Thoughts on the Road to Holy Kerbala

Thoughts on the road to Holy Kerbala

We passed through Alexandria, one of Alexander the Great’s multiple cities
founded by himself. Our driver told us this is the last one he built
before he died. That may explain why so little evidence of his time here
still exists. Afterwards, the empire fell apart. Now it is a sleepy
little hamlet, which passersby would not suspect of such a notorious
heritage. We'll be going back soon though, to meet with an ambitious
young college professor who has started his own human rights organization
there. Perhaps then we will learn more. Iraqis, delightfully, love to
give tours to guests of their cities.

I never expected I’d spend so much time since being here in hijab, or
abaya (the long, loose black robe that rests on your head but is open in
front), or even that cheap indestructible polyester suit jacket I picked
up in Jerusalem before coming here last winter. Then again, I never
expected I’d be meeting so many high level Muslim clerics. Mainly these
have been the head Shi’a and Sunni clerics of Baghdad at their respective
shrines, (though I have recently befriended the Ssaid’s wife who is my
age). In Kerbala though, we met the Great Teacher (‘Ayatollah al-Odmah’)
Mohammed Taki al Mudarssy, who is of the same level as Ayatollah al Hakim
who was recently assassinated in Najaf, and Ayatollah Sostani, who has
taken his place. Each time I have met a new leader, I have been reserved,
respecting of the Shi’a gender roles and having the oldest male present
serve as spokesperson. Eventually, though, I get pulled into the
conversation to the amusement, then genuine interest of everyone involved.
I am well aware of this special privilege afforded to me in my role as a
foreign, Christian woman human rights worker.The Ssaids and Ayatollahs
have been most gracious hosts, and easy to talk with. I have now spent an
incredible amount of my short time here among the Shi’a and have had so
many of my preconceptions overturned. Shi’a, rather than being the
fundamentalists of Islam, are actually a lot more like the Catholics.
This is really quite easy to see when you have a Catholic priest with you
at these meetings. They are pious people who devote much attention to
shrines, pilgrimages, and physical and artistic expressions of their
faith. One beautiful custom is to stop after each meal and even in the
street to collect fallen crumbs of bread and place them up on a ledge.
This is because bread is the simplest, cheapest food one can eat, the food
of the poor, and to tread on it is to desecrate what others may need to
survive. I see this custom slightly altered in Palestine, Jerusalem
particularly. There, the Muslims are Sunni. I could write more now on
this but will save other new realizations for later.

The wife of Ssaid Ali in Baghdad presented me with a beautiful and ornate
ring the other day when we met. It is a stone called ‘Yacout,’ which I
believe comes from Yemen. It appears black, but has a reddish tinge when
held to the light. She also presented me with a plea, to help her locate
the body of her father, who was executed in 1983 by the former regime. He
was a veterinarian working at the military academy when he was called in
by the security forces and ordered to give injections to convicts. He
refused, and was thrown in to prison himself for two years before he was
hung. This conversation and plea leads our team to the mass graveyards in
Baghdad and many other cities. It will take a long time, I think, and the
task of finding one person among so many is immense. How can we do it, I
wondered to myself, without DNA testing? Of course, as the Westerner, I
look to technology for a solution. Our translator has a much simpler
idea: “Let us go to the graveyard and find the minder for this place and
talk to him and see what he knows. Probably they kept very good records.”
Ah.
And so we begin.

As we drive to Kerbala, we pass the date-palm jungles, the bullrushes
standing maybe twelve feet high above the marshlands along the roadsides;
the mudflats and the salt-gathering places. The villages are a different
kind of life than Baghdad, where the men wear long robes and head
coverings, all white, in contrast to the women robed all in black, a sort
of turned-around wedding scene.

I never thought I’d see machsoms here, the large earth-and-debris piles
blocking the roads that were a sad fact of life in Palestine. But they
are everywhere, whether placed by US forces to slow traffic near their
bases, or by locals to warn of danger from unexploded ordnance or bridges,
earlier bombed, that cannot carry heavy trucks. We crept over another
such bridge today, which mostly resembled a bridge but its sides were
somehow squashed, if you can imagine squashed, pulverised concrete and
flattened siderails. I didn’t know concrete did that.

We crossed that bridge over the wide, lazy Euphrates river, as wide as the
Mississippi, and lined with green, even in the heat of the summer.
Suddenly you pass from the dry brown mud flats to the jungles and even
thin green grass and pastures and wonder what happened until you see the
source of the green belt. These are prime farming areas, and favorites of
road travelers for stopping to rest.

