Twin
specters hang over the Middle East of the American
imagination—the perceived rise in the geopolitical
power of the region’s Shi‘i Muslims
and the dark shadow cast by the sectarian reprisals
that increasingly propel the Iraqi civil war.
In the United States, pundits and Democratic
presidential candidates point to the first specter
as the ominous unintended consequence of the
2003 invasion of Iraq, which, according to what
is now conventional wisdom, strengthened majority-Shi‘i
Iran at the expense of the US-sponsored order
in the Persian Gulf. The Iraqi civil war, meanwhile,
is the newest evidence for Americans that conflicts
in the Middle East are intractable because they
are, at root, religious. Many Americans have
turned against the Iraq war not because the invasion
was launched on false pretenses or lacked UN
approval, but because they now see the well-intentioned
US military trapped amidst what Newsweek called “violent
sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims,
the two main branches of Islam that have been
at odds for centuries.” In Washington,
former war supporters like Rep. Wayne Gilchrest
(R-MD) have taken to calling for “passing
the torch to the Iraqis, who are the only ones
who can handle this ancient—I’d say
primitive—sectarian dispute.”
If
nothing else, the notion that a primordial Middle
Eastern hatred explains the Iraqi civil war is
distressing for its resonance with the canard
that Jews, Christians and Muslims have been fighting
over the Holy Land since time immemorial. Regular
consumers of American news coverage believe that
because upon each flare-up of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, historical primers inevitably appear
in the newspapers to show that the confrontation
is infused with religious attachments anchored
deep in the past. Such primers are an abuse of
history, because they substitute detours through
antiquity for excursus of far more relevant contemporary
events. Politically, they are pernicious, for
they encourage passive public reactions—shrugs
at hopeless tribalism or the stunned silence
one would evince at a natural disaster. “They
will never make peace,” many readers understandably
conclude, before flipping to the sports page.
As
with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the problem
with the religious-sectarian narrative of the
Iraqi conflagration is not factual inaccuracy
per se. Violence has indeed plagued Sunni-Shi‘i
relations from time to time, and several wars
have been fought in the name of establishing
one sect’s power or another, or at least
been so justified by the aggressor. It is sadly
true that the Iraqi civil war has a distinctly
sectarian cast, and many Iraqis have certainly
died or fled their homes simply because they
are Sunnis or Shi‘a.
The
problem is lack of historical context. Timelines
do not tell us what caused outbreaks of “sectarian
violence,” and they are especially poor
at conveying multiple causes. Nor, crucially,
does the existence of doctrinal differences between
Sunnism and Shi‘ism teach us anything about
the relationship between sect and politics—why
and how communal aspects of identity take precedence
over others, why and how religious identity becomes “sectarian” or
chauvinist, why and how rulers mobilize feelings
of communal belonging for political ends. This
last point suggests that we search, in contemporary
rather than ancient history, for the political
moorings of the tenet that sectarian affiliation
determines political motivation, and so explains
current events.
American
fear of Shi‘ism stems partly from the unresolved
angst caused by the 1979 Islamic Revolution and
the 444-day hostage crisis in Tehran. Footage
of shouting Iranian revolutionaries burning US
flags—the archetypal “Death to America” images
for Americans over 35—and the 1982 Marine
barracks bombing in Beirut, attributed to Hizballah,
imprinted lasting mental equations of Shi‘ism
with political extremism and Shi‘i religiosity
with irrationality. These prejudices surfaced
immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein,
in April 2003, as commentators gazed aghast upon
the pilgrimage of Iraqi Shi‘a to Karbala’ to
commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a
practice long banned under the old regime. “That
is religious fanaticism as demented as you will
ever see it,” said MSNBC’s Lawrence
O’Donnell on the Sunday talk show “The
McLaughlin Group,” as pictures of chest-beating
Shi‘a flashed on the screen.
