The border-crossing fraudulent Iranian voters

"Outside the precincts of government, Muqtada's popularity grew in the months following the US-led invasion, but not because of his anti-Iranian posturing.  In fact, his superficial nationalist rhetoric belied his actual interest in drawing Iranian money and support.  Iranian birth and citizenship did not diminish Ayatollah Sistani's broad support among Iraq's Shias, and despite close ties with Iran, SCIRI was able to deepen its support in Baghdad and the south.  At the same time, Iyad Allawi, [ many Iraqis like Shaqawa do not like Allawi] who campaigned in the January elections as a bridge-builder, reaching out to Sunnis, did poorly; by some estimates his support was even weaker than his numbers suggested.  Almost a year later in the December 2005 elections his popularity would plummet even further.  All this showed that amid the raucous accusations of Iranian influence-peddling in Iraq, for the country's Shias the enemy was not external - not Iran - but rather internal.  The problems, as Shias saw them, were Ba'thism and Salafi-style extremism, which were casting a grim double shadow over Sunni politics."

-Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival

This reminded me of Khalid Jarrar:

"Iraqi Sunnis' attitudes were from the outset shaped by their belief that they would able to get back on top.  Many Sunnis clung to the illusion that the Shias' majority status within the country was a myth spread by America.  One Sunni talking point, repeated by no less a figure than Jordan's King Abdullah as well as then Defense Minister Shaalan, was that Iranians were crossing the border into Iraq in order to inflate Shia numbers.  The insinuation was that many, if not most, Shias were not actually Iraqi at all - that Iraq was being turned into a Shia state by force and fraud."  [ Sometimes I find these beliefs amusing.  We know that king Abduallah's not the sharpest tool, but damn, he's the king!  Ya gotta pass that stuff through your wife before you try it in public, ya hmar. ]

The currency of such beliefs among Sunni Arabs was important in driving the Sunni decision to boycott the January 2005 elections - a choice that the weight of Sunni opinion later came to recognize as a mistake.  Many Sunnis at the time, however, were still overestimating their own share of Iraq's population and so believed that sitting out the January vote would hold turnout below the final mark of almost 60 percent."

-Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival

Sectarianism

It is always interesting to read the posts of Iraqi bloggers who blame the sectarian violence in Iraq on the current Iraqi government and/or the US without mentioning the crimes of Sunni extremists and Baathists, who began murdering Iraqi Shia and Kurds long before Shia militias started their murderous rampages in Baghdad. Riverbend writes in her latest post:

"I always hear the Iraqi pro-war crowd interviewed on television from foreign capitals (they can only appear on television from the safety of foreign capitals because I defy anyone to be publicly pro-war in Iraq). They refuse to believe that their religiously inclined, sectarian political parties fueled this whole Sunni/Shia conflict. They refuse to acknowledge that this situation is a direct result of the war and occupation. They go on and on about Iraq's history and how Sunnis and Shia were always in conflict and I hate that. I hate that a handful of expats who haven't been to the country in decades pretend to know more about it than people actually living there."

Amazing. Not a word about the hundreds of suicide bombings and car bombs that have killed tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis since 2003. Perhaps Riverbend believes, like many Arabs and Arab Americans do, that Americans are behind those bombings, or that bombing markets and mosques is a natural reaction to invasion and occupation by a foreign power. Dare I say that the bombers were Sunni extremists, and most victims were Shia and Kurds? To make such a claim is to run the risk of being called a 'sectarian' - to some Iraqis, I AM the sectarian because I mention the sects of the criminals who mass murder Iraqis.

Apparently to Riverbend and a few other Iraqi bloggers, the Baathi elite are not sectarian and never were. This is not to say that Maliki's government is not sectarian in nature, and that the powerful Shia clerics (Hakim, Sadr) are not without fault, but to assert that the current Iraqi government is responsible for starting the sectarian violence is absurd. Furthermore, the current government in Iraq, as dubious as many members' qualifications may be, is a product of democracy in a Shia-majority country that has been dominated by Sunni Arabs for centuries.

Vali Nasr writes in his excellent book The Shia Revival:

'The cities of Baghdad and Basra, and others, swelled much as Beirut had, as strife, persecution, continuing high birthrates, and rural underemployment drove millions of Shias off farms and out of villages. These people streamed into vast and poverty-stricken conurbations such as the Zafaraniya neighborhood of South Baghdad or Sadr City, the enormous Shia neighborhood that skirts the eastern and northern edges of Iraq's capital. The poor of Baghdad or of Basra in the far south had little connection anymore with rigid authority of their ancestral farms and marshes. In the slums, desperately needed social services came via the efforts of such clerical leaders as the ayatollahs Muhammad Sadeq al-Sadr (executed by Saddam Hussein in 1999, and the father of Muqtada al-Sadr), Abol-Qasem al-Khoi, and Ali al-Sistani. As a result, when Saddam's regime fell before U.S. tanks, it was not the mathematician-turned-politician Ahmad Chalabi or the doctor-turned-politician Iyad Allawi who emerged to lead the Shias, but Sadr, Sistani, and the clerics of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).'

If you have not read The Shia Revival and want to understand more about the history of sectarianism in Iraq, this book is a must read. Vali Nasr explains the historical persecution of the Shia, and not just in Iraq, but also in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. He explains in a chapter aptly titled The Fading Promise of Nationalism that although the Iraqi Shia embraced Arab nationalism, they were still marginalized and persecuted:

'The Shia also embraced nationalism enthusiastically. In the aftermath of World War I, new national identities were forged - sometimes out of thin air - to define the struggle against colonialism and the character of the nation-states that were to follow. For the Shia, especially where they were a minority, secular nationalism was an inclusive identity. It defined them above and beyond the polemical debates of old and as equals to Sunnis in the eyes of the nation. Shias had failed to dominate the Islamic world theologically or politically and had faced the pains and perils of marginality. The modern state showed them a path forward that was free of the baggage of their religious identity. In Iran nationalism did not have these connotations, because Shias were a majority; but where Shias were a minority or ruled by Sunnis, nationalism appealed to them in the same way that inclusive ideologies attract minorities, who are drawn by a promise of a level playing field. Shias therefore embraced Arab nationalism, Pakistani nationalism, and Iraqi or Lebanese nationalism, in each case imagining a community where Shia-Sunni divisions would not matter. The modern world, at least in its nationalist guise, held the promise of ending centuries of painful prejudice and persecution.

