Love and War

Among cosmopolitan, educated Baghdadis, who are the Iraqis most likely to meet Americans and speak their language, one used to see few of the scarves, veils, chadors, short robes or long beards that foreigners associate with Islam. But their sense of identity as Muslims is strong nonetheless, and they affect a sense of modesty and propriety that some Americans might find Victorian. Lena and Mariam's mother, Muna, knew only a few words of English. One, which she employed frequently when Leo would come to visit and sit too near her young daughter, was "space, space."

For the Americans, even those involved with the most Westernized Iraqis, navigating this minefield was fraught, if occasionally refreshing. Army Maj. Angela Barzo worked as a civil-affairs officer in Baghdad in 2004. Over lunch in the Green Zone one day, talk centered on a couple of American soldiers who were engaged to Iraqi women. "Well, let's turn the tables," Barzo said jokingly. "Where are the single guys?" "I'm good to go," piped up a young Iraqi interpreter everyone called MJ.

So he was. Their relationship, though, consisted of ever longer and ever more personal talks. After several weeks, Angie sent MJ a text message one night on his cell phone: "I'm falling in love with you." As her brief tour approached an end in January 2005, she sent him another text: "Will you consider marrying me?" She was 39; he was 32. She didn't want to let the moment pass. After the sustained suspense of their courtship, their first kiss was as fervent as adolescence. "It was all so pure," MJ remembers. "I will never forget." Others recall holding hands like teenagers in the back of a darkened, empty theater, or caressing in a Green Zone garden.

In the two years after Angie left Iraq, she saw MJ for only 12 days in Cairo, where he was waiting for a visa. Once, on the phone, she told him she was sunburned from the beach, and he chided her for showing her body to strangers. When he finally flew to Chicago in February this year, he warned her beforehand that he would not hug her in public because he was a conservative man. But when he walked through the doors and saw her, he threw his arms around her. "I didn't want to let her go," he says. "I just wanted to smell her."

Religion remains a problem for Angie and MJ. She had converted to Islam after they became engaged; she studied the Qur'an; she even gave away her two dogs, which MJ considered "unclean," as many Muslims do. But eventually she turned away from the mosque and back to her own traditions. MJ made his peace with it, she says. But they try not to talk about the subject. "We know what the differences are and where we stand," he says.

Leo Barajas, the contractor, and Mariam Ghadeer found an accommodation when he agreed to convert, at least temporarily, for the marriage ceremony. But her sister Lena's husband, the gentle, blue-eyed Jimmy Ahearn, was genuinely fascinated by Islam. He told Lena he wanted to convert because he was a believer. At a ceremony in Amman, the week they got married in July 2004, he easily intoned before a judge the critical profession of faith: "There is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God."