Enemy on the Euphrates (20 page)

In fact, it is now clear that Bell’s estimate of the historical proximity of the settlement of the nomadic tribes in Iraq was still too distant: the period of most rapid settlement appears to have been as recent as the late nineteenth century. In 1867 the proportion of the nomadic elements in the rural population of southern Iraq was still 50 per cent, while in central Iraq it was 23 per cent. However, by 1905 these proportions had fallen to 19 and 7 per cent, respectively. As a corollary, during the latter part of the nineteenth century, small rural settlements grew into larger towns. No fewer than twenty major towns including ‘Amara and Nasiriyya were either established or expanded from small villages during this period.
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In the process, certain broad regional patterns of tribal domination became established.

The Muntafiq confederation began to dominate the lands of the Lower Euphrates and the Gharraf river. Gertrude Bell put their number at around 200,000, including women and children, occupying an area which extended sixty-five miles from east to west and fifty miles from north to south. The Dulaym settled on either side of the Euphrates above Baghdad while the mid-Euphrates was occupied by a shifting, unstable patchwork of many tribes including the Zubayd confederation occupying the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Bani Hasan who settled west of the Hindiyya branch of the Euphrates between Karbela’ and Kufa, and the Khaza’il confederation whose many tribes were scattered between Kifl, Diwaniyya and Samawa. The al-Fatla occupied the rich irrigated land of the mid-Euphrates along the Mishkab and Shamiyya rivers and along the Hindiyya, while further south the 40,000-strong Bani Huchaym remained a semi-nomadic confederation, raising camels and sheep on the lands between Samawa and Rumaytha, down the Euphrates as far south as Darraji and on the fringe of the great Shamiyya desert.
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The Al Bu Muhammad predominated in the great marshlands of the Lower Tigris, where they grew rice and bred immense numbers of water buffalo, while above them on the Tigris and as far as the Persian border were the Bani Lam, still partly nomadic at the time of the British invasion, between February and June moving around with their herds of camels and horses. Around the town of Kut al-‘Amara were the Bani Rabi‘a and
on the Tigris above Baghdad were the ‘Ubayd. To the north-west, the Jarba’ section of the Shammar, also still partly nomadic, occupied the region between Mosul and the border of Syria, while the Shammar Toqa were on the Tigris south of Baghdad and the Shammar Zawba‘ in the district of Kadhimayn. And out on the western desert fringe, ranging between the Syrian desert and the right bank of the Euphrates and regularly at war with the Shammar of Ha’il and its allies, were the still largely nomadic ‘Anaiza confederation, whose number Gertrude Bell also estimated at around 200,000.

However, as they settled, the great Bedouin tribes had begun to fracture into smaller units scattered along the cultivated river borders and they were further split up as new arrivals thrust their way among them, seeking their own place on the rich agricultural land. For example, among the great Muntafiq confederation, its principal constituents, the Bani Malik, al-Ajwad, and Bani Sa’id, effectively became independent tribes, often warring among themselves; and within each of these tribes, sections broke away, like the Bani Khayqan and Mujarra which emerged from the Bani Malik. Even where the tribal confederation remained broadly intact it was possible to identify numerous tribal sections; for example, in the case of the Khaza’il, an important tribe of the mid-Euphrates, Gertrude Bell identified sixteen separate sections, each with its own sheikh.
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So at the time of the British invasion the picture was therefore increasingly one of tribal differentiation and schism while within the larger tribal confederations the arrival of the British coincided with a growing tendency among the tribesmen and sheikhs of smaller tribes and sections to resist the payment of rents to the greater landlord-sheikhs. As Bell described it, ‘three years of war had left tribal cultivators more independent than ever.’
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So, once the British finally established their occupation, many of the greater sheikhs turned to them for assistance in pacifying their unruly vassals while the occupiers soon came to realise that reinforcing sheikhly control would give them the levers of power whereby the collection of taxes and recruitment of forced labour would be greatly facilitated. Indeed, regardless of the status of a particular sheikh, if he
failed to comply with British demands for submission, taxation and labour he would be replaced by another candidate supported by British arms. Nevertheless, in many cases this policy of reinforcing sheikhly control or replacing recalcitrant sheikhs with pro-British candidates failed, as Bell herself later admitted.

