck their M16s outside, pointed skyward.

  Our pace began to quicken as we left Baghdad International Airport, passed through five checkpoints, and eventually reached the highway. It took me a minute to realize we weren’t driving on the proper side. We were speeding at ninety miles per hour the wrong way down a major highway, with cars whipping past in the opposite direction. A truck approached us from behind. Don’t you know we have guns? I thought. And the power? The truck passed us effortlessly. Wait, who does have the power anymore? I wondered.

  “My friend in North Carolina just had a baby,” Captain Walden said to no one in particular.

  “Mine, too!” her friend said. They started talking about the merits of breast feeding and the best way to burp a baby. I was dumbfounded. It was as if we were on a picnic.

  “Aren’t you afraid?” I asked Captain Walden.

  “Personally, I am not fearful,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m a Christian. I don’t have the spirit of fear. I don’t believe I’m going anywhere until it’s time to go.”

  The Flowers Land Hotel in the upscale Karada district is shielded behind concrete barriers, where guards used mirrors to examine the underside of vehicles. A mix of journalists, aid workers, and fashionable do-gooders were hanging around the lobby, which is decorated with surreal ceiling paintings depicting twisted vines and overeager bougainvilleas that reminded me of the cannibalistic flytrap in Little Shop of Horrors. The teenage desk attendant was watching television. “My uncle was just killed in a suicide bombing,” he said by way of introduction. “I just saw his face on Al Jazeera.”

  I reached to comfort him. As I did, a burly South African named Casper appeared at my side and noticed my dumbstruck gaze. “You look like you have Baghdad Head,” he said. “Don’t worry, in forty-eight hours this will all seem normal.”

  By the time I crawled into bed at 12:30 A.M., I was wobbly with exhaustion. Peace is a room with tape on the windows, only one blackout per hour, and the rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire to keep one’s dreams on edge. I lay awake, wondering what would happen if a bomb exploded through the picture window at the foot of my bed. Would a mortar in the lobby collapse my room? My legs started trembling. I felt the urge to cry—not tears of pain but those of a boy, alone. Twice in my life I had felt homesick: as a seven-year-old on my first night at sleepaway camp, as an eighteen-year-old on my first night out of the country.

  And now. I called out for my wife, by name. “Linda.” I needed comfort, security, solid ground.

  I needed sleep.

  The road south from Baghdad is cluttered with the detritus of war: bombed-out bridges, scorched tanks, looted oil tankers. Every few feet is a fruit stand selling the spoils of lifted sanctions: apples, oranges, and bunches and bunches of bananas. Under the embargo, bananas were scarce; now they were hawked on every corner and thrust into our window at every stop, like squeegees.

  Casper was right. After forty-eight hours, Iraq began to seem, if not normal, then at least manageable. We were greeted with a bewildering blizzard of advice: Don’t drive in a GMC, they’re used only by the military; don’t drive in an SUV, they’re used only by the Coalition; put tinting on your windows, no one will notice you’re a foreigner; don’t use tinting, people will think you’re CIA; always wear your body armor; never wear your body armor; sleep in the front of the hotel; sleep in the back; carry a gun; don’t carry a gun; never drive over dead carcasses, it’s where they place roadside bombs; never wear khakis, only military wear khakis; never wear blue jeans, only Americans wear blue jeans.

  Be safe.

  By the second day we had assembled a team, a plan, and an unmarked car. Our driver was Bijar, a quiet, fearsome former Iraqi Air Force officer who hid on his base when the war began, then fled to his wife and three children as U.S. Marines approached Baghdad. He dreamed of opening a meatpacking company. Our fixer/bodyguard/guide was Hikmat, a jolly university English professor with a dense, Saddam-like mustache and several grown children. Our plan was to drive all the way south to near the border with Kuwait, then work our way north, visiting biblical sites, return to Baghdad, and exit north through Turkey. By going back to the deepest roots of civilization, and the earliest stories of the Bible, I hoped to better understand the connections between humans, religion, and religious war. Is the confidence to kill in the name of God the natural outcome of having faith? Or can religion coexist with tolerance?

  Within half an hour of leaving Baghdad, we had reached barren countryside. The wheat was scraggly in the mostly brown fields, the cows were thin, and the herds of sheep threadbare. We passed an imposing brick wall. “That was the nuclear plant the Israelis bombed in 1981,” Hikmat said. I smiled in honor of Boaz.

