Haunted histories and ambiguous burial ... - UCL Discovery

Spring 2016 ORAL HISTORY 37

The town of Shaqlawa [ ] lies 400 kilometresdue north of Baghdad, fifty kilometres northeast ofIrbil, in the region of Kurdistan, Iraq. This articleconcerns the oral histories of a graveyard, known asthe Sahaba Cemetery [ ], on the outskirtsof Shaqlawa.

Purportedly a burial ground for soldiers of theArab-Islamic armies who originally conquered the areain the seventh century CE, this memorial space is thesubject of local traditions that portray it as both a targetfor well-deserved defilement and a hallowed groundwith its own uniquely supernatural properties. TheSahaba Cemetery’s status as an equivocal site – a fixedpoint of reference around which divergent historieshave accumulated – renders it especially relevant to theregion’s past, present and future. These divergenthistories variously cast the cemetery as a supernaturallysafeguarded resting place of saintly conquerors, or asa reminder of a regional, cultural exceptionalism pitted

against an intrusive force akin to today’s Islamic State.In the generation following the death of

Mohammed (632 CE), his successors led the Arab-Islamic armies eastward into the Sassanian empire andwestward into North Africa. Within three decades, theearliest caliphs had extended their control from theMuslim hub of western Arabia to encompass a vastswathe of territory, stretching between present dayTunisia and central Asia. According to conventional,written histories, the mountainous region that includesthe town of Shaqlawa was subjugated by the caliphOmar (alternatively transliterated as Umar, who ruledfrom 634 to 644 CE), when the Kurdish tribes alignedthemselves with the Sassanian Persians.

Shaqlawa, then part of a Median province, wasoverrun by Arab-Islamic forces en route to the city andplain of Shahrazor. The chain of valleys whereShaqlawa lies nestled between Mount Safeen and theSork Ridge seem to have formed something of a corri-

Haunted histories and ambiguous burialgrounds in Iraqi Kurdistanby Nahro Zagros, Tyler Fisher and Muslih Mustafa

Abstract: As part of a wider research project that documents site-specific oral history associatedwith caves and cemeteries among the rapidly changing populations of Iraqi Kurdistan, the presentstudy analyses oral histories and traditions concerning one particular graveyard. Reputed to be theburial site of seventh century Muslim conquerors, this graveyard is concomitantly preserved by tabooand subject to transgressive acts. This article discusses the anachronisms that underpin thecemetery’s reputation, the aetiological functions of the local lore and the shifting significance of thememorial space in relation to current events. As the region faces the menace of the self-declaredIslamic State, this cemetery has become a locus for reconsidering allegiances and identities withregard to the past and present.

Key words: Kurdistan; graves; memorial; taboo and profanation; Islamic conquest; Sahaba; Islamic State

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dor for successive waves of invasion and subjugation.But the earliest written accounts of the Arab-Islamicconquest were not set down until almost 200 yearsafter the fact. Moreover, lands like that of present-dayKurdistan were peripheral, in terms of both geographyand historiography. Far removed from the decisivebattles at Qadisiya and Nihavand, far from the grandcapitals and centres of power like Ctesiphon, theyexisted on the fluctuating frontier between the totteringByzantine and Sassanian empires, and consequentlydo not figure prominently in the record of events. Forthese reasons, beyond the general contours outlinedabove, the written histories are murky or entirely silentconcerning the particulars of the Arab-Islamic expan-sion into and through the vicinity of Shaqlawa.1

Sarah Bowen Savant has commented on the waysin which local lore developed in this context: ‘As oneof the most dramatic events in human history, the[Islamic] conquests gave rise to a creative mythologythat long afterward continued to inspire generations oftraditionists, who recalled the events of the conquestsas they negotiated their own loyalties to the Abbasidstate and its successors, to sect and family, and toregion, town, and neighborhood’.2 The present studyshows that, for lands once part of the wider Persianhegemony, Savant’s incisive statement is equally truefor the period prior to the Abbasid Caliphate andremains relevant to the ‘creative mythology’ of today.3

Oral traditions comprise a large part of what weknow concerning the past two millennia in the regionnow called Iraqi Kurdistan. The manner in which suchtraditions are conveyed, reconfigured, and incorpo-rated into oral histories also has profound implicationsfor the present.4 Jan Vansina’s now classic distinctionbetween ‘oral tradition’ and ‘oral history’ is a usefulpoint of departure for understanding the kinds ofcomplex, personal testimonies connected toShaqlawa’s Sahaba Cemetery. Vansina defines theproduct of oral tradition as ‘oral messages based onprevious oral messages, at least a generation old’, whileoral history entails ‘events and situations which arecontemporary, that is, which occurred during the life-time of the informants. This differs from oral traditionsin that oral traditions are no longer contemporary.’5

