The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum

=> Re: Making (Islamic) Distinctions

Re: Making (Islamic) Distinctions
Posted by Jeff (Guest) - Friday, September 8 2006, 8:32:34 (CEST)
from 69.14.30.71 - d14-69-71-30.try.wideopenwest.com Commercial - Windows XP - Mozilla
Website:
Website title:

Might as well post it here, in case that article ever goes down...

Issue 116, November 2005
Losing the south by Rory Stewart
When I was deputy governor of two southern Iraqi provinces last year, we tried to create a tolerant, modern
society. Then the Islamic parties won most of the seats in the election and the dream collapsed
Rory Stewart was the coalition deputy governor of Maysan and Dhi Qar, two provinces in the Marsh Arab region
of southern Iraq, from August 2003 until June 2004
Is southern Iraq only hell with flies? September's image of a British soldier bathed in flames as he tumbled from his tank
seemed to symbolise a state of anarchy, spawned by the coalition and dominated by Iranian-funded terrorist militias. The
reality is less bleak, but still unsettling. Southern Iraq is under coalition occupation but not coalition control; an elected
government that is not quite a democracy uses a secular constitution to impose Islamist codes; Iraqi nationalists funded by
Iran employ illegal groups to enforce the law. I spent ten months in Iraq last year as the coalition deputy governor of two
provinces--Maysan and Dhi Qar--without understanding what this meant. I began to grasp it only on my return in March this
year when I called on Abu Akil, one of the main new political leaders in the south and head of the Iraqi branch of the Da'wa
party.
It took some time to find Abu Akil's office in Basra; my bodyguard team was reluctant to follow a guide in case we were
driven into a trap, and they were not happy when we stopped in a side street blocked by large concrete bollards and a number
of armed men. Iraqis were not supposed to carry automatic weapons but the coalition largely avoided confronting the political
parties. I guessed the building had been, like so many party headquarters, illegally requisitioned from Saddam's Ba'athists. In
a narrow hall, more armed men stepped aside to let us walk up the stairs. There were cigarette butts all over the concrete steps.
We walked over three irregular squares of fitted carpet in our socks and sat on plastic chairs.
A man brought us hot tea. He called me "A-Khoi," a distant term, while he called my interpreter "Molai," or "Comrade in
Islam." I was a little taken aback by this distinction. The tea was in a glass with pink flowers on the rim, served on a small
porcelain plate with a European pastoral scene of a man in knee britches holding hands with a woman in a long dress. There
was a party newspaper on the table with articles encouraging women to wear the veil.
When, in a flurry of gunmen and aides, Abu Akil finally entered the room, I found to my surprise that he was dressed not in
clerical robes but wore a grey suit and a cream shirt, and large gold-rimmed glasses. He sat modestly on the white plastic chair
beside me and smiled as he stroked his short beard. I knew that he had spent 20 years in Iran, wanted a state based on Shari'a
law and was close to conservative Iranian mullahs. I also knew that his party had taken a number of the provincial council and
deputy governor positions in the south.
"It is necessary," he said, "to consider the government of the Islamic jurists from a scientific, not a political, point of view. As
Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr said in the founding document of Da'wa, Demokratia masdar kua lel ferd we el
mujtema--democracy is the basis of the power of the individual and the community." His long elegant fingers moved through
the air as he sketched out theories of government. I felt I was in a university seminar. But I was also confused. I knew that
Abu Akil wanted a theocracy, but he was presenting himself as a democrat.
"So is God and Shari'a law the ultimate authority in the state, or is it the people?" I asked, assuming he would say the former.
He paused, and said very slowly, "The two are the same... Power derives from the law which is based on Shari'a, which comes
from the Koran and God. But it also derives from the constitution which is created by the legislature elected by the people."
As he went on spinning distinctions between power, authority, law and policy, I felt more and more lost. He referred to works
by three different ayatollahs, drew distinctions between Islamic theory and policy, and concluded that the clerics should direct
the religious, moral and social actions of the people but not their politics. Whatever that meant.
"Abu Akil," I said. "I understand the differences in leadership and in the history of your groups, but what differentiates you
today from the other parties?"