The promise, however, proved to be illusory, as the modern states grew increasingly authoritarian and showed a penchant for using Sunni sectarian prejudices to shore up their own authority. The entrenched the very divisions that the Shia hoped they would bridge. These nations solidified Sunni rule and Shia marginality and, worse yet, gave impetus to sectarianism. The founding ideas of these nations, despite a certain surface rhetoric of inclusiveness, never truly encompassed the Shia. Nor did they make provisions to include the socioeconomically disadvantaged classes, who often were predominantly Shia (as in Iraq and Lebanon). Marginality continued to dog the Shia as they faced institutionalized discrimination, persecution, and vicious prejudice in their everyday lives.

...Shias have never risen beyond the glass ceiling that separates them from the Sunni elite. A few, such as Saddam's last and highly colorful information minister, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, rose to prominence. But they were tokens in a world where Shia feet never trod the real halls of power. Saddam Hussein liked to make much of the second part of his name before his Shia subjects - especially during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s - but he nevertheless characterized Shias as Iranian lackeys, and he periodically purged the Ba'th Party of its Shia members in order to make sure that the levers of state power and the banner of Arab nationalism remained firmly in Sunni hands. Shia privates filled the ragtag conscript ranks of Saddam's poorly equipped and ill-trained regular army, but the elite Republican Guards and Special Republican Guards were Sunnis almost to a man. Iraqi Shias revealed what they thought of the Ba'th Party when they insisted on including a clause in the August 2005 draft constitution that would ban all "racist" institutions, meaning among other things the Ba'th Party, and that barred former Ba'thists from holding office.'

Kings and Clerics

With the election in Iran and Obama's recent remarks about US involvement in the overthrow of Mossadeq in 1953, I thought I would transcribe a bit of history on the subject by Vali Nasr, which helps explain why Islam is so political in Iran today:

‘In Iran, the twentieth century saw the old partnership of kings and clerics strained to the breaking point. In 1925 the Shia ulama - Haeri’s father prominent among them - persuaded an army officer named Reza Khan, who had staged a coup, to declare himself shah. They feared the rise of a Kemalist ruler, and believed that whatever the faults of a Shia monarchy, it would be preferable to an aggressively secular republic of the sort that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was building next door in Turkey. But the clerics got more than they bargained for, since the Pahlavi monarchy that Reza Khan founded turned out to have less to do with preserving Shiism than with acting as a modernizing republic parading in royal trappings. The Pahlavis never conceived of Iran as a Shia realm and refused to see defending Shiism as their duty. On the contrary, they perceived Shiism as a stumbling block to their modernizing agenda.

Before the first Pahlavi shah took the throne, he had taken part in Ashoura, beating his chest while calling out to Imam Husayn. The shah included the name of the eighth imam, Reza, which he also carried, in every one of his sons’ names. Nevertheless, he saw a Turkish-style secular state as vital to Iran’s modernization. Reza Shah secularized the legal system and the courts, banned the veiling of women, deemphasized Iran’s Shia identify, and marginalized the ulama - when need be, brutally. The ulama resisted - at times violently - but the combination of a powerful government and a modernizing society caused clerical influence to fade.

One area where the ulama could still make their weight felt was the struggle against imperialism. Clerics supported both the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry in 1951 and the popular movement that it created. The nationalization led to a confrontation between Iran and the West, which ended in 1953 with the CIA-backed military coup that ousted the nationalist premier, Muhammad Mossadeq, and restored power to the young shah, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, who was Reza Shah’s son. While many in the Shia ulama supported Mossadeq’s goals, at the end of the day the most senior clerics backed the restoration of the monarchy because they badly feared chaos and a communist takeover. They set aside their sympathy for the nationalist cause and reacted to the same fears that led the US to support the coup. They had made, thought top clerics, yet another hard choice in order to defend the realm of the true (Shia) faith.

Whatever they meant at the time, however, the events of the early 1950s did not signal the birth of a lasting rapprochement between the throne and the Shia clergy. On the contrary, the 1960s and 1970s saw the state of relations between the two hit a new low. Rapid socioeconomic development, political repression, the growing influence of Western culture, the close ties between Tehran and Washington, and a growing gap between rich and poor all fed worsening social tensions. The ulama read these signs of the times as cause for worry, but also as an opportunity to undercut the religiously wayward Pahlavi monarchy. Some among the ulama also believed that unless Shiism took a leading role in the social and political struggles of the day, it would lose more ground and find itself shoved to the sidelines by leftists. To prevent this, the ulama would have to wax political as never before.’

--Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival

Pakistan's blasphemy laws

'Section 295C was introduced into the Pakistani legal system in the 1980s by the military dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq as part of his broader effort to Islamize laws in Pakistan. It stipulates that "derogatory remarks, etc., in respect of the Holy Prophet … either spoken or written, or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo or insinuation, directly or indirectly … shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine." '

So let's get this straight: the USA & KSA supported Zia ul-Haq because he was helping the mujahideen fight the Soviets. Zia ul-Huq 'was described by some as a "fundamentalist Sunni dictator"'.

While Zia al Huq was President, 'On 4 April 1979, the former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged, after the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence as passed by the Lahore High Court. The Supreme Court ruled four to three in favour of execution. The High Court had given him the death sentence on charges of the murder of the father of Ahmed Raza Kasuri, a dissident PPP politician. Despite many clemency appeals from foreign leaders requesting Zia to commute Bhutto's death sentence, Zia dismissed the appeals and upheld the death sentence. The hanging of an elected prime minister by a military man was condemned by the international community and by lawyers and jurists across Pakistan.'

