Don't Fear the Shiites

Reuel Marc Gerecht, The American Enterprise Online:

In the fall of 2003, when American diplomats in Baghdad first realized that Shiite clerics would be the most important political players in American-occupied Iraq, it was not a happy discovery. Most Western diplomats (and journalists) in the Middle East were used to dealing with either Westernized Sunni elites or thoroughly secularized Shiites from exile organizations. The deeply religious Shiite clerics--who exhibit little personal warmth, are inclined to talk elliptically or dismissively to foreigners, and are endowed with the hubris of accomplished lawyers--were not exactly backslapping partners. READ MORE

Indeed, many U.S. officials charged with rebuilding Iraq found the ulama--the Shiite religious authorities--to be frustrating allies. They insisted on more democracy sooner than the Provisional Authority believed safe. They resisted approving an interim constitution which checks the majority power of the Shiite community.

Yet Iraq's Shiites and their religious leaders have become the most important players in the Middle East. The senior clerics in the shrine city of Najaf will be the driving force behind any American success in Iraq. And it is precisely because they seek to blend politics and faith into a system where government is the servant of the commonweal that Iraq may be able to serve as the catalyst for serious democratic change all across this troubled region.

Sistani--threat or partner?

The Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini shook the world with his violent Islamic revolution of 1979. Iraq's Ayatollah Sistani is superficially similar--he is also a Persian-born Shiite divine who stands at the center of a climactic political transition. Yet Sistani is in many ways the antithesis of Khomeini, and it is quite possible he will have a far more profound influence on Muslim religious politics and the fate of the Middle East.

There is much resistance to this fact. Sunnis throughout the region are loath to accept that their immediate political future lies in the hands of the Shiite co-religionists they have belittled and often oppressed for 1,300 years. Many Americans, meanwhile, are panicked by the idea that Islamic clergymen and fundamentalists (who often dislike the United States, Israel, and causes like women's rights) are the key to liberating the Middle East from its age-old hostility to the West. Yet the reality is that these religious traditionalists--and not Iraq's much-fawned-over liberal secularists--are the most valuable democratic allies the U.S. has.

Like Iraq's Kurds, the Shiite Arabs (who constitute at least 60 percent of Iraq's population) were severely oppressed by Iraq's previous leaders. But the Shiites, especially their clergy, have been less effusively grateful to the U.S. for rescuing them from Saddam Hussein's slaughterhouse--because they remember the "betrayal" following the first Gulf War, when U.S. forces stood idle in the southern Iraqi desert while Saddam put down the massive Shiite rebellion that President George H. W. Bush had encouraged. Tens of thousands perished, and senior Shiite clerics have had heavy duty counseling their flocks on how to separate, bathe, bless, and rebury the bones of family members found in mass graves.

The late, renowned American diplomat Hume Horan (who wrote for TAE in our September 2004 issue), widely considered to be the finest Arabist since World War II, tried from May through November 2003 to develop a relationship with the four Shiite grand ayatollahs in Najaf. A former student of the great British orientalist Hamilton Gibb, and by birth half Persian, Horan was a 69-year-old repository of Middle Eastern knowledge. He met three of the four grand ayatollahs, and was the only American official Sistani ever agreed to see. But their scheduled meeting did not take place, owing to mechanical difficulties with a helicopter assigned to transport Horan. The next day, terrorists tried to assassinate Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sayyid al-Hakim, changing the atmosphere in Najaf. Seeing U.S. officials thereafter could have made Sistani appear anxious for American protection, so the meeting was never rescheduled.

Horan's affinity for Shiite clergymen was, unfortunately, atypical of State Department, CIA, and Pentagon officials in Baghdad. Ambassador Paul Bremer in particular did not relish contact with Shiite clerics. Though American officials knew they could not construct a democratic system that ignored Najaf's senior clergy, anti-clerical sentiment was--and continues to be--strong. Even among American diplomats who recognize that Sistani has been a critical stabilizing force in Iraq (working against the anti-American Shiite firebrand Moqtada al-Sadr, reaching out to Sunni Arab clerics, and usually recommending cooperation rather than confrontation with the occupation), suspicions about the grand ayatollah's political intentions abound.

