Basra,
the Reluctant Seat of “Shiastan”
Reidar
Visser
Reidar
Visser is a research fellow at the Norwegian
Institute of International Affairs and editor
of the website www.historiae.org, focusing on
southern Iraq. He is the author of Basra,
the Failed Gulf State: Separatism and Nationalism
in Southern Iraq (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 2006).
Senior
cleric of the Muqtada al-Sadr group at
Friday prayers in Basra. (Alan Chin) |
On
December 24, 2005, an Iraqi writing under the
signature “Hammad” published a remarkable message
on a website devoted to southern Iraqi affairs:
In
the name of God the merciful and compassionate:
To the activists of the world, to the United
Nations: Look at the south, look at the richest
area in the world in terms of oil, agriculture,
culture and science…. [But] look at us, and
you will find cities destroyed as if they were
Sumerian ruins…. The age of the tyrant Saddam
came to an end and everything was going to
change…. But nothing changed…. The people of
the south are marginalized and have no representation
in government…. When we turn to the government
they tell us the Iraqi government is a spoils
system and the south will obtain its share
through the Shi‘i parties! Sir, the majority
of the leaders of the Shi‘i parties are from
the middle Euphrates area and Baghdad. They
give all the positions to people from those
areas and don’t give a fig about the south.[1]
Hammad’s
brief appeal evokes three bones of deep contention
among the Iraqi Shi‘a. He speaks of a “southern”
Iraq limited to the triangle of Basra, ‘Amara
and Nasiriyya, and thus separate from the Shi‘i
heartland in the center of the country. He decries
the continued exclusion of this area in Iraqi
and Shi‘i party politics in the post-Saddam era.
Finally, he mentions the concentration inside
this triangle of nearly 99 percent of the oil
often described as the “Shi‘i oil” of Iraq. The
internal friction and disagreement over such
issues show that talk of a “Shi‘i crescent” dipping
through Iraq is more a fearful prophecy—perhaps
a specialized version of the “clash of civilizations”
thesis—than an empirically grounded analysis.
The notion of a “Shiastan” in what is now central
and southern Iraq postulates a motive of pan-Shi‘ism
that is simply absent (and sometimes even abhorred)
in large sections of the Iraqi Shi‘i community.
Regional
Cells
There
is nothing new in the Shi‘a of Basra being at
odds with their co-religionists in central Iraq,
particularly those in Baghdad and the shrine
cities of Najaf and Karbala’. Tensions pitting
south and center against each other date back
to the foundation of Shi‘i Islamist movements
in the 1960s. In that period, students and older
laymen in Basra fronted moves to curb the influence
of clerics within the burgeoning Da‘wa current,
to the point where some contemporary analysts
read the struggle as a battle between Basra and
Najaf. These tensions lingered throughout the
1970s—when the Basrawi Da‘wa cells remained organizationally
independent for long periods—and came to a head
in the early 1980s. The lay Da‘wa leadership
in Iraq had been gradually decimated by the regime’s
security forces, and, in 1980, at an early stage
of the Iran-Iraq war, Tehran-based clerical leaders
in exile availed themselves of the opportunity
to recoup influence within the movement, successfully
defeating the “Basra line” that had formed the
core of internal opposition.[2]
Shortly
afterwards, the Basra branch formally disassociated
itself from the mother party, or rather sought
to replace it by giving itself a variant name:
the Islamic Da‘wa instead of the Islamic Da‘wa
Party. Islamic Da‘wa soon disintegrated, and
many of its adherents found refuge in Iran, the
very Islamic republic that they had frequently
criticized in their quarrels with other Da‘wa
members who had been more sympathetic to the
idea of clerical dominance in Islamist politics.
However, tensions related to regional loyalties
persisted within the Iraqi Islamist movement.
One exile recounts the mechanisms at work in
the 1980s:
One
day I asked a leader who had been expelled
from the leadership of one of the [Shi‘i] parties
why he had moved [from Iran] to London and
why he was disinclined to work for party X.
He answered me with a single word—janubiyyatuhu (his
southernness). He was from one of the southern
cities of Iraq, and, whatever his personal
qualities, the party leadership did not want
to transform him into a leader because they
wanted to give preferential treatment to those
from Najaf and Karbala’—and considered all
the rest worthless regardless of what they
did.[3]
During
the run-up to the 2003 invasion, the Basrawi
current within Da‘wa reasserted itself, now under
the name of Harakat al-Da‘wa (the Da‘wa Movement).
