THE MARSH ARABS
WILFRED THESIGER was born in Addis Ababa in 1910 and educated at Eton and Oxford where he got his blue for boxing. In 1935 he joined the Sudan Political Service and, at the outbreak of the Second World War, was seconded to the Sudan Defence Force. He later served in Abyssinia, Syria and with the SAS in the Western Desert, and was awarded the DSO. After the war he travelled in Arabia, Kurdistan, the Marshes of Iraq, the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams, Morocco, Abyssinia, Kenya and Tanganyika, always on foot or with animal transport. In recognition of his journeys he received the Founder’s Gold Medal from the Royal Geographical Society, the Lawrence of Arabia Medal from the Royal Central Asian Society, the Livingstone Gold Medal from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and the Burton Memorial Medal from the Royal Asiatic Society. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy. In 1968 he received the CBE, and a knighthood in 1995.
In his two greatest books, The Marsh Arabs, which won the 1964 W. H. Heinemann Award, and Arabian Sands, he gives a vivid account of a way of life which, until recently, had continued for thousands of years. Arabian Sands, is also published in Penguin Classics. Wilfred The siger’s other books include Desert, Marsh and Mountain: The World of a Nomad, his autobiography, The Life of My Choice, and Visions of a Nomad. An accomplished photographer, he donated his extensive collection of negatives to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Wilfred Thesiger died in 2003.
JON LEE ANDERSON, an American journalist, has written for the New Yorker magazine since 1998. He has reported frequently from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as from such countries as Lebanon, Liberia, Angola, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran. Anderson is the author of several books, including Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, The Fall of Baghdad, The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan, and Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World. He lives in Dorset, England, with his wife and three children.
WILFRED THESIGER
With an introduction by JON LEE ANDERSON
PENGUIN BOOKS
For my Mother
To whose encouragement and understanding
I owe so much
PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Longmans, Green 1964
Published in Penguin Books 1967
Published with a new introduction in Penguin Classics 2007
Copyright © The Estate of Wilfred Thesiger, 1959, 1984, 1991
Introduction copyright © Jon Lee Anderson, 2007
All rights reserved
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
ISBN: 978–0–141–90443–6
List of maps
Introduction by Jon Lee Anderson
Chief Characters
Preface
1 A glimpse of the Marshes
2 Back on the edge of the Marshes
3 Hunting wild boar
4 Arrival at Qabab
5 First impressions of the Madan
6 In Sadam’s guest house
7 Bu Mughaifat: a Marsh village
8 Crossing the Central Marshes
9 In the heart of the Marshes
10 The historical background
11 Winning acceptance
12 Among the Fartus
13 Feuds in the Marshes
14 Return to Qabab
15 Falih Bin Majid
16 Falih’s death
17 The mourning ceremony
18 The Eastern Marshes
19 Among the Sudan and the Suaid
20 Amara’s family
21 1954: the Flood
22 1955: the Drought
23 Berbera and Mudhifs
24 Amara’s blood feud
25 My last year in the Marshes
Glossary
Iraq
Southern Iraq
The Marshes
When the explorer Wilfred Thesiger visited Iraq’s southern Marshlands for the first time in October 1950, he was forty years old, and feeling restless. He had undertaken gruelling expeditions deep into the Sahara desert and the remotest parts of Abyssinia, hunted marauding lions in the Darfur, and fought bravely against the Germans and Italians in the Second World War. After several years spent traversing the Empty Quarter, the vast and virtually unexplored desert of south-eastern Arabia, in the company of Bedouin nomads, he was searching for a new wilderness in which to immerse himself. ‘I had spent many years in exploration,’ he wrote, ‘but now there were no untouched places left to explore, at least in the countries that attracted me. I therefore felt inclined to settle down among a people of my choosing.’
Thesiger had been drawn to Iraq, where the ancient land of Mesopotamia retained a strong allure for intrepid Westerners seeking to follow in the footsteps of Freya Stark, and T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell before her.
I was on my way south from Iraqi Kurdistan, where I had gone to recapture the peace of mind I had known in the deserts of Southern Arabia. There I had lived with the Bedu [Bedouin] for five years, and with them had travelled ten thousand miles across country where no car had ever been – until seismic parties, the vanguard of modern progress, began to arrive in search of oil.
He enthused lyrically about his time riding on horseback over ‘wild and beautiful’ Kurdish mountains with rustic tribesmen who, he noted approvingly, ‘still wore the finery of tribal dress… hung with daggers and revolvers and crossed with decorated bandoliers, heavy with cartridges’. But it had not been enough for him. ‘Travel was too restricted, rather like stalking in a Highland deer forest… I was fifty years too late.’
