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Iraq and the one-eyed
liar
By Nir Rosen
BAGHDAD - The al-Rahman
mosque sprawls over a huge lot in Baghdad's upper class
al-Mansour district. Saddam Hussein began constructing
the immense mosque that was originally named after him,
and it is still unfinished, raw concrete domes with
metal poles dominating the neighborhood's horizon.
Immediately after the war, the mosque was taken over by
partisans of Muqtada al-Sadr, the young leader of a
militant, theocratic movement that dominates Shi'ite
politics.
Muqtada's control was called into
question on Friday, August 15, when supporters of Sheikh
Mohammed al-Yaqubi, a rival Shi'ite cleric, demonstrated
outside the mosque at the noon prayer time. "Yes, yes
for Yaqubi!" they shouted, and condemned Ayatollah
Kadhim al-Hairi, a cleric with whom Muqtada is allied.
This fitna, or strife, within the "house of
Islam", is generally a state that Muslims avoid at all
costs.
Al-Yaqubi and Muqtada are rivals in the
contest to define the direction that Iraqi Shi'ites will
take in post-Saddam Iraq. The center of this battle is
in a collection of schools called the hawza, or
Shi'ite academy, based in Najaf, a shrine city built for
Imam Ali, the cousin and son in law of the Prophet
Mohammed, regarded by the Shi'ite Ali (or partisans of
Ali) as their first leader.
Shi'ites comprise
over 60 percent of the Iraqi population, and are
mobilized by their religious organizations. The
hawza has historically been dominated by the
traditional Shi'ite view that religious leaders should
eschew politics and focus on the spiritual world and on
advising their flock.
In the 1950s, however,
responding to government oppression and encroaching
Western secularist trends, a more activists brand of
Shi'ism developed. The activist Shi'ites sometimes refer
to themselves as the hawza natika, or the
outspoken hawza, or the thawra
(revolutionary) hawza, or faala (active),
and disparagingly view their introverted counterparts as
the hawza samita, or silent hawza.
Yaqubi was the favorite student of Mohammed
Sadiq al-Sadr, an important proponent of the hawza
natika who was killed by agents of Saddam in 1999,
and thus achieved the status of a revered martyr. His
son, the young Muqtada Sadr, has used his father's
reputation to galvanize a mass movement that now holds
key Shi'ite neighborhoods and mosques throughout Iraq
and who has ambitions for national control. Muqtada and
Yaqubi are now bitter rivals seeking to embody the
hawza natika and eventually rule Iraq.
Yaqubi made his debut Baghdad appearance at the
Friday prayers of April 25, where he spoke at the Kadhim
mosque to tens of thousands of devotees who chanted
"yes, yes for the hawza natika!" A week later, he
established an organization in Najaf called Fudala,
which means "the generous ones". Fudala held its
founding conference on April 30. No other Western
journalists were present for what may well have been the
beginning of the Islamic revolution of Iraq.
About 300 people attended the conference held in
Fudala's headquarters at the gutted mansion of Najaf's
former Saddam-appointed governor. The participants were
religious leaders, tribal leaders and academics, all
people who could command a significant following of
their own. Like every religious conference, an
appropriate chapter from the Koran was read. In this
case it was a triumphal proclamation that Allah had
opened their path to the future and they could not be
stopped because they were victorious.
Yaqubi
then spoke, describing the goals of Fudala. He sat
behind a desk, flanked by laymen in Western attire on
both his sides. Yaqubi himself is a small, frail man,
with a white turban and a stern face behind thick
gray-framed glasses. He has a clipped graying beard, and
the robes of a clergyman fall over his child-like body.
In his speech, Yaqubi claimed that Fudala represented
the hawza and would defend Muslims from Western
culture.
They would open offices throughout Iraq
to organize the work of the hawza. They would
organize the majlis al-shura, or supreme council,
to be elected by the participants. They would establish
a newspaper to disseminate their thinking. They would
establish an information office to gather information
and analyze it in order to predict the future. There
would be a majlis dusturi al-Islami, or a
constitutional Islamic council, that would be
responsible for politics and monitoring other parties,
to evaluate and control their behavior. Yaqubi urged
people to go to their mosques. The mosque is a school,
he explained, a cultural center, a center for
conferences. Everything that is done must be done inside
the mosque.
On the conclusion of Yaqubi's
speech, a selected group of about 150 people took part
in elections. Not surprisingly, since he was the only
candidate, Yaqubi was elected general secretary of
Fudala. He announced that he would appoint seven people
to work under him. Although Yaqubi stated in an earlier
interview that Fudala was not a party, a professor of
nuclear physics from Saddam University in Baghdad, named
Abdel Aziz, who attended the conference, admitted that
it was indeed a political party. Most Islamists in Iraq
avoid the term "party", with its secular and corrupt
connotations, and prefer, as does Fudala, to refer to
themselves as a "group" or "council".
