An elderly woman across the room wept for the deceased Selma, for herself, for Iraq
AMMAN AYSAR, elegant in black pant suit, her face framed in a cloud of grey curls, greeted us at the entrance to the salon.
Ranged along the walls of the L-shaped room were a rank of chairs with red fabric upholstery. At the corner were set the chairs and microphones for the men who would recite and sing the service, the mawloud, for Selma who had succumbed to cancer after slipping into the confusion and silence of Alzheimers.
Qais Awqati strode across the room to welcome the newcomers from Nicosia. Charlie and Leila had been students with Selma at Cambridge. I had met Selma al-Radi, her sister Nuha and Ma in Beirut. For all of us, Suad, their mother, has always been “Ma”. Based at Columbia University, Awqati, Selma’s husband, is one of the world’s most esteemed kidney specialists. Her son, Kiko, who went to school in Ireland and university in the US, is a botanist working in Costa Rica. Global scattering of family members is common to the Iraqi diaspora.
The five musicians took their places. Hamed al-Saadi, a sharp-faced man in black cap, is Iraq’s most famous praise singer. He was accompanied by a Sunni cleric in a turban and three other men. All Iraqis. Only Iraqi Muslims hold such observances for their departed; in the rest of the Arab world such services are held on the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad and on saints’ days. I attended Nuha’s mawloud in Beirut in 2004.
Ma arrived in a flurry of hugs. Small, grey-headed, sturdy, walking quickly with her stick at the venerable age of 93 and braving the loss of her second daughter. Until the US occupation of Iraq in 2003, Ma used to spend winter months in Baghdad in her elegant home on the river Tigris and summers in Beirut in the flat overlooking the Mediterranean.
When she returned to Lebanon she would bring boxes filled with Iraqi delicacies, flat meat patties from Mosul and bread baked with cheese. But she no longer makes the journey to her violent homeland.
Guests were still arriving when we took our seats. Although half a dozen men sat together at the far end of the dining room nearest the singers, men and women were interspersed rather than separated, as is traditional in Muslim households in gatherings to mourn a lost relative or friend. Only three women wore headscarves. The singers began with chants of loss, pausing for silent recitation of the Fatiha,the first verse of the Koran.
As the music rose and fell, I recalled Selma’s triumph, the inauguration of the Amiriya, the 16th-century palace she restored in the provincial town of Rada in Yemen. It took her 25 years to transform a ruin into a marvellous white wedding cake of a palace, using materials and technologies employed by its original builders. In 2007, she was awarded the Aga Khan prize for architecture in recognition of her feat.
An elderly woman across the room wept for Selma, for herself, for Iraq. On the wall opposite me was a painting by Nuha, depicting a snarl of wires atop an electricity pole typical in postwar Beirut. Nuha’s wry comment on warfare. She began as a ceramist, became a painter and, eventually, a celebrated diarist of Baghdad during the 1991 war.
The musicians improvised the melodic maqam, their voices harsh, soft, gentle. The lead singer, al-Saadi, a Shia, wove in references to the ongoing commemoration of Muharram when Shias mark the slaying of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein, at a battle near Kerbala in Iraq.
The progression from sorrow to the celebration of life was slow, carefully modulated.
Selma's mawloudwas performed in Aysar's Christian household with Christians and foreigners attending along with Sunnis and Shias. Sitting side by side were the two Amals, one Shia, the other descended from a Sunni saint, school friends whose fathers had rebelled against the British in 1920 and 1941. Awqati's father had also been involved in the 1941 coup and imprisoned for six years until Ma helped secure his release.
Iraqi painters, poets, archaeologists and former diplomats, a husband and wife medical team from the US, a British photographer and a Canadian war correspondent still based in Baghdad had come to honour Selma.
The gathering represented the old tolerant Iraq, the cosmopolitan Iraq of the Arab and Ottoman empires, the Iraq of the British occupation and the republic declared in 1958. The Iraq where no one asked one’s religion or sect. The Iraq that survived the brutal years of Saddam Hussein but fell apart when the US imposed a policy of divide and rule, setting Sunnis against Shias and Kurds against Arabs, and put into power exiled ethno-sectarian politicians who, as Amal remarked, “rode into Baghdad on the backs of American tanks”.
Such mawloudsare "normal", observed Sheherazad, who organised the ceremony. "We still do it in Baghdad."
The old Iraq is not yet prepared to give in to division and hatred.