Thesiger lived in a perpetual state of lament about the world he saw changing around him. He yearned to have lived in a time when he could have forged on endlessly, like the dauntless explorers of the nineteenth century, into the great unknown. As his biographer, Alexander Maitland, suggested in Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer (2006),
Thesiger’s impossible dream had been to preserve the near-idyllic life he had known as a boy in Abyssinia. He viewed change dismally, as a threat to the tribal peoples he admired, and to himself as a traditionalist and romantic who ‘cherished the past, felt out of step with the present, and dreaded the future’. Such a reactionary outlook was doomed from the start, and Thesiger knew it… He took an aggressive pride in being the ‘last’ in a long line of overland explorers and travellers, a refugee from the Victorians’ Golden Age.
Thesiger was educated at Eton and Oxford but, more importantly, he had been born in 1910 in Abyssinia. In those days, the capital, Addis Ababa, was a remote outpost, and the British Legation, which his father headed, was little more than a collection of thatched huts. At the age of six, he had witnessed the unforgettable spectacle of the emperor’s armies celebrating their battlefield triumph against the rebel leader Negus Mikael. The Guardian journalist Jonathan Glancey, who met Thesiger in 2002, noted that the battle had marked the historic end of an era: ‘The fighting had been entirely hand-to-hand, one of the last great pitched battles between traditional African warriors. About 26,000 died.’ The victory parades had a profound impact on the young Thesiger, who later wrote:
I believe that day implanted in me a lifelong craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour and the throb of drum, and it gave me a lasting veneration for long-established custom and ritual, from which would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovations in other lands, and a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world.
The fifties were probably the end of the best times in the Middle East for a roving Old Etonian. The British Empire was in its death throes. India had gone, and so had Palestine, but Iraq, ruled by a pliant Hashemite monarchy, still lay within Britain’s dwindling sphere of influence. The widespread hostility towards the West that would engulf the region with the rise of radical Arab nationalism was still a few years away – and so were commercial jet travel, mass tourism and Islamic fundamentalism. The oil-producing Arab states were beginning to develop, but the great boom of energy wealth that would transform their countries had not yet occurred. There were not so many people, either. The worldwide population boom of the postwar years had begun, but in 1957, Baghdad was a city of a mere 900,000 people, and the whole of Iraq had only 8 million citizens. In the hinterland, meanwhile, there were still a few wild places to be explored.
For the better part of eight years, Thesiger found the escape he was looking for in Iraq’s Marshes. Believed by many historians to be the site of the biblical Garden of Eden and Great Flood, the Marshlands had been the cradle for human civilization 5,000 years before. ‘They were,’ wrote Thesiger, ‘a world complete in itself, a 6,000-square-mile area of wetlands created by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers before they join to form the Shatt al Arab waterway, which flows past Basra on its way into the Arabian Gulf. The Sumerians, the ancestors of the modern Marsh dwellers, had controlled the river water with an elaborate irrigation system that was later destroyed by Genghis Khan’s grandson, Hulagu, when he laid waste to Mesopotamia in 1258.
The Marshlands featured vast beds of tall reeds, resembling bamboo, with which the Marsh dwellers, a tribe called the Madan, built large vaulted island houses. Tamarisk trees grew on the banks of the deltas where river water fed into the Marshes, and carp and dozens of other types of fish were abundant. There were wild boar, wolves, otters and striped hyenas, as well as over a hundred species of birds, many of them migratory waterfowl that depended on the Marshes for refuge in the winter. The Madan planted rice, speared fish and raised water buffalo, and they used poles to propel themselves around in bitumen-coated wooden canoes; sheikhs owned larger graceful wooden boats called taradas.
The Madan, who used curious nicknames such as ‘Hyena’, ‘Little Rat’, and ‘Little Dog’, were feared and shunned by Arabs who lived outside the Marshes. This only added to their allure for Thesiger. ‘Even among the British in Iraq their reputation was bad,’ he wrote, ‘a legacy, I suspected, from the First World War, when from the shelter of their Marshes, they had murdered and looted both sides indiscriminately.’ Nonetheless, Thesiger felt attracted to these social outcasts:
What little I had seen so far of the Marshmen appealed to me. They were cheerful and friendly and I liked the look of them. Their way of life, as yet little affected by the outside world, was unique and the Marshes themselves were beautiful. Here, thank God, was no sign of that drab modernity which, in its uniform of secondhand European clothes, was spreading like a blight across the rest of Iraq.