Hey it was the 80s! In the 80s most Americans had no idea where Pakistan is. As a teenager growing up in Colorado, I knew there was a country called Pakistan, and most Pakistanis are Muslim, but I did not know so many of them are Shia. It wasn't until I read Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival that I learned about the history of sectarian conflict in Pakistan. It seems that most Americans still don't know about the sectarian violence in Pakistan, and if they do, they probably don't care. Americans in general don't see a difference between Sunni and Shiite.

'Some see a precursor of Pakistani Shia-Sunni strife in the April 1979 execution of deposed President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto on questionable charges by Islamic fundamentalist General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. According to Vali Nasr, Ali Bhutto was Shia and Zia ul-Haq a Sunni.

The "Islamization of General Zia ul-Haq" that followed was resisted by Shia who saw it as "Sunnification" as the laws and regulations were based on Sunni Fiqh, or Jurisprudence. In July 1980, 25,000 Shia protested the Islamization laws in the capital Islamabad.'

It's amazing how quickly one can learn about the history of a country (and just about anything else) on the web these days.

Making Aid Accountable

The US has given Pakistan billions of dollars in aid since 9/11, presumably to fight the Taliban, but Pakistan has been unable, and perhaps unwilling, to get tough with the Taliban. The Obama administration is now holding the Pakistanis accountable for the aid they receive from the US, which I think is long overdue.

"Vali Nasr, a professor at Tufts University's Fletcher School of International Affairs, has been tapped to be a senior adviser to Richard Holbrooke, the administration's special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Nasr says this time Pakistan will need to be held accountable for the U.S. aid it receives."

It is disheartening to think the US has been handing out money to people who do not fulfill their end of the obligation, who may even be supporting injustice. Which brings me to Israel. Israel has been receiving billion of dollars in annual aid since 1973. For the last 36 years Israel has unconditionally received $3 billion every year and has used it to buy all kinds of things, including US-made weapons and big bulldozers to destroy Palestinian homes and olive farms. In 2007 Israel received $6.8 million every day in 2007. Shouldn't we attach some strings to that? Shouldn't the US be influencing Israel, and helping to protect justice, instead of Israel influencing the American Congress to ignore injustice?

Salt less than 15 miles from Palestinian border

I have been re-reading the last few chapters of Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival and I transcribed and posted the first part of the chapter titled The Battle For The Middle East, which is, among other things, about the men of Salt and their 'jihad' in Iraq. This may have been the last of Shia Revival posts. I encourage you to read the book for yourself. I was curious where Salt is relative to Amman, and it actually lies to the northwest of Amman, not to the north as Nasr wrote. I noticed that Salt is just more than 10 miles east of the Palestinian border. It amazes me that the deranged sons of Salt traveled about 500 miles to the east in order to kill Iraqis and Americans, considering they have lived a few miles from occupied Palestine all their worthless lives.

Shi'i Democracy

This is an excellent article (thanks Maury!) that discusses the rise of Shi'i democracy.  I will post only the first part because it's so long, but you should read the entire article if you want to learn more about Shiism.  The author refers to Lebanon as a Shia majority country, which is interesting because I grew up believing that the Shia in Lebanon have a plurality, not a majority.   I have also heard some people claim that the majority of Lebanese are actually Sunni.  Before the elections in Iraq, I was hoping that a secular government would be formed in Baghdad, but it should not be surprising that the Iraqi Shia voted for religious leaders who are viewed by many as being fundamentalists.  The Iraqi Shia have been plunged into war and poverty for decades, and history has shown that in times of war and poverty, people often turn to religion.

On a side note, I would like to point out that it makes more sense to call it a Shii democracy (as opposed to Shia democracy) as Shii is the adjective (and singular) form in Arabic - see 'FYI' in the sidebar to learn more.  Also, I wish journalists would start spelling it Nejef (like it sounds) rather than Najaf.  I don't know how many times I have heard American journalists call it 'Najoff'.

PS: Until 2003 I thought Iraq and Iran were the only countries in the world with Shia majorities.

'Shia Democracy': Myth or Reality?

Sreeram Chaulia
February 16, 2007

In contemporary Shiism, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Najaf (the holiest center of Shiism) has been the marja with the largest popular approval since the death of his mentor Abol-Qassem Khoi in 1992.

Editor's note: This is the first part of a two-part article.

The Other Islam

Discussions about the democratic deficit in the Muslim world tend to conflate Sunnis and Shias as culturally homogeneous groups. Nuances about diversity within Islam only come up related to the regional variation in practices and political institutions (e.g. Middle Eastern Islam, North African Islam, South Asian Islam, Central Asian Islam, and Southeast Asian Islam). Some scholars make the distinction between Arab and non-Arab countries with regard to their political culture and regime type. The unspoken assumption in studies proving the proclivity of Muslim countries toward authoritarianism is that sectarian schisms within Islam do not matter much when it comes to attitude and receptivity to democracy. Whether there are well-delineated differences between Shias and Sunnis in the way they conceive of—and construct—political authority has not been given much serious research. This is a surprising omission in contrast to the extent to which political scientists have debated the impact of the Catholic-Protestant schism on the evolution of capitalism and democracy in the Western hemisphere.

Blindness to the Shia-Sunni divide in the literature on democratization is likely to be the result of glossing over the smaller sect of Islam, Shiism, which claims no more than 15 percent of the world's Muslims. Most Western depictions of what is termed "Islam" focus implicitly on Sunnism and Sunni political culture, except when the case studies of interest are Shia-majority countries (Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan). That there exists another Islam, Shiism, with its own identity and at least 200 million worldwide adherents, is largely bypassed. Perhaps there is something to "Shia democracy" as a concept that might hold a ray of hope for furthering democracy in the Muslim world. If deep-set Shia-Sunni differences are theological, social, and economic in nature, then one should expect non-random differences in their political culture and preferences too, which in turn might translate into differing orientation to regime types. The general framework of this essay is provided by Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel's theory (2005) that causation runs from values (culture) to institutions (democracy or authoritarianism) and that values differ systematically from culture to culture. If Shia and Sunni communities have systematically different cultures, they should a posteriori be different in their political infrastructures.