  We were traveling over 1
10 miles an hour when suddenly a black-and-white dog wandered across the highway. Bijar swerved, cursed, but hit the animal head-on, killing it instantly. He kept driving. The one situation we most wanted to avoid was stopping. Looters were known to sit by the highways with shotguns, picking out foreigners. But soon parts of our car—the light, a piece of the bumper, a swath of hood—began flying into the windshield. We had no choice. Bijar pulled over, Gwendolen wrapped a black scarf around her head, and I slid on the hood of my windbreaker. The two Iraqi men jerry-rigged the hood into place, bent back the bumper, and within seconds we were off. “Safety first,” Hikmat said.

  After several hours the scenery began to change: concrete farmhouses were replaced with mud huts, women in black chadors swarmed the fields, giant portraits of Shia ayatollahs arose. And water—rivers, puddles, canals—appeared everywhere. We had reached the womb of the world.

  The term Mesopotomia has always been an uneasy fit with the upper arm of the Fertile Crescent. A combination of the Greek words mesos, meaning “middle,” and potamos, meaning “rivers,” Mesopotamia suggests that the most vital part of the land is between the rivers. In fact, more habitable land occurs outside the streams. But the larger point still holds: Unlike more temperate climates, say that of Europe or the United States, where the bulk of territory is well watered with rain, the Middle East is far more dependent on rivers.

  The Tigris and Euphrates are not long, as rivers go. The Euphrates, whose name means “sweet water,” covers 1,740 miles, making it the twenty-eighth longest river in the world. The Tigris, whose name means “fast as an arrow,” stretches 1,180 miles, the fifty-fourth-longest river in the world. But they are strategically placed. They begin in eastern Turkey, 50 miles from each other, not far from Mount Ararat. When they emerge from the Taurus Mountains, they are 160 miles apart; they converge near Baghdad, where they are 20 miles apart. They diverge again before meeting in Qurnah, 200 miles southeast of Baghdad, whereupon they flow together into the Persian Gulf.

  Geologists suggest the two rivers probably never met in biblical times. In antiquity, the Persian Gulf was a broad valley, which slowly filled with seawater as the ice caps melted twelve thousand years ago. Around 4000 B.C.E. the gulf was six or seven feet above its present height, meaning its shoreline reached all the way to Basra in southern Iraq. A combination of regressing sea levels and accumulating silt has added around 150 miles of land in the last few thousand years, including all of Kuwait.

  Key to Mesopotamia’s rise was the regular supply of freshwater, especially in the south, where the temperature can often reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit. But the rivers are not unalloyed gifts. Unlike the Nile, which floods in late summer, the Tigris and Euphrates overflow in spring, too late for winter crops and too early for fall ones. Also unlike the Nile, which flooded reliably for millennia, the Tigris and Euphrates are more erratic. Dependent on snowfall, they sometimes flood too little and sometimes too much. Mesopotamia hovers between desert and swamp.

  But in one crucial way, the Tigris and Euphrates are like the Nile: They have a legacy of tensions between the highlands and the low. Ethiopia and Egypt still battle over which should be the beneficiary of the Nile. The same with Turkey and Iraq over the Tigris and Euphrates. In antiquity, the chief rivalry was between the Assyrians, who lived in the highlands, and the Sumerians and Babylonians, who lived in the low. In this competition, one place has been consistently overlooked: the southern marshlands. It’s here that the Tigris and Euphrates meld to create a vast network of saline wetlands. It’s also here that Saddam executed his most destructive environmental catastrophe. And it’s here, Genesis suggests, that Adam and Eve first walked.

  The egress of Mesopotamia, the Bible implies, is the entrance to the Garden of Eden.

  Nasiriyah is a riverside town where it’s not safe to walk by the river. Two hundred and fifty miles south of Baghdad, the strategic heart of the south, Nasiriyah was the site of a brutal battle during the British defeat of the Ottomans in 1916, center of the failed Shia uprising in 1991, and home to some of the bloodiest fighting in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. Not long after the end of the war, eighteen Italian troops stationed along the Euphrates were killed by a suicide bomber. We drove by the building, its roof collapsed and concrete walls dust on the ground.

  A few blocks away, the Irrigation Department was hidden behind layers of security, its floors flooded under several inches of water. The water seemed amusing, until we followed it into the building, up a small incline, and into the office of the director. How could Iraqis reconstruct their country, I thought, when the department charged with regulating water could not even control its own bathroom? Dreams spring eternal, however, and one man was dreaming big.

  Azzam Alwash has good teeth. He has good skin. He has a nice smile. He also has a trim white beard cut close to his face in the manner made popular by American television actors in the 1980s. An engineer by training and activist by default, he looks like a cop from Miami Vice. And fresh from twenty-seven years in exile in California, he was on a mission made for Hollywood: he wanted to reflood the Garden of Eden. Five minutes after meeting him, I wouldn’t have bet against him.

