Tag: British Iraqi

IRAQ- U.K: Sewing Queen and Surgeon Dr. Asmaa Al-Allak’s memories of Iraq are woven into her very fabric

Handed-down skills won the medic crown of Great British Sewing Bee champion.

Head bent in concentration, tape measure slung around her neck, young Asmaa Al-Allak often knelt on the floor amid piles of colourful fabric even as rockets whistled above the family home in southern Iraq.

The seven-year-old would take in every detail of her mother and grandmother flicking through pages of their favourite fashion magazine and discussing the sewing patterns for each outfit featured in that month’s issue.

While the two women traced templates on to bolts of material, Asmaa mimicked them in miniature on remnants for arguably the best-dressed Sindy doll in war-torn Basra.

Four decades later, childhood memories like these compelled Al-Allak to become a contestant on The Great British Sewing Bee 2023, a reality TV show she won in an achievement that, for her, topped even attaining a medical degree.

“Creativity is in the genes,” she tells The National, laughing over a zoom call from Wales, where the consultant breast surgeon, now 47, lives with her engineer husband and children, Sophia, 20, and Jacob, eight.

“My grandmother taught me the basics of sewing, my mother built on those and the rest is self-taught.

“The first thing I remember making for myself was a green cotton pinny dress with a floral design. Terrible! My gran was the only one who was positive, saying: ‘My God, that’s so amazing.’ But that’s grandmothers for you.”

Mariam Al-Ethan didn’t live to see her granddaughter’s greatest triumph but photographs of her were pinned to a vision board for inspiration throughout the competition, and Al-Allak proudly wore a necklace inscribed with the word “Allah” that her grandmother bought for her in a gold souq.

Married at the age of 12, Mariam had long sewed clothes for her extended family before becoming a professional seamstress out of necessity during the prolonged armed conflict between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s.

“It was a really difficult time. Even though my grandad worked, he didn’t have enough to support the family,” says Al-Allak.

In spite, or perhaps because, of being illiterate, Mariam made determined efforts to send her seven children, including Asmaa’s mother Fatima, to university.

Fatima studied at the University of Basrah before undertaking a doctorate in physics at Cardiff University with her husband, Haider, soon after baby Asmaa arrived in 1976.

Initially, Asmaa and her brother Ammar, born two years later, were raised by their maternal grandmother but joined their parents for a few years when Fatima sent for them shortly before hostilities broke out. No longer able to stay in the UK after finishing her PhD, however, Fatima returned with the children to Iraq.

Haider feared his name might be included on the Baathist regime’s list of traitors and objectors and a longed-for reunion would not occur for another eight years.

The Al-Allak siblings were plunged into a war zone, frequently changing schools as they moved between Basra and their father’s relatives near Baghdad, whichever was deemed safest as Iranian troops fired mortars across the border.

When classes were disrupted for up to three months at a time, Asmaa sat transfixed for hours watching broadcasts of the devastation.

“I’ve seen [images of] dead bodies lying in the road,” she says in a flat voice. “If the Iraqi army had a good advancement or had won a battle, they would show pictures from the front on television.

“Even though they were supposed to be the enemy, for me, they were people who had died. My decision to study medicine came because of what I’d seen in Iraq.”

She became an expert in gauging the threat from rocket fire. If a whistle could be heard overhead, Al-Allak knew it was probably going to travel farther.

The ones that didn’t whistle were the more dangerous “because you didn’t know where they would land”.

Backbone of the family

While her mother worked as an assistant professor at the University of Basrah, Al-Allak inevitably grew close to her grandmother, ever the backbone of the family.

The detached house was surrounded on three sides by other homes, and Mariam declared the small kitchen, tucked away at the rear, to be the safest of all the rooms. There, the extended family retreated during the worst bombing campaigns, lying “like sardines” on two mattresses squeezed between the oven and fridge.

For Al-Allak, the rules and rhythms of sewing became a comforting reliability in a world of chaos and confusion: if she followed a pattern, cut fabric on the bias, respected the grain line and measured correctly, a satisfying outcome was guaranteed.

“The only thing that’s kept me going and balanced in life – especially in the past few years – has been sewing.

“It’s my escape, my way to forget about all the troubles in the world and at work. I don’t think I will ever stop.”

An opportunity arose for Al-Allak to rejoin her father after the Gulf War ended in 1991 when Haider was a British citizen working as a physics researcher at Durham University.