But
the US foreign policy establishment has been
equally disquieted by a series of admonishments
from Sunni elites, phrased in explicit sectarian
terms, that the post-Saddam political transition
in Iraq is upsetting the strategic applecart.
As votes were being counted after the January
2005 elections for a transitional government,
Sharif ‘Ali bin Hussein, nephew of the
Hashemite king of Iraq deposed in 1958, warned
Americans to steel themselves for a “Sistani
tsunami” sweeping the Najaf ayatollah’s
fellow Shi‘a into power. Before long, he
said, they would find US soldiers “protecting
a country that’s extremely friendly to
Iran, and training [that country’s] troops.” Jordan’s
King ‘Abdallah II went further in a subsequent,
widely quoted speech, claiming to espy a “Shiite
crescent” stretching from Iran through
the Arab oil producers into Lebanon. In case
this formulation was overly subtle, Egyptian
President Husni Mubarak sledge-hammered the point
home in later televised comments: “Most
of the Shi‘a are loyal to Iran, and not
to the countries they are living in.”
History
does not support Mubarak’s assertion. As
it so happens, the specter of a “Shiite
crescent” has arisen before, not even 30
years ago, and the man who thought he spotted
it was Saddam Hussein.
The
fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, and the subsequent
Islamic Revolution in that country, ushered Shi‘i
clergy into political power for the first time.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s doctrine
of velayat-e faqih (rule of the jurisprudent)
represented an epochal break with the traditional
quietism of the Shi‘i clerical hierarchy.
In practice, quietism had rarely meant that the
clergy absented itself entirely from the political
realm. It had encompassed a range of positions
on the part of senior ayatollahs, from subservience
to regimes to the occasional honoring of requests
for fatwas blessing state policies to
utter disdain for politics. But Khomeinism—asserting
that clerics should seize the state—was
quite different from the ideas of even the most
politically active among Khomeini’s peers.
It remains a minority doctrine among Shi‘i ‘ulama worldwide.
Nonetheless,
Saddam Hussein later confided in his Egyptian
counterpart Mubarak that the Islamic Republic
of Iran posed a greater threat to Iraq than Israel,
because Khomeinism could inspire insurrection
and secessionism among the Iraqi Shi‘a,
forcing the breakup of the nation-state. The
Gulf monarchies shared Saddam’s fear of
revolutionary Iran, which called upon Muslims
everywhere (not just the Shi‘a) to emulate
its example, and so they extended enormous loans
to the Iraqi dictator during the devastating
eight-year war following his invasion of Iran
in 1980. Washington was also spooked by the shade
of Iranian expansionism, and so it “tilted” toward
Iraq in the conflict, supplying Baghdad with
satellite imagery of Iranian troop movements
and falsely accusing Iran of perpetrating chemical
weapons attacks launched by Iraq. But Saddam’s
trepidation about the Islamic Revolution was
emphatically not shared by Muslim populations,
who saw a successful uprising against a Western-backed
tyrant, or by most Sunni Islamist movements,
who saw an Islamic revolution, not a Shi‘i
one. Most importantly, despite Saddam’s
presumption of their disloyalty, and despite
Khomeini’s bid to win their defection by
labeling Saddam as Yazid (the Umayyad “pretender” said
to have killed the revered Imam Hussein in battle),
the overwhelming majority of Iraqi Shi‘i
soldiers fought against Iran during the war.
Part of the reason why lies in the differences
in the Iranian and Iraqi confrontations between
Shi‘i mosque and state, and the relation
of these confrontations to nationalism.
Khomeini
first came to prominence in the early 1960s as
a vocal opponent of the Shah’s “modernizing” White
Revolution, particularly its measures enfranchising
women and breaking up large agrarian estates
for redistribution to peasant smallholders. The
latter measure eroded the wealth of old elites,
including the landlords among the Shi‘i
clergy, who labeled land reform contrary to Islamic
law. Khomeini’s spirited attacks on the
White Revolution, while contributing to unrest
that was violently suppressed, did not rouse
the mass of the population against the regime.
