My father died on 9 July 1995. He was eighty-nine.
He had been suffering from fluid on the lungs. The day before, Ali Ishmail—the brother of my old school friend Ayser and an intern who was two years older than me—brought over some intravenous fluids, a few needles for the IV drip and a couple of hydrocortisone injections. He put in the IV drip, but after a while it ruptured the vein—so I had to place another in my father’s arm. I was a fourth-year medical student and that was the first time I’d carried out a cannulation on anyone.
The night before my father died, we were sitting around him. He could still talk, but only very slowly. Areeg and her mother were visiting and brought some cake. We gave my father a piece, which he ate. Weakly, he said: ‘Thank you, that’s very nice.’
During the night, he started gurgling and his younger sister—herself in her eighties—came over from the other side of the river because we knew he wouldn’t last long.
Everything seemed to be going as smoothly as it could so, after spending the evening and much of the night with my father, I went back to my house on the other part of the property.
I was woken about seven in the morning by my uncle, the sculptor, knocking on my door. He’d never done that before, so I knew something must be seriously wrong. He told me my father had died during the night.
I hurried to my parents’ house and asked my mother what had happened. Quietly, she explained that she and my aunt had been with my father when he died about 3 a.m.
Even at that stage, relatively early in the morning, she was wearing black clothes to demonstrate her grieving. In line with tradition, my mother had cleaned my father’s face with rose water. But she hadn’t been allowed to wash the rest of his body—according to the Moslem custom, that had to be carried out by someone from the mosque who specialised in the ceremonial process. After she had cleaned his face, my mother and my aunt had spent the time since my father died praying and reading The Koran.
I went in to see my father’s body, kissed his head and covered him.
The Moslem tradition is to clean the body in the house, then transfer it to a coffin. But except for soldiers, the body isn’t buried in a coffin.
We took my father to the Imam Abdul Qadir Al Kaylani cemetery. There’s a family shrine in the cemetery: my grandfather is buried there and so is my father. There’s even a place for me—although I think the chances of me using it are diminishing by the year.
Under Moslem tradition, bodies have to be buried as soon as possible, preferably by sunset on the day the person dies. So there’s really not much time to get everything in order.
On the way to the cemetery, we had to get a death certificate. I went into the Emergency Department at the Al-Kindi Hospital and told the doctor I was a medical student. A couple of the other medical students recognised me and vouched for me with the registrar, who then confirmed that my father was dead and gave me the necessary papers.
As a civilian, my father’s body was completely wrapped in a white shroud, tied at the ankles, the waist and the shoulder. He was laid to rest in classic Islamic style, with his head resting on a stone pillow and facing Mecca. My family threw the first handfuls of sand over his body. After we left, the cemetery workers shovelled the rest of the soil into the grave.
In Iraqi culture, as in many others, the size and style of the grave is a measure of the family’s wealth. Some gravestones feature marble and gold, other families build mausoleums around their part of the cemetery—including air-conditioning and chairs. The more elaborate shrines tend to belong to Shi’ite families. Sunnis usually have simpler traditions, contending that they follow the teachings of Mohammed more closely and pointing out that the Prophet said the best graves are no higher than the knee.
My father’s grave was very simple—one piece of marble, very low, with a headstone detailing his name, his date of birth and the date he died.
Moslem funerals are quite different from their Christian counterparts. While Christians normally follow a funeral with a wake that lasts a few hours, a Moslem funeral is extended over a whole year and many of the traditions may seem quite bizarre to outsiders.
To be honest, especially after the funeral of my cousin Ribal who had been killed in the final days of the war with Iran, I didn’t want any form of official mourning after my father’s burial. But my mother was adamant and, in due deference to her feelings, I complied. Although I insisted that, in line with my father’s beliefs, we excluded the more extreme rituals often associated with Islamic funerals. In particular, there was no dervish—the self-mutilation ritual which often accompanies Islamic mourning.
The dervish is a bizarre custom. In the Sunni tradition, drums are rhythmically beaten as a group of men dance and feverishly nod their heads until they’re in a trance. Then they launch into a frenzy of self-mutilation. One might put a dagger into his throat, another might put a sword into his chest or stomach. I’ve even heard of people shooting themselves in the head and chest. It’s all completely barbaric.
How do they do it without serious injury? After studying their techniques, I noticed the men who were putting swords into their stomachs would place the weapon into existing scar tissue at an angle which ensured they weren’t going to hit any vital organs. That’s the only explanation I can come up with.
There are others, though, where there is obviously not even the merest hint of deception. I’ve seen videos on the internet where individuals are inflicting massive wounds on themselves with swords. Why they do it is entirely beyond me.
So, even though I’d given way on the funeral, I wouldn’t have anything to do with the self-mutilation rituals. My father believed the people who took part in the dervish ceremonies were hooligans. I agreed.
