Monday, May 12, 2008
Will Iraq turn into an Iranian-style theocracy or a more tolerant Muslim state? As zero hour for America's grand experiment approaches, Shiite leaders hold the key.
Jan 30, 2004 | The other day, on a trip to the Ministry of Public Works, I sat in an unmoving car with my driver and translator. A mysterious but typical snarl up ahead had turned the road into a parking lot. Frustrated drivers U-turned over a median, edged their cars into wrong-way traffic, jumped sidewalks in misguided attempts to escape the mess. "Look at this," said Amjad, my translator. "They think democracy means you can do whatever you want." Inevitably, a fender scraped a door panel. Men jumped from their cars and began shouting and shoving in the ribbons of space between vehicles. One guy went for his tire iron and waved it like a sword over his head. Before things got truly ugly, Iraqi traffic cops came running from somewhere nearby and calmed the situation by directing the cars, gesturing with their Kalashnikovs. Eventually, the mass untangled and the cars continued to edge toward their destination.
Amjad's take on the Iraqi definition of democracy is certainly simplistic, but it's not completely out of line. Iraqis tell me all the time that they don't understand what democracy means. So far, they associate the word with chaos and the freedom to do whatever the hell you want. That's not democracy as Americans understand it, but the confusion is understandable. Since before the war, the United States had been promising the Iraqi people that Saddam's ouster would be followed by a wee bit of occupation and a whopping portion of democratic nation building. So far, the opposite has been true.
In the next few months, Iraq and the United States will be struggling to figure out what the handover of power will look like. A few weeks ago, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most respected Shiite leader, demanded free and open elections in lieu of the caucuses the U.S. favors to create a transitional government at the end of June. In Najaf, Basra, Baghdad and other towns around the country, tens of thousands of Iraqis demonstrated in the streets to pressure the U.S. to pay attention to the Shiite religious leader's demands. And it worked. Proconsul Paul Bremer returned to the United States to confer with the Bush administration and ask the United Nations, which had pulled out of Iraq after a devastating Aug. 20 bombing destroyed its headquarters and killed its top official in the country, to reinvolve itself in Iraq -- specifically to see if elections are possible. Since then, U.N. chief Kofi Annan has announced that, as long the United States can provide proper security, the United Nations will, indeed, return.
In theory, open elections represent the most democratic option for Iraq. But there's a problem. Shiites constitute a majority in Iraq, with 60 percent of the vote. And while Sistani and his followers aren't gunning for a full-out theocracy at this point, followers of his that I spoke with indicated that a Shiite-dominated government would do its best in the long term to shift the nation toward Islamic rule. That could lead to the marginalization of minority groups such as the Kurds, Christians and Turkmens, not to mention the Sunni Arabs who ruled the country under Saddam's long reign. It could greatly compromise the rights that women maintained under Saddam's secular (albeit dictatorial) regime. And it could completely screw up the Bush administration's hopes of fabricating an ally smack-dab in the middle of the Middle East. (To be honest, such an alliance may be a long shot no matter what the political outcome is.) In a worst-case scenario, hardline Islamic rule could mean the abrogation of future elections and a theocratic state. In other words, the democratic process might result in the death of democracy. It's a scary prospect for the Bush administration, which is scrambling to keep everything at least looking like it's under control until the U.S. election in November.
Earlier this week, I made a trip to the holy city of Najaf, a few hours south of Baghdad. Najaf is the religious epicenter for Shiite Iraqis and indeed Shiites around the world, because it's where Imam Ali, godfather of the Shiite sect of Islam, is buried. Sistani maintains his headquarters there, as do most Shiite leaders, though they have satellite offices in Baghdad and other parts of the country.
On the drive to Najaf, I asked Amjad (who is Shiite) about Sistani and the control he is suddenly wielding over the United States and its plans. As a rule, Amjad told me, Sistani doesn't involve himself in politics. He focuses purely on religious issues. It's part of the reason he garners such respect. Iraqis see Sistani as someone driven by the welfare of the Iraqi people, not by personal ambition or desire for glory. (By contrast, many Iraqis mistrust most members of the Iraqi Governing Council, believing that they made Faustian bargains with the United States.). Since the end of the war, Iraq has been suffering from a major leadership vacuum. Sistani (who has indicated he will not occupy political office) is stepping into the breach until someone else emerges, Amjad said.