Worries begin with Sistani's "Persianness." He, like many clerics in Iraq, is Iranian by birth and early education (though he has lived nearly 60 years in Iraq). Since it was the catalyst for the Muslim world's only true Islamic revolution--which cast the U.S. as the Great Satan--links to Iranian Shiism are unsettling to many Americans. Moreover, Sistani has close family in Iran, and Tehran's ruling mullahs often use family coercion as a means of blackmailing dissidents. More generally, Western liberals worry that no leading Muslim religious scholar can subordinate Islamic holy law to the tolerant norms and dictates of democracy. They bemoan the fact that the future of Iraq is dependent on men who may whip themselves with chains and swords once a year to expiate their sins and express their love of God.

Americans, however, should not have an inordinate fear of Sistani. His actions will surely reveal that he is not cut from the same theocratic cloth as Ayatollah Khomeini. Sistani and those who follow him are gradually but firmly leading the Shiite faithful toward a sensible and peaceful democratic understanding of Muslim mores.

On the streets of Najaf

To be sure, a Western visitor to Najaf could understandably conclude that our fate in Iraq is in the hands of medievalists. High Shiism can appear bizarre to the eyes of outsiders--even to many Iraqis. Walk into predominately Shiite middle-class neighborhoods in Baghdad and you will see lightly or unveiled Shiite women walk hand in hand with their mates. In Najaf, the faith envelops you. For an unbeliever, it feels heavy and claustrophobic.

On the edge of a desert, fed only in modern times by a canal, Najaf is parched and unadorned, its historic quarters composed chiefly of two-story plaster and concrete houses. The palm trees and grass found closer to the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers are nowhere to be seen. The city's largest open square is a sprawl of dirty khaki-colored tents. There are no souq smells of spices, leather, or carpets, no sounds of Western or even Arab music. Pilgrimage trinkets, Korans, and religious commentaries are the main items sold on the crowded streets, along with small household appliances, cheap clothes, and other necessities of daily life.

Incongruously, Najaf is known as the "village of Volvos." Saddam Hussein flooded the town with the model 240 during the Iran-Iraq War to buy the loyalty of Shiites, who made up the rank and file in his Sunni-led army. Traffic jams in Najaf are Volvo junkyards.

And everywhere, through the fumes, one sniffs the flow of corpses. From the golden-domed shrine of Ali, where pilgrims bring their deceased loved ones to be blessed, to the town's enormous graveyards, the circulation of the dead repeats itself endlessly.

Away from the smell and noise, inside Najaf's Imam Ali Library (a three-story modern building recessed into a narrow winding street of row houses), Shiite history is stacked, floor to ceiling. With 600,000 volumes and 15,000 titles, it is the largest religious library in Iraq--the only great Shiite collection not destroyed by Saddam after the rebellion of 1991. For in addition to the dead, students from all over the Muslim world have come to Najaf since the eleventh century, when its first religious school opened. Although not always the preeminent center of Shiite learning, Najaf holds the spiritual trump card of being the burial site of the last Arabian caliph who oversaw the Muslim conquest of the Near East.

Khomeini's ghosts

Grand Ayatollah al-Hakim's youngest son, Izz ad-Din, guided me through Najaf's twisting walkways to the house Ayatollah Khomeini inhabited during his exile in Iraq. It was an old, unpainted, sand-scratched wooden home with small barred windows. Khomeini lived in Najaf from 1964 to 1978, when Iran's shah unwisely asked Saddam to boot the cleric from the country. Relocated to a Paris suburb, no longer under Iraqi surveillance, Khomeini and his lieutenants let loose a torrent of anti-shah propaganda via radio, cassette, telephone, and fax. Yet so far as Izz ad-Din knows, very few Iranian Shiite pilgrims--who started coming to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in great numbers almost immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein--ever seek out the ayatollah's former residence.

It was in Najaf that Khomeini perfected his political theory of a cleric-led Islamic revolution. The theory was a brilliant innovation, transforming Shiite clergy into an organized vanguard propelling the masses into the streets. But Khomeini would be disappointed in his hope that an Islamic revolution would ignite the Middle East. Arab Sunnis resisted his call to arms against the region's kings and dictators. Sunni fundamentalists like the Muslim Brotherhood were inspired by Khomeini's success, but could not get beyond their sectarian suspicions of him. The great divide in Islamic civilization between the Sunnis and the Shiites (who predominate only in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon) held firm.