Following my father’s burial, we went back to our own houses. Then the relatives started arriving; traditionally, close family members usually stay with you for the first three days of the funeral. Because we were secular, there was some mixing of men and women outside the houses, but not inside. The women went to my mother’s house while the men came to my home.
Normally, a funeral starts about 4 p.m. and the ceremonies last for the rest of the day. Beforehand, the family takes the furniture out of the house and the oldest son sits at the door to welcome people as they arrive. The other sons sit in order further away from the door.
For the first three days, every night about eight o’clock you have to slaughter two or three sheep to feed the guests and visitors who are there as the funeral continues. The tradition is that the bereaved family buys live young male sheep and someone will come in, pray and slaughter them in halal fashion in the garden. The sheep carcass is hung in the trees before being skinned and cooked.
Because, almost inevitably, there’s far too much food, neighbours come in and join the feasting. Then anything left over is taken to the nearest mosque and distributed to poorer people.
Once we’d clambered over the hurdle of those first three days, we started preparing for the seventh day. The seventh day was only for women. I think my mother commemorated the fortieth day and the first anniversary, too. I took part in only the first of the four stages. I was desperately sad at my father’s passing—he had, after all, been my greatest mentor and the person who steered me in the direction of logic and learning. But, as I saw things, life had to go on.
To be honest, the whole ritual of the funeral ceremony was the last thing I wanted after my father had died. In many ways, I found it distracted me from the loss. And while some people might find that a welcome distraction, I wanted nothing more than to come to terms with my grief.
Instead, I was involved in what I saw as largely unnecessary pageantry when my preference would have been to reflect on my father’s life and what he had taught me. I detested the ceremonial. The whole thing was so artificial.
After the funeral, my fiancée Areeg started pushing me to get married. Her parents were particularly keen.
In contrast to their enthusiasm for us to be married, my mother opposed it. As she did with all my relationships. And, as with my other relationships, we argued about it. Regardless, I decided to get married three months after my father died. I was twenty-three and in my final year of medical school.
Like funerals, the Moslem wedding process is very different from the Western Christian expectations. Officially, Areeg and I were married two years before, when we were both studying at Baghdad University. But that initial wedding is more the equivalent of becoming engaged in the West. We just went to the court for a non-religious wedding and were pronounced man and wife.
That original ceremony involved us driving to the east bank of the Tigris River, crossing the river by boat to the west bank and the oldest courthouse in Baghdad. It was a very small ceremony—just myself, Areeg, my lawyer, my mother and her older sister, Areeg’s parents and her next youngest sister. It lasted about fifteen minutes, then we went back to Areeg’s house for lunch.
In Iraq, this stage is called Maher—it means we’re officially married, but we haven’t started living together. It’s very common there. In Iraq, it’s still considered shameful for a woman to become pregnant at that stage of the relationship, before the full wedding.
For the second wedding, in the autumn of 1995, we decided to have another small ceremony—just forty or fifty friends from school and university. The only relative who was invited was Areeg’s mother. We had dancing and singing at the reception, which was held at the Iraqi Airways Reception Centre, in what has more recently become known as the Green Zone of Baghdad.
The wedding didn’t have all the standard trimmings you might expect. I simply drove to Areeg’s house in the wedding car, ignored the expectation of kissing the bride’s mother and father’s head or hand and went on to the ceremony. That wasn’t me being churlish. It simply reflected my deep dislike of what I consider unnecessarily elaborate ceremonies.
And you have to remember that, by this stage, I had already been through a series of religious traditions and ceremonials which I found seriously embarrassing, with my father’s funeral and the lead-up to the wedding.
Before an Iraqi wedding, there’s the equivalent of a hen’s night. It’s called henna and is staged during the day, usually in the afternoon. A group of women friends and relatives gather in the bride’s house—along with the groom. The bride wears a nightdress covered by a gown and is fully made up. The guests use henna to make drawings on her hands and face. The bride’s feet are put in rose water with rose petals and they drop rice and pearls on her head—depending on how rich the family is. Then the women start dancing.
As the groom, I felt completely ill at ease sitting there next to the bride while the women were carrying out the whole ritual.
As well, on the day, Areeg’s mother insisted that we have a religious ceremony for the wedding. Shi’ites don’t accept a civil ceremony—so I had to agree.
After the henna, they brought in an imam. Under the Shi’ite tradition, he sits with the groom, the bride’s father and the male relatives in a different room from the bride. No one in that room can see the bride, who is still wearing the nightdress and the full gown.
The imam starts the ceremony and asks the bride ‘Will you accept this man to be your husband?’ fifteen times. She’s not supposed to say anything until the imam asks the fifteenth time—because if she answers too early, it’s supposed to indicate that she’s cheap. But if she doesn’t answer the fifteenth time, the imam can’t go ahead with the marriage ceremony!
Also, because you can’t see the bride, the imam doesn’t have any idea who she is. She could be someone off the streets for all he knows!
