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

insisted that the four of us sit and eat
    together. Khadija was painfully embarrassed and could not
    even look at Bob; she kept her eyes cast down and
    occasionally giggled nervously. Jabbar decided I could teach
    her to bake cakes and cookies like the upper-class Baghdadi
    women; I tried hard, but she had neither talent nor interest.
    Khadija seized on me out of loneliness and curiosity, for I
    was so odd a figure in the village even she felt comfortable
    with me. But the friendship was a difficult one. Unless I spent
    every afternoon with her, which was impossible, she
    complained to Jabbar that I did not like her; since Jabbar was
    one of Bob’s closest personal friends in the village as well as a
    key figure in his irrigation study, this made life troublesome
    for all of us. I finally limited myself to a weekly visit with her,
    and Bob told Jabbar that I was busy at home and helping him
    the rest of the time.
    Khadija dreaded marriage, she told me, because she would
    have to leave Jabbar and her family and go with her husband;
    I thought she feared more the burdens of cooking, child-
    rearing and entertaining in a white-collar household, activities
    at which she seemed bound to prove inadequate.
    The teachers, the mayor’s wife and the doctor’s wife, all
    fairly well educated, tried to be kind to Khadija, and although
    she was pleased at their attentions, basically she resented
    them. Hind, youngest of the three teachers, a lively witty girl,
    tried to teach Khadija to read and write. At this time Jabbar
    was considering marrying Hind; though nothing had been said
    to Hind’s family, she had heard the rumors. When he suddenly
    became engaged to another girl, Hind quite rightly tried not to
    visit his house so often. But Khadija was furious and told me
    over and over again that Hind had never liked her, that she
    only wanted to marry Jabbar, and that was why she had visited
    her before.
    I did not believe this, for Hind was kind as well as sensible,
    much like her older sister Aliyah, who had come to El Nahra
    thirteen years before when the girls’ school opened and had
    remained there ever since, teaching, in loneliness and
    obscurity, the girls of this remote area. At first, she told me,
    only a few girls, daughters of merchants and effendis, had
    come to school; Aliyah had not been discouraged. She visited
    the village families, not just once, but many times, until they
    became used to her presence and were no longer suspicious.
    She pointed out the importance of women learning to read, not
    only the Koran (the women mullahs were available to teach
    them that), but books about Islamic history, about sewing and
    cooking. When Sheik Hamid married Selma, Aliyah went to
    visit her and was welcomed warmly; they had mutual

acquaintances among the teachers in Diwaniya. Gradually the
    tribal girls began to attend the school. First only one came
    from each of the wealthier families, then the poorer girls, and
    finally more and more of the villagers. The school had grown
    slowly, but it had 175 girls now, and only three teachers.
    Inspectors from the Ministry of Education had expressed
    several times to Aliyah herself their amazement at the large
    enrollment in such a conservative area, but knowing Aliyah
    and the high personal respect she enjoyed in El Nahra, I was
    not surprised.
    The town fathers knew that Aliyah was no modern upstart,
    come to teach the girls to take off their abayahs and learn the
    wicked, immodest ways of the city. Her family was from
    Baghdad, it was true, but was known to be conservative and
    religious; Aliyah wore the abayah herself and lived quietly
    with Hind, their mother and another unmarried sister who
    cooked and kept house. Jabbar once explained to Bob, “They
    have no man to protect them, but their good reputation is
    protection enough.”
    Aliyah was anxious that I teach English part-time at the
    school; she had asked the Ministry repeatedly for another
    teacher to help handle the growing