The Shah’s adoption of a bill granting
blanket immunity from local laws to the numerous
military and civilian American personnel then
working in Iran was a different story, as the
memory of the 1953 CIA coup that reinstalled
the Shah was still fresh. Khomeini thundered: “If
some American’s servant, some American’s
cook, assassinates your marja‘ al-taqlid [the “source
of emulation,” or respected elder cleric
whose guidance is sought by pious Shi‘a],
in the middle of the bazaar, or runs over him,
you do not have the right to apprehend him!” It
was this simple appeal to Iranians’ national
dignity and resentment of the West that led the
Shah to banish Khomeini in 1964. He fled to Najaf,
Iraq, where he continued to inveigh against the
Shah’s close ties to the US, and developed
the tenets of velayat-e faqih.
As
in Iran, disputes between successive post-colonial
Iraqi regimes and the Shi‘i clergy stemmed
from worldly roots. The senior jurisprudents
resident in the shrine cities of Najaf, Karbala’,
al-Kadhimiyya and Samarra’ rejected the
land reform measures and secular family law of ‘Abd
al-Karim Qasim, the colonel who led the revolt
against the last Hashemite king, and the “socialist
decrees” of the Arab nationalist government
of President ‘Abd al-Salam ‘Arif
in 1964. The Iraqi state enforced its policies
of nationalization and wealth redistribution
at the expense of private capital, and as in
Iran, the poorer Shi‘i classes backed the
reforms regardless of clerical opposition. In
Iraq, however, the state had been dominated by
Sunni Arabs since its creation under British
auspices, and the urban merchant class was heavily
Shi‘i. The Shi‘i establishment saw
a sectarian edge on the “socialist decrees,” perhaps
because they came amidst an effluvium of anti-Shi‘i
innuendo from the mouths of state-affiliated
intellectuals and ‘Arif himself. The primary
insinuation was that the Shi‘a were too
close to “Persian” Iran.
In
part because of the Shi‘i clergy’s
conservatism, many Shi‘i Iraqis (like Iraqis
of other sects) had long sought refuge in avowedly
secular ideologies and identities such as liberalism,
communism and Baathism. Communist and Baathist
success in building strong cells that could rally
mass support impelled a junior cleric named Muhammad
Baqir al-Sadr and a handful of others in Najaf
to form al-Da‘wa (the Islamic Call) beginning
in 1958. Al-Da‘wa aimed, in Leninist fashion,
to wage a four-stage struggle for an Islamic
polity: public education and party formation,
party building, revolution and, finally, Islamic
rule. The Islamic rule envisioned in al-Usus,
the manifesto penned by Sadr, was not velayat-e
faqih. Rather, al-Da‘wa thought the
party leadership should exercise dual authority
along with the marja‘ al-taqlid,
a mechanism which effectively gutted the age-old
role of the senior jurisprudent. In fact, in
line with the internationalist spirit of communism
and pan-Arabism, the ideologies it sought to
combat, al-Da‘wa avoided conventional Shi‘i
terminology and tried instead to craft a message
for all Muslims. After the clerical hierarchy
in Najaf and Karbala’ heaped scorn on these
ideas, laymen in the party dropped pan-Islamism
and focused on educating and mobilizing Iraqi
Shi‘a, attracting increased regime surveillance
from ‘Arif’s time onward.