In Shaqlawa, oral traditions rehearse the events andcircumstances of the initial Arab-Islamic conquest ofthe region in the seventh century; oral histories conveyrecent, personal encounters with the cemetery that theconquest purportedly left in its wake. In practice,however, the distinction is not always clear-cut.6

Although Vansina proposes that the two categories ‘arevery different with regard to the collection of sources aswell as with regard to their analysis’,7 the oral accountsfrom Shaqlawa mingled ancient lore with more imme-diate experience. For these informants, the conquestthat occurred more than thirteen centuries ago holdsan ineluctable relevance, and they perceive it withvarying degrees of distance and immediacy. As we willsee, the supernatural properties which tradition ascribesto the local Sahaba Cemetery grant a particular

contemporaneity to a bygone event. This cemetery, adynamic, interpretive memorial, figures in oral tradi-tions, oral histories and combinations of the two, for itreflects and refracts the community’s present percep-tions of itself, as well as individuals’ retellings of tradi-tions in relation to their own experiences andallegiances.

In December 2014, the authors carried out a seriesof individual and group interviews with adult male resi-dents of Shaqlawa, a town of roughly 25,000 inhabi-tants. The twelve informants were uniformly Kurdishby ethnicity; were Muslim, at least nominally; and, withthe exception of one, were above the age of fifty.Among these twelve, however, levels of education andsocial class ranged from that of an illiterate shepherdwho had no formal schooling, to that of a mukhtar (alocal dignitary, akin to an elected mayor), who wouldhave completed secondary education. A more diversesampling of informants – one that includes women andyouths, for instance – might have yielded significantlydifferent responses.

The demographic parameters of the present studyreflect, in part, the interviewers’ limited access tomembers of the community other than older men. Theinterviewers, both male and both outsiders inShaqlawa, did not gain access to private homes.Cultural norms prevented interviews with women, yetthe interviewers might have eventually been able tointerview women if accompanied by their familymembers or in groups, after spending more time in thetown.8 Such limitations meant that the authors, on theadvice of local historian Sarbaz Majid Omer, soughttheir informants in public settings, beginning with thekobunewey ewaran [ ], or evening gath-erings – a traditional context for communal story-telling, in which men gather near the wall of themosque, public building or tea house for conversation.Even individual interviews in or near such settings wereby nature public; in all of the interviews, additionallisteners were never far away. This factor granted thepresent study, almost paradoxically, a wider reach withpotentially greater inhibitions. The men conveyed anawareness that they were speaking for themselves and,to a certain degree, to and for their town.

In spite of a population sample that is supposedlyrelatively homogenous, the sheer variety of accountsand perspectives these interviews ultimately obtainedis significant. The interviews elicited a wide array oflore concerning the initial Arab-Islamic expansion intothe region and local repercussions; accounts rangedfrom brief reports of traditions that scarcely constitutea narrative, to personal anecdotes, to traditional tales.The Sahaba Cemetery at the edge of town loomedlarge in their collective memory. It served as a stimulusand focal point for what they related. That acre dottedwith gravestones, the informants concurred, is a burialsite for those who died fighting to extend the dominionand religion of the Rashidun Caliphate into the region.Furthermore, the special status of those buried thereentails an exceptional, supernatural restriction on the

38 ORAL HISTORY Spring 2016



The Sahaba Cemetery in Shaqlawa. Photo: Tyler Fisher, December 2014.

Gravestones in the Sahaba Cemtery. Photo: Tyler Fisher, December 2014.

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use of the site: no other cadavers can be interred in thatplace, for the land will reject such bodies. In spite of aperceived scarcity of suitable land for graves in thevicinity of Shaqlawa, the Sahaba Cemetery remainsoff-limits for fresh burials.

This, in brief, is the oral tradition on which theinterviewees agreed, though they varied in theirpersonal experiences with the Sahaba Cemetery andpresented discrepancies in the degree to which theysubscribed to a belief in the supernatural sanction. Thevariations in their accounts transpose personal andcollective preoccupations onto the cemetery, a locusthat serves to reify shifting patterns of allegiance. Iron-ically, then, this is one patch of ground whose signifi-cance has not been neatly conquered or controlled.

