The Weight of a Mustard Seed Read Online Free

Medina is worth 10,000, the same in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. A prayer in a mosque is worth twenty-seven prayers compared to a single prayer at home.”
    PHOTOGRAPH: A black and white snap from the sixties with a white border: Um Omar, then a university student called Shamh, young and curvy, squeezed into a dark pencil skirt and a cropped jacket with a cinched waist, is standing on the street. Her dark hair is swept up into a big beehive, her eyes are drawn with kohl like a movie star and her lashes are thick with spiky mascara. She is smiling at the camera as if she is pretending to be annoyed with it for catching her.
    â€œI didn’t wear hijab then.” Um Omar and I were sitting together, talking alone. I had told her I wanted to hear everything from the beginning, how she had grown up, how she had met her husband, and I had asked her if she had any old photograph albums.
    â€œNot many,” said Um Omar, and then she had gone inside and come back with a box of loose snaps. Fingering this one, she regarded her younger Shamh self fondly and then said, with jokey self-admonishment, “If my husband had been a religious man back then, he would never have married me!”
    Um Omar sat closer to me and laughed at another era and her memories.
    â€œI am glad Ahmed isn’t here…,” she suppressed a smile. Ahmed would certainly have frowned.
    Shamh had gone to Baghdad University to train as a teacher; none of her sisters had gone to university—education was her abiding ambition. When she was in her second year she began to notice a young man from the neighborhood following her. She would see him at the bus stop wearing his police uniform. She was flattered by his attention, but she did not speak to him until he sat next to her on the bus one day, told her his name was Kamel and recounted his virtues and his circumstances and said he would like to marry her. Shamh was pleased, his speech showed that his intentions were honorable, the Sachets werea known family. Shamh confided in her sister-in-law his attentions, and after a short time, he formally brought his parents to meet her parents. Shamh agreed to marry him on one condition: that he bought her a house so that they could live independently, but Kamel could not afford a house on his policeman’s salary and so the plans for engagement were stalled.
    Um Omar covered her mouth with her hand in a conspiratorial whisper, and explained, in mock-rueful horror at her own disrespect, the difference between her family, urban and established, and his family, recent immigrants from the village with Bedu manners. “You know I did not want to live with his family; his parents were a bit Araby !”
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    K AMEL S ACHET HAD been born in 1947 in the village of Hor Rajab, the third son of an illiterate farmer’s family. Life was as plain and poor as it had been for generations. Hor Rajab was only twenty kilometers from Baghdad, but there was no road or electricity or radio or even a mosque. On Fridays the village sheikh would climb a small hill and make the call to prayer without a megaphone and prayer would be held in one of the rooms of the low mud-built schoolhouse.
    Kamel was tall for his age and quiet, even as a child, to the point of taciturn. His life was barefoot and dishdasha , blackboard and chalk, elder brothers and father, cold in the winter and burning in the summer. The government provided lunch for schoolboys: eggs, oranges, bread and milk and a daily spoon of cod liver oil that they called caviar and hated the smell of. Lessons taught by the sheikh, reading and writing and the Koran, chores at home and play. The boys in the village made their own footballs out of bundled bits of rag and scraps of shoe leather tied up with heavy string. One time a camel caravancame to the village and they scooped up tufts of camel hair and mashed it with camel milk and packed it hard to dry and make a rubbery ball that bounced, but the