same-sex family members. Industry and responsibility were stressed. Girls learned to prepare food from scratch, to manage household chores like cleaning the compound, laundering, and making dung patties for fuel, to collect reeds, to care for chickens or turkeys, to assist in the harvest, and, perhaps most important of all, to guard the family resources. Women had to assure that resources lasted from one harvest (or, rarely, one paycheck) to the next. Girls also learned proper behavior, which included the subtle influencing of male behavior and the outcome of events. Boys learned agricultural methods, the care of livestock, fishing and hunting, proper village behavior—especially the etiquette for participation in discussions in the mudhif—and the special crafts, if any, of their fathers. During their training, children learned what it means to be a man or woman through close and extended association with the parent of their own sex.
Children go to work at a very early age, learning and doing at once. There are many helpful jobs a child of seven or eight can do—herding animals, looking for eggs, and helping to plant or cook. Through constant association with their father or mother children learn their proper roles in the household and the village; they learn to be useful and to contribute to the family’s well being. Children as young as 7 or 8 usually participate in serious family decisions; they are very much a part of the family unit, providing services and sometimes wages which help to make the family economically viable.
Formal schools for both boys and girls, provided by the central government, are within walking distance of most villages. These schools teach the skills of reading, writing, and figuring, and they give students some knowledge of their government and some understanding of the Quran. The most common method of learning is to recite the lesson aloud. Foreign teachers, usually from Egypt, almost inevitably staff schools and children attend them for several years: girls until about 8 or 9 and boys until about 12 or 13. Local parents curtail their daughters’ education because they are concerned about the girls’ honor. Bright boys are able to graduate from the country schools to regular or technical secondary schools in nearby towns.
A major rite for boys is circumcision. In two of the villages around al-Hiba in the late 1960s circumcision took place near the age of puberty, somewhat later than in most places in the Middle East. Children expect it and prepared for it by mastering self-control. The local barber usually performs the operation in the village square. He uses a razor, but no anesthetic. Stoicism is required: boys are expected not to wince or make a sound or even let a tear inadvertently escape their eye. By showing no signs of pain during the operation, boys prove themselves brave men. Unfortunately, infections often set in because the procedure was carried out under far from sterile conditions. Some of these infections were serious enough to cause deformity or even death. Once the magic of our antibiotic powders was discovered, nearby villages tended to postpone these ceremonies until the excavation was running, assuring themselves access to our supplies if they are needed for their sons. The man who performs the circumcision in the nearest village makes the donated antibiotic powder a part of the official proceedings.
With the onset of puberty, boys usually enjoy greater freedom than they had known in their youth. They are almost never punished now: they have learned to act according to the dictates of honor, to work well and industriously, and never to pilfer from members of friendly clans. When they complete their assigned work they are free to come and go as they please without explanation. Such freedom is considered necessary for men in order to develop self-control.
Girls, on the other hand, have their freedom restricted at puberty. Even a slightly sullied reputation seriously limits a young girl’s marital choices, if it does not preclude her marriage altogether. Therefore girls seldom leave the immediate neighborhood. When they venture out of their family’s courtyard they usually do so to work in their family’s fields or to collect reeds and sedges from the marshes near their homes. Even then they must wear the abaya and use it to hide their faces as well as their bodies.
In the area of al-Hiba where the dictates of religion are seriously adhered to, the onset of puberty can make life very difficult for young people. The Quran completely forbids any sort of sexual pleasure outside of marriage. There is no practice of masturbation, nor is there a word for it. One young man who worked for the excavation went into the most abject despondence I have ever seen, which lasted for nearly two weeks. When I inquired about the reason, Muhammad told me that the boy had exploded, that is, he had experienced a wet dream. His shame over this experience was acute. To avoid unwanted thoughts, it seemed to me, young men became punctilious about their religious conduct, spending their evening hours studying the Quran or singing religious songs.
Death
When an individual approaches death he or she is rolled onto their right side facing Mecca. Gunshots and the wailing of grief-stricken family members signal death. While the corpse is being washed by the womenfolk and wrapped in cloth, family friends go down to the banks of the canal to arrange transportation for the corpse to the huge cemetery in the holy city of Najaf, in southern Iraq, where those Shia who can afford it are buried near the tomb of the martyr Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. Those whose families could not afford the trip, more women than men, were buried in a local cemetery. The dead person, whose family could afford it, was accompanied to the boat by male relatives and friends, shooting their guns and singing hosas of mourning. The ululation and mourning of the women could be heard from the dead person’s home where women wailed, scratched their faces with their fingernails, and heaped dirt on their heads. The bodies of men and those few women who were to be buried at Najaf were accompanied aboard the boat by grieving relatives and transported to the dock near Shatra. There a taxicab driver, who brought a wooden coffin, met the corpse, the coffin most often belonged to the driver, and he rented it to the grieving relatives for the trip to Najaf. The body was placed in the coffin, which was then lashed to the roof of the taxi for the trip. The deceased was accompanied by relatives, but fewer than those who had accompanied the body to the dock, for the number of mourners were usually limited to those who could fit inside the taxi. When the body reached its final destination, I was told, it was removed from the coffin and buried in the soil in its cloth wrapping. The owner of the coffin retrieved it and was free to rent it again. It was the responsibility of the members of the clan to assist with the expenses of transporting the body to Najaf and those of the three-day mourning period. All families who had either a relationship with the dead person or with other members of the immediate family were expected to attend the mourning ceremonies and offer gifts, which were usually cigarettes or coffee.
For most women and those men unable to afford transportation and burial at Najaf, the only alternative was a small cemetery on the village outskirts. Although some locally buried bodies were bedecked with mud imitations of the jewelry they wore in life, this never occurred, to my knowledge, with the bodies sent to Najaf.
Local burials were quickly made in the 1960s, and those family members lucky enough to have a job soon returned to their daily activities. One of our pot washers, a lad about 9 years old, asked one day if we would permit him to have an hour off. A few moments later I saw him with a small group of people on “cemetery hill.” He returned in about 45 minutes.
“Did someone in your family die?” I asked him.
“Oh yes,” he said, “my mother.”
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked. “Please take the day off. I’m so sorry.”
“Oh no,” he said. “That’s not necessary, God is good.”
He sat down before a pile of potsherds and went on with his work.
The Mi’dan
The Mi’dan, sometimes known as Marsh Arabs, depend on the watery environment of the marshes for their way of life. They keep water buffalo, which provide them with fuel and milk, and have even taught these semi-domesticated creatures how to forage beneath the water’s surface for succulent reed