Of stones and stories In contrast to traits normally associated with Muslimcemeteries in the region, the gravestones of the SahabaCemetery, in their present form, bear no apparent mark-ings. No ornamental trees or flowers adorn the gravesiteof these anonymous dead; no one makes weekly visitsfor the upkeep of the place, nor erects fences to delineateplots of familial interest, because no one feels a directfamilial connection to it. There is, nevertheless, a senseof communal caretaking in the mere fact of its preser-vation. Set on a small hill among pasturelands, thisparticular cemetery has been spared, thus far at least,from encroaching development. From the site itself, onecan see recently constructed roads and related elementsof infrastructure, mining operations, housing, sportsfacilities and two neighbouring, modern cemeteries thatshow clear signs of recent use, including fresh graves.But no such developments or interments intrude uponthe present perimeters of the Sahaba Cemetery.

The town of Shaqlawa viewed from the Sahaba Cemetery. Photo: Tyler Fisher, December 2014.

The mukhtar, Hassan Kadr Khdir. Photo: Tyler Fisher,December 2014.

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Nevertheless, several informants conveyed first-hand impressions that the dimensions of the cemeteryor the number of similar cemeteries had been reducedduring their lifetime. ‘Shaqlawa was full of such grave-yards. There are only a few cemeteries left from thegolden days’, according to Abdul Kadr Aziz Taha, whowas born in Shaqlawa in 1932 and had a careerworking on the town’s water and sewage systems.‘There were several cemeteries’, sixty-two-year-oldGazi Saeed Rashid agreed. The consensus among theinterviewees was that the Sahaba Cemetery today is adiminished remnant of what was once a much morenumerous network of analogous burial sites. HassanKadr Khdir, Shaqlawa’s mukhtar, said:

It is the only such cemetery left in Shaqlawa. Thereused to be many more. Although there are scatteredsingle graves around Shaqlawa, this is the only col-lective graveyard. I remember the cemetery beinglarger when I was a child. It extended where thepaved road now runs.

Kadr Hammad, an eighty-two-year-old shepherd,emphasised how the sheer profusion of such graves hasgiven rise to a popular, unofficial name for the valleysthemselves, the Doli Ashaban [ ] or SahabaValleys:

All the way from Shaqlawa to Ranya, there is a chainof valleys called Sahaba Valleys, where there weremany graveyards of Sahaba who died when theycame to Kurdistan. [...] They were fighting the infi-dels.

But the wider Sahaba Cemetery and the other,similar burial sites have since been effaced. They havebeen effaced, moreover, without inciting any apparentretribution from the supernatural forces that protectthe burial place. The hallowed ground could not orsimply has not resisted diminution over time. Ofcourse, it does not substantially matter if the witnesses’recollections concerning a more extensive cemetery ormore abundant graveyards correspond to a veritableobliteration of such sites, or if childhood impressionsonly construe them as having been larger in retrospect.What is important is that a perceived vulnerability toobliteration calls into question the uniquely protectivepowers ascribed to the site – its powers to ward offinapposite bodies.

Regarding the cemetery’s purported powers, theverb the informants used to denote the supernaturalrejection of new burials requires close attention. Theyrepeatedly employed two distinct verbs to expresswhat the sacred ground does to foreign bodies. Themore common of the two was fredan, fredadat, [ ], which denotes rejecting, discardingor throwing out. The other verb phrase was qbul nakat,[ ], signifying that the earth ‘does not accept’the intrusive body. These lexical choices are suffi-ciently abstract and imprecise to allow a broad scope

for imaginative speculation on what form(s) thatrejection might take. The Sahaba Cemetery againshows itself open to interpretation. One couldimagine the ground simply proving impervious toinhumations, for instance, or one could imagine amore active expulsion of the bodies, with projectilepossibilities. The indeterminate verbs for rejection ornon-acceptance can sustain a variety of imagineddeterrents and afflictions for an unwelcome body.

Nor, it seems, is this peculiar burial ground anymore tolerant of living occupants than it is of extrane-ous corpses. Aziz Hassan Kadr, who was born inShaqlawa in 1943, related a tale from ‘a long time ago,when [he] was young’: a man inadvertently built upona Sahaba gravesite.

In the night, a Sahaba came to him in a dream andtold him that he had built his house and farm on aSahaba graveyard. In the morning, the man dug ahole and found a Sahaba, his body intact but bereftof an animating soul.

The implication of this vision and excavation wasthat the man must vacate the sacrosanct space of theSahaba’s gravesite. Still, as long as the introduction ofpersonal property into the Sahaba Cemetery did notconstitute a permanent installation, its protectivepowers also, apparently, extended to safeguardingpersonal effects. The mukhtar recalled that ‘in the olddays, people used to leave their belongings there whenthey went hunting for days at a time, and no one woulddisturb their belongings because they were in a holyplace’.

