Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village by Fernea Elizabeth Warnock

Author:Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock [Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9780385014854
Goodreads: 170808
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2010-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

15

Summer

Haji Hamid was preparing to leave for his summer vacation in Lebanon. Each year he spent the two hottest months in a small mountain hotel above Beirut, where he met sheiks from Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Syria, men distantly related to him by blood or by tribal affiliation. In the cool mountain air the men would talk away the summer, drinking tea and coffee, playing trictrac (backgammon) and occasionally driving into town to tour the fleshpots of Beirut. When September came they would head back to the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, to towns and tribal settlements where many of them, like Haji Hamid, were still responsible for the welfare of many people.

Summer sojourns to fashionable watering places like Lebanon were a comparatively new thing among the sheiks of southern Iraq. Haji’s father had been one of the first to go, and each summer he had taken one of his sons with him. When Haji had assumed the sheikship, he decided to be adventurous; scorning the little mountain hotel, he traveled to Cyprus one summer, accompanied by three retainers.

The men checked into a second-class hotel in Nicosia, and all might have been well if the hotel had not unexpectedly caught fire in the middle of the first night. Servants rushed up and down the hallways, pounding on doors and shouting “Fire! Fire!” alternately in Greek, Turkish and English. Haji put on his eyeglasses and opened the door of his room to see what the commotion was about, but of the clerk’s screaming neither he nor his retainers understood a word. No smoke had yet penetrated the floor and the four Arab gentlemen stood looking at the frantic clerk in some perplexity. Finally in desperation the clerk pulled at the sleeve of Haji’s white nightshirt; the three retainers stepped forward, but Haji apparently realized that it was no plot, the clerk simply wanted them to come with him, and they did so.

Hustled downstairs and out onto the lawn, the four Arabs were greeted by a sight which Haji told Bob he never forgot. All the hotel guests were assembled on the lawn, attired in odds and ends of clothes which they had been able to don quickly in their flight from the burning building. Some wore almost nothing. These half-clad men and women were talking and joking together, and Haji, coming from a society where strange men and women never talk together, and the women are always covered up to their eyes, found the scene very upsetting. Eventually the fire was put out, and little damage had been done. The guests returned to their rooms, but Haji had had enough. Next morning he packed his bags and returned to Lebanon.

The sheik was planning to drive to Baghdad and take the plane to Beirut. His car was being washed and waxed, and when I went to see Selma she was putting her husband’s summer wardrobe in order for traveling: boiling the undershirts, dishdashas and long-legged drawers, and bleaching them in the sun to a dazzling whiteness.

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