Part I

Shia Communities as Democratizers

Masoumeh Ebtekar, the first female vice president of Iran under the reformist former President Muhammad Khatami, recently remarked that Shia gains through electoral means in Iraq will "encourage us (Iran) to open up, since we see a different example of governance but with similar mentality that is also Shiite" (2005, 58). This sentiment is echoed by the prominent Iranian dissident intellectual Abdol Karim Soroush's thinking that as the Shia majority in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq comes to power, there will be a shift in "the overall balance among Shiites toward democratic legitimacy and away from the idea of clerical rule we see in Iran" (2004a). Historian Juan Cole buttresses this school of thought by noting that between April 2003 and January 2005, Shias underwent a remarkable development in legal thinking about democracy that is not new and that will outlive the contingencies in Iraq:

The ideals of elections, representation of the people, expression of the national will, and a rule of law are invoked over and over again by the most prominent Shiite religious leaders. Unlike Khomeini in 1979, they are completely unafraid of the term "democracy" and generally see no contradiction between it and Islam. (2006, 34)

The first full-length treatment of the subject of Shias as democratizers has been given by Vali Nasr, another Iranian thinker, who extends the range of the projected democratic tide beyond Iran to Shia-populated parts of the Middle East and South Asia. The gist of his argument is as follows:

Shias are both an objective and a subjective democratic force. Their rise in relative power is injecting a robust element of real pluralism into the too-often Sunni-dominated political life of the Muslim world. Many Shias are also finding democracy appealing as an idea in itself, not merely as an episodically useful vehicle for their power and ambitions. (2006, 180)

Shias, unlike Sunnis, are supposed to be rebellious by nature and opposed to dutifully obeying authority that lacks legitimacy. Historically repressed and discriminated, Shiism's ideal was always to fight against Sunni injustices and tyrannical rulers. Since the origin of the Shia-Sunni split in medieval times, Shia imams (spiritual leaders descended from the Prophet Muhammad) invoked a fear of revolt among Sunni Caliphs and were countered with persecution, imprisonment, and killing. To survive persecution in the Sunni-dominated Caliphates and Ottoman Empire, ordinary Shias had to hide their sectarian affiliations (taqqiya) and their imams escaped to Iran and India to seek refuge. The germs of anti-authoritarianism and protection of minority rights were thus, according to Nasr, inherent in Shiism from the very beginning (c. eighth century A.D.).

The break Shias initiated from Sunnism centered on what they considered to be the morally just kind of political authority. In contrast, the Sunni understanding of worldly power concentrated on a preoccupation with order, not the quality of rulership. The theory of government developed by medieval Sunni jurists was to uphold any government as long as it maintained stability and order and protected the Muslim (Sunni) community. Shiism emphasized the substance and quality of a regime much more than its form, an important congenital characteristic that would resonate with the evolution of democracy in modern times. Imam Ali's political testament (ahd) and Imam al-Sadiq's instructions to the Shia governor of Ahvaz, both of which entered Shia political culture by the 11th century, contain the patrimonial theory of just rule and fair treatment of subjects by kings. Respected ulama of the Safavid period (17th century) reiterated these themes with special emphasis on the rights (haqq) that subjects have against rulers. They stressed avoidance of tyranny, accountability, and access of holders of temporal authority to subjects. To Mulla Baqir Majlisi,

if kings show gratitude for their power and domination and if they observe the rights of the subjects, their kingdoms will last. Otherwise, they will soon disappear. A king will remain while he is an unbeliever, but not while he is a wrongdoer. If a possessor of knowledge should act badly with his flock, his knowledge will soon be taken away; otherwise, it will be increased. (Chittick 1988, 291)

The idealistic expectation of accountable and fair rulers in historical Shiism was revived by Ayatollah Na'ini of Najaf during the time of the Iranian constitutional revolution of 1906. He persuaded the Shia ulama of the time that while the world awaited the return of the twelfth imam (hidden from human perception), "the form of governance most compatible with Shi'ism is democracy-shaped and defined by a popularly ratified constitution" (Milani 2005, 27). His contemporary and fellow constitutionalist, Sayyid Imad Khalkhali, wrote, "In our time, sovereignty is founded on justice, fairness, and the principle of equality, as is obvious from the Europeans" (Dabashi 1988, 339). Mangol Bayat (1982) argues that Shia intellectuals of the modern era who employed Western ideas of constitutionalism, sovereignty of the people, liberal democracy, and secularism, were in fact carrying on the long-established tradition of dissent in Shiism. Despite loud calls for Westernization from as early as the mid-19th century, their thought was in spirit and form deeply rooted in the Shia norm of standing up to absolutist despotism. It is noteworthy that pro-democracy trends such as these did not evolve with as much depth or sophistication in the history of Sunnism, a faith that spoke the language of rulers more than that of the ruled.

Sunni-Shii relations post-1980

From Wikipedia: 'Following this period, Sunni-Shia strife has seen a major uptick, particularly in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many explain the bloodshed as the work of conspiracies by outsiders - "the forces of hegemony and Zionism which aim to weaken [Islam]" (Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Yusuf al-Qaradawi), unspecified "enemies" (Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), or American neo-liberals who wish to provoke "a debilitating Islamic civil war." (Dilip Hiro).

Others lay the blame for the strife at a very different source, the unintended effects of the Islamic revival. According to scholar Vali Nasr, as the Muslim world was decolonialised and Arab nationalism lost its appeal, fundamentalism blossomed and reasserted the differences and conflicts between the two movements, particularly in the strict teachings of Sunni scholar Ibn Taymiyyah.[50] The Iranian Islamic revolution, changed the Shia-Sunni power equation in Muslim countries "from Lebanon to India" arousing the traditionally subservient Shia to the alarm of traditionally dominant and very non-revolutionary Sunni.[51] "Where Iranian revolutionaries saw Islamic revolutionary stirrings, Sunnis saw mostly Shia mischief and a threat to Sunni predominance."

Although the Iranian revolution's leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, was very much in favor of Shia-Sunni unity, he also challenged Saudi Arabia, in his view an "unpopular and corrupt dictatorship" and an "American lackey" ripe for revolution. In part because Saudi Arabia was the world's major international funder of Islamic schools, scholarships, fellowships, etc., this angered not only Saudi Arabia but its many fundamentalist allies and benefactors throughout the Sunni world.