Under the leadership of ‘Izz al-Din Salim, this
current went on to participate in the December
2002 London conference of the Iraqi opposition
to Saddam Hussein—one of the few Da‘wa branches
to do so—as well as in the Iraqi Governing Council
appointed by L. Paul Bremer to be the “Iraqi
face” of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Then, in May 2004, Salim was assassinated. The
success of the party he left behind was limited
in the two national elections of January and
December 2005, but the fact that some Shi‘i Islamists
of Basra chose to run separately from the United
Iraqi Alliance that sought to unite all the Shi‘i
parties (including the main Da‘wa group then
headed by Ibrahim al-Jaafari) served as a reminder
of a certain zest for independence.[4] In
local elections in Basra, the Da‘wa Movement
managed to pick up three seats.
Up
until 2004, the Basrawi particularism within
the Iraqi Shi‘i Islamist movement had mostly
expressed itself in impeccably universalistic
language. The “Basra line” was an attempt by
Basrawis to gain control of the entire Da‘wa
organization, rather than a breakaway movement
that intended to withdraw from national politics
to concentrate on purely local affairs. The conflict
with the rest of Da‘wa was mainly over recruitment
patterns rather than ideology, and those ideological
issues that at times had accompanied the quarrels
between Basra and Najaf would later emerge with
equal force within the main faction of Da‘wa.
If anything, especially in the early days, many
adherents of the Basra line leaned toward currents
that looked beyond Shi‘ism. Such a key figure
as ‘Arif al-Basri was involved with Sunni Islamist
parties at one point. On the eve of his arrest
in 1974, he was intending to go to al-Azhar in
Egypt to complete his studies.[5] Nor can the party splits satisfactorily be explained
by the oft-cited notion of Basra as more pro-Arab,
anti-Iranian and opposed to Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini’s doctrine of velayat-e faqih (rule
of clerics through the supreme jurisprudent),
where other groups were attracted to the tenets
of the Islamic Revolution. In the 1980s, ‘Izz
al-Din Salim mixed the old Da‘wa theme of inter-sectarian
dialogue and outreach beyond the Shi‘i world
(to Sunni areas such as Afghanistan and the Palestinian
territories) with enthusiasm for Khomeini’s Shi‘i
principles of government. A decade later, he
went on to become personally close to the Hakim
family, whose Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) adopted a more sectarian,
pan-Shi‘i stance.[6] On
the pattern of the competing Baath parties of
Syria and Iraq, the “southern” branches inside
Da‘wa were primarily regional cells vying for
leadership of a larger movement rather than clearly
defined and discrete ideological alternatives.
Visions
of Autonomy
Basra’s
riverfront promenade is the center of
public social life. (Alan Chin) |
Shi‘i
attachment to Iraqi nationalism is often underestimated.
The Shi‘a of the south may have had altercations
with their brethren in the shrine cities further
north, but due to the long-standing ties between
the Ottoman provinces of Basra and Baghdad (whose
oft-cited “separation” from 1884 to 1914 was
preceded by long periods of union), the concept
of “Iraq” was as widespread in Basra in the early
twentieth century as it was in Najaf (and, for
that matter, in Tikrit). There was a separatist
movement in Basra in the 1920s, but this was
directed mainly by Sunni, Christian and Jewish
merchants, whose non-religious political program
aimed at transforming Basra into a cosmopolitan,
mercantile Gulf republic.[7]
That
separatist movement ultimately collapsed. But
after the ouster of the Baathist regime in 2003,
there have been signs of similar political projects
in Basra, this time with input from both secularists
and Islamists, and framed within a federal system
that would guarantee the overall territorial
integrity of Iraq. The first glimmers of this
movement appeared in early 2004. Inspired by
the then popular scheme of converting Iraq’s
existing 18 governorates into federal entities,
Basra governor Wa’il ‘Abd al-Latif outlined a
vision in which Basra would become another Dubai—not
necessarily by laying special claim to the enormous
revenues from the Basra oilfields, but by exploiting
its location at the head of the Gulf to grow
into a futuristic trade entrepot.[8] Then,
in March 2004, Iraqi politicians adopted the
Transitional Administrative Law with provisions
for creating federal entities made up of a maximum
of three existing governorates. Tribal figures
in neighboring Maysan and Dhi Qar provinces soon
expressed interest in joining Basra in a “southern
region” (iqlim al-janub). This slight
reformulation of the initial scheme also received
support in Basra, but it never completely supplanted
‘Abd al-Latif’s original idea.[9]
Interestingly,
both of these trends perdured after Islamist
leaders came to power in the south, and the two
gradually merged into something that also appealed
to the Basra cells of the pre-war Islamist opposition
movement. An Islamist takeover occurred in Basra
in late August 2004, when Hasan al-Rashid of
SCIRI replaced ‘Abd al-Latif, who had been appointed
to a ministerial post in Baghdad. In a newspaper
interview shortly afterwards, the new Basra governor
reiterated his predecessor’s idea that the United
Arab Emirates was a suitable model for Basra.