As we neared Najaf, I began seeing posters, billboards and large hand-painted portraits of Sistani (as well as pictures of famous Shiite martyrs). He is an older man with a full white beard and sharply peaked dark eyebrows, wearing the black turban-like emama worn by Shiite religious leaders. During the day, the road to Najaf is busy and relatively safe. We passed through a number of checkpoints where Iraqi police and soldiers asked my driver, Thamer, whether the car belonged to him (car theft remains one of the many major security issues here). A simple "yes" got us waved through. The method seemed pretty flawed to me, but Thamer said the police look for telltale signs of nervousness or evasion and base their decision on intuition.
Traffic became heavier on the outskirts of the city, as cars, dilapidated passenger vans, and smoke-belching buses converged on the city center. On top of many of the vehicles lay plain wooden coffins lashed to the luggage racks, some partially covered with blankets that had been disordered like bedcovers by long highway trips. Just about every Shiite Muslim who dies in Iraq (and many who die in other countries as well) is brought to Najaf for burial in a cemetery so large it is supposedly visible from outer space. The cemetery begins along one of the city's main roads and sprawls over the outskirts like an endless subdivision of miniature houses. Steamer trunk-sized burial markers are so tightly packed together that it seems impossible a body could fit beneath them. Only a few roads snake through the cemetery. Amjad's father is buried somewhere in there. Amjad told me that the last time he came to the cemetery, he found it nearly impossible to locate his father's grave site.
We drove down a boulevard lined with squat glass-and-cement tourist hotels and parked buses that seemed on the verge of shedding one or more parts. Since the end of the war, Iranian Shiites have begun making tourist visits to the holy city, crossing easily over the once-restricted border, which is only a little more than 150 miles away.
Sistani will not speak directly to the press or members of the Coalition Provisional Authority (another reason he holds such respect among his followers). He sometimes speaks through representatives, but on the day I went to Najaf, recent articles in the Western press had left the Sistani camp feeling frustrated and misquoted. One cleric told me that, if I waited until 8 p.m., I could submit some questions in writing. Making the three-hour trip back to Baghdad late at night would have been very stupid -- a significant number of hijackers haunt the roads then -- and since Sistani rarely answers such questions anyway, I begged off.
Instead, I met with the spokesman for Ayatollah Bashir al-Najafi, one of the three most important Shiite leaders in Iraq apart from Sistani. (The others are Mohammed Said Hakim and Mohammed Ishaq Fayyad). The three lesser leaders all command significant numbers of followers and their teachings differ from Sistani's in modest ways. But overall, they and their followers acquiesce to Sistani's ultimate authority (especially now, since they've put on a united front to deal with the Americans). This is not necessarily the case with Muqtada al-Sadr, a young Shiite cleric whose popularity derives foremost from his legacy as the son of Muhammed Sadiq al-Sadr. In the 1990s, the older al-Sadr gained a significant following by defying Saddam Hussein's iron-fisted anti-Shiite edicts (for instance, his attempt to forbid Friday prayer). Saddam had him assassinated in 1999. Though Muqtada does not have his father's seniority or clout, he's shown he cannot be ignored. Shortly after the end of the war, Muqtada organized large anti-American protests and, at one point, attempted to set up his own alternative government. Shiites tell me that, in general, he is not widely respected. But he has served as the focal point for anti-American sentiment and, these days, that means a lot. Lately, though, he has dropped somewhat from the scene. I've heard that he's being checked somewhat by Sistani's influence, but I cannot say that with certainty.
Bashir's headquarters are in the old section of the city. Sand-colored brick row houses with metal doors bordered the streets. In front of one, a skinny boy worked a large piece of sandpaper over a wooden headboard propped on sawhorses. A man in a brown pinstriped dish-dash robe and matching suit jacket walked along carrying a plastic bag of vegetables in one hand and a string of prayer beads in the other. As we parked the car, two very young boys in sweat suits rode past in a small donkey cart pulled by a smaller donkey. A pair of women walked down the street wearing abayas -- the head-to-toe black covering favored by conservative Muslims. In Baghdad, less than half the women I see wear the abaya but every woman I saw in Najaf had one on.
I had dressed in full loose clothing and brought a scarf to cover my hair. Most of the time, I don't wear a hijab (headscarf) -- it's just not necessary. In Najaf, it would have been highly insulting, to both men and women, to go without one -- the equivalent of wearing a bikini to Sunday mass. (Since yesterday, when I wrote this, I've had a bit of a policy shift. I've started to wear a scarf in the car and out on the street for safety reasons. Three days ago, armed attackers pulled alongside a car carrying a mostly Western CNN crew and opened fire, killing two Iraqi CNN employees. One of the men killed was the cousin of a friend of mine. He told me that, in the interest of keeping as low a profile as possible, I should wear the scarf. Sadly, he's right.)
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