Olivier Roy, research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, sees the "Shia awakening and its instrumentalisation by Iran" as leading to a "very violent Sunni reaction", starting first in Pakistan before spreading to "the rest of the Muslim world, without necessarily being as violent." According to Roy, "two events created a sea change in the balance of power between Shia and Sunnis: the Islamic revolution in Iran and the American military intervention in Iraq" in 2003. "Today, Azerbaijan is probably the only country where there are still mixed mosques and Shia and Sunnis pray together." '

It's incredibly sad to think how much Iraq changed after 1980.

Muqtada al Sadr

"Muqtada was not a proper cleric. To begin with, he was too young; his father's legacy gave him charisma and support but not the scholarly attainment and respect that are the real sinews of lasting esteem among the Shia clergy. It did not help that he had failed to finish his seminary education, and that as a youth he was better at playing video games than dealing with intricacies of Shia law and theology (in his seminary days he was nicknamed Mulla Atari, after the maker of electronic amusements). Like the scions of many other clerical families of Iraq, he found himself catapulted into a position of power and prominence because his father and older brothers had been killed. So weak were Muqtada's religious credentials that he had to rely initially on the authority of one of his father's allies, the Qom-based Ayatollah Kadhim Husayn al-Haeri, until al-Haeri, worried by Muqtada's erratic politics, found it prudent to distance himself.

 

What Muqtada laced in religious credentials he tried to make up for with a radical brand of politics exacerbated by his own unstable personality. He preferred fighting his battles in the political arena, and actors ranging from Hezbollah and Iran's Revolutionary Guards to Ahmed Chalabi manipulated him to serve their own ends. Even Sistani, who was a target of Muqtada's rash politics, found the young firebrand cleric a useful tool in dealing with the U.S. administration in Baghdad, since he and Muqtada formed a kind of de facto 'good cop, bad cop team that helped to keep the Americans off balance. 

 

Muqtada's rebel image, mixing Islam and nationalism, and his willingness to challenge U.S. authority, gained him popularity. His movement, however, lacked coherence. It was powerful but chaotic, best characterized as street (or barrio) politics. He had a cultlike following among poor and uneducated Shia youth, and his support in southern Iraq grew after he threw his Mahdi Army into a fight against U.S. forces in 2004." -Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival

Missed opportunity for peace with Iran

I'm watching an excellent Frontline special on Iran right now.  Frontline interviewed many experts and key people, including Vali Nasr.  The reformists in Iran, led by Mohammed Khatami, wanted to normalize relations with the US.  Dubya basically gave Khatami and the reformists the cold shoulder and rejected a key peace offer in 2005.  Washington apparently saw the reformists as politically weak and unable to deliver.  This may have been Bush's biggest blunder in American relations with Iran. 
Watch the full program here.

The deranged sons of Salt

'Salt is an ancient Jordanian town, a short twenty minutes drive north of Amman. Salt was a trading center, once the most important settlement between the Jordan River and the desert lands to the east. In the Ottoman period, it was the capital of the Balqa region, which covered roughly the same territory as modern Jordan. It is a picturesque little town, with narrow streets and charming houses that have tall arched windows in the style of the late Ottoman period. During its heyday, Salt was a cosmopolitan, tolerant place where Muslims and Christians lived together in peace.

 

This town of many churches showed a different face in March 2005. During that month there was a much-publicized wake for a native son of Salt, Raed Mansour al-Banna, who had died on February 28 hundreds of miles to the south [sic, should be to the east], in the Iraqi city of Hilla, some sixty miles south of Baghdad. Raed was the suicide bomber who killed 125 Shias and wounded another 150 in one of the worst suicide bombings in postwar Iraq. His bomb had killed new recruits who were lined up waiting to join the Iraqi security forces. The government building that Raed targeted was next to an open-air market, so his bomb killed many women and children as well. Even by the standards of the gruesome violence that various "irreconcilables" were using to stop progress in post-Saddam Iraq, the massacre in Hilla was a brutal and shocking act of terror.

 

Salt, however, seemed to feel proud of its son. Many of the town's young men had done much as Raed had, going over the border during the previous two years in order to gather behind their countryman, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as their amir (commander [or literally 'prince']) and fight for him against the Americans and Shias. Raed's family held a three-day wake for him. Those who attended "celebrated" what they called his "martyrdom," as Jordanian newspapers reported. The Shias whom Raed had murdered drew no sympathy at the wake. For Raed to have been a martyr, those Shias by definition must have been infidels whose murder was justified. The tale of Hilla and Salt is emblematic of how Iraq has been changing the hearts and minds of some Sunnis in the region, and of the bloodletting that will define the boundaries between the two."  

 

The celebration in Salt brought retribution in Baghdad. Enraged by reports of the wake, a Shia mob attacked the Jordanian embassy on March 20. Iraq and Jordan exchanged strong words and withdrew their respective diplomats. Jordan, which had been Iraq's gateway to the world during the years of wars and sanctions, was now estranged from its neighbor. Sectarian tensions were driving old allies apart, replacing filial bonds of Arab identity and long-standing ties of commerce with deep suspicions. For Iraq's Shias, Jordan was the country of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the haven for Ba'thist exiles. For many in Jordan, Iraq was fast becoming a Shia country friendlier to Iran than to its Arab neighbors. Iraq would, however, be only a beginning.'

 

--Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival

Why democracy in Iraq has been difficult

The other day on facebook my dear cousin lamented that Iraqis came close to overthrowing their dictator in 1991, and their struggle did not get as much coverage as Egypt has. I commented that there was no Al Jazeera in 1991, and even if there was, they would have taken Saddam's side. LOL, just kidding. All the Persian Gulf states were freaked out by Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, and I'm sure Qatar was too. There were no media at all during the uprising in southern Iraq in 1991, nobody showing the world what Saddam's Republican Guards were doing to Iraqis all over the south, while US troops stood nearby (they were ordered to). Saddam & Sons would stay on in Baghdad to imprison, torture, and murder Allah-knows how many more innocent Iraqis.