The second point to which Gertrude Bell drew attention in
The Arab of Mesopotamia
was that whereas in their purely Bedouin era, the tribes had originally been nominally Sunni, after settlement a majority of them converted to the Shi‘i branch of Islam.
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Indeed, in 1919 the British estimated that 53 per cent of the Iraqi population (1.5 million out of a total of 2.85 million) was Shi‘i.
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The conversion to Shi‘ism began to develop as the nomadic tribes penetrated the cultivated fringe of the rich Shamiyya region on the Middle Euphrates. The Shamiyya contained the two great Shi‘i shrine cities: Najaf, with a resident population of around 30,000 at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Karbela’, with around 50,000 inhabitants of which perhaps three-quarters were actually Persian Shi‘is who had taken permanent residence there. Their status as Shi‘i shrine cities dated from events which occurred in the very earliest days of Islam. In ad 661, the caliph ‘Ali ibn Abu Talib, son-in-law of Muhammad and the first Shi‘i imam, was murdered at Kufa and his shrine was built at Najaf seven miles to the south-west while that of ‘Ali’s son, Husayn, the Sayyid al-Shuhada’ – the prince of martyrs and third Shi‘i imam – was located in Karbela’.
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The economies of the two holy cities were enriched by the annual presence of thousands of Shi‘is who travelled to Najaf and Karbela’ to visit the shrines; and outside Najaf lay the vast, ever-growing cemetery, the Wadi as-Salaam, to which the corpses of devout Shi‘is were carried from as far away as India, to rest in peace within sight of ‘Ali’s shrine, a privilege which, naturally, they had to pay for.

However, the Shi‘i divines of the two holy cities and their followers were also vulnerable. In 1801 Karbela’ had been sacked by an army of Sunni tribesmen from Najd belonging to the fanatical and puritanical Wahhabi sect while Najaf had been twice besieged by them. The Shi‘i clergy therefore came to see in the recently settled tribesmen a potential
‘home guard’ which would protect them against future predatory attacks, so they began to send out religious agents – graduates of the Shi‘i madrasas – into the areas of Arab settlement, ostensibly to assist the settlers with such legal matters as inheritance, marriage and divorce but also to convert the tribesmen and bind them in loyalty to the Shi‘i cities. In fact, the erstwhile Bedouins’ affiliation to the Sunni branch had probably only been nominal – after all, most of them had no mosques in which to worship nor qadis to guide them in religious jurisprudence. Indeed, Lady Ann Blunt, who visited the nomadic tribes which roamed between Syria and Iraq in 1879 considered the true Bedouin to have virtually no religion at all.
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So, for the Shi‘i mujtahidin and other ‘ulema’, the religious consciousness of the recently settled tribes was something of a blank sheet of paper on which they assiduously transcribed the tenets of their own version of Islam. They regaled the tribesmen with stirring tales of the heroic Husayn, who laid claim to be his father’s rightful successor as caliph, and who in ad 680, with a tiny band of supporters, pitted himself against the overwhelming military might of the rival Sunni forces and perished on the plain of Karbela’. These Shi‘i teachings emphasised the courage, eloquence, chivalry and manliness of Husayn and his father ‘Ali, often using Arabic poetry to better convey their religious message in a manner which was appealing to the traditional, tribal value systems of the former Bedouin. By 1919 it was estimated that in the Middle Euphrates, the region with the greatest proximity to the two holy cities, 94.7 per cent of the total population of 567,267 were Shi‘is while the Sunnis only constituted 3.1 per cent (the remaining 2.2 per cent being Jews, and Christians).
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For their part, the tribesmen took strength from the knowledge that, after conversion, they were now ‘good Muslims’ with a proper place in the new social order into which they had migrated. Moreover, the fact that the Shi‘is of Iraq – albeit officially tolerated – were nevertheless generally at odds with the government in the shape of the Sunni Ottoman authorities, appealed to their old Bedouin ideals of anarchic freedom and independence.

However, there remained significant groups of tribes and sections
of tribes which remained at least nominally Sunni. Generally speaking, the further the distance from the two main Shi‘i shrine cities, especially towards the north of Iraq, the more likely the Arabs were to remain Sunni in religious allegiance. Moreover, those tribes which remained largely nomadic – the ‘people of the camel’, as Bell described them – ‘have kept as a rule to the desert doctrine and are almost invariably Sunni’.
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However, the picture was complicated by the fact that while some sections of a tribe became Shi‘i, others, of the same tribe, remained Sunni; and in other cases the mass of the ordinary tribesmen were Shi‘i while their leading sheikhs were Sunni: such, for example, was the case of the Muntafiq, whose tribesmen were overwhelmingly Shi‘i while their ruling clan, the Sa‘dun, were Sunni.