Aetiologies and anachronismsAside from any supernatural properties, the SahabaCemetery’s explanatory power has preserved it frombeing entirely effaced. In other words, its capacity tolend persuasive force to explanations of past andpresent circumstances has ensured its conservation asboth a physical space and a part of oral tradition. TheSahaba Cemetery serves an aetiological function onboth a micro- and macro-level, on a narrowly local andbroadly national scale. On the most localised level, thetraditions that regard this as a burial ground of seventhcentury Arab-Islamic warriors serve to explain thepresence and preservation of the graveyard on thatparticular site. On the macro-level, the Sahaba Ceme-tery serves to explain the rightness or legitimacy of theIslamic conquest; its status as a sacrosanct space,which supernaturally impedes additional burials,stands as a justification of the presence of those Arabbodies in lands beyond the Tigris. In this way, thecemetery becomes a self-justifying, self-perpetuatingmemorial, but not, as we will see, an uncontestedmemorial.

The explanatory function of the Sahaba Cemeteryrelies on several apparent anachronisms. In terms ofhistoricity, these anachronisms are problematic, yetthey are richly productive. The anachronisms include



the identity of those who are buried in the cemetery,the age of the gravestones and the site’s associationwith Hasan Basri. First, strictly speaking, the Sahabaor Ashab (the conventional transliterations of theArabic term �) were the ‘Companions ofthe Prophet’, that is, Mohammed’s relatives, closestassociates and disciples. Over time, however, the defi-nition of Sahaba broadened to include anyone whohad any contact with Mohammed during his lifetime.9

Among the Kurds of Shaqlawa, the application of theterm has clearly expanded even further. The localusage goes beyond the orthodox acceptation to encom-pass a very extensive group indeed: all members of theconquering armies, some of whom qualified as Sahabasensu stricto, while many, of course, would never havehad contact with Mohammed. This is the first point ofanachronism for Shaqlawa’s Sahaba Cemetery – thecategorical inaccuracy that underlies the very identityof the site. By assuming a closer association withMohammed, by suggesting a closer link to the originsof Islam, the designation as a Sahaba cemetery entailsa heightened status for the space, a space accordinglyendowed with powers of self-preservation or, in effect,deemed worthy of preservation by the community.

Secondly, the vertically erect slabs of sandstone thatpresently mark the purported graves cannot possiblyhave endured the more than thirteen centuries thathave transpired since the conquest by the so-calledSahaba. Relatively friable sedimentary rock of this kindis particularly susceptible to weathering and otherforms of erosion. If this cluster of little monoliths inShaqlawa does, in fact, mark a burial ground for theinvading Arab-Islamic armies of the late seventhcentury, local peoples must have replaced the memorialstones at certain points over time. A more likely expla-nation, however, is that the cemetery has no veritableconnection to the original Arab-Islamic conquests, butis rather a vestige of some relatively minor, forgottenskirmishes of more recent date, perhaps between theOttoman Turks and the Kurdish tribes of the region –skirmishes that resulted in heavy casualties, hastyburials and very little in the way of lasting socio-histor-ical impact. The octogenarian Abdul Kadr Aziz Taha’ssummary concerning the Sahaba Cemetery includes atelling bit of guesswork on this point:

A long time ago, in the Ottoman Empire or before,Muslim invaders came to Shaqlawa and were buriedthere. You cannot bury anyone else there. That iswhat we have always been told and believe.

For this informant, the Sahaba Cemetery is equallylikely to pertain to the time of the Ottomans as to thefirst waves of Islamic expansion. A vague sense ofantiquity, of incursion by outsiders and generalcredence are the important points in his conceptuali-sation of the cemetery’s significance.

One factor that might have influenced the preser-vation of this particular space is its proximity to a smallcave called the Cave of Hasan Basri (referring to al-

Hasan al-Basri, 624-728 CE), located roughly 200metres from the cemetery in a ravine. Among the infor-mants in Shaqlawa, Aziz Hassan Kadr gave a précis ofthe traditions concerning the cave in this way:

Hasan Basri lived in the cave. He was the comman-der of the Sahaba army. He used the cave to rest,pray, worship. It has always been known as the Caveof Hasan Basri.

This is another anachronism that enhances thestatus of the cemetery’s location and reinforces itsassociation with the conquest. The historical HasanBasri pertains to the generation of early Muslims calledal-Tabi’un, the Successors of the Sahaba. The Succes-sors were, technically, two degrees removed fromMohammed, after the true Companions. Although theycould not claim to have had direct contact with theprophet of Islam, the closeness of their associationconferred a level of authority on these saint-likefigures, who were distinguished for their piety andexemplary wisdom.