The Marsh Arabs also offered Thesiger the rare excitement of becoming the ‘first’ European to get to know them. ‘In recent years a number of Europeans from Basra and Baghdad had come for the duck shooting, but they stayed with the richer sheikhs on the edge of the Marshes,’ he wrote dismissively. ‘I was probably the first outsider with both the inclination and opportunity to live among the Madan, as one of them.’
To Thesiger, the Marshes were nothing less than a romantic Arcadia:
Memories of that first visit to the Marshes have never left me: firelight on a half-turned face, the crying of geese, duck flighting in to feed, a boy’s voice singing somewhere in the dark, canoes moving in procession down a waterway, the setting sun seen crimson through the smoke of burning reedbeds, narrow waterways that wound still deeper into the Marshes. A naked man in a canoe with a trident in his hand, reed houses built upon water, black, dripping buffaloes that looked as if they had calved from the swamp with the first dry land. Stars reflected in dark water, the croaking of frogs, canoes coming home at evening, peace and continuity, the stillness of a world that never knew an engine.
After that first visit, Thesiger returned again and again, spending up to seven months every year from 1951 to 1958 amongst the Marsh Arabs (with the exception of 1957, when he stayed away to write Arabian Sands). In the Marshes, Thesiger roved from village to village on his own tarada – a gift from a friendly sheikh – with several devoted teenaged boys who volunteered to accompany him. Together they hunted for wild boar and waterfowl, attended weddings and funerals, and wherever they went, Thesiger – finding himself frequently asked to assume the duties of an ad-hoc doctor – treated illnesses as best he could with his cache of medicines and attended to injuries that ranged from pig-gorings to gunshot wounds and dog-bites. Once he carried out an amputation, of some fingers, and another time he removed a man’s eyeball.
Mostly, though, Thesiger was sought out for his mastery of circumcisions. ‘Before he arrived in Iraq Thesiger had never performed a circumcision, although he had often watched the operation in hospitals and among the tribes,’ wrote his biographer, Alexander Maitland. It turned out to be something Thesiger had a knack for, however, and he performed over 6,000 of the operations during his years in the Marshes. ‘Thesiger’s reputation for circumcising cleanly and almost painlessly spread far and wide throughout the Iraqi marshes,’ asserts Maitland. ‘Circumcision became Thesiger’s calling card, his introduction to unvisited tribes and his certain means of winning acceptance.’
Thesiger and his ‘canoe boys’, as he called them, were invariably welcomed as honoured guests, invited to share meals and to sleep in their hosts’ arched reed-built mudhifs, or meeting houses. As was his custom, Thesiger recorded his activities in notes and long letters to his mother, Kathleen, and to a few close friends, and he took a series of remarkable black and white photographs, many of which are reproduced in The Marsh Arabs.
Ever the hunter, Thesiger shot hundreds of wild boar, which habitually devastated the Marsh Arabs’ croplands and occasionally attacked people. His shooting skills not only earned him the gratitude of the tribesmen, but their high esteem as a brave man with a gun. The boar also gave him good sport, but he eventually tired of killing them, and he fretted generally about the Iraqis’ penchant for shooting any living creature that came within their rifle range. ‘Throughout the Marshes ducks and geese were becoming fewer year by year,’ he observed. Iraq’s last known lion had been killed thirty years before, and outside the Marshes, Iraq’s remaining antelopes were quickly being hunted to extinction. Thesiger recalled how in 1951 he had seen ducks ‘in such numbers that they reminded me of swarms of locusts. When I left the Marshes there were nothing like as many. A million cartridges were imported annually at that time into Iraq, and most of the people who used them counted on getting at least one bird with a shot.’
As time passed, small events brought changes to the lives of many of Thesiger’s Marsh Arabs. A wild boar gored one young boy and crippled him for life. Another youth went mad after his father was wrongfully beaten and imprisoned. Falih, the sheikh who had first befriended Thesiger and had given him his tarada, died tragically after a shooting accident. Thesiger’s favourite canoe boy, Amara, was married, but became involved in a blood feud, in which Thesiger tried to intercede, with mixed success.
