Iraq's religious tide cannot be turned
back By Nir Rosen
BAGHDAD - With the June 30 deadline
for the handover of sovereignty from the occupying
coalition powers to an Iraqi authority, the search is on
for a suitable recipient. While the Americans handed
control of Fallujah to a coalition of warlords and
radical clerics, they are still searching for some
authority in the south with any sort of legitimacy to
take over the cities there where US troops have been
battling Shi'ite militias. While Sunnis in Iraq
have former military
officers who can command authority, they still rely on
radical Islamic clerics to provide them with legitimacy.
In the Shi'ite south, there are no secular or military
authorities, only clerics. It would seem that the United
States is on the road to creating an Iraq of fiefdoms
ruled by warlords and clerics, as is the case now in
Afghanistan.
A year after conquering Iraq, the
US military fought bloody battles to retake many cities,
and in the case of Fallujah it was forced to cede
control of the city to the very people it had wrested it
from a year before. A mere two months before a promised
transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi people, the United
States was fighting a two-front war against Sunnis and
Shi'ites, belying official claims that "the enemy" is a
small minority of "former regime loyalists" and foreign
fighters and increasingly proving that the enemy is the
Iraqi people who have rejected the occupation.
Armed gangs control the streets. To anyone
listening to the Iraqi people, this was all
fore-ordained and the only surprise has been how quickly
US blunders provoked the inevitable. It will get worse
before it gets even more worse. Though Iraq's Sunnis and
Shi'ites are united in their hatred of the United
States, when the common enemy has left they will not
celebrate long before turning on each other in a bloody
civil war over who will define the nature of the new
theocracy in Iraq.
Signs of trouble were evident
already in the December 2002 London Iraqi opposition
congress. The final statement of that meeting declared
that Islam was the official religion of Iraq and that
Islam was "the" source of legislation, rather than
merely "a" source, as the English translation of the
interim constitution now says. But this was the
opposition in exile. What were the Iraqi people thinking
and what would they want? The administration insisted
that Iraqis were secular, like their regime, and would
not seek to establish a theocracy, as is the case with
their neighbors in Saudi Arabia and Iran. When US civil
administrator L Paul Bremer announced that Islam would
not be the primary source of law for the new
constitution, his decision was greeted with universal
condemnation by Shi'ite and Sunni leaders alike.
While Iraqi society was once among the most
secular in the Middle East, it has become increasingly
religious. Iraq's once avowedly secular Ba'ath Party was
founded by a Shi'ite, and Shi'ites had once dominated
the Communist Party. In the late 1950s, the Dawa
(Religious Call) movement was formed by Shi'ite
theological students to combat this communist influence
in their slums. The movement benefited from the regime's
decimation of their communist rivals. Its leader
Muhammad Baqir Sadr wrote books about Islamic politics
and economics to prove that Islam provided solutions to
all social questions. He was killed in 1980 for opposing
the regime, and has since been known as "the first
martyr".
The paranoid Ba'ath Party regime sought
to control every part of society. It was most threatened
by the autonomy of the Shi'ite clergy, organized in a
loose academy called the Hawza in the holy city of
Najaf. The ability of Shi'ite religious institutions to
mobilize tens of thousands of their followers terrified
the Ba'athists, as it had the Ottomans long before them,
and Saddam Hussein sought to dominate the Hawza through
violence and co-option. From 1969, Shi'ites were in
constant battle with the regime, and violence erupted
every year. Every time the Iraqi government clashed with
Iran, the Ba'ath regime demanded that the Shi'ite clergy
take sides in the disagreements between the two
neighbors. Shi'ite alienation from the Ba'ath Party
began in 1963 when the party split along denominational
lines. The leftist wing of the party, mostly Shi'ite,
was seen as pro-Syrian, and the centrist anti-Syrian
wing was mostly Sunni. The two Ba'ath Party-run states
competed for legitimacy, and Iraq's Shi'ites were seen
as suspect since Syria was run by the Alawis, a sect
that had split off from the Shi'ites.
The legacy
of the first martyr was inherited by his nephew Muhammad
Sadiq Sadr, who declared himself the wali, or
leader of the faithful, a position higher even than
Iranian Islamic revolution leader ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini's, and whose work focused on the Mahdi, or
Shi'ite messiah who is expected to return on judgment
day. Sadr established a network of followers in towns
and villages throughout Iraq during the 1990s. He was
less a philosopher and more a populist and mystic, his
writings obsessed with the return of the Mahdi. Sadr and
his sons were assassinated by the regime in 1999 for
opposing Saddam and Muhammad Sadiq Sadr became known as
the second martyr. Sadr's serene Santa Claus-like
black-turbaned visage dominated the walls of every
Shi'ite neighborhood alongside posters of his uncle and
other radical figures such as ayatollah Khomeini of
Iran.