Fatima and the children had already endured one failed attempt to leave after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait the year before, packing their bags and waiting in Baghdad for two days before realising all flights had been cancelled.

This time, at Mariam’s behest, she wasn’t taking any chances. “We left everything behind and walked away. There was still food in the fridge and toys on the floor.”

Ripped from her roots

If Al-Allak was devastated at being ripped from her roots, worse came on hearing of the impact the sudden separation had on her grandmother, who sat weeping surrounded by their abandoned possessions.

“It broke her heart,” she says.

After a gruelling 24-hour bus journey to Jordan, the family waited a month for visas to Britain, arriving in the north-east of England in August.

Young Asmaa had forgotten most of the words picked up during her three-year stay as a toddler, and the other pupils at Framwellgate School showed no mercy, mocking her poor grasp of the language, using racist taunts, and pulling her hijab off.

She was pushed to breaking point, and it is clear that the recollections are still painful.

“I couldn’t wait to leave. I used to go home and cry. I said to my Mum: ‘I’m not going back to school. I just can’t do it any more.’”

But Al-Allak, one in a line of strong women, developed a methodical and meticulous means of getting by. “My five-year goals keep me going through life,” she says.

“For me to become a doctor, I knew I had to get good grades. I had to cope with the surrounding environment and not let it affect me.

“My mother was a rock. She told me to rise above it and sat with me with a dictionary trying to help but English wasn’t her first language either.”

Sheer determination earned Al-Allak a place at Cardiff University to study medicine, where for the first time in her teenage years she felt a sense of belonging.

Though she had seemingly left sewing behind in the ancestral home together with her beloved Sindy doll, her mother carried on, making surgical scrubs and other outfits for her on a Singer sewing machine bought at a car boot sale.

That old Singer has since been usurped by a newer model but still sits in Al-Allak’s office near the desk where lace and fancy packaging for the bespoke mastectomy bras she creates for her patients can be glimpsed. There, too, is the Sewing Bee award, and, on a mannequin, the dress described by the show’s judges as “spellbinding”, and “a feat of genius” and “clever engineering”.

Modelled in the final by her close friend and fellow doctor Pritti Aggarwal, it unfurled in a mesmerising transition from electric blue shift dress into shimmering emerald gown.

Al-Allak’s skill at overcoming obstacles such as this last of the 10 weeks of tough sewing challenges will, she hopes, increasingly be put to use to help breast-cancer patients recover physically and mentally, unencumbered by uncomfortable bras or incorrectly positioned inserts for prosthetics.

She plans to continue campaigning for greater consistency in patient provision, while developing the mastectomy lingerie into a viable venture.

“It’s one of the things I’m really passionate about,” she says. “On the NHS, you get a prosthetic to fit in your bra for free. Sometimes the company will also offer a free bra but not always, and the pocket might be on the wrong side.

“You’ll have darker-skinned women receiving a light-coloured prosthetic because there is no other option. Patients are offered different things in different parts of Wales.”

Al-Allak talks of how she employs the same knots during suturing in surgical procedures as those used in sewing but isn’t sure whether the medical skills inform her craft or vice versa; she is inclined to think probably both.

Certainly, her love of fashion dictates the choice of “work” shoes that add several inches to her 5ft 2in frame – red-soled patent leather stilettos only swapped for pink Crocs covered in butterflies in the operating theatre.

“Because I make all my clothes, my one guilty pleasure is Louboutins ,” she admits. “I bought my first pair when I became a consultant and I only buy one pair a year.”

That taste for the finer things in life earned Al-Allak the title of “Queen Asmaa” on The Great British Sewing Bee.

Alas, Sophia, heir-apparent, has yet to take up needle and thread in any way that her mother might describe, in her strong Welsh lilt, as “proper serious” but has found an outlet for her imagination as a fine arts student.

“I think it will happen at some point,” Al-Allak says, hopefully.

Meanwhile, the two have bonded over a shared love of musicals, such as Phantom of the Opera, Wickedand Hamilton, and have been to Take That and My Chemical Romance concerts together.

Young Jacob, however, expressed an interest in sewing at seven years old, the same age his mother started, and he helps with cutting, pinning and basic stitching.

“Look what he made!” Al-Allak says, gleefully waving a pattern weight stuffed with rice.