There were larger events, too, such as the flood of 1954, which inundated the Marshes, swamping villages and croplands. Coinciding with the 1955 drought that followed the flood, Basra’s new oilfields came into production, and the money that began pouring into Iraq sparked off an exodus from the Marshlands and surrounding areas. Thesiger observed that:
In Baghdad whole quarters of the town were being pulled down and rebuilt, new roads were being made everywhere and bridges constructed. Casual labour was in great demand and exaggerated accounts of the money to be earned circulated among the tribes… They sold their boats, their buffaloes, their grain, in fact everything, except what they could carry with them on a bus or lorry – for they had no intention of returning.
Once in the cities, however, the Marsh Arabs ended up inevitably as slum-dwellers, and Thesiger futilely lamented their fates, plaintively extolling the virtues of their old lives in the Marshes:
What was the point of going? A man who stayed at home and worked in his rice fields could harvest enough grain to feed his family for a year… He could keep buffaloes for milk and chickens for meat. Fuel, building material and fodder for his animals, were all to be had for nothing. There were fish in the rivers and lakes, and water-fowl in the marshes.
The Hashemite monarchy ended bloodily in July 1958, when King Faisal II was murdered, along with members of his family and Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Said, in a revolt led by nationalist army officers. The British embassy was stormed by a mob. The so-called ‘July 14 Revolution’ occurred three weeks after Thesiger’s latest sojourn amongst the Madan of the Marshes. He never returned.
In the succeeding years, Iraq fell prey to the brutish dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, who unleashed the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, and then launched the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which led to the 1991 Gulf War. Throughout, Saddam waged war against his domestic enemies as well, both real and imagined, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Then came the American- and British-led invasion in 2003 that toppled Saddam’s dictatorship and placed Iraq under occupation, which sparked off both a vicious insurgency and a sectarian civil war.
Iraq is clearly no longer the country that Thesiger knew, and neither are the Marshes. Thesiger could not have foreseen Iraq’s descent into a killing-ground but, in 1964, when he wrote The Marsh Arabs, he predicted the Marshlands’ eventual destruction: ‘Soon the Marshes will probably be drained; when this happens, a way of life that has lasted for thousands of years will disappear.’
Plans to drain the Marshes were being devised by British engineers even when Thesiger was there, although the real damage was not done until forty years later. Originally, the idea was to build canals to drain off water that was excessively salty or polluted, and to create more land that could be cultivated. The work progressed slowly, and was delayed further in the eighties, when Iranian forces repeatedly crossed into Iraq and invaded the Marshes, which became a war zone. Many of the Marsh Arabs, who are Shiites, fought against the Iranian Shiites in the war, and causeways were built so that armoured units could manoeuvre. The Marshes remained fairly remote, however, and after the war they became a sanctuary for a large number of deserters from the Iraqi Army.
On 28 February 1991, the day the Gulf War ended, a Shiite revolt began in Basra, and hundreds of Baath Party officials, police agents and informers were killed. The uprising was joined by thousands of members of the Badr Brigade, a militia made up of Iraqi refugees, who crossed the border into Iraq from Iran. The Shiites in the south and the Kurds in the north had been encouraged by the Allies to rise up against Saddam, and they assumed that they would get support for their rebellion, but they did not. The Americans and the British abandoned the rebels. In March, the Iraqi Army shelled the Shiite holy shrine in Karbala; the Marsh Arabs rebelled in June and they were savagely put down. Villages were bombed and then razed. Human-rights organizations reported that napalm and chemical agents were being used in the Marshes. Lakes were poisoned, killing large numbers of aquatic birds and animals. The reedbeds were burned. People were transported to army camps in the north, where mass executions took place.
Tens of thousands of Shiites were killed outright. Others were arrested and disappeared. For a few years, Shiite rebels kept up a low-level insurgency, using what was left of the Marshes as a sanctuary, but they did not survive for long. In 1992, Saddam Hussein ordered the rapid construction of an immense canal to drain the area. When the canal was completed six months later, it was named Saddam River. By 1994, as much as 90 per cent of the Marshes had been destroyed, and most of the Marsh dwellers had been killed, or had fled into exile in Iran, or moved to the slums of Basra and other Iraqi cities. What had been pristine Marshlands teeming with birdlife and water buffaloes had become the vast baked pan of an empty desert.
In November 2002, I obtained official permission to visit the Marshes. They were a sensitive topic in Iraq, almost taboo, and I had stressed that I was interested only in the area’s natural beauty and historical significance. In Basra, I was joined by an agent of the Mukhabarat, Iraq’s much-feared secret-police organization. Without him, I was told, I could not leave the city.
