The Weight of a Mustard Seed

Run! Split up!” But the rest of the prisoners were struck dumb and paralyzed by the authority of the system in which they found themselves shackled (although unshackled) and did not move.

Ahmed’s conspiracy theory was wrong, but maybe no more trite than its opposite: that democracy could be imposed by force. It was only the inverse of an opposite set of beliefs, scorn and reaction, like two presidents calling each other “evil.” All of us grow up in a community, a society, a country that feels, to us, safe and familiar; outside, across the sea, somewhere else, reside the dragons of the other. Ahmed had absorbed the mores and opinions of his community: family was honor, Islam was right, the larger world was a conspiracy that kept Muslims and Arabs down

If Iraq had taught me anything it was the complexity of reactions to events and ideals and isms contained within each human mind. Iraqis carried the scars and memories of good and bad and mad and sad and bits of Baathism, globs of pride and an inferiority complex; they carried Koranic surahs in their heads along with the precepts of grandfathers, memories of war slogans and the chorus of a Britney Spears song. Fractious, miasmic and changeable: Communist to Baathist. Jingo to war weary. Religious to skeptic. Fanatic to cynic. History doesn’t necessarily progress, and people don’t follow straight-line lives either.