Sanctions were enforced immediately after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait and continued to make life miserable for all Iraqis, especially the poor, for another twelve years. During the sanctions era Islamic fundamentalism spread throughout Iraq. Vali Nasr: "The works of the Iraqi exile thinker Muhammad Ahmad al-Rashid on jihad and the Islamic state, which were smuggled from Egypt, gained a following, but more important, the tentacles of fundamentalist and Salafist trends popular elsewhere in the region began to penetrate the country."

During his rule, Saddam led Iraq into two disastrous wars and economic ruin. In 2003 many Iraqis were happy to see the end of Saddam's regime, but they wanted to end it themselves, as difficult as it might have been, and they certainly did not want to see yet another bombardment of their country. They had no choice in the matter, and Saddam and his gang of thugs would end up on trial for crimes against humanity. Iraqis were finally free. Democracy would flourish, so we thought.

Amnesty International summarized in a 2010 report the situation in Iraq since 2003:

Since 2003 armed groups opposed to the Iraqi government and the presence of US forces in the country have been responsible for gross human rights abuses amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity. They have targeted civilians and attacked indiscriminately, killing thousands of civilians, mostly in suicide bomb attacks in busy public places. They have also kidnapped, tortured and killed thousands of others. US and Iraqi forces have also committed grave human rights violations. They have tortured or otherwise ill-treated many prisoners, some of whom have died as a result. They have killed civilians in raids on houses, at checkpoints and during armed clashes. They have destroyed the houses and other property of Iraqis.

Last night I read Samia Nakhoul's article "Unlike Iraq, Egyptians do regime change their way". The article is mostly about how great Egypt is and doesn't really explain why Iraqis could not do regime change "their way". She doesn't mention the thousands of suicide bombers, the car bombs, the incredible sectarian violence that has ravaged Iraq, except to say "the fall of Saddam, at a cost of thousands of lives -- and a foreboding of so much more blood to come -- failed to ignite the sense of national triumph among Iraqis that has had Egyptians dancing in the streets after 18 days of popular protests." She did refer to the crippling sanctions. But not a single mention of suicide bombings or the other challenges that Iraqi democrats have had to overcome since 2003.

Terrorists have tried hard to destroy any possibility of democracy in Iraq. Egypt has not been through what Iraq has been through in the last three decades. Democracy is difficult to achieve during war. Iraq has been at war for a long time and is still in a state of war. On top of war there is corruption, ineffective government, high unemployment, and little progress. Iraqis have realized that elections do not necessarily yield a wonderful democracy.

As Yuliya Tymoshenko noted recently: "what if the enemies of freedom use elections to entrench their anti-democratic agendas? What if elements of the old regime, or the cadres of militant minorities, only pretend to embrace democratic norms in order to hijack the new democracy?"

And what if terrorists murder elected members of government, police, army recruits, judges, and ordinary citizens? How can democracy thrive in that setting?

Salafi ties to Iraq before 2003

"It was during the decade of sanctions, as central power weakened, that the fundamentalism and Salafism associated with the insurgency grew roots in Iraq. The works of the Iraqi exile thinker Muhammad Ahmad al-Rashid on jihad and the Islamic state, which were smuggled from Egypt, gained a following, but more important, the tentacles of fundamentalist and Salafist trends popular elsewhere in the region began to penetrate the country. 

The Muslim Brotherhood, with its strong presence in Jordan and Syria and affiliation with the Wahhabi establishment in Saudi Arabia, established itself in the Sunni regions of western Iraq that border on Jordan and Syria, and is today entrenched in the Iraqi Islamic Party. Firebrand preachers such as the Egyptian Hamid Kashk and the Syrian Mahmoud Qoul Aghassi (also known as Abu Qaqaa) were popular with Iraqi Sunnis even before the war, and copies of their sermons became ubiquitous in Sunni towns afterward. Throughout the decade of anti-Saddam sanctions, Jordanian mosques remained concerned with the plight of ordinary Iraqis and raised funds that were disbursed through mosque networks in Iraq. Also active in Iraq were Islamic activists such as Laith Shubailath of Jordan and extremist Salafist activists – some with close ties to al-Qaeda – such as Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who is a friend and by some accounts one of Zarqawi's mentors. Before the war toppled the Saddam regime, extremists from everywhere would come to the Jordanian-Iraqi border towns to buy weapons smuggled out of Iraq. Trade in weapons created ties that straddled boundaries and gave extremists contacts and allies inside Iraq, and in turn made it possible for the growing insurgency in that country to spread across the region.

Extremist activists had an incentive to move into Iraq. They were losing ground to the more moderate main body of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan and were often hounded by Jordanian or Syrian security forces. Their activism over the decade leading to the Iraq war not only introduced fundamentalist thinking in al-Anbar but also created organizational links that would facilitate the insurgency after the war. In fact, Zarqawi's emergence as a force so soon after the war reveals the extent of involvement of Jordanian Salafis in Iraq. Extremist ties between Jordan and Iraq ran in both directions. The flight of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi exiles and refugees to Jordan and Syria has only expanded the opportunity for building extremist networks that cut across national boundaries. The extremism that was exported to Iraq before and during the war, strengthened and radicalized, spread back into Jordan. The same ties also made developments in Iraq directly relevant to Islamic activism in Syria and Saudi Arabia."

–Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival

Historical Persecution of the Shi'a

'The Umayyad caliphs, and more so their successors, the Abbasids (750-1258), who ruled from Baghdad, imprisoned and killed Shia imams and encouraged Sunni ulama to define Sunni orthodoxy and contain the people of Shiism. By the tenth century Sunni jurists of the Hanbali school, known for their intolerance of Shiism, held sway over Baghdad, and fear of Shia revolts supported their penchant for purifying Islam. The last decades of that century witnessed anti-Shia violence in Baghdad and its environs – mosques and Ashouras were attacked, and Shias were even killed or burned alive. When in 971 C.E. Roman forces attacked the Abbasid domain, the first response of the caliph’s forces and the angry and terrified Sunnis was to blame the Shia. Shia houses in al-Karkh (in today’s Iraq) – which had become a refuge for Shias who escaped persecution in Baghdad – were torched as the attackers chanted, “You [Shias] are the cause of all evil.” In a pattern of behavior that would be repeated throughout the centuries down to the present, the Shia bore the brunt of popular frustrations with the failures of Sunni rulers. Treated as the enemy within, they were the first to come under suspicion when there was an external threat to the ruling Sunni establishment. By the middle of the eleventh century, persecuting the Shia of al-Karkh had become a custom; ever Saturday, Sunni mobs would show up at Shia mosques and shrines before looting the town, saying “You blasphemers! Convert to Islam!"

