Ayatollah al-Sistani and the end of
Islam By Spengler
Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the definitive presence
of traditional Shi'ite Islam, has warned that he
"no longer has power to save Iraq from civil war",
and has withdrawn from politics (see Iraq loses its voice of
reason, Asia Times Online, September
6).
ATol's Sami Moubayed reported, "If
Sistani lives up to his word, this means silencing
the loudest - and only - remaining voice of reason
and moderation in Iraqi politics." He noted that Sistani's
followers have transferred
loyalty toward the Iranian-controlled warlord
Muqtada al-Sadr.
That Iraq would break up
in bloodshed has seemed predestined since late
2003, when I predicted civil war and eventual
partition (Will Iraq survive the Iraqi
resistance? December 23, 2003). But the
collapse of Sistani's influence is news indeed. It
portends the end of Islam in the Persian Gulf, as
much as pope Pius XII's virtual incarceration in
the Vatican during World War II augured the end of
Christianity in Europe.
On the face of it
the notion that Islam is in jeopardy seems absurd.
Muqtada al-Sadr is a Shi'ite cleric of fanatic
persuasion, close to and perhaps wholly owned by
the fanatical mullahs of Tehran. But Islam is not
defined by political allegiance, nor by a specific
set of doctrines, but rather by a way of life. In
the case of Islam it is the life of traditional
society embedded in a circle of spears directed
outward against the leveling empires. More than
any man alive, Sistani personifies the traditional
life of Islam. The end of his mission implies that
his followers are thrust onto the stage of the
modern world in the cruelest form, in this case a
civil war of attrition. Islam, as Sistani teaches
it, cannot survive the shock.
It is
important to be clear that there is nothing at all
religious about the present civil violence in
Iraq. It is not 1572 in France or 1618 in Germany,
in which both sides accuse the other of heresy and
preach crusade to purify the true faith. The
issues under contention have to do with caste and
tribal privileges.
The Sunni insurgents
stem largely from the secular regime of Saddam
Hussein, who have no particular religious
objection to the Iraqi Shi'ites. They simply wish
to rule the country as they have since the British
invented Iraq. As Professor Angelo Codevilla wrote
in 2003, "Iraq was not a good idea in the first
place. American and British Wilsonians decided to
re-create something like the Babylon empire: Sunni
Mesopotamian Arabs from the Baghdad area would
rule over vastly more numerous southern Shi'ite
Arabs, and Arabophobe Kurds. Why the ruled should
accept such an arrangement was never made clear."
Despite the secular character of the old
Ba'athist regime in Iraq, traditional Muslim life
flourished there even as it languished in Iran. A
crisis of faith in the Islamic world underlies the
desperation of the Iranian regime, I have argued
in a series of essays during the past year.
Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the
Iran's fertility
rate
Year
Value
1950-1955
7
1955-1960
7
1960-1965
7
1965-1970
6.8
1970-1975
6.4
1975-1980
6.5
1980-1985
6.63
1985-1990
5.62
1990-1995
4.33
1995-2000
2.53
2000-2005
2.12
2005-2010
1.79
2010-2015
1.57
2015-2020
1.4
2020-2025
1.35
collapse
of Iran's fertility rate. As projected by the
United Nations, Iran's fertility rate already has
fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 births
per female. Iraq's fertility rate now stands at
just below 4, compared with 1.79 for Iran. This
has potentially catastrophic consequences, as I
reported in an earlier study (Demographics and Iran's imperial
design, September 13, 2005). At
present, six Iranian workers support every
retiree. By mid-century the number will fall to
1.5 workers per retiree.
Sistani
represented Islam, the real religion that
permeates the lives of believers. "The ayatollah's
concerns hardly overlap with those of the American
occupation officials whom he refuses to address
directly. On the contrary, what preoccupies him
are the minutest issues of daily existence, most
of all the question of ritual purity within
traditional society," I wrote of him two years ago
(Why Islam baffles
America, April 16, 2004). His website,
as I reported at the time, contains detailed
instructions for regaining ritual purity after
sodomy with an animal, for washing the anus after
defecation, as well as for the precise posture and
deportment during prayer. [1] Sistani, I wrote in
the cited article, "addresses the inhabitants of
traditional society for whom spiritual experience
means submission, that is, submission to communal
norms, whence the individual derives a lasting
sense of identity. In the most intimate details of
daily life, culture and religion become
inseparable. For traditional society it is the
durability of communal norms that lends a sense of
immortality to the individual, a life beyond mere
physical existence."
Adherence to
traditional society was the source of Sistani's
influence among Iraqi Shi'ites, because it is the
wellspring of Islam itself. A birth rate
comparable to that of secular Europe demonstrates
that the Islamic Revolution in Iran has been a
failure, for it failed to restore the norms of the
traditional world. On the contrary, the fertility
rate fell from 6.5 children per female in 1980,
just after ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's
revolution, to only 1.79 today.
A great
gulf is fixed between Islam and Christianity,
which do radically different things for different
people. Christianity is the permanent and
irreconcilable enemy of traditional society, for
it holds that the flesh of the Gentile itself is
sinful. To become a Christian is to abandon
Gentile origins and to be reborn into the People
of God. The fact that Christianity grew by
syncretism, incorporating traditional elements, is
beside the point, for that approach to
Christianity has all but died in Europe, whereas
the United States, the land without ethnicity, has
become more Christian during the past generation.
Islam is the revenge of traditional
society against the encroaching empires -
originally against the Eastern Roman Empire -
which threaten the life of the tribes. Under Islam
the tribes unite in the ummah, retaining
their customs and character. The delicate task of
clerical leadership in Islam is to regulate the
most intimate details of daily life within the old
tribal norms, while keeping the ummah
intact. As strange as this may appear to Western
eyes, it is a difficult job to execute.