Significantly, he now also alluded to the mechanisms
for oil revenue distribution inside the UAE and
suggested that Basra should achieve a position
like that of Abu Dhabi (which hands over only
half of its oil income to the federal government).[10] Other figures in the local assembly, including
members of the Tanzim al-Iraq branch of the Da‘wa
Party (a very recent splinter group from the
main branch, launched by exiles in Europe and
Iran circa 2002)[11] came out in defense of the project, issuing a collective statement
that referred to the right of any three governorates
to combine into a federal entity.[12] In October, visiting journalists from Baghdad
reported widespread popular support for the idea
of a small-scale federal entity, and Basra’s
biggest newspaper, al-Manara, published
a passionate editorial complaining that even
under the new regime (with many Shi‘a in leading
positions), southerners were still treated “as
if they were strangers from Senegal” when visiting
Baghdad.[13]
With
the elections in January 2005, a new provincial
government incorporating still another Islamist
faction came to power in Basra. That faction
was the local branch of the Fadhila party, composed
of former followers of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq
al-Sadr, murdered by Saddam Hussein’s regime
in 1999, who are now adherents of the Najaf cleric
Muhammad al-Ya‘qoubi and have broken with the
main Sadrist trend led by Muqtada al-Sadr. Fadhila,
considered a more “native” force than the formerly
exiled SCIRI and mainline Da‘wa parties, joined
with the Da‘wa Movement and the secular Wifaq
movement to form a coalition that sidelined SCIRI
in Basra politics. Nevertheless, this coalition
pressed on with the previous local government’s
campaign for a three-governorate federal entity
in the far south.[14] The secular wing of the movement was especially
articulate in the first half of 2005, convening
a handful of federalism conferences, but independent
Islamists also made their contribution through
vociferous dissatisfaction with discrimination
against “southerners” inside the national Shi‘i
electoral alliance.[15]
Importantly,
the movement for a small southern entity detached
from the wider Shi‘i areas remained alive after
the adoption in October 2005 of the new Iraqi
constitution, which places no upper limit on
the size of federal entities. The southern regionalists
have explicitly opposed growing calls from Shi‘a
in other parts of Iraq for a much larger federal
entity with a purely sectarian basis.[16] More
than anything, the leading role of the Da‘wa
Movement in agitation for a federal entity in
Basra bespeaks continuity with pre-war southern
particularism within the Shi‘i Islamist movements.
In late May 2006, the Movement’s council leader,
Muhammad Sa‘dun al-‘Abbadi, berated the central
government for paying no attention to the city
that “singlehandedly fills the coffers of the
Iraqi central bank.”[17]
Radical
Alternatives
Iraqi
“marsh Arabs” pull their boat to shore
near Basra. (Atef Hassan/Reuters/Landov) |
Not
every Islamist in Basra is interested in regionalism.
In August 2005, a Basra newspaper casually reported
that a “procession led by clerics and a large
number of citizens” had taken to the streets
of the city to declare allegiance to the “guardian
and prophet of the Mahdi, Ahmad al-Hasan” and
that those who did not join their cause would
be in “revolt against the rule of the Commander
of the Faithful, ‘Ali bin Abi Talib.” Two photographs
showing a small gathering of people marching
through Basra accompanied the report.[18]
This
procession was not the launch of Ahmad al-Hasan’s
radical agenda. His “uprising” dates back to
shortly before the start of the Iraq war in 2003.