My escort, a dark-skinned and muscular Bedu, who told me to call him Lion, accompanied me on a drive north of Basra. We drove for more than two hours to the village of Al-Madina, which Lion explained was our ‘approved’ destination. Soldiers manned machine-gun nests at every bridgehead. The landscape was tattered and bleak, a salt-encrusted desert leavened occasionally by a few date palms or a copse of bull-rushes or a swampy section where stagnant water gathered in pools.
Sheikh Rashash, the brother of the supreme chief in the region, was waiting for us in Al-Madina, which consisted of a few dozen mud houses. The sheikh and several other men greeted us in a mudhif. Persian carpets lay on the floors, kilim-covered cushions were arrayed along the sides, and lamps hung from the reed rafters. A fireplace with large brass coffeepots had been constructed in the centre of the mudhif, which was open at both ends and looked as if it could accommodate 200 people. It was a splendid structure, and looked exactly like those Thesiger had so reverentially described and photographed in The Marsh Arabs.
While I marvelled at my surroundings, I got off to a bad start with the sheikh, a big-nosed, beefy man who wore a dishdasha robe and a red-and-white checked kaffiyeh headscarf, when I addressed him as ‘sheikh’ and said that I was pleased to meet a chief of the famous Marsh Arabs of Iraq. He stood up from his cross-legged position in front of me on the floor and strode purposefully over to the entrance of the mudhif. He pointed to a portrait of Saddam hanging above the archway, and boomed, ‘There is the sheikh, Saddam Hussein. He is the rais [chief] of the Arabs, and there are no Marshes any more!’
I decided to let this go, and I asked him how life was different now that the Marshes had disappeared. ‘There is a big difference between then and now,’ Sheikh Rashash replied. ‘Before, there were no schools and hospitals. Now each town has a school. Before, everyone lived along the river. Before, there were Marshes, but the government has drained them, because this area is very good for oil. Very rich.’ There were oil wells, he said, waving toward the distance. I told him I had heard that the Marshes were cleared because of conflict, not to drill for oil. His eyes narrowed, and he shot a look at Lion and my interpreter, Ahmed, and said something to them in Arabic. Then he turned back to me, grinning. ‘This is wrong,’ he said. ‘The people are living better than they were before. I speak very clearly for you.’
I tried a different tack: ‘Are the people happy about the marshes being gone?’ The sheikh waved at the men in the mudhif, who were staring at me without expression. ‘Look at these people. They are healthy and happy, whether the Marshes are gone or not gone. Don’t worry about it. Before, people only had small boats. Now they have cars. Now the people work making bricks, in agriculture, and as taxi-drivers.’
I asked Sheikh Rashash whether there were still any of the old boats around that I might be able to see. He shook his head. ‘Everyone has cars now. They are better.’ He paused and stared hard at me for a moment and then he said, ‘Wasn’t it like this in America once? We all change. Maybe in ten more years this’ – he waved up at the beautiful reed structure – ‘will not be reeds but glass, like in America! There, people came from the wilderness, too, but now they have big houses, big cars. We, too.’
It was almost dusk when we left Al-Madina. Sheikh Rashash said, as he bade me farewell, ‘The President has given us electricity and roads, and I hope he gives us more presents in the future. Anything he gives would be nice. The Shia are with Saddam Hussein. The great-grandfather of the Shia is Saddam Hussein. We have only one leader, and he is Saddam Hussein.’
Four months later, in March 2003, came the invasion of Iraq. By the middle of April, Saddam and his cronies had fled into hiding and, amidst widespread looting in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, American and British troops set about occupying the country. Hundreds of thousands of Shiite refugees from Iran poured back into the country. Iraq’s army was dissolved and the formerly omnipotent Baath Party was banned.
Within weeks, guerrilla attacks against the occupation forces had become a daily occurrence, however, and before long the situation had deteriorated further, with the onset of frequent terrorist bombings. By 2007, the Americans, the British and their allies had become bogged down in an intractable conflict that showed no sign of abating.
Amidst all the human misery unfolding in Iraq, its Marshes began a revival. As soon as Saddam Hussein had fled Baghdad in April 2003, tribesmen took shovels and diggers, and tore holes out of the sides of the earthen dikes that Saddam’s engineers had erected. Water poured through, and began to flood over the barren land. Within a year, an estimated 20 per cent of the former Marshlands had been re-flooded. Iraq’s government began working with a consortium of international experts to restore the Marshes, but scientists were divided over how much of the original Marshlands could be revived. Some said as much as 80 per cent, others said only a third. In some places vegetation began to reappear, while other areas remained barren. Some of the displaced Marsh Arabs returned to rebuild their villages, but many more did not.