By the eleventh century these attitudes had also been canonized by Hanbali jurists, who condemned Shias as rafidis, or rejecters of the Truth. They said that Shias should not lead prayers or marry Sunnis, and that any meat that Shias slaughtered was not halal (permissible) for Sunni consumption. In short, the Shia were not to be treated as Muslims. After the Mongol sack of Baghdad and the destruction of the Abasid caliphate in 1258, attacks on Shiism grew even sharper. Hanbali characterization has in recent history found a reflection in the extremist Sunnis' demonization of Shiism, which regards the faith as a heresy and a bigger threat to "true" Islam than Christianity and Judaism.'

--Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival

1991 changed everything

'Despite all this the Shia remained generally loyal – that is, until 1991, when Shia soldiers returning from the first Gulf war in Kuwait sparked a riot in Basra that quickly spread north to Najaf. The Shia looked to the United States for support, interpreting President George H.W. Bush's call to the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam to mean American intervention on their behalf. However, Saudi Arabia warned Washington in no uncertain terms that if Saddam were to fall from power, Iran would gain control of southern Iraq.  The House of Saud did not wish to see the Shia uprising against Saddam succeed. Riyadh saw the same threat in Shia empowerment in Iraq in 1991 that it sees today. It preferred to keep Iraq under a Sunni dictatorship rather than risk empowering the Shia. Influenced by their ally in the war, the United States balked at involvement in the uprising. U.S. forces stationed in the Euphrates Valley looked on as Saddam sent his dreaded Republican Guards to the south, armed with tanks and helicopter gunships to crush the rebellion.

 

Large parts of Shia towns were razed, the shrines in Najaf and Karbala were shelled, and tens of thousands of Shias were killed. Bodies were draped across the beams of the shrine of Husayn in Karbala. The brutality was merciless; as one Iraqi general said about a massacre of Shias in Hilla after the 1991 uprising, "We captured many people and separated them into three groups. The first group we were sure were made up of people who were guilty. The second group we had doubts about, and the third group was innocent. We telephoned the high command to ask what we should do with them. They said we should kill them all, and that's what we did." –Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival

Paradoxical fatwas

Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd Allah ibn Baaz of KSA issued two key fatwas:

1. "During the [1991] Gulf War Ibn Baaz issued fatwa allowing the deployment of non-Muslim troops on Saudi Arabia soil to defend the Kingdom from the Iraqi army. Some noted that this was in contrast to his opinion in the 1940s, when he contradicted the government policy of Islamically allowing non-Muslims to be employed on Saudi soil.[12]"
2. From Shi'a–Sunni relations: "In recent decades the late leading Saudi cleric, Abdul-Aziz ibn Baz, issued fatwa denouncing Shia as apostates, and according to Shia scholar Vali Nasr "Abdul-Rahman al-Jibrin, a member of the Higher Council of Ulama, even sanctioned the killing of Shias,[125] a call that was reiterated by Wahhabi religious literature as late as 2002."[127]"

Occasions for Mourning

"Throughout all this debate and conflict, Sistani tried to stay above the fray. He continued to keep his eyes on the big prize: delivering Iraq to the Shia and protecting Shia identity by ensuring its embodiment in the new constitution and the state arising from it. He did not get bogged down in debates over who was Iranian and who was Iraqi. Most Iraqi Shias were clearly Arabs, but that identity was surfacing in a new way, different from the way in which Arab nationalism and Ba'thism had always envisioned it.

 

The bombing of markeplaces, police stations, mosques, and open-air religious gatherings meanwhile occurred almost daily, generating a tale of sorrow and rage that would tear Shias and Sunnis apart. On August 31, 2005, about a million Shia pilgrims gathered at the shrine of Kazemiya in Baghdad to mark the anniversary of the death of the seventh imam, who is buried there. The crowd stretched from the mosque across the River Tigris to Sadr City, clogging the bridge over the river. A mortar attack on the crowd early in the day killed sixteen and injured many more. The crowd was on edge when some person or persons on the bridge spread a rumor – Shias believe deliberately – that there was a suicide bomber in their midst. Anxious and fearful, the crowd panicked. In the ensuing stampede, more than a thousand people died; some were trampled to death, while others drowned after jumping into the river. Most of the victims were women and children. The incident showed the extent to which the insurgency could disrupt Shias' lives and turn their commemoration of the death of their imams into a new occasion for mourning. It also underscored the inability of the Iraqi government to contend with the violence, and even more the extent to which the insurgency had succeeded in instilling fear in Shias' hearts and minds.

 

Urged by Sistani and his clerical network not to respond in kind, Shias showed tremendous restraint. Their patience was taxed, but their sense of distinct identity only grew under the onslaught of Sunni terror (a good deal of which was the work of non-Iraqis, such as the terror group run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian Salafi who masterminded the insurgency's most violent excesses). Attitudes on the street hardened, as did Shias' determination to stay in charge of their own destiny. Even where relations between Shia and Sunni neighbors remained friendly, distrust of Ba'thists and the Wahhabi influence on Sunni clerics intensified.

 

Increasingly, Shias saw Sunnis as vicious brutes and ridiculed their historical claims to grandeur. In Basra and other places in the south, Sunnis came under attack. Targeted killing of Sunni clerics and community leaders served notice to others to move away. These acts, which some blamed on the Badr Brigade, reflected the mood on the street. Anger and prejudice were rising on both sides of the sectarian divide. The manner in which Shia identity was taking for was directly tied to the intensity of the sectarian conflict.

