Joint Isn’t Jumping in Baghdad

Close your eyes and the dusty ballroom of Hadira Shalal seems to come alive with the sounds of Iraqi folk music and the scent of booze and cologne. The scattered wooden chairs of the deserted nightclub become the swirling figures of happy-go-lucky revelers flirting and line-dancing. Juicy kebabs and bottles of liquor appear on the bare tables, now piled up in the corners.

Until restaurateur Bassel Aziz Majid closed the doors about a month ago, Hadira Shalal, which means “the sound of a waterfall,” may have been Baghdad’s last nightclub. Not one of many restaurants that secretly serve liquor but the real deal: a rollicking hot-spot where guests drank and partied until the wee hours.

Majid, known for his flashy gold jewelry, acquired a taste for la dolce vita when he lived in Italy in the late 1970s. He opened Hadira Shalal five years ago and after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, he tried his hardest to keep the party going. He warded off questions from American patrols, and threats from insurgents. He ignored the initial demands of Islamists, and for a time succeeded in courting them. Being arrested couldn’t stop him, and neither could the death last year of his ailing wife.

But finally, Iraq’s newly empowered enemies of Western-style fun got to his landlord, a good friend who with a heavy heart told him to shut down the club and get out of the building before it became the target of a bloody attack.

“Before Iraq’s wars and troubles we used to have a lot of nightclubs with bands, music and dancing,” said Majid, 46, who has a penchant for open-collared shirts. “Now, the atmosphere makes it very difficult.”

Since the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Shiite Muslim militias and puritanical Sunni insurgents have begun enforcing fundamentalist Islamic prohibitions against alcohol and night life in cities across Iraq. They’ve firebombed liquor stores in Shiite-run Basra, once a lively and freewheeling port city, and slain alcohol merchants in primarily Sunni Fallouja.

Iraq’s small Christian minority, which traditionally dominated the country’s liquor industry, has borne the brunt of much of the religious crackdown. Christian community leaders say that many of their flock across Iraq have fled to Syria and elsewhere.

Ubiquitous under the regime of Saddam Hussein, liquor stores have closed down or moved underground -- even in the cosmopolitan capital -- for fear of being targeted by insurgents or enforcers of public morality.

Although Iraq’s newly elected political leaders -- many of them members of Shiite religious parties -- speak high-mindedly of creating a tolerant new order that includes their onetime Sunni Arab tormentors, many apparently are loath to allow what they see as Western decadence.

Majid launched his 3,000-square-foot club in 2000, the triumph of his career after two decades managing restaurants, hotels and kebab stands in his hometown of Basra and in Baghdad. He enticed customers with a kitchen that served traditional Iraqi kebabs and rice dishes as well as a few Chinese and Western entrees.

When Hussein was in power, the club was a popular hangout, mostly attracting diplomats rich enough to afford a night out. Under the secular rule of the time, liquor and clubbing were mostly permitted, though the dictator tried to bolster his Islamic credentials during the final years of his reign.

It was immediately following the 2003 invasion that Hadira Shalal took off.

“The days after the fall of Baghdad were great,” said 25-year-old Lamiya Mayen, a former barmaid at the club, which employed about 20. “We were people who were having a lot of fun.”

At that time, the club was frequented by foreign businessmen and their clients, high-level officials of the fledgling government, well-to-do couples in suits and glitzy dresses, and ordinary young guys with their girlfriends.

Mayen recalled a birthday bash for a well-known Iraqi television star named Nagham, who starred in “War and Love,” a post-invasion soap opera. Artists and actors laughed and danced into the night.

Before the war, only fat cats could afford to frequent places like Hadira Shalal. A postwar increase in salaries and commerce brought people of all different walks of life into the club.

“It was glamorous,” Mayen said. “Iraqi people were deprived of this kind of thing for so long.”

Women would launch into impromptu belly dancing. A three-piece band pumped out Iraqi folk music as guests stood up and did the chobi, a line dance in which men and women lock arms, move two steps forward, one step back and to the side. Once, a group of Canadian journalists joined in.

“Iraq needs such places, for business as well as recreation,” said Alaadin Abdul Razzaq, a 50-year-old civil engineer and construction contractor who was a regular customer. “We would invite investors and businessmen. It was a first-class restaurant with excellent service.”

But problems emerged almost from the start of the occupation. Majid kept the place open some nights until 1 a.m., prompting questions from U.S. troops patrolling the club’s Arasat Street neighborhood.

“They used to come and ask me, ‘Why are you open so late? What’s your purpose?’ ” he said. “Once the Americans understood that this was a positive challenge against the general situation and that we wanted to bring back Iraqi nightlife, they were supportive.”

