ABSTRACT
On a beautiful spring day in March 2004, the historic Serail of Rumaythah stood in majestic splendor in the center of this dreary southern Iraqi town at the edge of the desert. Despite the bleakness engulfing the place that had suffered the effects of more than three decades of war, brutal repression, and/ or international sanctions, the Serail conveyed a sense of a past replete with events. The sturdy edifice, a rectangular two-story building with protruding corner towers to defend the entrance, acted as the seat of local government during Ottoman times. After the British invasion of Iraq during World War I, the building, built with red bricks baked from local clay, became the headquarters of military and civilian British rule. The small external windows covered with metal bars on the ground floor conjured up images of jail cells.1
In fact, it was a night raid by tribesmen of the Dhawalim tribe to free their tribal chief Shaykh Shaʿalan Abu al-Chun, who had been imprisoned at the Serail on charges of refusing to pay taxes, which sparked an anti-British rebellion in June 1920. The British broke the backbone of the insurrection some five months later but at the exorbitant price tag of 40 million pounds, “twice the annual budget allotted for Iraq,” and the lives of more than 400 troops.2
