Beyond the Pale
“Two days into my stay, the villagers fall over one another to share with me the rumors that Abdel Jameela is in fact distantly related to the esteemed Assad clan. By my third day in Beit Zujaaj, several of the Assads, omniscient as “important” families always are in these piles of cottages, have accosted me to deny the malicious whispers. No doubt they are worried about the bad impression such an association might make on me, favorite physicker of the Caliph’s own son.
The latest denial comes ...from Hajjar al-Assad himself, the middle-aged head of the clan and the sort of half-literate lout that passes for a shaykh in these parts. Desperate for the approval of the young courtier whom he no doubt privately condemns as an over-schooled sodomite, bristle-bearded Shaykh Hajjar has cornered me in the village’s only café—if the sitting room of a qat-chewing old woman can be called a café by anyone other than bumpkins.
I should not be so hard on Beit Zujaaj and its bumpkins. But when I look at the gray rock-heap houses, the withered gray vegetable-yards, and the stuporous gray lives that fill this village, I want to weep for the lost color of Baghdad.MoreLess
The latest denial comes ...from Hajjar al-Assad himself, the middle-aged head of the clan and the sort of half-literate lout that passes for a shaykh in these parts. Desperate for the approval of the young courtier whom he no doubt privately condemns as an over-schooled sodomite, bristle-bearded Shaykh Hajjar has cornered me in the village’s only café—if the sitting room of a qat-chewing old woman can be called a café by anyone other than bumpkins.
I should not be so hard on Beit Zujaaj and its bumpkins. But when I look at the gray rock-heap houses, the withered gray vegetable-yards, and the stuporous gray lives that fill this village, I want to weep for the lost color of Baghdad.MoreLess
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