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

that
    Bob avoided him whenever possible. He kept his dispensary
    open only when he felt like it, and treated with contempt or
    indifference the men and women who trooped to the
    government clinic, racked with one or several of the diseases
    endemic to the area–tuberculosis, bilharzia, malaria, amoebic
    and bacillary dysentery. Although the sulfa and other
    medicines provided by the government were supposed to be
    free, Dr. Ibrahim charged for them. One night when
    Mohammed’s mother was very ill, the doctor refused to go to
    see her in his own car (it was raining and he didn’t want to get
    it splashed with mud) and forced the distraught Mohammed,
    in addition to the medical fee, to pay half a pound for a private
    taxi to take him across the canal to the tribal settlement. The
    tribesmen were silently contemptuous of the doctor. “No man
    who changes his religion can be trusted,” they said, and dosed
    their bilharzia and dysentery with caraway tea, buying aspirin
    in the market for the pain.
    This little group of civil servants and civil servants’
    wives—Um Saad, Aliyah, Hind, Nadia and Khadija—were
    always pleasant and always hospitable to me. Their lives were
    remote from those of the tribal women I knew: their
    upbringing and training, their aspirations and hopes were
    different, for they were from the cities, which have developed
    separately from the rural areas in the Middle East for
    generations. But as I visited back and forth between the two
    societies, sitting in a deep maroon plush armchair at Um
    Saad’s or squatting on a reed mat at Mohammed’s, I was
    struck too by the similarity in these women’s values. Though
    the town and the country are worlds apart, a good woman is
    the same in both spheres: her reputation for fidelity is above
    reproach, she is hard-working, a devoted wife and mother, a
    good cook and housekeeper, and a quiet, obedient companion
    to her husband. And in spite of the relative obscurity in which
    these women lived, I came to realize how much they
    influenced men, their husbands and especially their sons, and
    even—indirectly, by silent example (as did the teachers)—
    men they never saw or met. Not only did the women
    influence, but in many cases they helped to determine events:
    whom their sons would marry, whom their daughters would
    marry, whether or not a child would go on to school and
    university. And they did this without coercion, without
    publicity, and above all without reproach.
    5
    Gypsies
    Gypsies! I had heard the word several times in the houses of
    the women recently. “Do they dance?” I asked. “Tell
    fortunes?”
    “Of course,” said the women. “They are gypsies.”
    “Have you ever seen them?” I asked. They looked at me.
    “No,” they said.
    Bob reported that a troupe of traveling gypsy entertainers
    was camped somewhere in Diwaniya province and, one sunny
    winter day, out for a drive with Jabbar and Khadija, we saw
    them on the move, thirty people or more in a caravan of
    donkeys and camels.
    They were unmistakable, distinguished from all other
    nomads on the road, not only by their bright clothing and gaily
    saddled animals but by the arrangement of the caravan. The
    men were in front, as is usually the case, but these men were
    on foot rather than on horseback, and instead of kaffiyehs and
    abas and heavy rifles, they wore tight black trousers and
    gaudy silk shirts and carried drums and pipes and batons. Next
    came the younger women on donkeys, but again there was a
    difference. The gypsy girls rode astride and their abayahs
    were tucked artfully around them to good effect, showing here
    a décolleté flowered dress, there a printed silk petticoat or a
    gold-braceleted ankle. On the camels at the end of the
    procession rode the old women and men and children. The
    pots and pans and striped blankets were tied to the camel
    saddles. But even the children were different, the boys in tight
    pants and silk shirts like their fathers, the little