Let Our Fame Be Great Read Online Free PDF Page A

choice was then ratified by the group. Respect, the story showed, is for the Circassians a two-way process. This is not a society that celebrates aristocrats or slaves, but free men who appreciate they are part of a community.
    Likewise, Circassians must respect members of the opposite sex, and Circassian women enjoy much greater freedom than in the Arab communities of the Middle East.
    Several Circassian men boasted to me that they had kidnapped or ‘stolen’ their wives, in order to force them to marry them. At first I was shocked, but the situation was not in fact what it sounded like. Far from being effectively the rape of an unwilling woman, Circassian bride-stealing is a strategic step taken to force her unwilling parents to agree to her getting married. The stealing is ritualized, and accompanied by a volley of gunshots to alert the parents that it has happened. The couple would never be alone together, and the groom’s uncle would normally be employed as an emissary to sound out the prospective in-laws.
    If they relented – which they almost always do – and agreed to the match, she would return home immediately, and the wedding would
be prepared. If they did not agree, she would go to live with the groom’s uncle until the wedding.
    Khon was in fact one of the most recent people in Kfar-Kama to steal his wife, and many of the villagers were sad that, under the influence of Islam and with more tolerant parents, bride-stealing and the slight whiff of scandal it generates was dying out.
    â€˜It is all very easy now, so there is less and less kidnapping. The last case was a year and a half ago, when they decided to get married they wanted to do everything properly, but the mother of the girl said she was too young at only twenty years old and that her grandmother had only died two years before. That night, gunshots were heard. There are lots of weapons here, you see soldiers with weapons, but we do not use them. So if you hear gunshots that means someone has been kidnapped. Then they told the mother the girl had been kidnapped, by SMS I think, and she said okay, they could get married, and everything was fine,’ said Zoher Tahawha, curator of the village museum.
    The most famous Circassian trait, however, and the cornerstone of habze, is hospitality. Circassians must respect their guests, and treat them as a member of their own family – a trait I exploited shamelessly.
    While travelling through the Circassian communities – from Kosovo, around Turkey, to Israel, Jordan and then to the Caucasus itself – I rarely had more than one phone number to call for help in any of the countries I visited. Sometimes I would not even have that. Still, everyone I met would put me in touch with a friend or acquaintance in the next town or village. And people gave up sometimes several days in a row to show me their communities.
    In the afternoon, Khon took me to talk to his friends, and they too greeted me like a long-lost brother.
    We sat, the four of us – Khon, me, and his friends Ali and Gerchad – and discussed habze in the delightful warmth of an Israeli afternoon, cups of coffee on the table in front of us and the breeze stirring the folds of a Circassian flag – a green rectangle, with three golden arrows crossed below twelve gold stars.
    â€˜Just to begin to understand the Circassians you have to be such a philologist,’ said Gerchad. ‘There are no histories of us, so you have
to be able to read English, Arabic, Turkish, French, Russian, Circassian and more. If you can’t read all of these you will not get a complete picture. Besides, I don’t think anyone could write down habze anyway.’
    Habze, they told me, is about obedience and loyalty. Look at the Circassians, they said. The whole nation fought for the army of whatever state they found themselves in. I thought back to the conversation with Khon in the morning. I had asked him if, being a Muslim,