The worst poverty and neglect I have seen is here in Najaf and in the other sacred Shia city near by, Kerbala. Realising that the crowd was hostile to us — we are the only ‘Westerners’ in sight — the two people in charge of the Emir Ali mosque decide to put us in an office and then ask us to take our shoes off. There the man in charge of the mosque decides to give me a history lesson and tells me in great detail about the remains of Prince Ali. (The same thing happened to me yesterday, in Baghdad, in the mosque of the Khadim Brothers, when a holy man explained to me at length that, at the end of time, Christ would come to kiss the hand of El Madi and, from then on, Muslims and Christians would become brothers.) I listened patiently. After he was murdered in Kerfa, the remains of Muhammad’s son-in-law were buried secretly by the faithful. They remained hidden for many years. Some time later, during the caliphate of Harun Al Rachid, the caliph noticed when he was out hunting crows that the dogs always kept a respectful distance from a certain mound. There they discovered the remains of the Emir. This beautiful mosque was then built to honour them.
While he is instructing me, I observe the mass spectacle of the believers. They come into this enormous rectangular patio with the coffins of the dead held aloft and they walk them around the crypt of the Emir. The great throng of men push and elbow each other, chanting, praying, praising Allah, some in a state of hysterical paroxysm. It is doubtless impressive but, for me, very depressing. Hands and lips reach out to touch and kiss the walls, the railings, the grooves and ridges of the doors, and some of the faithful sob at the top of their voices, prostrate, touching the ground with their forehead. Around the crypt, the group is all male. The women, dark shapes, remain behind, crowded together at the rear of the mosque, keeping a magic distance from the men, who are the only protagonists in this dramatic ceremony. My teacher explains that many of the faithful are pilgrims who have come here from far off — ‘some from Bosnia’ — and that they sleep on these sacred tiles.
‘Isn’t it the same in Lourdes or in Fatima?’, a Spanish friend tries to console me that same evening in Baghdad when I tell him about how uneasy I felt after the visit to Najaf as we drank a warm, acid beer in the semi-darkness during the latest power cut. Is it the same? I don’t think so. In these great centres of Catholic pilgrimage, there is a whole commercial apparatus involved, a major tourist exploitation of faith, which rather undermines this faith, but also makes it seem inoffensive. There is nothing of this here: here faith is pure, integral, disinterested, extreme, the only thing that many of these people, destitute and ravaged by poverty, have to hold on to as they scream and shout out their prayers, and this could easily be channelled into violence — a holy war or jihad — by a charismatic ayatollah like the one I am visiting in Najaf.
Taking the advice of friends in Baghdad, I asked Morgana and her friend Marta, from the Iberoamerican-European Foundation, not to try to enter the mosque of Prince Ali, and to wait for me instead in the main square at Najaf, and look around the colourful market. But I’ve never had the slightest authority over my daughter, so there they were, swathed in borrowed abayas, with their foreign faces visible to all, passing themselves off as Afghan Muslims! And Morgana, with that temerity that she’s always shown ever since she made her cot shake with her furious tantrums, started taking photographs. An agitated believer went up to her and flung a blow at her face, which was deflected by the camera. The bodyguard accompanying her put his head in his hands, upset at this show of obscurantism. Marta was more fortunate: instead of being greeted with aggression, she received, in English, a marriage proposal, which she turned down.
We visited the other Shia holy city, Kerbala — more open and less claustrophobic than the cramped, poverty-stricken city of Najaf — which is the site of two immense and strikingly beautiful mosques, one of which is the burial place of Imam Hussein, the son of Prince Ali, who was killed in the Yazid invasion. But the hostility in the air was such that we decided to cut short our visit and leave, with great regret, that beautiful place with its golden cupolas, tiled walls and squares and marble floors. In that city as well, in the shady arcades of the market, and in the narrow streets with its houses that looked on the point of collapse, we are pressed on all sides by a crowd that looks on us with hostility and disgust. The attempts of the three Baghdad friends that were travelling with me to convince them that we were not Americans but Spanish Muslims on a religious pilgrimage, does not convince them. My friends tell me that we should hurry up and get out. The democratic virtues of tolerance and coexistence in diversity seem alien to these parts.
When I ask Ayatollah Al Hakim what he thinks about what is happening in neighbouring Iran, where we have recently seen an increase in demonstrations by young students demanding more freedom and democracy from the repressive conservative government, he wriggles out of the question: ‘I do not have reliable information as to what is happening in Iran. We do not even know accurately what is happening in other provinces in Iraq. I do not dare take seriously what certain information media, in Qatar, the Emirates and Jordan, put out because they are just looking to incite violence and hate, so I prefer not to have an opinion on this matter.’
He doesn’t reply very openly when I ask him if he would accept a secular government for Iraq: ‘Would a secular government mean a government against religion?’ he replies tersely. I tell him not, that such a government would not be in favour or against religion, it would be independent and neutral on religious issues, it would restrict itself to guaranteeing respect for all beliefs.
Imam Al Hakin can barely disguise his displeasure: ‘Islam must be respected,’ he says firmly. ‘Like in Pakistan, Egypt or the Maghrib, which are Islamic countries. That is the type of state that Iraq will have.’
I have been given scarcely half an hour and my time is nearly up. One of the imam’s assistants is indicating in a peremptory fashion that I should take my leave. I try to move the conversation on to a more personal level and ask him how he felt when he came back to Najaf, after an absence of more than two decades. The imam is a politician who never drops his guard and he gives me the official answer: ‘I feel both happy and sad. Happy because I am among my own people and the tyrant has been overthrown, but saddened by the two million disappeared that we had in the years of Saddam Hussein, by the common graves where we find the remains of tortured and murdered brothers, and by the suffering and hardship that the Iraqi people are still suffering today.’
I left there convinced that Al Hakim would certainly like the future Iraq to be like Iran, but that he knows that the people of Iraq and, above all, the Americans would find it very difficult to agree to this, and that, as a pragmatic politician, he has given up for now this goal in favour of a more realistic and less theocratic formula: a coalition of religious, political and ethnic forces, in which the Shia, because of their overall majority, would still have majority representation. Despite his vociferous criticism of the occupying forces, I am quite sure that at this stage, at least, he would work with the Provisional Coalition Authority and Paul Bremer.
I discuss this issue with my Baghdad and Spanish friends in a restaurant full of the turbans and abayas of Kerbala, called The Pearl of Najaf, with the inevitable fried chicken with rice, pureed beans and gherkin salad with yoghurt. A menu that would shadow me throughout the twelve days of my stay in Iraq. Morgana and Marta have taken off their veils to eat, and our fellow diners look at them out of the corner of their eyes, with surprise.