  “Shall we go see the marshes?” he said. “The best sun for pictures is in the afternoon.”

  He even understood lighting.

  Azzam and a colleague squeezed into our car, and we turned west. Azzam was born in nearby Kut; his father had been the head of the water department. “The irrigation engineer rules the south,” he said. As a boy, Azzam traveled the marshes with his dad. “It’s the most beautiful place on earth,” he said, “except Yosemite.” Driven into exile by Saddam, he settled in California and became an avid kayaker. “When I first started dating my wife, I told her, ‘Wait until Iraq gets liberated. I will take you kayaking in the most beautiful wetlands.’ ” He paused. “Then I became aware that the marshes were disappearing.”

  The marshlands at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates were one of the most abundant ecosystems in Mesopotamia, filled with fish, shrimp, and a population of Marsh Arabs. Ninety percent of seafood eaten in Iraq in 1990 was caught in the marshes. In 1991 the Shias revolted against Saddam and were brutally crushed. Massacres bled the region red. “And the people in the south did what they did for eternity,” Azzam said. “They fled to the marshes to escape the wrath of the central government.” In retaliation, Saddam drained the marshes. In three years 8,000 square miles—the size of Massachusetts—were reduced to 800. An ecosystem that had thrived for more than ten thousand years vanished overnight.

  “From an engineering point of view, it’s admirable,” Azzam said. “But this is one instance when engineering was used as a weapon of mass destruction. Three hundred and fifty thousand people were dislocated.”

  For centuries, the mentality of humans was to conquer nature, he continued. “We built dams, rerouted rivers. But since the 1960s we have begun to understand that wetlands play a vital role in biodiversity. They are the liver of water. Iraq has been using its rivers as open sewers, but the marshes cleaned out the impurities. Since the drying of the marshes, the coral reefs of the gulf have been decimated. The fisheries have been cut in half. Shrimp are no longer caught.”

  In the mid-1990s Azzam began traveling to conferences to spotlight Saddam’s crime. His goal was to reflood the marshes. “The sanctions were on,” he said. “Nobody wanted to listen. By 1998, I gave up.” After September 11, however, Washington took note. With money from the State Department, Azzam and his wife started a foundation out of their bedroom. Its name: Eden Again. “As an engineer, I never really believed in Paradise,” he said. “Engineers believe they can improve on God’s design. But the older I get, the more I disbelieve that theory.” He winked. “Also, having lived in the U.S. for twenty-seven years, I know a little about marketing.”

  Azzam moved back to Iraq after the war but was hamstrung by security. It was too unsafe for his family. The marshes were a breeding ground for thieves. A colleague drove to
meet some Marsh Arabs, who promptly shot him in the leg and took his car. Uneasiness still hung over the area. Indeed, the farther we got out of Nasiriyah, the more uncomfortable I became. The scenery was stirring—bushy marshes that reminded me of Georgia’s low country, stately birds soaring over the water—but the roads were empty, and the sun vibrated ominously off the asphalt.

  We needed a bathroom break and pulled into a store. As I waited, Hikmat approached me nervously. “Where’s your money?” he said. “In a pouch,” I said. “I think you should give it to me,” he said. I handed it to him immediately. He hiked up his trousers and wrapped the pouch around his calf. “I think you should give me your camera as well.”

  My throat clenched. “What’s going on?” I said.

  “I must be honest,” he said. “We are being followed.”

  “What?”

  “A red Toyota has been trailing us since we left Nasiriyah. I think they intend to rob us.”

  “That’s it,” I said. “We’re going back.”

  “But, Mr. Bruce, you want to see the marshes.”

  “Safety first,” I said.

  Within seconds we had piled into the car and turned back toward Nasiriyah. Azzam’s colleague, who had been quiet, now spoke up, in dialect. The day before he had made a similar drive, and some looters had attacked his car, stripped off his clothes and shoes, and left him standing in his socks by the side of the road. “Then why did he come with us?” I whispered to Hikmat. “He wants the twenty-dollar tip we will give him at the end of the day.”

  We drove home in silence. “Maybe I should hire security,” Azzam mused. As we said good-bye later, I asked him, “So why are you doing this?”

  “Because I could not live with myself if I don’t,” he said. “As it is, I hardly sleep. Here I am, seventeen thousand miles away from the two most precious things in my life, my two little girls, eight and eleven. I’m missing the best part of their lives. But God bless my wife. She said, ‘Look at yourself in two years’ time. If you don’t do this, are you going to be happy? Because if you’re not happy, I don’t want to be living with you.’ ”