Between Two Worlds
Between Two Worlds
“I never had to put together the body of one of my family members like a puzzle after it had been hacked apart. I never had to spend years going from prison to prison in hopes of finding alive a son who had been snatched away from our dinner table by the Mukhabarat. I was one of the lucky ones, one of his “beloved ones.” I was guarded by the very secret police Amo used to terrorize others. There are times I cannot stop sobbing when I think about the crimes he committed against the Iraqi people. But I couldn’t cry then. I couldn’t even imagine being able to express any feelings at injustice. I just processed such horror stories as information. We were surrounded by stories of people going to prison for simply making a joke about someone in Amo’s family or for criticizing a single thing he did.
Any society that stops questioning its leaders is vulnerable to dictatorship, and Amo used our own traditions against us to help instill and perpetuate fear. To the traditional concept of ayeb, wh...ich dealt with things that were forbidden by cultural courtesies, and haram, which dealt with things that were forbidden by religion, Amo seemed to add a third, mamnu’a, which just meant forbidden.MoreLess
Any society that stops questioning its leaders is vulnerable to dictatorship, and Amo used our own traditions against us to help instill and perpetuate fear. To the traditional concept of ayeb, wh...ich dealt with things that were forbidden by cultural courtesies, and haram, which dealt with things that were forbidden by religion, Amo seemed to add a third, mamnu’a, which just meant forbidden.MoreLess
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