[Mb-civic] COMMENTARY The Real Battle of Najaf: for the Shiite Soul

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-bull13aug13.story

COMMENTARY

The Real Battle of Najaf: for the Shiite Soul
 By Bartle Breese Bull

 August 13, 2004

 While Muqtada Sadr, Iraq's young Shiite firebrand, leads his insurrection
from the holy city of Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani ‹ the spiritual
leader of Iraq's 15 million Shiite Muslims ‹ sits silently in London,
recovering from heart surgery. We are watching two battles for Najaf: the
physical fight raging between Sadr's Mahdi militia and the U.S. military,
and a subtler struggle for influence within Iraq's Shiite majority ‹ a
struggle that is in many ways a battle for the future of the country.

 Najaf, as the resting place of Imam Ali, the founder of the Shiite branch
of Islam, is the holiest city on Earth for the world's 200 million Shiite
Muslims. The leaders of the city's clerical community are the natural
leaders of the global Shiite community, whose members everywhere aspire to
be buried in the cemetery where so much of the fighting is taking place. The
spiritual prestige of these leaders produces enormous temporal power as
well, and it is this political standing that Sadr seeks to usurp.

 Sistani is the most senior of Najaf's four grand ayatollahs, and doubts
about his health have highlighted the issue of who will replace him in the
religious realm. Regardless of timing, any spiritual successor to Sistani
could come only from among the other three. All three, like Sistani, eschew
the sort of direct political rule exercised by the mullahs of Iran. All are
in their 70s.

 The only native Iraqi among them is Mohammed Said Hakim. Some observers
believe he would lean toward the policies of the Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite political group that is run by his
cousin and that has historical ties to Iran. The council allied itself with
the U.S.-led coalition during the war and has been relatively cooperative
with the occupation since then.

 Bashir Najafi, a Pakistani who has been in Iraq most of his life, has been
an outspoken critic of the occupation and, as the most radical and
anti-American of Sistani's potential successors, could be expected to take a
more activist line.

 The third grand ayatollah is Mohammed Ishaq Fayyad, who, of the three, is
the most committed opponent of Iran-style clerical rule.

 No front-runner has emerged, and nobody knows for how many weeks or decades
Sistani will survive the three blocked arteries that caused his trip to
London.

 What is certain, however, is that the conditions feeding the rage of the
urban poor who currently dominate Iraqi Shiite politics will not disappear
in the near future. Iraq's slums are some of the most demoralizing places on
Earth ‹ places like Sadr City in Baghdad, an urban wilderness of cinderblock
and wire where families live nine to a room and sewage and engine oil bake
in the gutters. There are no jobs and seemingly no prospects of them. The
feeling of impotence is pervasive.

 After 30 years of Sunni apartheid under Saddam Hussein, Shiites are
impatient for change. They were betrayed by the British in 1930, with the
arrival of a foreign prince who ruled through the Sunni minority. They were
betrayed by the United States in 1991, when they followed George H.W. Bush's
exhortations and rose against Hussein, only to be crushed. They form 60% of
Iraq's population and have waited centuries to run their own affairs. They
cannot understand why Hussein's fall has brought so little improvement to
their lot.

 Sadr draws his support largely from the disaffected male youth of Iraq's
Shiite slums. Even though he is identified as a cleric, the power he wields
does not derive from religious authority. Depending on who is counting, he
is between 24 and 30 years old, and it is debatable whether he has even
completed his seminarian training. Even if he had the requisite juridical
talent, it would take him 30 or 40 years to become a grand ayatollah.

 But his temporal power is substantial. In a nationwide poll conducted by
the coalition authorities in May, only 2% backed him for Iraq's presidency,
but that's not really a measure of his power. The same poll showed that he
enjoyed 68% approval nationwide. His standing comes partly from the prestige
of his father, a grand ayatollah killed by Hussein's people in 1999.

 Sadr represents a set of grievances and aspirations embodied in a movement
that exists with or without him, whatever his fate as the U.S. soldiers
fight their way ever closer to the Imam Ali shrine where he has taken
refuge. 

 Sistani's silence while battle blazes through Najaf ‹ his home and the
wellspring of his authority ‹ is not as remarkable as it might seem. For all
the "quietism" that has seen him shun formal political roles, Sistani is an
active political player. He has imposed prior truces in Najaf and Karbala,
scuppered U.S. plans for regional caucuses in the constitutional process,
forced the June 30 hand-over date and dictated the abandonment of federalism
in the latest United Nations resolution.

 Quietism is different from quiet, and Sistani's current silence is a loud,
clear refusal to rescue a man whom senior Shiites see as an unruly thug and
who is a rival to Sistani for power in the Shiite community.

 Whoever emerges as the main channel for Shiite political energy in Iraq,
the thrust of that energy will be the same: maximum power for the majority
via a maximum of direct democracy, as little federalism as possible, and as
much Islam as possible. The question of whether Iraq's Shiites can deliver
the conditions for a lasting, unified country acceptable to its minorities
will be determined by the winner of the real battle for Najaf.

 *


Bartle Breese Bull, an author and journalist, recently returned from
assignment in Iraq. His next book, about Harlem, will be published next year
by Public Affairs.




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