In an
earlier interview, Sheikh Husain al-Tai, the office
director of Fudala, explained that their goal was to
prove that the hawza could govern all aspects of
life in Iraq, political, social, administrative. He said
that Fudala is an experiment in the efficiency of a
theocracy, starting in Najaf. He compared the seminary
in Najaf to the other important Shi'ite seminary in Qom,
Iran, and asked, "if Qom can be political, why can't
we?" Al-Tai also expressed his desire for a walayat
al-faqih, or government by the religious
jurisprudents, a system that has governed Iran since
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's revolution of 1979.
Fudala sells books by Yaqubi, who has appointed
himself an ayatollah, thereby promoting himself in the
religious hierarchy. In one book, entitled The West
and Us, Yaqubi wrote that "America lifts the flag of
enemies of Islam and makes itself the enemy of Muslims,
so we must consider America our enemy." Yaqubi maintains
that there is a cultural war between the West and Islam.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, a unipolar system
dominated the world. It is epitomized by American
imperialism. Controlling this system are the Masons.
They have been planning in the shadows for 200 years to
implement their goal of controlling the world under the
guise of internationalism and legality. Their new system
is called globalization, Yaqubi teaches.
Yaqubi
also discusses the awar al-dajal, or the one-eyed
liar, in his book. This is like the Muslim antichrist,
an ostensibly omnipotent entity with incredible powers
that claims to be a god and demands a following. The
awar is blind because it sees only money, and has
no feelings. It brings with it a hell and a paradise.
Only the return of Imam Mohammed al-Mahdi, the
disappeared leader of the Shi'ites, along with Jesus
Christ, can destroy the awar al-dajal. Yaqubi
labors in his book to demonstrate that the awar
is not a single person. Rather it is a big power, like
America. America has all the powers of the awar.
This is evident by its stunning technology. The
awar's hell is the suffering caused by America.
His paradise is the money with which America buys
people. Anyone sent to the awar's hell will be
rewarded with Allah's paradise, and anyone tempted by
the awar's paradise will be rewarded by Allah's
hell.
Abu Abdullah, Fudala's spokesman,
maintains that Fudala's vision differs from the Iranian
system and the role that they see for their hawza
differs from the role that the Shi'ite academy of Qom
has. "In Iran," he explains, "non-Islamic parties are
illegal, but in Iraq every party will have the
opportunity to be a candidate, and the hawza will
also be a candidate. Fudala does not deny anyone the
right to take part in the government, on condition that
his work is consistent with the decrees of the religious
leaders."
Regarding non-Muslims, Abu Abdullah
replied that "we accept everyone who believes that there
is no god but god, but not heretics or apostates".
Non-Muslims would have a special status, called
dhimitude, that has protected them throughout
Islamic history, while also relegating them to an
inferior, and often vulnerable, social status. Abu
Abdullah explains that the hawza natika was a
term created by Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr during the reign
of Saddam to identify his anti-government stance and his
Friday sermons criticizing the former regime.
"Fudala's goals," Abu Abdullah continues, "are
to make the hawza active in forming the
constitution but we will not deny anyone elected by the
people the opportunity to work according to the
constitution." Given that Fudala has called for an
Islamic constitution and a future government consistent
with Islam, they are defining the structure in such a
way that it will exclude, or allow them to exclude, any
individual or party that they identify as inconsistent
with Islam, the hawza, or the edicts of their
religious leaders.
Abu Abdullah explains that
the war with the West is multifaceted, "There is a
cultural and educational war, because Western cultural
and educational institutions try to destroy the virtues
of Islam and the Islamic identity. There is an economic
war because the West tries to expropriate the wealth of
Islamic lands, and there is a military war, such as the
one in Palestine, because the West supports Israel and
its murder of the Muslim Palestinian people."
Fudala will have many locations to propagate its
ideas, because, according to Abu Abdullah, "every mosque
in Iraq will be an office for us because it is the
natural place for religious people to meet."
Interviewed recently in his Najaf office, Yaqubi
was explicit about the need for the hawza to be
politically involved. "Our founding declaration says we
will adopt political activity, and political action is
one of the hawza's most important duties," he
said, voicing subtle contempt for members of the silent
hawza.
"The Koran says there are
different people and they are not equal. There are those
who fight for God, called the mujahideen, and those who
are afraid to fight and stay home. The mujahideen are
better and the natika hawza is the one that does
more duties." Yaqubi then quoted a verse from the Koran
about how everyone is rewarded, but god prefers the
mujahideen.
Yaqubi, who avoided specific details
about his plans in a manner typical of the general and
vague innuendoes used by clerics, did, however, say that
it was not necessary for the hawza to directly
control Iraq because "if the hawza controls each
city independently, then the sum total for management of
all cities would be like a government".
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information
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