Hasan Basri did serve with the conquering Arabarmy in what is now Afghanistan and south-easternIran, though his principal activities were fiscal admin-istration and teaching.10 By that time, the lands aroundShaqlawa were under the caliphate, and there is nohistorical record of Hasan Basri’s presence in theregion. It must, nevertheless, be granted that biograph-ical accounts concerning Hasan Basri are largelyinconsistent and contradictory, so it is difficult to ruleout entirely any connection between the historicalpersonage and the cave that now bears his name. Onceagain we find ample latitude in the oral tradition – awillingness to take liberties with time and place in orderto augment the prestige of those associated with thecemetery (the Sahaba, a legendary Hasan Basri) andthereby to enrich the aetiological value of the place.

These anachronisms evince a measure of flexibilityand versatility in how the cemetery and its history areconstrued and negotiated. The gravestones are, afterall, ambiguous, multivalent monuments. On the onehand, they memorialise the resistance, valour and mili-tary prowess of the local, pre-Islamic tribes; as oneinformant said, with an evident sense of patriotism:

There were more Sahaba killed in the Khoshnawarea [Knoshnaw is the name of the predominantlocal tribe] than anywhere else in Kurdistan. We asKhoshnaw people have killed more Sahaba than anyother Kurdish tribes anywhere.

On the other hand, the gravestones are also monu-ments to the justness or legitimacy of the conquest –of the rightness of subjugating those tribes to theconquerors’ rule and religion. These seemingly incon-gruous commemorative functions that inhere in theSahaba Cemetery give rise to a variety of personalreactions, including physical gestures of defiance, asthe Shaqlawa interviews attest. In spite of or because



of its aetiological capacities and its anachronisticunderpinnings, the cemetery occupies a peculiarlyprecarious status between sacred taboo and target forprofanation.

Taboos and transgressionsThe informants’ responses reveal an exceptionalphenomenon in this regard: the Sahaba Cemetery is acontested site that vacillates in its status between tabooand target for defilement, between being a consecratedtract of hallowed ground and an object of desecration.A standard definition of ‘taboo’ (or tabu) in its anthro-pological acceptation gives its meaning as ‘anythingthat is forbidden under supernatural sanction to adher-ents of a religion or members of a community’. Taboosinvolve ‘rules of avoidance, prohibition, or restriction[such as those] regarding a particular ritual state orsetting’.11 The definition fits the sense of interdictionagainst interring new bodies in the Sahaba Cemetery,particularly in the manner in which the threat of super-natural exclusion from the space underwrites thatinterdiction. But this cemetery’s taboo is also one thatis peculiarly vulnerable to violation. Rather than beingdiametrically opposed points on a spectrum, there is athin line here between reverence and sacrilege, betweendevout preservation and dismissive, derisive profana-tion.

Describing acts that ranged from the innocuous tothe more deliberately sacrilegious, the informantsreported challenges to the sacrosanct space. TheSahaba Cemetery, as previously noted, seems to havebeen much more extensive in the past, at least inShaqlawa’s collective memory. Yet the rising tide oferasure by nearby development has met no paranormalresistance at the cemetery. Moreover, ‘children used toplay marbles in the cemetery’, Hassan Kadr Khdir, themukhtar, recalled. He especially associated disregardor defiance of the gravesite with local youth, who pittedtheir rebelliousness against the time-honoured space.Mitigating a personal confession with the first personplural, he admitted: ‘We used to spit on the cemeteryon our way to school’. Thus, the cemetery provedsusceptible to demolition, irreverent incursions, evenphysical contamination.

Naturally, one might expect this testing of the tabooto correlate with an increasing scepticism concerningthe sacred status of the site. But the informantsperceived no neat trend along such lines. Yes, theypointed to a general waning of belief in the supernat-ural sanctions, yet the impulse to preserve the SahabaCemetery persists. ‘It is strange that we now have nomore space for cemeteries, and still no one uses thathill for burial’, Gazi Saeed Rashid remarked. Themukhtar concurred: ‘Even those who do not believe inthe stories are cautious about the area’. According toinformants’ estimations, rather than correlating withdegrees of scepticism, factors such as newcomers’ignorance of the traditions, younger generations’ lackof interest and, perhaps most importantly, shifting atti-tudes towards the Sahaba, would render the cemetery

and its accompanying oral lore vulnerable in the future.‘Of course it will change. Outsiders relocating herehave no connection to this city. People will forget thecemetery’, the mukhtar continued. ‘The stories I tellabout the cemetery are from my father, who heardthem from his father. [...] But when I tell my own chil-dren the stories of my father, they do not care aboutsuch stories.’