Baathist
rule after 1968 cemented the enmity between the
Shi‘i currents and the regime. The clergy
quietly appreciated the Baathists’ massacres
of communists during their first tour in power
in 1963, but were wary of the Baathists’ own
plans for a “socialist” command economy
as well as the mostly Sunni Arab makeup of the
party’s upper echelons. The regime, for
its part, demanded clerical obeisance to raison
d’etat. In 1969, President Ahmad Hasan
al-Bakr asked Ayatollah al-Hakim to condemn the
Shah’s stance in the Iranian-Iraqi dispute
over division of the Shatt al-‘Arab waterway
at the head of the Persian Gulf. The ayatollah
said no, whereupon the regime expelled some 20,000
Iraqi Shi‘a from the country (because of
their alleged Persian descent), the first of
several such expulsions under Bakr and, later,
Saddam Hussein. A cycle of Shi‘i protest
and ever harsher repression ensued, including
the exile of Hakim’s sons and the execution
of several al-Da‘wa activists. At the onset
of the Iranian revolution in 1978, al-Da‘wa
circles became interested in the ideas of Khomeini,
who was previously unimportant on the Iraqi Shi‘i
scene, though resident in Najaf. Muhammad Baqir
al-Sadr had independently developed the concept
of al-marja‘ al-salih—a cleric
who was not necessarily accepted as supreme by
the hierarchy, but who was deeply in touch with
his flock and was politically active on their
behalf. In its marriage of spiritual and political
roles, this concept bore some resemblance to velayat-e
faqih. In February 1979, the Iraqi ayatollah
sent a telegram to Khomeini, saying, in part: “We
put our whole being at the service of your great
prominence.” Saddam’s regime murdered
Sadr and his sister Bint al-Huda in May 1980.
It
is unclear how many ordinary Iraqi Shi‘a
shared Sadr’s admiration for the Islamic
Revolution, and to what extent. What is clear
is that Khomeini’s pan-Shi‘i appeals
did not rally them to the Iranian flag, and that
fear of regime retaliation was not the only reason
why not. When Hakim’s son Muhammad Baqir
returned to Iraq in 1991 as head of the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI),
then promoters of Khomeinist ideas, dramatic
popular uprisings were sweeping the south of
the country. The uprisings probably involved
tens of thousands of Shi‘i (and non-Shi‘i)
conscripts in the Iraqi army, streaming home
from Kuwait, as well as local residents. Hakim
issued a communiqué to the effect that “all
Iraqi armed forces should submit to and obey” the
orders of SCIRI. This “disastrous slogan,” argues
the Iraqi scholar Faleh A. Jabar, both alienated
the Kurds and communists engaged in simultaneous
revolts and failed to mobilize the Shi‘i
masses of Baghdad and al-Kadhimiyya. The uprisings
were crushed.
Talk
of a “Shiite crescent” today also
evokes a pan-Shi‘i unity enforced by the
malign grip of Persian Iran. For US-allied, Sunni-led
Arab regimes, as for Saddam, dismissing modern
Shi‘i movements as sectarian or Iranian-backed
is a convenient way of marginalizing their mundane
demands, whether for national belonging and enfranchisement
or simply the protection of traditional communal
prerogatives. Yet such concepts continue to erase
the agency of Shi‘i parties and communities
in the Arab world. In Bahrain and Saudi Arabia,
the large, oppressed Shi‘i communities
have taken pains to distance themselves from
Tehran, so as to avoid Sunni backlash. The Saudi
Arabian Shi‘a seek full acceptance as citizens
and members of society, despite the sectarian
bile regularly spat in their direction by Sunni
clerics close to the state. In Lebanon, Hizballah
has long since realized it cannot impose an Islamic
state. The “party of God” has entered
the hurly-burly of Lebanese electoral politics,
working closely with Christian allies, and advancing
its own, very Arabic-inflected vision of Lebanese
nationalism. It is not coincidental that even
within Lebanon’s Shi‘i religious
sphere, Hizballah must compete for the Arabist
mantle with the respected Sayyid Muhammad Hussein
Fadlallah, who derides the Iranian tendency to
consider Iran the center of Shi‘i Islam.