"Khomeini was a great man," Izz ad-Din says evenly. "He triumphed over the shah, who was not a good man to his people. But Khomeini is the past. His way is not the future of Iraq." Sheikh Muhammad al-Haqqani, a senior cleric close to Sistani, put it another way, "We want a non-Islamic government that is respectful of Islam." A highly respected teacher in Najaf, of Iranian descent and happy to guide a stranger through his two-story religious school, Haqqani invited me and Iraqi and Iranian clerics to sit for a meal of lamb, chicken, and river fish.

"There is serious discussion of the Islamic Republic and the idea of Islam in Iraq. After Saddam, there is a strong desire to have more Islam here," stated Haqqani. "However, very few people want to see an Islamic revolution like Iran's."

Slightly annoyed by my continuing questions about Khomeinism in Iraq, he tried again to explain. "If you want to do Khomeini self-study in Najaf, you are free to do so. His writings are available here. If you can find disciples of Khomeini, you are free to study with them. But if a student becomes too engaged in social affairs, this student may not have time to study and advance through the system. This student should leave." The Iranian clerics nearby nodded firmly.

In their attitude to Khomeini--respectful but not approving--Izz ad-Din and Haqqani are good examples of the Shiite clergy throughout Iraq. His abuses aside (the Shiite clergy in Iraq are not hesitant to discuss Khomeini's terrible errors), the founder of the Islamic Republic had shown that a tyrannical king could be called to account. Khomeini eventually became a tyrant himself and betrayed his own obligation to live under the law, but for one amazing moment, he rendered justice.

Almost all of Najaf's clerics are familiar with the writings of Khomeini and his Iraqi counterpart, the more intellectually gifted Muhammad Baqir as-Sadr. Sadr argued that Muslims should reject both communism and capitalism as foreign ideologies based on godless materialism. Khomeini made this "third way" approach famous in his revolutionary "Neither East, nor West." In Najaf today, it is easy to find both Sadr's works and Khomeini's Islamic Government, first compiled from the ayatollah's Najaf lectures in 1970. Yet by and large, today's Shiite clerics in Iraq view the revolutionism of their predecessors as outdated, and few yearn to implement those designs in Iraq.

A politics informed, not run, by religion

Today's disinterest in theocracy among the leading Iraqi Shia is not, as is sometimes said, because they view politics as spiritually polluting. It is true that Shiite teachers have traditionally resisted mixing politics and religion. But after enduring decades of unspeakable tyranny, today's clerics have concluded they must keep an eye on the political system to ensure that their flock is never slaughtered again. Their ideas of political legitimacy and justice, however, are quite secularized.

Take the fatwa of Ayatollah Sistani that pushed the Bush administration to accept a speedy transition to democracy. Arguing against an extended interim government, Sistani wrote:

Popular elections are necessary so that each Iraqi who is of voting age can choose his representative for a constituent assembly. And then any Basic Law written by this assembly must be approved by a national referendum. It is incumbent upon all believers with their utmost commitment to demand this, and asserting the truth of this path is the best way that they can participate in this process.

That opinion, issued on June 28, 2003, is revolutionary in the history of Islam. Note that there is little reference to Islam. There is no allusion to the duties man owes to God. In its essentials--one man, one vote, and the moral obligation to have a constitution written by elected representatives and approved by popular referendum--this fatwa is flawlessly secular. It simply makes the people the final arbiter of politics.

Sistani's opinion is the more striking when compared to Khomeini's political vision--which is that God is the sole legislator, and that government is mandated to implement God's plan in this world. The only acceptable form of government in the Khomeini view is one directed by the most religiously learned.

Once in power, he and his clerical cohorts gutted the Iranian constitution of any commitment to democracy. The idea that each Iranian has the right to select his or her representative would have been seen by Khomeini as an anti-Islamic plot.

Western observers who see in Ayatollah Sistani's growing influence the beginnings of an Iraqi theocratic state are quite simply wrong. Sistani has done what Iran's pro-democracy dissident clerics have dreamed of doing: He has taken the critical moral imperative in Islamic history--"commanding right and forbidding wrong"--and detached it from the state. While by no means liberals, Sistani and the traditional clergy allied with him are inverting this doctrine into a defense of political liberty. They are laying the pillars of a new, clerically protected democratic order.