I travelled again to Al-Madina and sat down once more with Sheikh Rashash in his mudhif. This time, my escort was a man with the Badr Brigade, the Shiite militia that, until Saddam’s overthrow, had operated clandestinely out of Iran. The sheikh greeted me warmly and said he recognized me. I observed that the portrait of Saddam that had hung over the entrance was gone. When I reminded the sheikh of the words he had used to praise the ousted dictator, and of how he had expressed his happiness over the draining of the Marshes, he smiled, and explained that he had just been saying what he had to say at the time. He was an avowed enemy of Saddam Hussein, he assured me, and had been a secret member of Badr for many years. My escort nodded his approval as Sheikh Rashash spoke.
It had rained that day, and outside the mudhif, beyond Al-Madina, the desert landscape shone like liquid silver from the pools of standing water.
Perhaps, one day, I thought wistfully, I might be able to look out and see what Thesiger had seen on his first visit:
As I came out into the dawn, I saw, far away across a great sheet of water, the silhouette of a distant land, black against the sunrise. For a moment I had a vision of Hufaidh, the legendary island, which no man may look on and keep his senses; then I realized that I was looking at great reedbeds. A slim, black, high-prowed craft lay beached at my feet – the sheikh’s war canoe, waiting to take me into the Marshes.
Jon Lee Anderson, 2007
Majid al Khalifa |
Sheikh of the Al bu Muhammad on the Majar river |
Falih bin Majid |
Majid’s son. Lived on the Wadiya |
Abd al Wahid |
Falih’s son |
Khalaf |
Falih’s brother |
Muhammad al Khalifa |
Majid’s brother. Lived at Majar |
Abbas |
Muhammad’s son |
Hamud al Khalifa |
Majid’s brother. Lived at Majar |
Hatab |
Hamud’s son. Lived on the Wadiya |
Dair |
Falih’s retainer and canoeman |
Abd ar Ridha |
Falih’s coffee-maker |
Sadam bin Talal |
Majid’s representative at Qabab |
Sahain |
A Feraigat qalit, or headman. Lived atBu Mughaifat |
Jasim al Paris |
Sheikh of the Fartus at Awaidiya |
Falih |
Jasim’s son |
Daud |
Jasim’s nephew |
Hashim |
Daud’s father. Served ten years in Amara prison for murder |
Maziad |
Sheikh of the Al Essa |
Abdullah |
Maziad’s uncle. His representative at Saigal |
Tahir |
Abdullah’s son |
Amara |
One of my canoeboys. Lived at Rufaiya |
Sabaiti |
One of my canoeboys. Lived at Rufaiya |
Yasin |
One of my canoeboys. Lived at Bu Mughaifat |
Hasan |
One of my canoeboys. Lived at Bu Mughaifat |
Thoqup |
Amara’s father |
Naqa |
Amara’s mother |
Reshiq |
Amara’s brother. Cultivated rice |
Chilaib |
Amara’s brother. Looked after the buffaloes |
Hasan |
Amara’s brother. Went to school |
Radhi |
Amara’s brother. A small child |
Matara |
Amara’s sister |
Lazim |
Sabaiti’s father |
Badai |
Amara’s cousin. A nomad Feraigat |
Radhawi |
A nomad Feraigat. On bad terms with Badai |
Hasan |
Radhawi’s son. Ou bad terms with Badai |
Khalaf |
Radhawi’s son. Killed by Badai |
I lived in the Marshes of Southern Iraq from the end of 1951 until June 1958, sometimes for as long as seven months on end. 1957 was the only year when I did not go there. Although I was almost continuously on the move this is not properly a travel book, for the area over which I travelled was restricted. Nor does it pretend to be a detailed study of the Marshmen among whom I lived, for I am not an anthropologist nor indeed a specialist of any kind. I spent these years in the Marshes because I enjoyed being there. During this time I lived among the Marshmen as one of themselves, and inevitably over the years I became to some extent familiar with their ways. From my recollections, helped by my diaries, I have tried to give a picture of the Marshes and of the people who live there. Recent political upheavals in Iraq have closed this area to visitors. Soon the Marshes will probably be drained; when this happens, a way of life that has lasted for thousands of years will disappear.