Gradually, he attracted a small number of followers
among religious students and others in the south
of Iraq, especially in Basra, Maysan and Dhi
Qar provinces. His basic message is that he is
the representative of the Mahdi—the Messiah-like
figure for whose appearance all Shi‘a yearn—and
therefore possesses “divine authority” (wilaya
ilahiyya) and can overrule the traditional
Shi‘i clergy on any issue of jurisprudence. He
dismisses the concept of legal interpretation
(ijtihad), and demands that, in legal
questions where the Qur’an is ambiguous, the
faithful should refer to him as the sole source
of emulation. He employs several Shi‘i traditions
concerning the coming of the Mahdi to buttress
his claims, among them prophecies that an “Ahmad
from Basra” will appear shortly before the Mahdi
himself. Ahmad al-Hasan also says he is “the
Yemeni” described by many Islamic sources as
a sign of the Mahdi’s imminent emergence. (As
Basra is distant from Yemen, he offers the explanation
that “the Tihama—the southern coastal plain along
the Red Sea coast of the Arabian Peninsula—is
part of the Hijaz and also part of the Yemen;
hence, all Arabs are Yemenis.”) Other signs reported
by Hasan as evidence of forthcoming apocalypse
include the appearance of the forces of evil
in the shape of al-dajjal—the diabolical
deceiver of Islamic eschatology—who, he proclaims,
is present in Iraq in various incarnations, including
the US military forces as well as the leading
Shi‘i clergy.[19]
The
idea of territoriality in Hasan’s writings is
intriguing. Some of his messages are directed
specifically at “Iraq,” and others at “Iran,
the land of the Rayy.”[20] He has issued a separate demand to Ali Khamenei, Khomeini’s
successor as Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution,
to surrender the reins of power in Tehran, and
many messages are clearly geared toward a Shi‘i
audience, with separate addresses specifically
directed at religious students in Najaf and Qom.
But Hasan’s purview is far wider than any “Shiite
crescent.” In a call to world powers, he demands
the immediate withdrawal of US and allied forces
from “Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Qatar, Najd,
Hijaz and all Muslim lands.”[21] He bemoans Wahhabism as a devious foreign
implant in Muslim society, artificially propped
up by British imperial power in the early twentieth
century and by the United States since the 1980s.[22] And
in a recent statement, he appeals to spiritual
leaders of “all the three religions”—Islam, Christianity
and Judaism—thereby stressing the universalistic
tendency of his message.[23] Territorial control of limited
geographical zones and the liberation of “Shi‘i”
territory seem to have no place in Hasan’s agenda.
Hasan
is an extremist, and his group is a tiny one.
But his views are nevertheless important, because
he operates on the same continuum as more influential
figures like Mahmoud al-Hasani and Muqtada al-Sadr.
(It is no coincidence that the majority of his
public affrays—they often take the form of theological
duels known as munazarat—have been with
Sadrist followers.[24])
In contrast to Hasan, Sadr and Hasani have not
yet burned their bridges to orthodox Shi‘ism,
and they continue to employ the terminology of
the traditional clerical establishment. But their
followers are clearly playing with Mahdism (and
are allowed to do so), and Ahmad al-Hasan is
therefore significant as a Shi‘i who has proceeded
much further down this road—and as a leader within
the broader Mahdist current in contemporary Iraq
whose importance abruptly came to light during
the violent confrontation between rebels and
government forces at Najaf in late January 2007.[25] Crucially,
on the specific issue of territoriality, the
ultra-radical Hasan has more in common with the
traditional Shi‘i clergy than with the “crescent”
theorists, in that he has proclaimed to be a
leader not only for the Shi‘a, but for all Muslims.
It was ecumenical considerations that, in the
1920s, led the conservative Basra cleric Mahdi
al-Qazwini to condemn as too sectarian the practice
of chest beating during Muharram celebrations,
and that in recent years have prompted Grand
Ayatollah ‘Ali al-Sistani to protest just as
loudly during Israeli military operations in
the (largely Sunni Muslim) West Bank as in (Shi‘i)
southern Lebanon.[26]
The
Sectarian Challenge
Since
the summer of 2005, local regionalists and pan-Islamist
Shi‘i thinkers of Basra have been facing a serious
challenge: a bid by Shi‘i leaders of central
Iraq to create a Shi‘i federal super-region stretching
from the Gulf to Baghdad that would absorb Basra
and its oil wealth. In contrast to the “southern
region” project, this scheme—known as the “region
of the center and the south” (iqlim al-wasat
wa al-janub)—is explicitly linked to sectarian
identity. The key argument in the accompanying
propaganda is that establishing a federal entity
would create safety for the Shi‘a and protect
them from attacks by Sunni terrorists. In contrast
to the local projects in the south of Iraq, it
has a certain “crescent” dimension: The former
leader of SCIRI, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, was
one of the first and few Shi‘i intellectuals
to write in distinctly pan-Shi‘i terms, with
his vision of a unified Shi‘i empire—Iran and
Iraq are explicitly mentioned—controlled by a