Newly appointed Iraqi Interior Ministry officials encouraged Majid to try persuading other restaurant owners to stay open late too. But Iraq’s troubles began catching up with Majid. In late summer 2003, two car bombs were found and defused near the restaurant, possibly meant for the Japanese Embassy next door, prompting the diplomats to put up ugly concrete barriers and barbed wire.

Then an improvised roadside explosive device went off near the restaurant. More barriers went up. Visitors to Hadira Shalal now had to walk through a gray corridor that resembled Cold War Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie. Business slowed to a trickle.

Majid tried to lift his employees’ sagging spirits. “He would say now there’s no work, but maybe in a couple months it will pick up again,” recalled Mayen, the barmaid.

As insurgent attacks became more common, fewer and fewer people dared traverse the city to visit the nightclub. A coarser kind of client began frequenting the club. Once a fight broke out when a woman resisted the advances of a drunken young man.

Then, more trouble struck. Last October, U.S. troops raided Majid’s home and nightclub and detained him. He said they confiscated his computer, some cash, a satellite phone, four crates of whiskey and his gold jewelry. In jail, they gave him two blankets; his cell was a cage on an outdoor basketball court, he said. He was told that an informant had fingered him as an insurgent sympathizer and former member of the Fedayeen Saddam, a militia loyal to Hussein.

Majid was surprised by the accusation. Iraq’s insurgents are usually puritanical Islamic extremists who live for jihad, rural Sunni Arabs who feel wronged by the status quo or hardened former members of Hussein’s Sunni-dominated security apparatus. Majid is a hard-drinking and urbane Shiite with a degree in hotel and restaurant management from Italy and a fondness for Elvis Presley.

After eight days in detention, Majid, who still has his prison tags, was released without being charged. But the stress of the arrest, he said, got to his 38-year-old wife, Shamaa Fadhel, who was diabetic. A few days after his release, she died of complications related to diabetes and a weak heart.

In mid-January, came more trouble. An earnest-looking man in his 20s with a neatly trimmed beard showed up at his club. Majid said he was ordered to appear the next day at the offices of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution of Iraq, or SCIRI, the nation’s largest Shiite political movement.

Majid felt intimidated. Not only do prominent members of the government belong to the party, the Badr Brigade, a paramilitary force, has ties to the organization. Majid showed up at the headquarters on time at 11 a.m.

After he was frisked, Majid was hustled into a dimly lighted room inside the heavily guarded compound. His interrogator, Majid said, was a humorless man in a gray suit and collarless white shirt.

Majid said the official declined to give his name or his hand when Majid extended his. “He didn’t even invite me to sit down,” Majid recalled. “It was as if I was entering an intelligence office.”

The man proceeded to give Majid a lecture on morality. “He said, ‘What you are doing is against Shiism, against religion. How can you sell liquor?’ ” Majid recalled.

Majid said he made a vigorous defense. “I told him, ‘This is my living, this is how I eat. If you stop me from throwing parties how will I live?’ ”

The official demanded that Majid sign a document promising to cease operating the nightclub. “I signed the paper,” he recalled. “Otherwise maybe they would kill me.”

But on the drive home Majid came up with a plan to buy time. Through a friend, he contacted eight SCIRI bigwigs and invited them to his club the following weekend. He stocked up on whiskey and invited some pretty girls. The eight men showed up and were treated to a night of booze, folk music and more discreet entertainment. He didn’t hear from SCIRI again, said Majid, who is known as Abu Nour to his friends.

But last month, someone -- either the authorities or Islamist activists -- got to the owner of the building, Abbas Assem Flaya, and told him he must evict Majid. Flaya terminated the lease.

“What can I do?” said Flaya, as workers packed up the restaurant equipment. “Abu Nour and I are friends. But all I own is this building. I’m afraid they’ll blow it up.”

Fans of the club are depressed.

Abdul Razzaq sees the closure as part of an oppressive religious crackdown sweeping the country. A couple of weeks ago he was run out of Basra because he and a buddy were sharing a can of beer in their hotel room during a business trip.

“A guy married in Baghdad used to go to Basra for his honeymoon,” he said. “Closing such places down, that’s a new thing for Iraq.”

Westerners in Iraq have also noted the growth of violence and intolerance directed against those involved in the spirits business and wonder whether it’s the start of a trend toward street-level religious extremism.

David Patel, a Stanford University scholar who lived in Basra for many months, said militants had shot and killed a man who sold him whiskey. “I don’t think this sort of thing will be officially institutionalized in terms of ‘promotion of virtue and prevention of vice’ squads” such as those in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, he said. But the willingness of the authorities to stop this kind of violence and intimidation is very much up in the air, Patel said.

Majid, for his part, remains positive. He has urged his old staff to stay hopeful and available. He’s searching for another space for the club and says he’s already got new investors lined up.

It’s just a matter of time, he said, before he brings back the magic. “I will reopen Hadira Shalal the same as before and even better. I must bring night life back to Baghdad.”