As time went on, Gertrude began to compile tribal lists for GHQ in quite remarkable detail, itemising and naming the hundreds of individual tribes and tribal sections and their leaders. In 1917 she completed a study of the tribes of the Tigris and in the same year two further studies were published by the Government Press, one on the ‘Tribes around the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris’ and the other on the major tribes of the Lower Euphrates. The following year her enormous erudition resulted in a further volume,
Arab Tribes of the Baghdad
Vilayet. In addition to enumerating and naming tribal sections, estimating their numbers of fighting men and naming their sheikhs and sada, Bell included information as to the economic activity of the tribe, the location of its cultivated areas and animal pastures and any other relevant details she could pick up in conversations with her Arab friends, servants and informers.
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Although Bell undoubtedly enjoyed the scholarship involved in this work, its final, instrumental purpose was clear. Writing to her stepmother she observed, ‘If you’ll take advantage of tribal organisation and make it the basis of administrative organisation … there is nothing easier to manage than tribes.’
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And ‘managing’ the tribes was precisely what the Civil Administration of the new Iraq intended to do.

But perhaps Miss Bell was not so adept at ‘managing the tribes’ as she thought. Since the occupation of Baghdad in March 1917 and the
truce between the British and the Iraqi Arabs, the policy towards their sheikhs had comprised little more than bribery. Muhsin Abu Tabikh, the Shamiyya landowner and sayyid who had fought at the battle of Shu’ayba in 1915, recalled in his memoirs how Miss Bell had written to the sheikhs and notables in April 1917, ‘in every district and every Division’, asking them to attend Sir Percy’s Baghdad office, whereupon they had all received ‘presents’ in the form of large sums of Indian rupees.
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Muhsin Abu Tabikh was one of a small number of Euphrates sheikhs and sada who had politely refused and the following month he arranged for a close relative and neighbour to take his letter of refusal to Baghdad; although not wishing to deliberately antagonise Sir Percy, Abu Tabikh merely conceded that ‘at a convenient time in the future’ he would be happy to pay a visit to the civil commissioner.

A month later, while he was in Baghdad, Abu Tabikh did indeed pay a call on Sir Percy. After the usual exchange of pleasantries, Sir Percy had asked him whether the Euphrates tribes were glad to be free of the Turks and now welcomed the British as their ‘liberators from Turkish oppression’, to which Abu Tabikh replied that, yes indeed, they
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pleased to be free of the Turks but they now expected the promises about ‘freedom’ made in that ‘famous’ proclamation of General Maude on entering Baghdad, to be fully honoured: not exactly the answer Sir Percy was expecting and who now, rather peremptorily, instructed Abu Tabikh to pay a call on Miss Bell herself. On entering Miss Bell’s office, he recalled that he had initially been received with considerable warmth:

She ordered coffee for me and chatted away about current affairs for some time; but then she began to ask me the same questions, more or less, that Sir Percy had asked and I gave her the same reply. I could tell, then, that she was angry, by her facial expression and when she spoke she expressed herself in a manner inappropriate for a political officer, even if she was a woman. I thought there was something coarse about her and that she only had scorn for the Iraqi people. Before I left I said to her, I’m going to give you some advice, you can take it or leave it, but I just want to add this: if you English want to consider me a friend, as his Excellency the Civil
Commissioner put it in his letter, I tell you, a friendship only of individuals will not suffice: instead you must be friends with all the Iraqi people.
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Having politely but coolly said their goodbyes, Abu Tabikh was on the point of leaving the civil commissioner’s HQ when Sir Percy’s Iraqi secretary offered him the same ‘present’ of rupees that had been accepted by those other sheikhly visitors to Sir Percy’s office. But Abu Tabikh once more politely refused, apologising that ‘he had no need of it’. As one who considered himself a ‘man of honour’ he despised those of his class who – in his own disdainful words – had ‘flocked’ to get their bags of rupees. However, Abu Tabikh was still willing to have a cordial relationship with the occupiers; as yet he had not experienced the onerous obligations which, sooner or later, would descend upon the tribal areas, partly as the quid pro quo for those seemingly generous ‘presents’ (whether accepted or not); and neither he nor Miss Bell had any idea that in three years’ time they would be on opposite sides at the beginning of a bloody and brutal armed struggle.