 

This became clear when a bombing attack on the Shia Askariya shrine (where the tenth and eleventh imams are buried, and wherefrom the Twelfth Imam went into hiding) brought sectarian conflict into the open. Hundreds died as angry Shias and Sunnis attacked mosques, killed clerics, and abducted and murdered civilians. Despite calls for calm the violence continued to rage, exposing the deep sectarian fissures that were shaping Shia identity and politics."

 

-Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival

Palestinians think Saddam was cool

Layla Anwar wrote a post in defense of Saddam, which is not surprising. But she made some good points, and of course some deceptive ones. She called it "Saddam Hussein's Iraq." As if Saddam owned the country. Well he certainly acted like he owned Iraq.

It's not surprising that Tony of the Palestinian Pundit (a Levantine Christian who moved to California in the 60s, like Sirhan Sirhan) has posted Layla Anwar's entire post. The Palestinians, along with most Sunni Arabs, seem to think Saddam was a cool cat. He safeguarded Iraqi Christians, who have been persecuted since the fall of Saddam. This is true.

Layla: "Did any of the Arab countries safeguard the rights of Arab Christians like Saddam's Iraq did ? The answer is a flat NO."

Here's where the deception begin: "Did any country in the Middle East/Arab world engage as many Shias in the political process as Saddam's Iraq did ? The answer is again a flat NO."

Engage the Shias in the political process? How? By imprisoning them and hanging them? By torturing them?

Layla wrote: "Over 60% of BOTH the Baath party as well as the leadership was Shia."

I've heard this repeated many times, and it's true. But no Shia ever reached Saddam's top brass, who were all Tikriti. There was never a Shia Vice President in "Saddam's Iraq". The current Vice President of Iraq is a SUNNI Arab.

Saddam mass murdered Iraqi Shia, Kurds, and killed any Sunni Arab who dare tell the truth about the criminality of Saddam's govt. And the Arabs kinda like the mass murderer. It is so embarrassing.

Vali Nasr summarizes the Iraqi Shia struggle under Saddam's rule:

"...Shias have never risen beyond the glass ceiling that separates them from the Sunni elite. A few, such as Saddam's last and highly colorful information minister, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, rose to prominence. But they were tokens in a world where Shia feet never trod the real halls of power. Saddam Hussein liked to make much of the second part of his name before his Shia subjects - especially during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s - but he nevertheless characterized Shias as Iranian lackeys, and he periodically purged the Ba'th Party of its Shia members in order to make sure that the levers of state power and the banner of Arab nationalism remained firmly in Sunni hands. Shia privates filled the ragtag conscript ranks of Saddam's poorly equipped and ill-trained regular army, but the elite Republican Guards and Special Republican Guards were Sunnis almost to a man. "

I might add to this post later...

Exploiting The Old Feud

'Saddam had always had a flair for drama and a keen sense of history. To make sure that his countrymen felt the meaning of what had happened as well as to poison the well for the United States, he compared Baghdad's fall to the Americans in 2003 to its fall to the Mongols in 1258. That earlier conquest had spelled the end of the caliphate and is remembered by Sunni Arabs as a calamity, when the rivers of the cultured Abbasid capital are said to have run black with ink from books and red with the blood of the Mongols' massacred victims. Iraqis, Saddam hoped, would come to see resisting the coalition's occupation as an Islamic duty. He then made an ominous comparison in which he likened the Shias' lack of resistance to the Americans to the alleged offense of Ibn al-Alqami, the last caliph's Shia vizier, who supposedly helped the Mongols to sack Baghdad. "Just as [the Mongol chieftain] Holagu entered Baghdad," he ranted, "so did the criminal Bush enter Baghdad, with the help of the Alqami." His implication was clear: just as the Shia had betrayed Islam in 1258, he was saying, so they were betraying it again in 2003.

Since Saddam raised the ghost of Ibn al-Alqami, references to him have become ubiquitous in communiques of insurgents and Sunni extremists. As the bloody travails of war and occupation have unfolded in Iraq, the Shia have once more been held responsible for failures of the Arab world. Long persecuted and suppressed by the Sunni-dominated Iraqi state, now they are being blamed for teh debacle that Sunnis face in the new Iraq - and by extension in the whole Middle East.

The ready way in which a "secular" Ba'thist figure such as Saddam can ring a change on a seven-century-old Sunni grudge to appeal to sectarian prejudices is a sign that the concepts and categories that are often cited in order to explain the Middle East to Western audiences - modernity, democracy, fundamentalism, and secular nationalism, to name a few - can no longer satisfactorily account for what is going on. It is rather the old feud between Shias and Sunnis that forges attitudes, defines prejudices, draws political boundary lines, and even decides whether and to what extent those other trends have relevance.'

-Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival

Power to the (Shia) People

"A grassroots outpouring of sympathy for the victims of September 11 occurred on the streets in only two places in the Muslim world, both within days of the collapse of the twin towers and both among the Shia. The first was in Iran, where tens of thousands snubbed their government to go into the streets of Tehran and hold a candlelight vigil in solidarity with victims of the attacks. The second was in Karachi, where a local party that is closely associated with the city's Shia broke with the public mood in Pakistan to gather thousands to denounce terrorism. What followed September 11 in Afghanistan and Iraq has only strengthened these feelings. The Shia in Afghanistan, between 20 and 25 percent of the population, were brutalized by the Taliban. The constitution adopted in that country in 2003 has broken with tradition to allow a Shia to become president and to recognize Shia law. The Shia have come out from the margins to join the government and take their place in public life. The violent face of Sunni militancy in Iraq underscores the divergent paths that Sunni and Shia politics are taking.

The Shia revival constitutes the most powerful resistance and challenge to Sunni extremism and jihadi activism within the region. Shia revival is an anti-Wahhabi and anti-extremist force. Its objectives re served by change in the regional balance of power and democracy. In turn, democracy will unleash the full extent of the Shia challenge to Sunni extremism. Democracy will bring to power Shia majorities and give greater voice to Shia minorities, whose ideology and politics diverge from the extremist bent of Sunni radicalism."

--Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival