BAGHDAD, 27 October 2003 — The fat man in the parking lot of the Babylon Hotel was dancing like a bulldog in a cartoon, index finger twirling in the air, hips swiveling below. A snare drum snapped out a rhythm from the desert. A young man with a red face coaxed a sinuous arabesque from a battered trumpet.
And here came the bride.
Wrestling her hoop skirt out from the back seat of a decorated BMW, she wore a henna tattoo on her upper arm, a dusting of glitter on the base of her throat and a mask of hardened white powder on a china doll face frozen either by the makeup or the scene unfolding on a patch of asphalt already crowded with three other weddings, each as raucous as hers.
In Iraq, weddings are back.
Freed of an onerous Baath Party bureaucracy that sought to regulate even the most fundamental aspects of Iraqi life — such as who married whom — Iraqis lately are tying the knot in numbers not seen in recent memory.
Before President Saddam Hussein was toppled, the ruling party imposed a complex and strict set of matrimonial rules on Iraqis, particularly on members of the military. And since military service was compulsory for Iraqi men, the effects were pervasive. Now civil servants estimate at least twice as many couples are registering for marriage as were a year ago.
Precise comparisons are impossible, marriage records having gone up in the flames that consumed government buildings when looters ravaged the city in the days after US troops took Baghdad.
“Because Saddam is gone, now I’m getting married!” said Wasim Adel, 27, beaming beside his bride, Sheelan Shafeeq, 18, in a crowded corridor at Karrada city hall, which serves a neighborhood in central Baghdad. The hallway was jammed with couples making their way from the office of the registration clerk to the office of the judge who would perform a civil ceremony. Four couples waited ahead of Adel and Shafeeq.
“There is no comparison between now and before,” said Kamel Abbas Tammimi, Karrada’s senior judge. “Now there are no obstacles.”
In a country still weighing the pros and cons of the US occupation, the liberty to wed as one chooses — or as one’s family chooses — counts as a definite plus, Iraqis agree. The armored patrols of an occupation army may offend national dignity. Electricity might yet flicker away without notice. And the streets of Baghdad still echo after dark with the fire of assault rifles set to full automatic.
But on Thursday and Monday nights — considered by Muslims the most fortuitous days to wed — much of the bang-bang is the sound of Iraqis whooping it up. The traditional wedding procession requires, in addition to a nice sedan, at least one rented bus jammed with celebrants hanging out the windows, firing the family Kalashnikov into the autumn night. “I’m very happy,” said Adel, his green eyes shining.
He met Shafeeq a year ago in the Baghdad neighborhood where they both grew up. “A love relationship,” Adel explained with a shy smile, meaning the bride and groom chose one another. Across Iraq, many marriages are arranged by fathers looking to cement alliances between families. Many other couples choose their mates from the orbit of extended family, voluntarily limiting potential partners to cousins.
But within weeks of clapping eyes on each other, Adel and Shafeeq knew they wanted to wed. Only Saddam’s government stood in their way. “Because I was a soldier in the military, I couldn’t get married,” Adel said. “There would be many difficulties.”
One was money. Soldiers were paid about $8 a month — no kind of income to start a household. And because the country was so often at war — three times in 23 years — tours tended to stretch on. “We spent our whole life in the military and didn’t get a chance to wed,” said Sabah Abdulhussein, whose marriage was delayed eight years by the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
The trickiest hitch, however, was paperwork. Members of the armed forces required clearance from the ministries of defense and health, which often batted applications between them. Civilians had to prove they had served in the military before a wedding was approved.
Iraqis who made the military their career faced more arduous reviews. The Defense Ministry’s legal officers had to sign off, but only after declaring the bride suitable — which involved intelligence agents fanning out to investigate. “They would go to neighbors and ask about her reputation,” said Sahera Ehsan, Adel’s mother.
Kurdish ancestry was a sure stopper, Iraq’s ethnic Kurds being notoriously rebellious as a group. Any hint of politics doomed a match. A woman whose uncle was condemned by Saddam’s notorious Revolutionary Court could expect to pass life as a spinster.
“We used to have complications and difficulties in front of the couples,” said Esa Abdullah Jaburi, a normally effervescent family law judge who turned pensive at the memory. “I witnessed a few sad things.”
It all changed with Saddam’s fall. The Iraqi Army was disbanded by the US occupation force, so proof of military service is no longer required. A good thing for Adel, who deserted, confident along with thousands of fellow government employees that the Baathists’ days were numbered.
“Because there was no Defense Ministry, no one could chase him,” said his smiling father, Adel Shaker Shuker.
Now we just ask for a health report,” said Jaburi, the chief judge.
And so the couples flock to the hallway outside the office of whichever judge is assigned to weddings. One recent day, it was a courtly, silver-haired jurist named Abdul Bari Aziz, who signaled his readiness by pressing a button on his desk. From a box above the door, a chime played, “Theme From Love Story.”
The couples edged into an office so new the brass hatrack was still wrapped in plastic. “They looted the chairs,” a judge explained. “They looted the (air-conditioning). Even the Qur’an.”
A new one lay on the desk, however, wrapped in green cloth. One of the two witnesses reached across to hand over the paper from the registration office.
With a flourish, the judge made an entry in the ledger open before him. Then, reading from a standard form, he asked the bride and the groom if they accepted one another, nodded at the replies, then called for a moment of prayer. Everyone in the room opened their palms toward heaven. And it was done.
If an older woman was in the room, an abrupt, happy ululation served as punctuation.