He smiled broadly. "Of course, Seyyed Rory, the parties are different because they look to different clerics for guidance:
different mujtahid [clerics qualified to interpret the Koran]."
"Do these clerics have different opinions?" I asked.
"Different interpretations but not different opinions," he replied cheerfully. "We are all Shia. We perform emulation towards
the grand ayatollahs, who, because they are all Muslim, agree."
"How about economic policy?" I asked desperately.
"Islam teaches all of us that there should be a pragmatically regulated free market. All agree on that."
"So would I be right to say that there are no substantial differences between your parties?"
"No. There are many differences. We agree in fundamentals, differ in policy."
"Give me an example."
"There are theoretical differences, intellectual differences, conceptual ones..."
"Can you give me an example please?"
"Well, for example in Britain you have a Labour party and a Conservative party--it is like that."
And that is all I got in a two-hour conversation.
Abu akil is a typical leader of one of the three groups that now dominate politics in southern Iraq and were associated with the
recent conflict with the coalition. These are Da'wa, SCIRI/Badr and the Sadrists. They have militias which are effectively
outside the law and have filled the police and the ministries with allies. Sadrists govern two of the four southern provinces and
Badr men the other two. With Da'wa (one branch of which is led by Abu Akil) these Islamic parties have taken almost every
seat in the south in both the national and provincial parliaments.
Any understanding of the current situation in Iraq depends on a detailed knowledge of these parties. But, as my conversation
with Abu Akil indicated, it is difficult to define the differences between them. This is as true for Iraqis as it is for foreigners.
The leaders are reluctant to emphasise the differences between their groups, keen to conceal their more extreme views from
the more moderate electorate and, most importantly, having led covert insurgency organisations for 20 years, are accustomed
to keeping their programmes secret. Like tribes rather than political parties, the clearest differences between them lie more in
history and leadership than in policy.
All three groups descend from a single party--the Da'wa (Islamic Call) party of the 1960s and 1970s--and their view of
political Islam is defined by Da'wa's founder, a cleric, Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr (sometimes called Sadr I) who was opposed
to Iraqi communism and to western "economic and cultural colonialism." Formed by clerics, developed in the ancient
medieval theological seminaries of Najaf and shaped by grand ayatollahs, who as mirja (sources of emulation) had unique
authority among the Shia, the party had a fundamentally theological character.
In 1970, the recently victorious Ba'ath party declared Da'wa illegal. For the next 33 years, political Islam in Iraq survived only
in exile or in secret cell networks. It moved from public politics to something resembling a revolutionary terrorist
organisation. On 8th April 1980, the government announced that it was a capital offence to belong to Da'wa. Tens of
thousands were arrested and the party's founder, Sadr I, was executed the next day. Much of the leadership went into exile in
Iran. This was the point at which the Da'wa movement began to fragment into rival factions whose leaders changed allies,
national patrons and ideological positions with startling rapidity.
The first and perhaps most famous of the Islamic groups is the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)
and its Badr brigade. In last January's election, it took the governorships in the pro-vinces of Dhi Qar and Muthanna as well as
half the seats on the provincial council in Basra. The leadership of SCIRI/Badr was in exile in Iran and has the closest
relationship with the Iranian state, whereas many of the Da'wa leaders chose Britain for their exile and the Sadrists mostly
remained in Iraq. The founding leader of SCIRI, Muhammed Bakr al-Hakim, an Iraqi cleric, campaigned for a theocracy in
which the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini would become the supreme leader of a Shia superstate embracing Iran and Iraq.
Under his umbrella came the Badr brigade, a paramilitary unit of Iraqi exiles commanded by the Iranian revolutionary guard
who had fought on the Iranian side in the Iran-Iraq war.
Many of the leaders of this group still have family in Iran. They are all religiously conservative and committed to the
establishment of an Islamic government. Their leadership has long-term connections with the Iranian revolutionary guard and
intelligence services. Thousands of their followers receive salaries from Iran, but they would not consider themselves agents
