Free Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerard Russell Page B

percent. Chocolate had become so rare that a friend of Nadia’s celebrated her university graduation by giving a small piece of chocolate to each of her friends; Nadia took her piece home and split it with her sister. The teachers at the university had to work as taxi drivers half the day, and one of them even drove his own pupils to class—he needed the fare to supplement his meager salary. Children were sent out to find work instead of going to school. This, in a country that once had $35 billion in foreign exchange reserves, whose middle class in 1990 made up over half the population, and which had reduced illiteracy among those under age forty-five to less than 10 percent.
    One day Nadia’s aunt came out of one of her spell-casting consultations with a troubled expression. Nadia and her cousins asked her what was wrong. “Oh, it was that client who just left,” she said. “She wanted an amulet for her daughter. She’s only fifteen, but the mother wants an amulet to help her daughter find a rich man to marry. The grandfather is ill, and the uncles are out of work. And as the woman took the amulet, she told me she had been dressing her daughter up with makeup and sending her out to knock on God’s door. So I was wondering what that might mean.” “Knocking on God’s door” was a phrase that a laborer might use to refer to standing in line with other workers waiting to be hired. “And I realized she must be sending her daughter out as a prostitute.”
    It was not only the poor and desperate who wanted spells. So, as Nadia related, did Saddam Hussein. Saddam’s Ba’ath party had begun its rule with a brutal crackdown on political opponents, who included Iraq’s most distinguished Mandaean, Abdul-Jabbar Abdullah. Born in a village in southern Iraq in 1911, Abdullah had been able to travel to America and study at MIT; he also worked under Albert Einstein, who was impressed enough with his pupil’s talent that he presented him with his own Parker pen. Abdullah was a meteorologist (a branch of science particularly suited to the Mandaeans, who have inherited the Babylonians’ fascination with the stars). When the left-wing nationalist Abdul-Karim Qassem deposed the Iraqi monarchy and took power in 1958, Abdullah became the first president of Baghdad University. He was, however, a Communist—a common thing then among minorities in Iraq, who saw Communism’s secular ideology as a protection against religious bigotry. So when the anti-Communist Ba’ath party seized power in 1963 they sent men to arrest Abdullah; they burst into his office at the university, announced his dismissal, and arrested him. But only when they seized Einstein’s pen and snapped it in front of Abdullah did he burst into tears. Later freed, Abdullah fled to the United States, where he died.
    Saddam was not an enemy to all Mandaeans, though: he employed one as a poet, and—seeing plots everywhere and fearing supernatural as well as human enemies—he also turned to the Mandaean high priest of the day for spells of protection. Perhaps because of this man’s spells—and the rumors of the Mandaeans’ powerful curses—Saddam looked after the Mandaeans. For a time he even extolled them as symbols of Iraqi identity. Like the palaces he built on the ruins of Babylon, the Mandaeans helped reinforce the idea that Iraq was a nation-state with a proud history rather than a province carved out of the Ottoman Empire. They did not represent a serious political threat, and they were not rich enough to be worth targeting for their money. Like Jews and Christians, they were identified as “people of the book”: the Mandaeans are identified as the “Sabians” mentioned in the Koran as deserving special leniency (as opposed to polytheist pagans, who were to be fought and killed). The Mandaeans even took care to publish one of their holy books in 2001 in a classical Arabic translation, a form designed to make it acceptable to Muslim readers. The