That is precisely what Ayatollah
al-Sistani sought to accomplish. As the cited ATol
report recalls, "This is the same man who used his
paramount influence to silence the guns of two
Shi'ite insurgencies in 2004. He then wisely
ordered his supporters to vote in last year's
national elections, claiming that it was a
'religious duty' to join the political process and
jump-start democratic life in Iraq." Sistani
attempted to preserve the ummah in Iraq so
that his Shi'ites might devote their energy to the
compulsions and taboos of traditional life as
prescribed by the Islamic clergy.
Sistani
frequently was described as a "moderate" by
Western media, which seems strange given the
all-encompassing character of his religious
prescriptions. The ayatollah's instructions follow
the faithful from mosque to bedroom to bathroom.
He was not at all a moderate in religion, but a
thinker to the extreme right of the most fanatical
integralism the Western world has ever seen. But
as the spiritual leader of Mesopotamian Arabs, he
resisted sacrificing them to the imperial
ambitions of neighboring Persia, unlike the
opportunist Muqtada al-Sadr. Now he has abandoned
his political mission. Unable to protect his
Shi'ite followers against Sunni attacks, and
deeply frustrated by his inability to influence
events, Sistani reportedly told his staff, "I will
not be a political leader anymore. I am only happy
to receive questions about religious matters."
As an Islamic leader, Sistani understood
much better than any Western observer that the
search for a "moderate" Islam, an Islam of
personal conscience rather than an established
state religion, was a fool's errand. It is not
simply that Islam cannot easily be transplanted
from traditional society. That transition
challenged all religions. Except in the United
States, Christianity has failed as a religion of
personal conscience throughout the industrial
world, disappearing with the last vestiges of
traditional society. Judaism's fate outside of
traditional society is uncertain, and this ancient
religion appears comfortable only in the Orthodox
creation of the traditional world. But that is
beside the point. Just as Christianity is the
People of God called out from amongst the nations
of the traditional world, Islam is the
traditional world whose tribes have united against
the oppression of the Cosmopolis.
Civil
war in Iraq, even if it is led by sectarian
fanatics, spells the end of traditional society in
Mesopotamia, just as the Khomeini revolution
turned out to be the end of traditional society in
Persia. Islam is the focal point of the
civilizational crisis, precisely because the
sudden leap into the modern world puts the
severest test to Islamic faith. Christianity
barely survived the end of traditional society in
the industrial world, flourishing as a religion of
personal conscience only in the United States. Yet
Christians had half a millennium to prepare for
the transition. Islam's prospects for survival
outside of traditional society are poor. It is a
fallacy to imagine that a deeply religious Muslim
world confronts a secular West. On the contrary,
Islamic radicalism is a response to a deep - I
believe fatal - crisis of faith in the Muslim
world.
Western observers, including
religious authorities who should know better,
display no sensitivity whatever to the existential
trauma that afflicts the Muslim world. On the
website of First Things magazine
(www.firstthings.com), the premier journal of
conservative religious opinion in the US and
perhaps the world, for example, Father Edward T
Oakes clicks his tongue over "the asymmetry
between Western and Islamic values". By way of
elaboration he quotes the columnist Mark Steyn as
to
the final words of Mohammed to his
disciples: "I was ordered to fight all men until
they say, 'There is no god but Allah.'" ...
Mohammed is saying fight all men until they
submit to your truth: It's not a plan for
converting an existing empire (as Christianity
did) but for establishing a new empire. Islam
was born and spread as a warrior's creed and,
while that can be sedated, the intensity of
anger of today's Western Muslims suggests that
the Mohammedan fighter endures at the heart of
their faith, albeit significantly augmented by
greater firepower.
I ask the reader's
pardon for losing patience, but this sort of
selective quotation reminds me of the doctrinal
disputes among the Trotskyite micro-splinter
groups who infested university cafeterias two
generations ago. Theologically it is incompetent,
even sophomoric, and Father Oakes, SJ, should know
better. Tossing about quotations from Mohammed is
a two-sided game, and for every unpleasant
utterance Mark Steyn might mention, Professor Juan
Cole can find another that sounds far more benign.
Islam is not a doctrine, I reiterate: it is a
life, just as Christianity is not a doctrine, but
a life. Jihad is not an evil doctrine, an
unfortunate afterthought, or an expression of
Mohammed's aggressiveness. It is a sacrament, the
Islamic cognate of the Lord's Supper. Through the
Lord's Supper, the Christian communes with the god
who has sacrificed himself so that Gentiles might
be reborn as children of Abraham. Through jihad,
the Muslim sacrifices himself to the severe
sovereign of the universe who demands obedience
and rewards service.
That is precisely
what hangs in the balance in Iraq today. The
traditional world in which Muslims order their
lives, the system that (as Bernard Lewis put it)
gave meaning to drab lives, has lost its moorings
in the modern world, and the capacity of Islam to
provide such meaning has eroded past the point of
no return. That is why Muslims will lash out with
the likes of Muqtada al-Sadr. Nothing less than
their lives is at stake.
Note 1. For
example:
"It is obligatory to conceal one's
private parts in the toilet and at all times from
adult persons, even if they are one's near
relatives (like mother, sister etc).
"It
is not necessary for a person to conceal the
private parts with any definite thing, it is
sufficient, if, for example, he conceals them with
his hand.
"While using the toilet for
relieving oneself, the front or the back part of
one's body should not face the holy Ka'bah [shrine
in the Great Mosque, Mecca]."