And so the rich seam of familial creativity runs on.

source/content: thenationalnews.com (headline edited)

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Asmaa Al-Allak says winning The Great British Sewing Bee topped gaining a medical degree. Photo: BBC

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UNITED KINGDOM / IRAQ

IRAQ-BRITISH: If Memory Serves: Lamees Ibrahim’s Quest to Dish up the Iraq of her Past

In our continuing series on inspiring life stories across continents, we learn what made her leave a career in medical science for a ‘cuisine lab called the kitchen’.

When Lamees Ibrahim left Baghdad in the 1970s, certain parts of the city, not least the riverside strip of fish restaurants along Abu Nawas, became a fixed ideal in her memory.

After an interval of three decades, a return to the flat bank of the Tigris in 2004 was an unexpected low point in a thoroughly disturbing homecoming.

The street once the “pomegranate of Baghdad” was no longer filled with diners being entertained by poets and musicians, engulfed in the aroma of arguably Iraq’s national dish, masgouf.

Instead, Dr Ibrahim stood shaken as she took in a rubble-strewn wasteland populated by a handful of struggling fish sellers.

Yet one sense was still powerfully triggered by the fresh carp grilling over the charred wood.

“It was not in very good shape,” she tells The National. “There were only bits of its old self left, but the smell was still amazing. There are certain scents that you smell and you think, ‘Wow, this is Baghdad.’ It is very, very specific. If you enjoy samak masgouf once, you will never forget it.”

Dr Ibrahim had made a long, hazardous journey from her home in London, where she moved decades earlier: marrying, earning a PhD in Pathology, raising four children.

Her husband was with her as she set out from Jordan in a car just after Fajr prayers that day, to “feel” her land, see her extended family, and show her eldest child, Maysa, her ancestral roots.

But the Baghdad conjured up by the smell of the barbecued fish was gone; the deserted, bombed-out streets were not at all familiar to her. They did, however, bring back one particularly strong recollection from childhood.

Sometimes in the summer months, the young Lamees would gather with her three siblings around their father to be regaled by stories about Iraq.

“I remember one day when he said: ‘Look, we built this country, the Iraqis, and we have to keep doing that. If every one of us contributed their own brick then the wall would go up and up, and we should keep on building.’ I never forgot that,” Dr Ibrahim said, “and I felt that we had to add our little brick to the wall. We had to make Iraq keep going.”

She returned to London on a mission to help rebuild Iraq in some way for the younger generations that would never have a chance to experience what it had been in the golden years.

The need to describe the country’s rich history and accomplishments was urgent, but whatever she put down on paper seemed inextricably tied to cooking. So it was that she came to realise it would be through food that she could preserve connections to things past.

“I wanted to write something, I needed to write, I had to write,” she says. “So I started. Eventually, it became a cookbook with a bit of history and anecdotes about culture, about civilisation.

“My background has nothing to do with cooking. It’s not cuisines of any kind, but I have a passion for Iraq. It’s my motherland, my country.”

When the 21-year-old Lamees had come to London in the early 1970s, it was to pursue a postgraduate medical degree at King’s College and then head back to her beloved Baghdad. Soon after arriving, she married and her life, she says, became busy but limited as she immersed herself in studying and research projects.

“You go to college, you study, you attend lectures, you come home, you open the books, read, read, read, have some dinner, and go back to college,” she says.

“I didn’t know that I was homesick until one day during Ramadan I saw an elderly woman going into King’s College Hospital with her black abaya and veil. I said to her ‘marhaba hajji’ and she was shocked. She hugged me, and I went home, crying all the way.

“I cried because I had a goal. I wanted to get a degree, and the sooner I got it, the sooner I could go back home. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.”

She was haunted by her homeland, by such memories as the heady perfume of jasmine and the days in her youth when the children would pick the flowers and turn them into long necklaces.

But the months turned into years, and years into decades. At first, returning to Baghdad was difficult as the academic successes mounted and her family grew. It became impossible when Saddam Hussein came to power, with Dr Ibrahim fearing that she would be detained were she to attempt a visit, and never see her three daughters and son again.

Her father died and then, on news of the death of her mother, Dr Ibrahim made the fateful trip when she found a country that was “not what I was expecting, of course. It was demolished, devastated.”