The Marshes cover some six thousand square miles of the country round Qurna, where the Tigris and Euphrates join above Basra to form the Shatt al Arab. They consist of permanent marsh where qasab (Phragmites communis) is the predominant vegetation; seasonal marsh, most of which is covered with bulrushes (Typha augustata) and dries up in the autumn and winter; and temporary marsh, which is only inundated during the floods and is later overgrown with a sedge (Scirpus brachyceras). This area can be conveniently divided into the Eastern Marshes, east of the Tigris; the Central Marshes, west of the Tigris and north of the Euphrates; and the Southern Marshes, south of the Euphrates and west of the Shatt al Arab. There is also some permanent marsh below Shatra on the Shatt al Gharraf, a river that leaves the Tigris at Kut and flows south-west in the direction of Nasiriya; some seasonal marsh on the plains to the north-east of Amara, where the floods from the Tib and Duarij flow down from the Persian foothills and disperse; and a little seasonal marsh in the Al bu Daraj country, fifteen miles north of Amara to the west of the Tigris. At the height of the floods great tracts of desert adjoining the Marshes are covered by sheets of open water that vary each year in size but can extend for a distance of more than two hundred miles from the outskirts of Basra almost to Kut. As the floods recede most of this inundated land reverts to desert.
In spring the melting snow on the high mountains of Persia and Turkey causes the Tigris and Euphrates to flood, and the Marshes are the centuries-old result of the overflowing and dispersion of these two rivers. The Eastern and Central Marshes draw their water from the Tigris, and eighty per cent of the discharge at Baghdad disperses into them. The Euphrates itself disperses below Nasiriya through numerous canals, its scattered waters gradually draining into the Haur as Sanaf, and thence into the Shatt al Arab down the channel of Qarmat Ali, a few miles above Basra. The old channel between Suq ash Shuyukh and Qurna is still known as the Euphrates, but in fact the water in it has escaped from the right bank of the Tigris. Until recently it was believed that the Tigris and Euphrates used to flow separately into the Persian Gulf and that the build-up of their silt had gradually pushed the coast-line farther and farther south. The present theory, first advanced by Dr G. M. Lees and N. L. Falcon in 1952, is that the weight of accumulated silt causes a corresponding subsidence of the earth’s surface and that the coast-line has therefore remained largely unchanged since Biblical times. On the Tigris the annual flood reaches its height in May, on the Euphrates a month later. From June on, both rivers begin to fall, and they reach their lowest level in September and October. In November there is usually a slight rise, increasing throughout the winter, and sudden short floods may occur during the winter and spring.
The Central Marshes, perhaps because I started there, is the area I came to know best. Indeed, I thought of it as home. In the course of years I must have visited nearly every settlement, however small, and most of them I visited again and again. When I acquired a canoe, my canoeboys came from there. Accepted by them, I was accepted by their fellow tribesmen. They remained with me throughout, and their villages were the bases to which I returned after expeditions. I travelled almost as extensively in the Eastern Marshes but never knew the people there so well. I remained a stranger, although welcome for the medical help I could give them. Of the Southern Marshes I saw but little.
I owe a great debt of gratitude to John Verney for all the help and advice he gave me with this book during the months I was with him in Florence. He read through successive drafts with infinite patience and made many improvements. I also wish to thank Valffrench Blake and George Webb for many valuable suggestions and for their kindness in reading and correcting the proofs. Graham Watson drove me to write the book, and he too gave me much encouragement and advice. My thanks are also due to k. C Jordan who drew the maps, to the firm of James Sinclair of Whitehall who have always given much care to the developing and printing of my photographs and who produced the prints for this book, to the staff of the Natural History Museum and many others who have helped me with information.
W. T.
Iraq
All day we had ridden across a flat plain, and the dust rose from under the horses’ hooves and choked us. The rains had failed, as they so often did, and the plants that had come up lay crumbling on the gaping soil. There was not a bush, nor even a rock, to serve as a landmark to measure our slow progress towards the horizon. Cur saddles, of the usual Arab design, were hard as boards. The stirrups, being hung far back, forced us to sit forward on our forks and pressed us into the pommel which stuck up like those on cowboy saddles. Indeed, it struck me that the American saddle had probably derived from such as these, the Arabs introducing the design into Spain and the Spaniards taking it with them to the New World.
We kept our horses at a walk for my companion had not ridden before. He was Dugald Stewart, British Vice-Consul at Amara. Though only twenty-nine and obviously very gifted, he maintained that he had no ambition except to end his career as Consul at Split, where he could get all the wild-fowling he wanted. We exchanged memories of Eton, as Old Etonians will. He had been a scholar and in spite of a game leg, made worse by two operations, had won many school colours, whereas I, with two sound legs, had never managed to get any.