Immediately after the collapse of the
Ba'ath regime a year ago, his last remaining son,
Muqtada, who had been living in hiding, donned an
imama, or cleric's turban, and capitalized on
this vast network to establish offices of his
representatives throughout the country, seizing mosques,
religious and former Ba'athist headquarters, and even
hospitals. Muqtada's representatives provided security
and social services, filling the power vacuum and even
changing the name of Saddam City, the vast Shi'ite slum
of eastern Baghdad, home to about 3 million, to Sadr
City. By the time the occupying powers had realized a
state and government had virtually been created under
their noses, it was too late to undermine Sadr's
authority.
Muqtada attracted the alienated and
angry Shi'ites, pitting his movement against the
American occupiers and more traditional clerics, such as
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Last June, when Muqtada's name
was proposed as a possible member of the US-appointed
Iraqi Governing Council, other Shi'ite members rejected
the idea. Muqtada and his constituency were radicalized
by the exclusion, and he was pushed into the hands of
Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri, his father's top student and
intellectual heir, living in Iranian exile. Though
Muqtada's politics were inchoate, lacking ideology and
seeking only inclusion and power, Haeri was a rigid
Khomeinist, with a clearly defined political program
aimed at establishing a theocracy in Iraq, just as
Khomeini had established his in Iran 25 years ago when
he ousted the monarch.
Sunni-Shi'ite cooperation
against the Americans emerged immediately after the war.
Ahmad Kubeisi, Iraq's most important Sunni scholar, led
a protest in April 2003. The sermon that followed the
prayer was unique for its nationalism. Baghdad had been
occupied by the Mongols, the sheikh said, referring to
the sacking of the capital of the Muslim world in 1258.
Now new Mongols were occupying Baghdad and they were
creating divisions between Sunnis and Shi'ites. The
Shi'ites and Sunnis were one, however, and they should
remain united and reject foreign control. They had all
suffered together as one people under Saddam's rule.
Saddam oppressed all Iraqis and then he abandoned them
to suffer. There were no Sunnis or Shi'ites, all Iraqis
were Muslims, and they had defended their country
together from the Americans and British as a united
people.
On top of the mosque's walls stood young
men holding banners proclaiming "One Iraq, One People",
"We Reject Foreign Control", "Sunnis Are Shi'ites And
Shi'ites Are Sunnis, We Are All One", "All the Believers
Are Brothers", and similar proclamations of national
unity. Throughout Iraq radical Sunnis and Shi'ites held
joint prayers and their militias supported each other,
culminating in the battles of Fallujah, Najaf and
Karbala, when radical Sunni, former Ba'athist and
hardline Shi'ite militias, collectively known as the
muqawama, or resistance, sent medical aid and
weapons to one another and even fought together.
Sunnis were expected to be secular, but in the
past decade they, too, had become radicalized. It
started in 1979, when Khomeini seized power in Iran.
Khomeini condemned the Ba'athist regime for its
"atheism" and "apostasy", and alleged it was
anti-Muslim. Seeking to deflect these blows, Saddam
changed his rhetoric. Michel Aflaq, an atheist of
Christian background who had founded the Ba'ath Party,
was rewritten into history as a Muslim. During the
crisis resulting from his August 1990 invasion of
Kuwait, Saddam increased his Islamic propaganda,
portraying himself as an Islamic warrior battling the
infidels and heretics led by the Americans.
In
January 1991, Saddam added the words "Allahu
akbar", or "God is great", to the Iraqi flag. He was
now leading an Islamic army. In 1993, Saddam reversed
his brutally secular policy and began the cultural
Islamization of Iraq through what he called al-hamlah
al-imaniya, or "the faith campaign", giving Sunni
Islam a huge boost. He built lavish new mosques, and 5
million Korans were printed and distributed. Islamic
studies were increased from two hours a week to six to
eight hours a week, and the secular Ba'ath Party members
were forced to study the Koran in their weekly party
meetings.
In 1994, Saddam issued a decree
punishing theft with the traditional Islamic amputation.
He banned the public consumption of alcohol and the
thriving nightlife in Iraq was curtailed. Saddam allowed
increased freedom of action and expression in the
mosques, and their following increased. It was now safe
to grow a beard. Clerics were made government employees
and their salaries increased. Wahhabism, the strict
brand of Islam associated with Saudi Arabia and
al-Qaeda, made inroads in Iraq as well, causing Saddam's
son Uday Hussein to complain about its presence in 1994.
It didn't hurt that Wahhabis were viciously
anti-Shi'ite after the 1991 Shi'ite uprising pitted that
community against the regime. As the party headquarters
had once been central in Iraqi politics, the mosque
became the center for self-expression and political
activism, since all other venues were closed off and any
other political opposition was either killed or exiled.
Those exiled Iraqi leaders who have returned to the
country have found little popular support, unlike the
religious clerics who dominate both the Sunni and the
Shi'ite communities, and we are now witnessing the
results of Saddam's attempts to neutralize Islamic
opposition movements in the inability to find a suitable
secular leader.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
have former military
officers who can command authority, they still rely on
radical Islamic clerics to provide them with legitimacy.
In the Shi'ite south, there are no secular or military
authorities, only clerics. It would seem that the United
States is on the road to creating an Iraq of fiefdoms
ruled by warlords and clerics, as is the case now in
Afghanistan. 
