There are Iraqis in Cairo who feel roughly the same way. In the courtyard of a hastily constructed apartment complex on the airport road, I found a group of Sunnis sitting outside their small shops. Ghaith, an 18-year-old from Baghdad’s western Sunni stronghold of Amriya — long since cleansed of its Shiites — had opened a small grocery. He pointed across the courtyard to his 12-year-old brother playing soccer with other boys and told me he had been kidnapped in Baghdad and held for one week. The kidnappers demanded six million Iraqi dinars. Sitting in the grocery store was Dhafer, a round 35-year-old man with a sharp nose. Originally from Baghdad’s Ghazaliya district, he had been threatened by Shiite neighbors. He was given 48 hours to leave. “I brought my relatives for my protection, and weapons, and they escorted us out,” he told me.

Next door to the grocery shop was a hair salon owned by a Sunni couple also from Ghazaliya. It was decorated pink and red for Valentine’s Day. Its owner, Ghada, taught herself hairdressing after she arrived in Cairo with her husband, Abu Omar, and their three children. Abu Omar was a former colonel in the Iraqi Army who retired in 1999. “After the American invasion, I started to feel the Iranian influence,” Abu Omar said. “Before, there were no problems between Sunnis and Shiites, but then on television we started hearing people talking about Sunnis or Shiites.” Like many former military officers, Abu Omar had been active in the Iraqi resistance. “As long as they are attacking the occupiers or those cooperating with the occupiers,” he said, the Iraqi resistance was honorable.

Ghada told me that Iraq’s sectarianism followed them to Cairo, causing problems in their children’s school. Iraqi Shiite boys beat their son Omar, she said. “He hates Shiites so much,” she told me, adding that many fights occurred between Sunni and Shiite Iraqi children. Ghada told me that Egyptian customers cried with her and consoled her after Saddam’s execution, and they had recited a prayer together. “The ones that Saddam killed,” Ghada said, meaning Shiites, “I would go back and kill more of them. I hate Shiites.”

III. The New Normal

Of the main destination countries, Syria is the friendliest for Shiites. Egypt may be ill disposed toward Shiites, but Jordan is downright hostile. Syria is a different story, and Damascus in particular has a variety of Iraqis seemingly ready to live together. Ali Hamid, a Sunni barber from Baghdad’s Shiite district of Shaab, has been working in the same Damascus shop since 2003. He explained that many barbers fled Iraq to Syria because Islamist radicals, who believe beards should be left to grow and Western-style haircuts avoided, had forced them to close their shops. “In Iraq there is a sectarian war,” he told me. “Here, we all get along.” He attributed this to the vigilant Syrian authorities: “Praise God, thanks to the Syrian government we have no problems. If anything happens, they deal with it when it happens. As shop owners we are not allowed to talk about sectarianism. Word spread to all business owners: You live in a different country, not your country; you have to respect their rules.”

Even Moktada al-Sadr’s representative in Syria, Sheik Raed al-Kadhimi, was espousing antisectarianism, even though Sadr’s Mahdi Army has systematically targeted Sunnis. “All Iraqis are united and well integrated,” he told me when I visited his offices in the Sayeda Zeinab neighborhood one morning. “I can say that they are like one body against the common enemy. Also I should say that Iraqis do not kill Iraqis. It is not possible. It is only those who come into the country, as well as takfiris” — radical Sunnis who anathematize Shiites as infidels — “and former Baathists who operate under the umbrella of the Americans. You see how they kill Iraqis through torture and suicide bombings.” Under such conditions, he said, it was natural that “people resort to a safe place and they come to Syria.”

Kadhimi’s office was in an Iraqi neighborhood that has sprung up in southern Damascus around the shrine of Zeinab, granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad and the daughter of Imam Ali, the fourth caliph. Her brother Hussein was killed at Karbala. For Shiite Muslims, this moment, when the family of Ali was betrayed, is one of the defining moments of their history. A vast commercial district has grown around the shrine. It has become home to so many Iraqis that, walking through its streets, I felt transported back to Baghdad, where I had spent so much time reporting — back to Kadhimiya, the Shiite commercial district built around the shrine to Imam Kadhim. The Damascus streets bustled with men speaking Arabic in the Iraqi dialect, overflowing indifferently onto the road nicknamed Iraqi Street. The walls were covered with political posters from Iraqi elections past. There was a mobile-phone shop named after the Euphrates River, and there were barbershops called Karbala and Son of Iraq.

On the eve of the 10th of Muharram — the month on the Muslim calendar when the martyrdom of Hussein at the hands of the caliph Yazid’s forces is commemorated — a procession organized by Sheik Kadhimi’s office gathered. Dressed in black, the men were led by youths wielding immense wooden flagpoles with colored flags that they struggled to wave from side to side. Others carried framed pictures of Moktada al-Sadr and his father. It was a latmiya procession, in which the men chanted songs lamenting Hussein’s martyrdom and vowing fealty to him. “We have chosen our destiny,” they sang, “we are the sons of Sadr, soldiers for the Mahdi.” The thousands of onlookers waited until dawn for the culmination of the events. At 4 in the morning, hundreds of men dressed in white robes met in tents. They carried short swords, which they cleaned in buckets of soap. After performing the dawn prayer they lined up, and led by trumpeters and drummers, they began a march through the alleys toward the shrine of Zeinab. They chanted: “Haidar! Haidar!” — another name for Ali, father of Hussein and Zeinab. The men and boys swung their swords rhythmically, hitting their foreheads and drawing blood, which soon drenched their faces and robes. As onlookers filmed the scene on their camera phones and the sun rose above them, the men danced in bloody ecstasy until they reached the shrine and the event ended suddenly, with people returning to their homes or hotel rooms. In Iraq’s shrine cities, I had seen such religious marches end in explosions and armed attacks. Here in Syria, the commemoration ended with the beginning of another unremarkable day. This must be what Iraqi normality is like, and now it can only happen outside Iraq.