We camped that night among the Bazun, sleeping on the ground in the sheikh’s guest tent after an enormous meal of rice and mutton. Except that it was supported on eleven poles and was far larger, the tent did not differ from the other black goathair booths pitched all around us. Open along one side, all faced the same way and most had a shackled horse or two picketed in front. A solid mass of sheep and goats pressed around, and often partly inside, each tent. I had watched them being driven in at sunset by the shepherd lads, each flock moving in a golden aura of dust. Throughout the night their bleating made a background noise against which the barking of dogs rose and fell.
I was on my way south from Iraqi Kurdistan, where I had gone to try to recapture the peace of mind I had known in the deserts of Southern Arabia. There I had lived with the Bedu for five years, and with them had travelled ten thousand miles across country where no car had ever been – until seismic parties, the vanguard of modern progress, began to arrive in search of oil.
In Iraqi Kurdistan, which I had always wanted to visit, I had ridden from one end of the country to the other, accompanied only by a young Kurdish servant. The scenery was wild and beautiful, and the Kurds who lived there still wore the finery of tribal dress – tasselled turbans and baggy trousers, short jackets and cummerbunds, of every colour and pattern – hung with daggers and revolvers and crossed with decorated bandoliers, heavy with cartridges. I had slept in terraced villages that hugged the mountainsides where the flat-roofed houses rose from the roofs below, and in the black tents of the nomads on bare mountaintops where gentians grew among the grass, and snowdrifts lay throughout the summer. I had followed tumbling rivers through oak forests where bears grubbed in the thickets, and I had looked down on a herd of ibex, threading its way along a three-thousand-foot wall of rock, while huge griffon vultures swung past, the wind whistling in their pinions. I had seen the glory of the Kurdish spring, valley-sides covered with anemones, and mountains crimson with tulips. I had gorged on grapes, freshly picked and warmed by the sun or cooled in a nearby stream.
But having seen Iraqi Kurdistan I had no desire to go back. Travel was too restricted, rather like stalking in a Highland deer forest. Across this stream was Turkey, beyond that watershed lay Persia, where uniformed police waited at the passes demanding visas I did not possess. I was fifty years too late. Half a century earlier I could have gone up through Rowunduz to Urmia, and on to Van, and the only effective hindrance would have been brigands and warring tribes. Admittedly the Marshes, for which I was now bound, covered a smaller area than Iraqi Kurdistan, but they were a world complete in itself, not a fragment of a larger world to the rest of which I was denied access. Besides, being fond of Arabs, it was probable that I could never really like Kurds. Although the landscape appealed to me the people did not. Admittedly I was hampered by not speaking their language, but even had I done so I felt that I should still not have liked them. As people are more important to me than places I decided to return to the Arabs.
Next day we rode on again, southward this time towards the Marshes across the unchanging plain, stopping at midday at some tents to feed ourselves and change horses. Dugald was remounted on a magnificent but restive grey stallion. When I protested that it would be too much for him, the sheikh clearly thought I wanted to ride it myself, and said he had brought it for ‘the Consul’. A little later Dugald inadvertently jabbed the stallion with his heel and it bolted. To save himself he dropped the reins and grabbed the pommel with both hands. Our companions started to gallop in pursuit, but, realizing that they would only excite it further, I shouted to them to stop. Dugald had already lost both stirrups. It seemed only a matter of time till he came off. The ground was hard and I pictured a ghastly accident, but two miles farther the horse stopped exhausted, with Dugald still clinging to the saddle. When we caught up with him he had dismounted and was looking at his hands. The palms had been scraped raw by the decorative nails in the pommel. ‘Now I am bloody well going to walk,’ he announced, and no assurances that our horses were quiet would induce him to change his mind and ride one of them.
The sun was still high. Past floods had covered the ground, which was fissured with deep cracks. While the sheikh kept up a flow of remonstrances, Dugald lurched and limped along: ‘Oh for God’s sake get him to shut up,’ he implored me. The sun set and there was still no sign of the Marshes nor of the village for which we were bound. It was dark when we saw lights moving in the distance. The Bazun had warned Maziad bin Hamdan, sheikh of the Al Essa, to expect us, and he had sent out a search party at dusk. They led us to his encampment on the edge of the Marshes. Beyond the tents we could sense rather than see water.
Maziad himself came out to welcome us (Plate 4). A small man, stockily built but standing very upright, he conveyed at once an impression of dignity and authority. The guest tent was