22 This idyllic global of the Marsh Arabs was once painted by way of Ethel Stevens within the early Twenties. She used to be the spouse of a British administrator and a BAGHDAD AND past 141 resident of newly shaped Iraq. Her imaginative and prescient of the rustic is stuffed with wish and exuberance. The inhabitants of the marshes are ‘like water- birds’; fluttering, light creatures residing out an enviably easy lifestyles in their nests amidst the reed beds. In Stevens’s eyes, their young children are ‘hardy little savages’ who run round or swim all day within the solar to make certain they turn into ‘wiry and strong’. this can be the imaginative and prescient of the primitive savage which has haunted such a lot of ecu guests’ perceptions of indigenous populations. Stevens notes no participants, meets no unmarried dweller of the marshes yet in its place sees basically the swarming lots of those happy-go-lucky amphibious creatures as they dive out and in of the waters. The marshes of southern Iraq include an unlimited zone of a few 6,000 sq. miles targeted in town of Qurna which marks the assembly of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the beginning of the Shatt al Arab. Its inhabitants of Marsh Arabs, or Madan, have constructed a different identification acknowledged by means of either Iraqis and British travelers. The setting is a haven for huge numbers of migrating birds; the flora and fauna of the marshes being pointed out by means of all visitors to the quarter. really expert at carving canoes, reed construction, fishing and harvesting the opposite assets of the marshes, the Madan have developed a different lifestyle. but competitive regulations of dispersion and drainage have now destroyed a lot of the watery global that Ethel Stevens observed within the Nineteen Twenties. Following failed uprisings opposed to Saddam Hussein in 1991, the marshes turned a secure haven, as they'd for refugees from the Iran-Iraq warfare that raged in the course of the Nineteen Eighties. within the Nineteen Nineties, as a Shia tribal humans, the Madan, ‘were subjected to lengthy persecution’ concerning ‘an fiscal blockade and repeated bombardment by way of the Iraqi military’ and the destruction of serious components of the marshes through diverting key rivers. 23 of these British visitors to depict the Marsh Arabs within the first zone of the 20 th century, Stevens used to be virtually uniquely sanguine. so much have been some distance much less flattering of their depictions. traveling in 1908, David Fraser talks of the ‘riverine Arabs’ as ‘a villainous lot in visual appeal, very dark-coloured, soiled, and ragged … Laziness is their leader attribute, and theft their favorite diversion. ’24 G. E. Hubbard used to be simply as dismissive in past due 1913, describing the marshes as a ‘mostly dismal-looking swamp’. they provide ‘a useless scene’ containing purely ‘occasional flocks of wild-fowl’ and a scattering of ‘naked riverain Arabs as much as their waists in water slicing reeds, which 142 FROM CAIRO TO BAGHDAD they use for fish-traps’. they aren't humans to be depended on, being ‘river vermin’ with a ‘love of piracy’. 25 those sentiments have been echoed via Alfred Vowles, who had met the Marsh Arabs whereas serving as a British soldier.