As the interview with the mukhtar drew to a close,Mohammed Hassan Ahmad, a local teacher who alsoruns a stationery shop, offered his unsolicitedcomments on the matter:

The place should not be kept as sacred because thosepeople were invaders, enemies who tried to conquerKurdistan. If the government decided to destroy thecemetery, it would not be a loss, nor would it attractmuch opposition from the people. Younger peopleespecially would have no reaction against it, andShaqlawa is not very religious. People always call itthe Cemetery of the Invaders [dagirkaran, alsomeaning ‘occupiers’ ], though somepeople think they were liberators [meaning bearersof a true, enlightened religion].

At the age of forty-three, this was the youngest ofthe informants. His comments crystallised a point oftension that emerged throughout the interviews. Thecemetery is only deserving of respect and preservationif the putative Sahaba died in a rightful conquest of theplace. The taboo only wields power if the Arab-Islamichegemony is perceived as supernaturally endorsed.

Common ground: seeing parallels in the pastGreil Marcus has theorised concerning what he calls‘history as disappearance’:

It’s as if parts of history, because they don’t fit thestory a people wants to tell itself, can survive only ashaunts and fairy tales, accessible only as spectersand spooks. [...] History is a kind of legend, and wedo understand, or sense, buried stories, those hauntsand specters, without quite knowing how or why.12

The traditions concerning the Sahaba Cemetery inShaqlawa do not figure in any official, conventionalhistories; they reflect a complex form of folk religiositythat exists outside of institutionalised religion.13 Yet thiscemetery encapsulates a story that the people ofShaqlawa simultaneously want and do not want to tellthemselves. The deeper, underlying narrative of theSahaba Cemetery is the story of Shaqlawa’scontentious self-perception. Do the Kurds of Shaqlawahold a greater affinity (ethnic, religious or otherwise)with the conquering Sahaba or with the tribes thatresisted those first waves of conquest? Like the ceme-tery itself, is the land still occupied, in some sense, byan alien power?

The informants, taken together, held these alter-natives in tension, and differences are not merely



generational. One can see this by comparing twostatements offered by octogenarians, previouslyquoted in part. The shepherd Kadr Hammad saidthat ‘there were many graveyards of Sahaba who diedwhen they came to Kurdistan. [...] They were fightingthe infidels. [...] They were retreating from the infi-dels’; while Abdul Kadr Aziz Taha stated that ‘Musliminvaders [ ] came to Shaqlawa and wereburied there’. The local peoples who resisted theSahaba, in Kadr Hammad’s version, are ‘infidels’ [ , or ‘enemies’], those outside the faith. In thelatter version, the indigenous resistance is onlyimplied, but the Arab-Islamic forces are clearly cate-gorised as ‘invaders’. Abdul Kadr’s characterisationof the Sahaba, as we have seen, is echoed in the viewsof the teacher who is forty years his junior.

Recent events inflect this depiction of the Sahabaas foreign invaders. At the time of the interviews, theKurdish military was engaged in a desperate counter-offensive to secure their border and drive Islamic Stateforces back towards Mosul. Only months earlier, inAugust 2014, the aspiring caliphate had seized villageswithin thirty miles of Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdis-tan. For most of the informants in Shaqlawa, points ofanalogy between the Sahaba and the self-declaredIslamic State were readily apparent. Gazi Saeed Rashidsaw no difference between the two aggressors, past andpresent:

During Caliph Omar’s rule, his army came to invadeKurdistan. [...] Anyone who refused to convert waskilled. He also killed many Christians. People who con-verted to Islam were left alone. It is the same with IS.

The mukhtar drew a similar parallel between theseventh century conquest and the current situation:

IS is trying to conquer by force like the Sahaba firstdid. When IS came, we first said, ‘This is a fight thatdoes not concern Kurds’. Most were content to letthem go attack Baghdad.’

But the Kurds suddenly found themselvescompelled to defend their territories, putting up a resis-tance that re-enacted the purported genesis of theSahaba Cemetery. One informant pointed out adistinction between the would-be invaders. BakrOsman, a retired policeman, commented:

One cannot say that they [the Sahaba] were thesame as IS. When the Sahaba came, there were noMuslims around, but IS is fighting Muslims.

A group interview in Shaqlawa. Photo: Tyler Fisher, December 2014.

Kadr Hammad. Photo: Tyler Fisher, December 2014.



The difference is one of degree, not of kind, in hisview. The Islamic State, which espouses an extremistinterpretation of Islam, is attacking their more moder-ate co-religionists – the people who accepted orsuccumbed to the religion of the earlier caliphate.