“Shiite
crescent” discourse today is characterized
by the same flawed assumptions of monolithic
unity and solely religious or sectarian motivations
among Shi‘i communities that were held
in the 1980s. The source of much of the confusion
is that there are indeed important linkages between
Shi‘a across national boundaries and traversing
great distances. One such linkage is the institution
of the marja‘ al-taqlid. There are
numerous Iranians, as well as Iraqis and others,
who follow Grand Ayatollah ‘Ali al‑Sistani
in Najaf. Likewise, some Lebanese Shi‘a
follow Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran, and some
Iraqis follow Sayyid Fadlallah in Lebanon. (Fadlallah,
once a student of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr in Najaf,
believes in keeping a distance, however small,
between clerical leadership and political leadership.
Though Hizballah officially subscribes to velayat-e
faqih, and considers Khamenei its marja‘,
but many party members follow Fadlallah personally.)
These sources of emulation collect vast sums
from faraway followers through a tithe called
the khums, half of which is redistributed
to the poor. Aspiring students of Islamic law
and philosophy come from all over the Islamic
world to study at the seminaries in Najaf and
Qom in Iran. Finally, the Islamic Republic of
Iran does cultivate close ties with Shi‘i
Islamist groups abroad, most notably today with
SCIRI and some branches of al-Da‘wa in
Iraq and with Hizballah in Lebanon.
Yet
the media frequently overstates or misunderstands
the significance of transnational ties for explaining
the actions of Shi‘i political actors.
Not only is there no pan-Shi‘i unity in
spiritual matters, as indicated by the profusion
of sources of emulation, but the marja‘ is
also not the combination of pope and generalissimo
he is often imagined to be. Followers might take
a momentous political step without clerical dispensation.
There is no evidence, for example, that in July
2006 Hizballah crossed the Lebanese-Israeli border
to capture Israeli soldiers on orders from Khamenei.
Journalists can be misled in these matters by
partisans of the marja‘ in question.
Following the success of the main Shi‘i
religious parties in the January 2005 Iraqi elections,
Sheikh Jalal al-Din al-Saghir, imam of an important
mosque in Baghdad, explained that Sistani, whose
visage had appeared on the parties’ posters,
was “the spiritual leader of all the Shi‘a
in the world.” Not even all the Shi‘a
of Iraq recognize him as marja‘.
Clerical
authority in Iraq is increasingly fragmented,
in line with the political and social fragmentation
of a country bound under US occupation and tortured
by civil war. In 2004, Sistani famously rejected
a provision in the US-sponsored Transitional
Administrative Law (TAL) that was to be Iraq’s “draft
constitution.” The ayatollah feared that
this provision, envisioning a collective presidency
shared by a Sunni Arab, a Shi‘i Arab and
a Kurd, would “enshrine sectarian and ethnic
divisions” in the country, perhaps leading
to “partition.” He dispatched a missive
to the UN urging that body not to refer to the
TAL in its resolutions. The UN heeded the letter
of his advice, but the post-Saddam political
transition in Iraq ignored its spirit. Today
Iraq has a Kurdish president, a Sunni Arab vice
president and a Shi‘i Arab vice president.
The country’s pathway to formal electoral
democracy, under the stewardship of the US-British
occupation authority and then the US embassy
in Baghdad, has enshrined sectarian and ethnic
divisions at every step of the way, much as the
Lebanese confessional system was forged under
French mandatory rule. SCIRI, a Shi‘i party
supported by Washington and nominally submissive
to Sistani, openly pursues a sectarian goal:
a nine-province “Shiastan” in central
and southern Iraq.
Lastly,
for tales of timeless Sunni-Shi‘i sectarian
division to achieve the status of social-scientific
theories, they must have predictive value. Here
the evidentiary record is not very convincing.