of Iran. Many claim to have been humiliated while in Iran and to be committed Iraqi nationalists. Immediately after the allied
invasion, al-Hakim recommended compromise with the coalition, no longer calling for an Iranian theocracy but instead for "a
democratic free Iraq that reflects the interests of its people." He was assassinated and his group is now run by his less
charismatic brother, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who is one of the most important figures in the national government in Baghdad.
The Sadrists are the second group that dominates southern politics. They tend not to have been in exile, see themselves as
nationalists, perceive the coalition as a colonial occupation, and are worried about threats from Iran. Their leader was
Muhammad Sadeq al-Sadr (a relative of Da'wa's founder), an inspirational teacher who preached on the evils of western
decadence and talked often of the coming of the Shia messiah, the "hidden imam." His populist conservative message
attracted many young clerics in the 1990s. Because "Sadr II" was resolutely nationalist and anti-Iranian and called al-Hakim a
traitor and a spy, he was initially supported by Saddam. But by 1998, his criticism of corruption, secularism and decadence
seemed increasingly dangerous.
Sadr II reached out to the poor with a charity supported by pious Iraqis. Tens of thousands of young men, often from poor
homes, began to attend the mosques where his young disciples preached. The most senior leader of the Iraqi Shia was (and is)
Grand Ayatollah Sistani, a much more learned scholar. But Sistani was born in Iran and did not give public sermons--some
said because he did not want people to hear him speak Arabic with a Persian accent. Young men sometimes mocked him in
private, calling him the "silent leader" and gave their hearts to the unimpeachably Arab Iraqi nationalist, Sadr II.
In 1999, Sadr II was assassinated by Saddam. This martyrdom turned a growing movement into perhaps the most powerful
popular religious movement in Iraq. Sadr II's legacy was continued through his grassroots network of social foundations and
the young preachers, led by his chief of staff and surviving son, Muqtada, a cleric in his late twenties. After the invasion,
almost anything in a Shia district that had been called "Saddam" was renamed "Sadr" (hence Baghdad's Sadr City, a poor
suburb of 2.5m people). Posters of Sadr II appeared throughout the south. Whereas Saddam was depicted in suits, sheikhly
costume or military uniform and holding rosary beads, a Cuban cigar or a hunting rifle, Sadr was depicted in his black robes,
preaching.
The party of his son Muqtada--the Office of the Martyr Sadr--is emotional in appeal, exploiting Shia themes of martyrdom
and messianic beliefs about the coming redeemer. It is anti-coalition--Muqtada led an uprising against the "occupation" for
much of last year in which thousands died. It is also popular. In Maysan, a proxy of Muqtada's party took three times as many
votes as the next party, and the head of the Sadr office in a provincial city became governor of Maysan. The group has a
militia called the "army of the Mahdi imam" (see Bartle Bull, Prospect, November 2004).
The Sadrist groups called Fadhile and Fudhala, led by the former chief of staff of Muqtada's late father, share the same
theological views and Iraqi nationalism as Muqtada but are more moderate in their politics. Their supporters are often urban
professionals whereas Muqtada's are from the urban poor. The governor of Basra is from Fadhile.
The third of the three Shia religious parties is still called Da'wa. It was involved in terrorist operations in Kuwait and against
Saddam (its Lebanese faction became Hizbullah with Iranian support). But it also established a more moderate branch in
London, which rejected Iran and further subdivided. One branch, with the closest links to Iran, became Iraqi Da'wa, whose
leader Abu Akil I met in March. Another became the Islamic Da'wa party whose de facto leader is the new Iraqi prime
minister, Ibrahim Jaafari.
Having descended from the same party, these three groups, though rivals, are now in an uneasy parliamentary coalition under
the patronage of Ayatollah Sistani. This coalition (the Sistani list) won the majority of votes in the national elections. In the
national parliament they have had to compromise with Sunnis and Kurds. But in the provincial politics of the Shia south they
have not, and it is there that they have forged a unique Islamic politics.
Although they now hold all of the senior elected positions in the provincial government and have thousands of followers in
the police and the ministries, the groups continue to rely on their militias. They use them to enforce religious practices:
firebombing internet cafés, alcohol and music shops, and attacking unveiled women. Many from minority religious groups,