The resulting homage, The Iraqi Cookbook, was published in 2009, a labour of love with the name of each dish painstakingly recorded in Arabic. Samak masgouf, of course, features, and Dr Ibrahim advises in the foreword that all visitors to Iraq should try it in one of the cafes and restaurants on the bank of the Tigris.

“I came back to London with one idea in mind, which is something that as a girl I grew up to learn,” she says. “I must do something for my country. I need to tell my children what my country is like, our history, our culture, our ability to do what we did in the old days.”

She is speaking by Zoom from her home in Richmond-Upon-Thames, her voice at times faltering and cracking with emotion as she talks about dedicating herself to bringing Iraq to the diaspora.

“Iraq to me is very important, very important,” Dr Ibrahim says. “It is in my blood. It’s in my genes. It’s my history.”

The book sold out in the UK and the US, and was reprinted by popular demand. Bit by bit, the time-consuming process of writing and re-writing, working with publishers and photographers, the press interviews had taken Dr Ibrahim away from her career in pathology.

“And I never went back,” she says. “I’m still very interested. I read a lot about Covid. I follow the research, but I’m not going back to that lab. I have a cuisine lab called the kitchen.”

With the emergence of the pandemic, Dr Ibrahim revisited experiments that she had begun as a teenager when she would try to make her mother’s recipes without meat. Sometimes it was successful, she acknowledges, sometimes not.

As a child, though, she had never been as fond of lamb as her siblings were. The family cat adored her, loitering under the table at lunchtimes for the morsels of the daily stew that Lamees would sneak down to her.

During lockdown, her own children became “guinea pigs” for her avant-garde creations as Dr Ibrahim collected together an array of vegan offerings that would appeal to a young audience interested in preserving the planet.

“Dishes don’t need to have meat to have the taste and flavour, for it to smell like an Iraqi dish,” she says. “Iraqi cooking can be vegan, as well as meat and fish-centric.

“If you can preserve the taste of the flavour of the dish, go for it. Many Iraqi dishes are, in fact, vegan but we ate them before ever knowing the word ‘vegan’.”

When one of Dr Ibrahim’s friends called to see how she was faring with the tight coronavirus restrictions in the capital, she told him she had been busily cooking all the recipes to be photographed for The Iraqi Vegan Cookbook. Curious, he wanted to know whether she was including any kubba, knowing that Dr Ibrahim had devoted an entire chapter to its many meaty variants in her first book.

On learning that the new book would contain Kubbet Jeriesh, Kubbet Halab and another recipe that Dr Ibrahim made from lentils, he answered: “Only three?”

His grandmother, he said, had never enjoyed meat in her kubba so the family reinvented the dish to suit her preferences, stuffing the shells with pine nuts, onion, spices and parsley.

“If all these years ago we had vegan Iraqis, we have plenty today,” Dr Ibrahim says, smiling.

The Iraqi Vegan Cookbook had been due out on December 31, but the release has been delayed not least because of the queues of hauliers that built up in Calais and Dover as a result of Brexit and the French shutdown of the border when the new strain of the coronavirus emerged in the UK.

Rescheduled for release at the end of January, Dr Ibrahim hopes that sharing more of the oldest cuisine in the world will counter some of the negative perceptions that persist about Iraq today.

“Iraq is positive,” she says. “Iraq is full of history, full of culture. This is the cradle of civilisation. I don’t like to talk about what’s going on now. I would like to talk about the positivity of all of our achievements.

“I feel nowadays, if I add that little brick, then I have added something which I would be proud of as an Iraqi living in the West. Living in Iraq, we can build from within. We are living in the West – all my children are also living in the West, but we add our bricks from our side, from outside the country.”

Dr Ibrahim is modest about her contribution to the wall that her father told her about all those years ago, hesitating to use the word achievement. If her writing can be described as such, she says, she wants to make clear that it was never about her. It was always for Iraq.

source/content: thenationalnews.com (headline edited)

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Dr Lamees Ibrahim has dedicated herself to bringing the country of her birth to the diaspora: ‘Iraq is very important to me. It is in my blood. It is in my genes. It is my history,’ she says. Courtesy of The Mosaic Rooms
The homage to Dr Ibrahim’s homeland, ‘The Iraqi Cookbook’, was published in 2009, a labour of love with the name of each dish painstakingly recorded in Arabic. Courtesy Lamees Ibrahim 

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BRITISH / IRAQI