When I asked Izz ad-Din whether he, his father Grand Ayatollah al-Hakim, Sistani, and the clerical community behind them consider democracy to be maruf ("that which is good"), he answered, "Completely. Muslims are entitled to live in a democratic society. Muslims, be they good ones or bad, have the right to vote."

A breakthrough in the making

Of course, Izz ad-Din is certain that "good Muslims" will prove triumphant at the ballot box. He has no doubt that Saddam Hussein's tyranny has made Iraq a more religious country. And you cannot remain long with Shiite clerics in Iraq and not hear the words khutut hamra, "red lines," the outer bounds of what is permissible behavior in a democracy. In Iraq today, clerics are often vague about how they see democracy intersecting with Islamic law. They are genuinely trying to figure out for themselves the interplay between the two, which they know is uncharted territory.

When the mechanics of democratic transition work themselves out, the religious establishment will no doubt become anxious about "anti-Islamic" and "anti-Shiite" measures in any permanent constitution. But what is striking about the clerical discussion of democratic "red lines" is that it is very difficult for clerics, individually or as a group, to decide on those limits. In trying to delineate them, clerics say that the divisive issues will be about akhlaq ("morals"). But they are by no means sure which morals should be closed to public debate.

Basic tolerance and political pluralism stand in the large gray area surrounding the "red lines." Without tolerance--the agreement to disagree within certain borders--democracy is impossible. Islam has always been far friendlier to linkages of religion and state than Christianity or Judaism. But the Shiite body politic, through years of suffering under Saddam Hussein, and watching the failures of the Iranian Revolution, has now absorbed a democratic ethic.

Iraqi clerics have no desire to follow the example of their eastern rival. In his quest to create more-perfect believers, Khomeini inadvertently demolished the legitimacy (though not yet the fact) of clerical rule. The alluring revolutionary path today is the belief that each citizen has an inalienable right to influence his country's political system. Sistani and the clerics of Najaf are building on Khomeini's unintended accomplishment, advancing further the idea of Muslim democracy.

Clerics must now share their ethical monopoly with the ballot box. In traditional Islam, there has always been an understanding that Muslims as a community had a certain moral integrity that stemmed from their direct communication with Allah. The belief that Muslims, as independent, rational actors, can voluntarily see the truth underlies today's acceptance of representative government. This shift toward democracy fulfills the dream of faithful Muslims who have wanted to marry the genius of Western innovation with Islamic traditions and values.

This historic transition could never have been implemented by anyone intervening from outside the traditional Muslim mainstream. But Sistani, Hakim, and the clerics of Najaf, as mainstays of Islamic tradition and the most esteemed voices in their community, are perfectly positioned to carry out this transformation. If the traditional clergy can keep hard-core radicals like those surrounding Moqtada al-Sadr in check, it will become increasingly difficult for any future Iraqis--for instance, Shiite generals commanding a majority Shiite army--to betray a democratic system.

Iraq's traditional clerics are aware of the stakes, both at home and abroad. "We need the Americans, but the Americans need us. Democracy in the Middle East will not be possible without us," quietly intoned Sayyid Ali al-Wa'iz, the son and grandson of Shiite grand ayatollahs, and a senior cleric of Baghdad's Kadhimayn shrine, one of the holiest in Iraq. Dressed in white, weak, and perhaps dying after 23 years of detention under Saddam, al-Wa'iz smiled softly as he tried to sit up in his bed.

"We don't want to repeat the revolution of 1920" (whenShiite clerics rose against the British occupation). "We want democracy this time, and we want the coalition troops to go home safely." Not at all annoyed by my repeated questions about the possibility of Shiite militancy gaining the upper hand in Iraq, al-Wa'iz mildly reproved me.

"We are all agents of Sistani, who is our marja (the 'source of emulation,' the highest rank for a Shiite cleric)," stated Wa'iz. "He is a rational religious scholar. He wants us to live religious lives, but not have religion dictate politics. We must have democracy, not revolution, in Iraq."

Reuel Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of The Islamic Paradox.

Published in Democracy Breaks Out in the Middle East April/May 2005