such as the Christians, have fled to Baghdad, preferring the terror in the Sunni triangle to threats from the Shia parties. In
March, the Sadr militia in Basra attacked a group of engineering students from the local university who were having a picnic.
Apparently angry that men and women were sitting together, that some of the Christian women were unveiled and that some
of the Christians were carrying alcohol (none of which was illegal), the Sadrists kidnapped some of them and shot dead a
female student for wearing jeans. Basra's new governor, a Fadhile Sadrist from the movement's more moderate wing,
defended the actions of the Sadr Office.
Partly because of such incidents, educated middle-class Iraqis are often horrified by their new leaders. Even if they did vote
for the "Sistani list" that now governs Iraq, they do not want to be ruled by men who have spent 20 years as Iranian secret
agents or who have no education outside a theological seminary. Some are so afraid that they are leaving Iraq.
Meanwhile, the new politicians use their militias to enforce their will whenever they are frustrated by the new constitution. If
SCIRI or the Sadrists are unable to fire a provincial minister through the formal channels, they send the Badr brigades or the
Mahdi army to knock on his door. The Islamist politicians are urban and anti-tribal and do not try to work with or around the
sheikhs in order to extend government into the rural areas where perhaps half of southern Iraqis live. And the Sadrist
movement in particular is reluctant to co-operate directly with an "infidel, colonial" coalition. The Sadrist governor of Maysan
has instructed Iraqi police units to cease joint patrols with the coalition. In Dhi Qar, the Fadhile faction in the council has
suggested rejecting all development assistance from the coalition. In Basra, the governor has supported the arrest of coalition
soldiers. Furthermore, the militias continue to mount terrorist attacks against the coalition, most recently killing soldiers and
embassy guards with shaped explosive charges, designed in Iran.
Nevertheless, southern Iraq is in a better condition now than it was last year. For much of 2004, the southern provinces were
caught up in a full-blown insurgency. In Maysan, in October 2003, the police chief was assassinated on the steps of a Sadrist
mosque and in May 2004, the governor shot dead another police chief (with Iranian connections) in a hospital morgue. In the
neighbouring province of Dhi Qar, the police were powerless, officials corrupt, beatings and rape commonplace and services
faltering. When I left Iraq in June 2004, a civil war seemed almost inevitable--not between grand factions but between small
local groups that were simultaneously mafia, tribes and political parties. Neither the police nor the coalition were in a position
to control them.
But when I returned to Iraq this year, scores of Iraqis told me that security was much better in the south. This improvement
was, of course, relative: my friend Sheikh al-Ibadi praised the security improvements, but did so while breathing heavily
because he had just been shot three times in the chest in an assassination attempt. The political militias still kill people and
collect "contributions" by threat; diesel smuggling rackets are booming and there were 60 murders in Basra in July alone.
But the rackets in carjacking, kidnapping and archaeological theft which dominated the south a year ago have largely been
beaten. The highways are safer. Businesses in Basra are not forced to pay protection money to gangsters. There are still
attacks on the coalition but the Sadrists stopped their full-scale armed resistance in September 2004 and have since allowed
some of their supporters to join the government (see Bartle Bull, Prospect, June 2005). The Islamist militias hate each other,
but apart from an incident in September they have avoided large-scale battles. Nor have they become full-time gangsters: they
have rarely, for example, involved themselves in the huge black market in diesel. Moreover, although many politicians have
been killed in Baghdad and elsewhere, I am not aware of a single provincial governor or member of a provincial council in the
four southern provinces who has been killed since Saddam's fall.
Despite their intolerance and violent methods, the new politicians are often young technocrats with a confident and articulate
programme of anti-corruption and economic development. Their religious beliefs can be an important moderating influence in
Shia society. So too are wider mechanisms of social control, confidence and moral concern. Thousands of Shia have been
killed by Sunni terrorists in Iraq but the Shia community has generally refused to retaliate. Restraint has been shown not only
by Sistani but also by political leaders at a district level. The leaders I met on my last visit had stopped complaining that they
