Read Online Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea - Free Book Online Page A

became a major
    undertaking. Who knew who might be sitting in the coffee
    shop who might remark that so-and-so’s family was running
    about town these days. For a model wife stayed at home, cared
    for her children and for her house, prepared good food for her
    husband and his guests, and kept out of sight of strangers. So,
    although few people really noticed it and only one or two of
    the women even remarked on it, in fact the women went out
    much less often after the new bridge was finished and the old
    bridge was dismantled and sold for firewood.
    The main street of El Nahra, neon-lighted, was a
    continuation of this new bridge. Here were the offices of the
    government officials assigned from Baghdad to administer the
    village and its immediate area. A boys’ primary school (400
    pupils), a girls’ primary school (175 pupils), the mayor’s
    office, the jail, the government dispensary with its resident
    doctor, the police station, and the post office lined the street.
    On a side road facing the canal was the office of the irrigation
    engineer, the one indispensable man among the government
    officials, for on his authority the floodgates which channeled
    water from a branch of the Euphrates River were opened and
    closed. The village and the surrounding farm community
    depended on the water supply for life.
    Along this bank, near the irrigation office, were the most
    modern dwellings in El Nahra, two or three well-built houses
    of fired brick, with tiled floors and carefully cultivated
    gardens. This was the fashionable, the “right” side of the
    canal, and the tribal settlement was obviously on the wrong
    side. Why on earth didn’t Bob and I, foreigners and not
    destitute, live on the right side of the canal, I was asked by the
    women schoolteachers, the mayor’s wife, the engineer’s sister
    and the doctor’s wife, the handful of middle-class ladies in the
    town who entertained me at lunch and tea, polite, pleasant,
    and quite puzzled as to our presence in this remote village and
    our house among those of the tribal fellahin.
    Khadija, the engineer’s sister, was from a tribal group
    herself and could hardly contain her curiosity about the
    women of the sheik’s house; she had never visited them, as
    they were not of her social group. Paradoxically she would
    have liked nothing better, for she enjoyed visiting the hut of
    the man who cultivated her beautiful garden. In the gardener’s
    one-room shack she could sit on the floor with his wife and
    daughter, drinking tea and gossiping. This kind of visit was all
    right—the gardener and his wife were her servants; she was
    expected to be kind and visit them occasionally, bringing
    small presents of tea and sugar. But the sheik’s house? Never.
    She was above that sort of thing now. Her brother Jabbar, the
    engineer, was a self-made man. An attractive, intelligent and
    ambitious boy, he had graduated highest in his class from the
    time he entered his village primary school until he finished
    secondary school in his provincial capital. His achievements
    brought him a scholarship to the engineering college in
    Baghdad. Now he was an effendi, a white-collar worker; he
    had risen higher than any member of his family before him.
    His younger sister, brought to El Nahra to keep house for him,
    had assumed his social status without his education and
    intelligence; unfortunately, she had not even Jabbar’s good
    looks in her favor. She worked at dressing smartly and
    learning to make crème caramel, she obediently visited the
    teachers and the mayor’s wife, tried hard to keep up with the
    latest song successes of Abdul Wahab and Um Khalthum, and
    asserted that she wanted to learn to read and write, but she was
    equipped for her role neither by training nor by native
    intelligence.
    Jabbar wished her to become accustomed to conversing
    with men so that she might be a companion as well as a
    housekeeper for her husband; accordingly he invited Bob and
    me to his house and