One afternoon when Phebe Marr was 12, she went alone to the movies in Mount Vernon, N.Y., where she grew up, to see the classic "The Thief of Baghdad." Captivated by special effects and tales set under starry nights with genies leaping out of lamps and sultans chasing pirates on the high seas, she sat through a second screening until her parents came looking for her.
"Otherwise, there is no Middle East in my background. I am a WASP, of Anglo-Saxon stock," said Marr as she sampled tea sandwiches at the Mayflower Hotel and traced her 50 years as a traveling scholar and expert on the region.
Phebe Marr has written and taught extensively on the history of Iraq and its emergence as an oil-rich state.
(Emilie Sommer -- The Washington Post)
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Marr, 71, has written, taught and testified extensively on one of the most controversial Arab countries, Iraq, and its emergence as an oil-rich state searching for identity through colonial rule, monarchy, Arab nationalism and revolution. As she updates her book, "The Modern History of Iraq," she insists that a lot remains to be discovered.
With the war well underway, Marr, who is also a frequent commentator on ABC, said she fears the outcome of street-to-street fighting in Baghdad. She said that Iraq initially will need help setting up new institutions but that U.S. troops should leave the country as soon as possible.
Iraqis are ambivalent about the U.S. presence but yearn for change, she said. Saddam Hussein has tapped into a strong nationalist streak, Marr explained, but the United States can tap into desires for liberation.
"We have to stick there long enough to get a change and put in something better with an Iraqi face on it. Iraqis are not ready. They do need help, whether they want it or not," she said.
When she was a student at Barnard College, a history course stirred her interest in the Middle East and in the carving up of the former Ottoman Empire into new Arab states.
After graduating in 1953, Marr studied Arabic as a prelude to a master's program in Middle Eastern studies at Radcliffe. In 1956 she obtained a travel grant from Harvard University, where she completed her doctorate in 1967.
Armed with her Arabic dictionary and a stubborn passion for discovery, she headed to Beirut in 1956, arriving at her destination during the Suez Canal crisis. She wrote for an English-language newspaper, socialized with intellectuals from the American University of Beirut and dabbled in teaching English. But she found the place too familiar, too Western.
"I went to restaurants and parties," Marr said. "I stayed there and absorbed things but told myself this is not the traditional Middle East. I longed to go live in a village and get immersed in Arabic to improve my skills, to loosen my ear and tongue."
Her opportunity came that year when she met a member of the Iraqi parliament, Feisal Al Damaliji, who invited her to stay with his family in Baghdad.
Her first three years in the Arab world were as fascinating as any American student bent on getting immersed in Arabic could have hoped.
She visited the village of Tikrit, Hussein's home town. She spent six months as a guest of a Shiite Muslim tribal chief, observing Bedouin traditions and religious rituals. She experienced life in Baghdad during the last year of the monarchy and from her rooftop witnessed executions during the bloody ouster of Iraq's royals.
She still wanted to get her rural experience. Saad Jabr, the son of Iraq's first Shiite prime minister, Salih Jabr, whose family hailed from southern Iraq, set her up as the guest of a clan related to Balassem Yasin, an influential tribal chief.
With a few peasant skirts and tops and her Arabic book and dictionary, she and Jabr took the 31/2 hour journey 120 miles south of Baghdad to a township halfway between Kut and Hilla. She ignored the warnings of her Christian friends in Beirut, heartened by the advice of a Lebanese historian, Albert Hourani, who told her there would be no harm in going. "Bless his soul, but I was going to go anyway," she said.
Mesmerized by a saffron and crimson sunset melting behind stretches of palm trees at dusk, she told herself: "This is what I came to see."
As their pickup truck rumbled in front of a sprawling mansion, Sheik Hassan Khayyoum was dispensing hospitality to visitors and sharecroppers. Dates, trays of lamb and rice were being served in a huge tent set up for the evening iftar meal, ending the daylong fast in the month of Ramadan. As a guest and a foreigner, she was treated to a rare delicacy: the baked head of a sheep.
"We were told to eat everything, including a sheep's eye. I did. I thought I should," she recalled, grateful for what she described as her iron stomach. "I did not fall for that again." She panicked when Jabr shook hands and left. She found herself thrown into a world where she understood the language but did not know how to behave.
The women had tattoos on their chins and wanted to know if she was like them, asking her questions that "you don't want to print in your newspaper."
She was invited to go with Khayyoum on arbitration expeditions between feuding clans. "I took elaborate notes," she said of one incident. A man from another clan, who had come to repair a well, was killed because of an old feud. It was settled by paying his tribe a sum of money and marrying off a dozen women to his clansmen.
"After I got my Arabic going I realized this was a phenomenal experience," Marr said.
At the end of her six-month stay, one of the sheik's relatives, Yassin, who had married a Turkish second wife, thought that it would be a good idea to have an American as a third wife. Khayyoum felt compelled to relay the request but understood her dismay. Marr joked about how much money a bride like her would fetch but realized she was "getting too integrated. I had done well but it was time to move on."
Marr met her husband, Louay Bahri, a political scientist and former professor at Baghdad University, at a Middle Eastern studies convention in New York in 1977. They married in 1985.
Marr and Bahri live in Doha, Qatar, where he is chair of the department of public administration. Bahri has never returned to his native Iraq, where he still has family. But Marr visited several times in the 1980s.