were the victims of a Zionist plot and seemed realistic, tolerant and humorous about progress. They had begun to find the
capacity to co-operate with each other and lay the foundations for government and security.
The new order in southern Iraq is, in short, hard to define. It is an improvement on the political exclusion and sadistic
inhumanity of Saddam and has a great deal to teach the Sunni areas about prosperity, security and politics. But it is also
reactionary, violent, intolerant towards women and religious minorities and uncooperative with the coalition. The new leaders
have dark histories and dubious allies; they enforce a narrow social code and ignore the rural areas.
Southern Iraq is a democracy but we should not assume that this or any of the other terms which we deploy frequently about
Iraq--insurgency, civil society, civil war, police force or even political party-- mean what they do in Britain. There have been
elections, but the government is not responsive to or respectful of human rights. In many ways it resembles Iran, but it is not
governed by clerics. Its militias are not infiltrators, they are an integral element of the elected parties. The new government is
oppressive, but has a popular mandate; it is supported by illegal militias, but it has improved security.
This is not the kind of state the coalition had hoped to create. During 14 months of direct rule, until the middle of last year, we
tried to prevent it from emerging. We refused to allow Shari'a law to be "the source of legislation" in the constitution. We
invested in religious minorities and women's centres; supported rural areas and tribal groups; funded NGOs and created
"representative bodies" that were intended to reflect a vision of Iraq as a tolerant, modern society. We hoped that we had
created the opportunity for civil society to flourish. This was a dream we shared with many Iraqis. We refused to deal with the
Sadr militia and fought a long counter- insurgency campaign against them. Then we left, an election was held and the dream
collapsed--the Islamist parties took almost all the seats provincially and nationally. The rural sheikhs, the "liberal" middle
classes and the religious minorities mostly vanished from the government.
Some observers suggest that people voted for Islamist parties out of ignorance or poverty. But most people in the south share
the parties' vision of a more religious, moral and traditional society, as well as their suspicion of non-Muslims and "western
decadence and colonialism." They are proud of being Iraqis and Shia Muslims. They may dislike the brutality of their new
leaders and be suspicious of their connections to Iran, but they prefer them to the coalition.
Most people in the south tolerate the coalition only because they believe the presence of the troops in bases may deter civil
war. Iraqis are reluctant to trust us or work with us. Because of this lack of co-operation, it has been difficult for the coalition
to achieve as much as it had hoped with its billions of dollars in development aid, and it has received almost no credit for its
efforts. The Shia are grateful that the coalition toppled Saddam but for little else. Despite thousands of troops and tens of
millions invested in essential services, despite a number of impressive reconstruction projects, despite ambitious programmes
in police training and in developing "good governance and civil society," the coalition has had only a minimal political impact
in southern Iraq.
The British soldier engulfed by flames and his colleagues who were kidnapped were not simply victims of mob violence, or
even of an illegal militia. They were confronting the authorities of an independent state. In place of last year's insurgency,
there is now an increasingly confident governing apparatus in the south, which extends from governors and provincial
councillors to the militias, police and ministries. The leaders of these groups have a distinctive Islamist ideology and complex
history. This new Islamist state is elected, it functions and it is relatively popular. We may not like it, but we can only try to
understand it and acknowledge that there is now little we can do to influence it.
Losing the south
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7111
Prospect Magazine
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk


Qasrani wrote:
>An oldy but a goody...
>http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7111



---------------------


The full topic:



Content-length: 25656
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Accept-encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: *hidded*
Host: www.insideassyria.com
Keep-alive: 300
Referer: http://www.insideassyria.com/rkvsf4/rkvsf_core.php?Making_Islamic_Distinctions-DEaw.8akl.QUOTE
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6



Powered by RedKernel V.S. Forum 1.2.b9