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

enrollment, one who could
    manage English. But she was constantly disappointed, for
    young girls did not want to come to a village as remote as El
    Nahra, where there were no decent living facilities for single
    women, few congenial companions, and not even the cinema
    to distract them from the hard work, low pay and bleak
    atmosphere. I would have liked to help Aliyah; we both wrote
    letters and I was interviewed by the Ministry. They offered me
    a job as an English teacher in the boys’ secondary school in
    Diwaniya. “After all,” said the deputy Minister, “boys need to
    learn English more than girls,” but I declined. So nothing ever
    came of the project; I was sorry for Aliyah’s sake, but in the
    long run it was better for Bob that I not be tied down every
    morning.
    I admired and liked the two teachers and enjoyed their
    company. They were intelligent enough to have some grasp of
    why we were there, and they accepted us without many
    questions. I would have visited them more often except that
    we all had our own work to do. But when I was depressed I
    would put on my abayah and walk across the bridge to Sitt
    Aliyah’s house. There I would drink tea and try to improve
    my Arabic by talking and listening to Aliyah, Hind and their
    visitors (they always had visitors, from every economic
    stratum of the village) talk of books and movies and the place
    of women in the new Iraq. It was comforting to know that
    even in El Nahra there were women who cared about such
    things, who worked subtly to improve conditions around
    them, but always from a position of strength and acceptance in
    their own community.
    Um Saad, the mayor’s wife and the third teacher, was
    another sort altogether. Highly educated, bearing the name of
    a wealthy and ancient Baghdadi Shiite family, she was held
    slightly in awe by the other teachers. In spite of her origins, or
    perhaps because of them, Um Saad was slight and
    unassuming. The moment I entered her house, I was aware of
    taste and education. There was not a garish object or a wrong
    color or texture. The pictures were old and good; the
    bookcase-the only one I ever saw in El Nahra with one
    exception (in the house of Khalil, the bright young man who
    taught Arabic literature in the boys’ school)—covered one
    whole wall of the dining room.
    The mayor, Abu Saad, was something of a poet and Um
    Saad read and criticized his work; she knew a great deal about
    Arabic poetry of the past and present. Their relationship was a
    close one: they had three sturdy boys, they were intellectually
    companionable, they seemed very happy. But there was one
    problem. Abu Saad confessed to Bob that he knew the
    wearing of the veil and the hiding of women in the house were
    old-fashioned and out-moded customs, that his wife was as
    intelligent and sensible as he was and that he should
    encourage her to enjoy the world as he did. But all of his
    background warred against it; his father had been a mullah,
    prominent in the business affairs of one of the most important
    mosques in Baghdad. His grandfather had written books well
    known throughout the Islamic intellectual world, urging
    limited education for women but warning of the dangers of a
    too liberal interpretation of women’s role. Abu Saad tried to
    overcome this, but he could not; Um Saad tried to understand
    and sympathize with his conflicts, but she could not. She
    remained a devoted wife and mother, but she was quietly
    disappointed that her husband did not have the strength to live
    according to his own rational convictions.
    The doctor’s wife never visited Um Saad; they had nothing
    in common. Her name was Nadia; she was voluptuous, well
    dressed, very coarse and very wealthy. Her husband, a
    Christian, had renounced his faith and become a Moslem in
    order to marry her. Dr. Ibrahim hated the village and despised
    the tribesmen and fellahin; he told Bob at their first meeting
    that the fellahin were animals, not human beings. After