I love roadside stops, literally ‘oases,’ here, under the date palms, with
little round huts build of dry reeds around a plastic patio table, where
you can drink fresh juice and tea in virtual seclusion. Other times there
are tiny amusement parks with aging rides for children. All have plenty of
colorful and curiously-shaped patio lights. And roofs from the sun.

As we pass these things I think that I am never sure which makes me want
to cry more when I am in Iraq: the heartbreak of people’s suffering,
which is much, and unabated during this new Occupation; or the sheer
beauty of this place, which endures throughout and keeps the people strong
as much as does their faith.

At a going-away party for a neighbor in our building last night, I met a
most suprisingly amazing man: a white-haired Swede, who has lived here
quietly the past 25 years. He first came to deal in oil, then after the
1991 invasion and sanctions turned to other goods. He actually was quite
well acquainted with Saddam and his sons (the sons he refers to as,
“absolutely nuts,”) and often went across the river as Saddam’s guest for
long talks. He was able to speak his mind freely with him, apparently
because the president realized he was unattached to any larger group and
had no clout. Truly, our solo neighbor just upstairs from us has seen it
all. One of my teammates is astounded. “Why aren’t the CIA and
journalists pounding down your door to interview you?” He shrugs his
shoulders. Perhaps its because he’s so unpretentious that nobody expects
him. He is a sort of wallflower, who I took pity on and tried to include
in the conversation. Little did I know!

He had something to say about what’s happening now, which rang true for me
in a new way. “The US had a golden opportunity here,” he said, “after the
war, when they were being welcomed with open arms. Then the post-war
looting began and they looked the other way, they allowed the country to
be ransacked while holding on to the oil alone. In doing so they
squandered their welcome. And then they became occupiers and everything
else ugly that goes along with that.”

When my same teammate also voiced his worry that Iraq would be exploited
by new corporations racing to move in and profit from the disorder and
post-sanctions economy, he said, “The Iraqis will never allow it. They
will resist them. They ousted the British occupiers and now will oust the
US occupiers. That’s the reason they are sabotaging the oil lines. They
see the corporations coming in and draining off the country’s wealth for
their own gain and they’re determined to stop it.”

I am still thinking of the Kadhum Pilgrimage last Monday, so unlike
anything I’d ever seen before. Swells of people, a solid human mass in
the streets; little stalls lining the way offering free breakfasts and tea
to those who may have journeyed up to 50km on foot to reach the shrine.
Iranians and Pakistanis mixed with Iraqi Shi’a, standing out only just
barely from the rest of the crowd. Brilliant colored flag processionals
entering the shrine, followed by triple-robed sheikhs and Ssaids,
Ayatollahs, and other holy men. Dozens of groups of young men flailing
themselves with metal chains to the beat of a funeral drum, followed by
beautifully decorated funeral platforms carried on shoulders. The human
river flowed slowly into and out of the gold-domed shrine, and everyone in
the crowd of millions knew their part in the ritual. Kadhum, the shrine
in the neighborhood which also bears its name, is the tomb of the great
Shi’a religious leader Musa Kadhum, who was martyred and left in a ditch,
an ugly way to die anywhere, and especially here. When his followers
discovered his body, they carried it on their shoulders to this place,
beating their chests and flailing themselves to convey their grief. Each
year, they re-enact this processional. That is, in addition to the very
real processionals they are forced to have quite often. Very few Shi’a
leaders live to die a natural death.

And so it is here in Karbala, where the twin shrines of Hussein and Abbas,
brothers hunted and killed in a brutal fashion, are built only a few
hundred meters apart from each other. The shrines themselves became
deathbeds for thousands of Shi’a during the 1991 Shaaban revolution
following the Gulf War, when the Shi’a took seriously Bush Sr.’s call to
revolt against Saddam and our government’s willingness to back them up.
Only Bush was not serious and the Shi’a were mowed down when the regime
crushed the revolution, even as they took sanctuary in their shrines. The
Human Rights Organization in Karbala, which we visited the same day,
estimates 25-30,000 are buried in mass graves around the city.

In beauty, these shrines surpass even the most famous churches of our own
religion, carefully hand-crafted of cut mirrors and painted tiles, and
lovingly washed each day. At night, they are aglow with the same lights
that adorn the roadside stops, causing them to glitter and seem
otherworldly in a world which by day is full of sand and sorrows. All the
poor come to lay their few wares down on the pavilions outside the
building, and many without wares take their rest on the cool marble floors
of the courtyard inside the gates. No one disturbs them all day.
Loitering is welcomed. This is what makes them most beautiful of all.