‘Places are not fixed, static, preservable entities’,one theorist of oral history has observed, ‘but more likeprocesses, [...] they are not bounded territories, but arepermeable – they are both shaped by and they shapeother parts of the world.’14 The Sahaba Cemetery, asa semiotic space, retains an acute relevance for thepeople of Shaqlawa. In it, they perceive and negotiatetheir collective histories and identities, as in a micro-cosm that embodies the wider territorial struggle forethnic and political autonomy. The informants’ readi-ness to see analogies in groups across time also showhow the anachronisms inherent in the Sahaba Ceme-tery traditions could have rapidly arisen from changingcircumstances. If today’s informants draw analogiesbetween the Islamic State and the seventh centuryconquerors, a similar telescoping or conflation ofhistorical events might have mapped an Ottomanincursion or even more recent conflicts onto the versa-tile graveyard.

Regarding his experience during the armed,internecine conflicts between the Kurdistan Democra-tic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in the1990s, one informant, Aziz Hassan Kadr, related inpassing, ‘I was hiding in a cave and found some oldarrowheads and gathered them, which just confirmsthat this has been a bloody place around Shaqlawa.’The cluster of gravestones, like Aziz’s arrowheads,encapsulate the history of conflict in this contestedregion; as a memorial that offers chronological andhermeneutic flexibility, the Sahaba Cemetery is a focalpoint for the active interpretation of these conflicts.

Conclusion: living historyThis article has referred to a region that is presentlydesignated Iraqi Kurdistan. At the time of this writing,that is its official name, but the question of its statusas a semi-autonomous region or as an emerging nationstate in its own right remains a volatile one. A success-ful transition from a stateless nation to a nation statewill depend, in part, on cultural allegiances that godeeper than mere political decrees. Oral histories, likethose concerning the Shaqlawa Cemetery, might wellshape the course of history to come, for these unwrit-

ten stories express and condition the Kurds’ varyingdegrees of affinity with or alienation from the IraqiArab regions, culturally and politically. Oral history, inthis case, holds a striking, current relevance.

At the dawn of oral history’s emergence as a disci-pline, John Marshall made the following prescientprediction: ‘As oral study develops, it will provide richand living data [...]; the local (or regional) historian,using oral history as his tool, can supply the sense ofplace that is often missing.’15 More recently, ShelleyTrower has underscored how ‘oral history providesunique insights into places’. She argues that ‘place andoral history can both have active, interactive roles. Oralhistory can help articulate how people experienceplaces, can change perceptions and understandings ofplaces’. But a local, place-specific focus need notpreclude an awareness of how that rich, living data mayhave wider regional, even global resonance: ‘oralhistory can develop in-depth knowledge of localities,re-establishing the connection between the local andoral in new ways and with new relevance in a globalcontext.’16 The potential these theorists and practition-ers recognise in oral history’s applications plays out inthe highly localised Shaqlawa interviews and theirwider relevance to emerging Kurdish autonomy,fraying ties with Baghdad and the Kurdish counter-offensive against the Islamic State.

The oral histories and traditions concerning theSahaba Cemetery of Shaqlawa are no mere relics of anall-but-forgotten past. They also provide a livingbarometer, as it were, of current and historic senti-ments among the conduits of these oral histories –dynamic perspectives on how the local peoples, partic-ularly Kurds, see themselves in relation to the Arabethnic groups of the south and west of Iraq. As we haveseen, current events inflect the informants’ interpreta-tion of this space and of those buried there. Were thosewho are now buried in the Sahaba Cemetery rightfulconquerors or wrongful intruders? Were they bearersof divine truth or imperial militants, akin to those whonow menace the region in the ranks of the self-declaredIslamic State?

The answers are not, as the figurative idiom inEnglish would have it, written in stone. Rather, theanswers are negotiated in a field of brittle sandstone,where the sacred and the profane exist in tension anda community’s voices convey the events of a pre-liter-ate era that still echo in today’s headlines.

AcknowledgementsResearch for this article was carried outwith funding from Soran University andthe Kurdish Regional Government. Theauthors are grateful to Sarbaz MajidOmer, who first introduced them to theoral history of the Sahaba Cemetery.

NotesHans J Nissen and Peter Heine, From1.

Mesopotamia to Iraq: A Concise History,

Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press, 2009, pp 134-43;Kaveh Farrokh, Shadows in the Desert:Ancient Persia at War, Oxford: Osprey,2007, pp 262-72; Michael Eppel,‘Historical setting: the roots of modernKurdish nationalism’, in Ofra Bengio(ed), Kurdish Awakening: NationBuilding in a Fragmented Homeland,Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014,pp 37-62.

Sarah Bowen Savant, The New2.Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran:Tradition, Memory, and Conversion,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2013, p 91.

Savant’s study focuses on the3.cultural aftermath of the conquestamong Iran’s Persians in the ninththrough the eleventh centuries CE.These centuries comprised the height ofthe Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258 CE),



during which post-conquest Iran wasbrought firmly within the Islamic fold.The Kurds of Shaqlawa, by contrast,date their effective Islamisation to anearlier time, under the RashidunCaliphate (632-661 CE), to which theyattribute the Sahaba Cemetery. TheRashidun Caliphate comprised thereigns of the four immediate successorsto Mohammed. A helpfully accessibleguide to the successive caliphates canbe found in John L Esposito (ed), TheIslamic World: Past and Present, Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2004, sv‘Caliphate’.

Christine Allison charts the rich legacy4.of verbal artistry in Kurdish culture – alegacy that endures, albeit precariously,in spite of predictions of its decline:‘Kurdish oral literature’, in Philip GKreyenbroek and Ulrich Marzolph (eds),Oral Literature of Iranian Languages:Kurdish, Pashto, Balochi, Ossetic;Persian and Tajik: Companion Volume IIto A History of Persian Literature, NewYork and London: IB Tauris, 2010, pp33-69. See also the chapter on thistopic in Robert L Brenneman, As Strongas the Mountains: A Kurdish CulturalJourney, Long Grove, Illinois: WavelandPress, 2009, pp 51-66. For efforts todocument Kurdish oral traditions andoral histories in the wider diaspora, seeGina Lennox (ed), Fire, Snow andHoney: Voices from Kurdistan, Sydney:Halstead Press, 2001; and Philip GKreyenbroek, Yezidism in Europe:Different Generations Speak about TheirReligion, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,2009.

Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History,5.Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,1985, pp 3, 12-13.

Recent theorists have called6.attention to the potential for overlapbetween oral tradition and oral history.See Ruth Finnegan, Oral Traditions andthe Verbal Arts: A Guide to ResearchPractices, London: Routledge, 1992, pp 44-45; and Lynn Abrams, Oral HistoryTheory, London: Routledge, 2010, pp 25-26.

Vansina, 1985, p 13. 7.The lack of women among the8.

informants for the present study is a gapthat calls for further investigation.Christine Allison has reported thatKurdish women express shame aboutoral performances before a mixedaudience, yet can reveal a vastrepertoire of oral lore when theiraudience is limited to other women orchildren: ‘Folklore and fantasy: thepresentation of women in Kurdish oraltradition’, in Shahrzad Mojab (ed),Women of a Non-State Nation: TheKurds, Costa Mesa: Mazda Press,2001, p 184, pp 181-194.

Azim Nanji, The Penguin Dictionary of9.Islam, London: Penguin, 2008, sv‘Companions of the Prophet’; Fu’adJabali, The Companions of the Prophet:A Study of Geographical Distribution andPolitical Alignments, Leiden and Boston:Brill, 2003, pp 41-55.

Suleiman Ali Mourad, Early Islam10.Between Myth and History: Al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 110H / 728 CE) and theFormation of His Legacy in ClassicalIslamic Scholarship, Leiden and Boston:

Brill, 2006, pp 1-16, 23-25.Robert L Winzeler, Anthropology and11.

Religion, second edition, Lanham andPlymouth: AltaMira, 2012, pp 130,292.

Greil Marcus, The Dustbin of12.History, Cambridge, Massachusetts:Harvard University Press, 1995, p 24.

This particular dimension of the oral13.lore concerning the Sahaba Cemeterycorroborates what Sarah C Williams hasasserted in the pages of this journal:oral history ‘offers a medium by which tocounterbalance the opinions of thesocio-religious commentators and toexplore para-institutional expressions ofreligiosity in some depth’ (in ‘Theproblem of belief: the place of oralhistory in the study of popular religion’,Oral History, vol 24, no 2, 1996, pp 27-34). The local definition of Sahaba, aswe have seen, goes beyond theorthodox categorisation, while thecontested taboo operates outside ofcanonical Islamic teachings concerningtransgressions and retribution. Thesubtly heterodox aspects of Shaqlawa’stradition grant it a dynamic vigour.

Shelley Trower (ed), Place, Writing,14.and Voice in Oral History, Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p 12.

John Marshall, ‘The sense of place,15.past society and the oral historian’, OralHistory, vol 3, no 1, 1975, pp 19-25.

Trower (ed), 2011, pp 2-3.16.

Addresses for correspondence:[email protected]@[email protected]


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