Then the imam asks the father of the bride: ‘Will you authorise your daughter to marry this man?’ and the father complies.
Once those formalities have been completed, the father and the groom shake hands. The bride’s brothers don’t attend the ceremony, because—for some reason—it’s considered shameful.
The Sunni tradition is different. The imam sits in the middle; there’s no door separating the bride and the groom. The bride—or a representative of the bride—and groom hold hands and their hands are covered with a linen napkin while the vows are exchanged. But, believe it or not, the bride doesn’t have to be there. Which is bizarre.
In more traditional areas the father and brothers of the bride will shave their heads and grow long beards for the wedding, then leave after the religious ceremony. The women, on the other hand, take part in a special ceremony exclusively for them. The whole thing goes on through the afternoon and into the evening.
Because my mother wasn’t at the reception, we went to her house immediately after the ceremony. Everybody went—the whole wedding party. It was a motorcade fit for any head of government!
In line with tradition, a couple of my friends fired their Kalashnikov AK47s after the wedding ceremony. I asked them to stop, but they didn’t.
Areeg and I couldn’t take an overseas honeymoon because of the tensions between Iraq and the Western powers over the economic sanctions. Instead we spent three nights at The Rashid, a five-star hotel in Baghdad which was later bombed by American warplanes.
Traditionally, the morning after the wedding, the groom’s mother brings breakfast—usually cream and date syrup and fresh bread. My mother did that and sat with us for a few minutes and then left.
After the three days at the hotel, we went back to my house and started living together. In the next few days, people came round and brought us presents. As in Western countries, the gifts will normally be something for the house.
In a cosmopolitan city like Baghdad, there’s no great pressure for a couple to have kids as soon as they’re married. But we did. It wasn’t planned and it created considerable difficulties. I was in my final year of medical school and Areeg was a year behind me. So it was a critical time for our studies and our careers.
There was a lot of family support—which was of enormous assistance. But there was another side to the coin—there was a lot of family interference as well.
My mother was living next door. She would often try to impose her views. And, even though they were further away, Areeg’s family kept interfering as well. Coupled with that, of course, I was pretty immature. So the whole thing was probably doomed from the start.
The baby—a boy we named Ahmed—was born in the private wards of Baghdad University Hospital on 1 August 1996.
On the day Ahmed was born, I had a huge row with my mother. One of the key problems was the family assets. My mother was running our family business, centred on the shops and commercial office building in Baghdad, and controlling our money—and, at that time, we were quite wealthy. My father didn’t leave a will. So, by law, when my dad died, I inherited seven-eighths of everything he owned. My mother inherited the rest. While my father was still alive, I asked him to register my house and his house in my mother’s name. That arrangement remained in place after his death.
Areeg’s parents didn’t like the fact that my mother was running the family businesses and officially owned both our houses. They kept insisting I should take control of everything. When you boil things down, access to my family’s assets was really at the very core of the problems.
Areeg and Ahmed stayed with her parents after he was born. But our relationship was deteriorating rapidly. It wasn’t long before Areeg said she’d had enough and wasn’t coming back to my house because of my mother’s meddling.
On 7 August Ahmed’s umbilical stump fell off—and there’s a tradition in Iraq that the stump should be put in a place which indicates the baby’s future. Areeg’s family put it in a copy of The Koran. I was outraged—I suggested throwing it in the bin because the tradition was ridiculous, but if they really believed in the myth they should have thrown it at a school or in a hospital.
That caused a massive argument and, as happens in these situations, the dispute quickly expanded to uncover a wide variety of real and perceived slights which had occurred over the years. All sorts of things were brought up. The arguments became increasingly heated and irrational and ended with a decision that we were going to separate—which, on reflection, was all very stupid. We’d been married for less than a year.
Of course, when a marriage breaks up, the animosity doesn’t end. Quickly, the inevitable legal issues started to emerge, complicated by the fact that in an Iraqi divorce, everything goes to the wife. Straight after we separated, Areeg and her family hired a lawyer and put a caveat on the entire contents of my house. But because the house was in my mother’s name, they didn’t have any claim on it. All this happened a month before my final exams—so I had no choice but to carry on studying. Which, I guess, took my mind off all the turmoil that was going on.
Areeg and I were divorced within a couple of months. The legal process was very similar to procedures in Western countries.
Areeg and her mother stayed in Baghdad after we were divorced and subsequently through the American invasion and its bloody aftermath. Their house was in one of the most hotly disputed areas of Baghdad, which was a battleground for the confrontation between Sunni and Shi’ite militia. It meant they were often caught in the cross-fire and the house was bombed several times as the fighting flared around them.
Areeg’s father died after the war and at that point, Areeg, her mother and my son Ahmed escaped to the United States as refugees. I didn’t see them again until February 2013, when I visited them in their new home in San Diego, California.