Tattooing seen as way to help identify bodies

Tattooing has been frowned upon in modern Iraqi society.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The ghastly procession of decapitated corpses and mutilated bodies that has defined death in Iraq drove Firas Adil Saadi to do something that once was the province of convicts and degenerates here: He got a tattoo.
The 28-year-old Shiite Muslim has a marking on his right shoulder so his family may avoid the despair of not being able to identify his remains. In ornate Arabic calligraphy, it says "My brother Husam," after a cousin who suffered such a fate. Saadi also carries paper identification, but he believes it would be burned beyond recognition in a bombing.
"The idea came to me after seeing these daily incidents during which some corpses are mutilated and distorted, some were even headless, and the fact that the identity cards are either lost or destroyed," said Saadi, a trader who works in Baghdad's Shorja market, which has suffered numerous bombings. "Even the water of the firefighting equipment is destroying them, so I thought about an irremovable identity card, which is the tattoo."
In Iraq, it has come to this: Faced with the omnipresent specter of death, an increasing number of people, mainly Shiite men, are willing to contravene social taboo to accommodate it.
Unwelcome change
Although tattoos are not exactly haram, or forbidden, under Shiite Islamic law, they are very much frowned upon in modern Iraq. There was a time here when men and women got tribal tattoos such as wrist markings or small dots on the chin as a sign of beauty or for spiritual reasons, such as warding off evil.
In the recent past, however, tattoos were usually worn by men of the lowest classes and became a way to identify prisoners' bodies in case they were tortured to death by guards. Repressed by Saddam Hussein, Shiites make up the bulk of the lower classes, which might explain why they're more willing than Sunnis to get tattooed.
"I think the resort to using the tattoos by people now from all social classes is something like a return to barbarism, and this is exactly what the Americans want, getting Iraq to the pre-civilization times," said Hashim Hassan, a Shiite professor at Baghdad University's College of Information.
"Both the lower and middle classes are taking tattoo drawings on their bodies. It is more among the men than the women because of the feeling that the men are targeted so they do not want to lose the links with their families [even if they are killed]," he said. "I think a time will come when each family will choose a tattoo for itself and get recognized by it."