Several editorials during the summer 2006 Israeli
bombardment and invasion of Lebanon pointed to
the official Saudi, Egyptian and Jordanian condemnations
of Hizballah as proof of a growing Sunni-Shi‘i
divide. Yet Sunnis across the Arab and Islamic
world loudly cheered Hizballah on. In February
2007, Zogby International released a poll of
Arab attitudes designed by political scientist
Shibley Telhami that cast additional doubt on
the sectarian thesis. Despite over a year of
coded warnings of a Persian peril from their
rulers, only 6 percent of Arabs in Egypt, Jordan,
Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United
Arab Emirates, most of them heavily Sunni Muslim
countries, considered majority-Shi‘i Iran
the biggest threat to their security. Nearly
80 percent honored Israel or the United States
with this dubious distinction. This result points
to the long-standing divide between Sunni Arab
populations and their rulers over what the people
see as the rulers’ deference to Washington.
It also reminds us that, contrary to another
implication of the “Shiite crescent” thesis,
the vast majority of Sunni Arabs in the modern
era have been just as subject to autocratic nationalisms
as the Shi‘a have been, whether in Saddam’s
Iraq or Mubarak’s Egypt. It is authoritarian
rule, not the relative regional clout of the
Shi‘a, that has always muffled the political
voice of the average Sunni.
So
we return to Washington, to find a paradox at
the heart of the “Shiite crescent” discourse:
The alleged crescent has appeared as promise
and threat. For the neo-conservatives in the
Bush administration, and their fellow travelers,
it held the promise of a new, majority-ruled
Iraq, a chastened “Wahhabi” Saudi
Arabia and liberated, pro-American Muslims in
the Gulf. Yet Shi‘i empowerment is also
a threat to the US, because of the national traumas
of the hostage crisis and the 1982 Marine barracks
bombing, as well as rivalry with Iran; to key
US ally Saudi Arabia, which fears its oppressed
Shi‘i citizens and Iranian ambitions in
the Gulf; and to Israel, which regards both Hizballah
and Iran as existential foes. Bush administration
interventions in the Middle East do not make
sense as a grand scheme to boost the fortunes
of the Shi‘a. In Iraq, despite much diplomacy
aimed at “bringing the Sunnis back in,” the
US is propping up two middle-class parties—SCIRI
and the rump of al-Da‘wa—bent on
establishing Shi‘i communal power. At the
same time, the US wages on-again, off-again warfare
against the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr (son
of Muhammad Baqir’s cousin), the most prominent
voice of Iraq’s downtrodden Shi‘i
poor. As is obvious from its green light for
Israel’s 34-day aerial assault upon Lebanon
in the summer of 2006, the Bush administration
has not forgotten the “blood debt,” to
quote former Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage, it believes Hizballah owes the US for
the Marine barracks incident. And the Bush White
House has escalated US-Iranian tensions to levels
unseen since the early days of the Islamic Revolution.
Because of its alliance with the Shi‘i
religious parties in Iraq, the Bush administration
cannot simply adopt its Arab allies’ sectarian
rhetoric wholesale. It prefers instead to place
itself on the side of “moderates” against “extremists.”
Even
so, the Bush administration is a prime beneficiary
of the prevalence of religious-sectarian modes
of interpreting the turmoil in the Middle East.
Those who see an enduring, ineluctable Sunni-Shi‘i
antipathy behind the Iraqi civil war absolve
the US of its integral role in fanning the flames
of the conflict. Sectarian tensions in Iraq were
born of the depredations of Saddam Hussein’s
regime and previous central governments in Baghdad,
and not a contretemps that occurred 1,300 years
ago. It was not inevitable, moreover, that those
tensions would explode into the cataclysm of
today. Only the US invasion, the failure to protect
Iraqi state institutions from looting, the neglect
of Iraqi public-sector factories and workshops,
the vengeful, sectarian debaathification policy,
the indiscriminate roundups of Sunni Arabs, the
Abu Ghraib horror, the subsequent outsourcing
of Iraqi prisons to SCIRI militiamen and other
calamities of the occupation were able to achieve
that. There is no “Shiite crescent.” But
actual US policy in Iraq, coupled with the actions
and rhetoric of Shi‘i US allies in Iraq
and Sunni US allies elsewhere, has indisputably
aroused sectarian passions across the region,
keeping the concept artificially—and dangerously—alive.
