He expressed the greatest regret at hearing that I was going to Halabja, for he had found one, he said, whom, both as neighbour and as friend, he had begun to value as only a lonely stranger can prize the acquaintance of another stranger. He did not attempt to dissuade me, for he himself had been to Halabja and had partaken of the hospitality of the Lady of Halabja—the wife of Uthman Pasha, whose name is famous in Kurdistan. The less did he lament my departure for Halabja, he said, that he knew the climate of that place would induce me to return to Sulaimania, when we should again meet.
The old man loved to talk of Constantinople and the West, and found in me the rare traveller in Kurdistan who had seen these places, and could converse about them as one familiar with the subject. These topics had drawn us together, and he was soon pouring out his woes to me. He had been appointed accountant of Halabja when in Constantinople. Travelling thence, alone, via his native place, Tripoli in Africa, he had reached Halabja four months after he had started. The Kurds would not consent to his presence amongst them, for he was a Turk, and they found the means to make him leave. Speaking not a word of Kurdish or Persian, he found himself among a hostile people, with whom he could not even communicate. So he returned to Sulaimania, and was appointed “mudir” of Gulambar, the old capital of Shahr-i-Zur. This post also he could not take up, for the Kurds equally refused to have a Turkish official in their midst. He also became very ill, and lay, alone, in his cell in the serai for six weeks, living upon a little curds and bread, brought to him by the serai-keeper. He was now appointed mudir of Serajiq, a village east of Sulaimania, but the state of the country and a lack of the necessary instructions kept him in Sulaimania; and all the time he had received no pay. He lived upon a little bread, and an occasional “kebab” from the bazaar, making his principal meal the dinner he found in the public guest-room of the shaikhs’ house, to which he went every evening. His days he spent in praying, and washing, and mending his clothes (he was scrupulously clean), making coffee, and wandering round the town, calling upon the Turkish officials and clerks.
MUSTAFA BEG
At times he would sit, melancholy, almost weeping, thinking of the distances and deserts that separated him from his native place and his family, and wonder how he, with the feebleness of advanced age upon him, could go back again. His only wish was to see the Mediterranean once more before he died; and he would tremble as he thought of the savage people among whom he was thrown, and the ridicule with which they met his attempts at intercourse with them.
Our friendship was like to have been a little shaken by the discovery that I was a Shi’a Muhammadan, and I was subjected to close examination upon the tenets of “The Sect of Twelve” before he would be convinced of the fundamental orthodoxy of my faith. His greatest objection was to seeing me pray with my arms beside me instead of folded before me, and to the perfunctory ablution which passes as sufficient among the Shi’a.
He produced a Quran, and finding our opinions did not differ upon it, reinstated me wholly in his affections, with many ejaculations of: “The stranger shall be merciful to the stranger.”
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER IX:
[50] Also during the few years in the first half of the century that Sulaimania was in Persian hands.
[51] “Amru, ’l ghaib wa ’l mustaqbal.”
[52] A notable instance of this peculiarity of Abdul Hamid’s policy was Ibrahim Pasha, the Kurdish rebel of Harran, whose history is set forth in Mr Fraser’s Short Cut to India.