single jurisprudent (faqih) in a federal
system.[27] For a long time, it was mainly SCIRI’s pro-Iranian
leadership that fronted the sectarian federalist
demand, but after the Samarra’ incident in February
2006, there are signs that an increasing number
of independent Shi‘i members of Parliament as
well as some adherents of the Tanzim al-Iraq
branch of the Da‘wa are waxing sympathetic to
the idea of a single Shi‘i region, although as
late as September 2006, at the time of the introduction
of the SCIRI-sponsored bill for the implementation
of federalism, internal disagreements on the
issue resurfaced in the Shi‘i camp.[28]
Nothing
even remotely resembling the SCIRI aspiration
has been seen in Iraq since medieval times. True,
there was an attempt in 1927 to launch a Shi‘i
separatist movement, but it instantly foundered
due to lack of support by the higher clergy.[29] An
attempt in the seventeenth century by a local
ruler in Basra called Afrasiyab to establish
an anti-Ottoman emirate was inter-religious and
not sectarian in character; in territorial extent,
it also more resembled today’s small-scale non-sectarian
regionalist project.[30] Probably the closest historical
parallel would be the short-lived tribal Mazyadid
emirate, which in the eleventh and early twelfth
centuries ruled Hilla and regions south and also
achieved a degree of control in Basra before
it collapsed.[31] But
if there is a lack of precedent for regional
identity congruent with the proposed scheme (vide the
long-winded “center and south” epithet), a motley
crew of other powerful horses are today pulling
the sectarian federalism project forward, giving
it a status quite out of proportion to its stature
in Shi‘i intellectual history. Iran has no doubt
given its green light (the visits by SCIRI leader
‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Hakim to Tehran shortly before
the summer 2005 launch and the August 2006 upsurge
of Shi‘i federalism propaganda seem particularly
suggestive in this regard). Sunni extremists
and al-Qaeda supporters are probably delighted
that their efforts to tear the Iraqi social fabric
apart are beginning to pay off. Arab and international
media—and prophets of doom generally—are attracted
to the project because of the dramatic headlines
it can deliver. Even some within the Democratic
Party have eyed it as a distinctive “alternative”
approach to the Iraq situation.[32]
To
Basra regionalists, the “region of the center
and the south” project represents a frontal attack.
It has awakened fissures within the Shi‘i Islamist
movement that emerged between Najaf and Basra
as early as the 1960s, and it challenges the
concept of a “southern” regional identity based
on collective historical experience instead of
sect. Today, this confrontation can be seen in
the raw power struggle for control of Basra,
where the regionalist Fadhila party has faced
off since May 2006 against the central government
of Nouri al-Maliki, and where the pro-sectarian
SCIRI are clearly hoping to regain lost control.
The composition of the United Iraqi Alliance
contingent in the new committee for revising
the Iraqi constitution forms yet another act
of internal Shi‘i marginalization of the south,
whose three governorates are represented only
by two members from Nasiriyya—both thought to
have SCIRI sympathies. And the law for the formation
of federal regions passed in October 2006 will
make it relatively easy for external forces to
interfere in the local federalization process,
because the mechanisms that decide which particular
federal scheme gets voted on in a referendum
will accept initiatives by relatively small (and
thus pliable) factions—one third of local council
members, or a tenth of the electorate.[33]
Still,
even with these strong pressures in the direction
of territorial sectarianism, signs of local resistance
remain. Exhausted by experimentation with regional
schemes, many Shi‘i citizens of Basra today simply
favor the restoration of a central Baghdad government
that can deliver security and services. Others
still cling to the “southern region” project,
despite a potentially fateful lack of progress
in recruiting support among the secularists,
Sunnis and Christians of Basra.[34] Even the wild pan-Islamism of Ahmad al-Hasan survives. In the
long run, these alternative visions may not derail
the sectarian scheme and its powerful sponsors,
but they will certainly delay it. In fact, they
might prompt experienced actors like Iran, which
probably takes a more nuanced view of the Iraqi
scene than do many Western analysts, to distribute
their bets more evenly, on a wider range of players
on the Iraqi scene.[35] In
spite of extreme pressures from an increasingly
violent political environment, projects like
these will carry on an intellectual heritage
that discourages many Shi‘a from thinking about
their religious community in terms of crescents,
rectangles or, indeed, any kind of cartographical
projection.
Endnotes
[1] Posted
December 24, 2005 at www.southiraq.org, and accessed
on February 18, 2006. The link is now defunct.
[2] On
regional tensions inside the Da‘wa, see Salah
Khurasan, Hizb al-da‘wa al-islamiyya: haqa’iq
wa watha’iq (Damascus: al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiyya
lil-Dirasat wa al-Buhuth al-Istratijiyya, 1999),
pp. 122, 368-371, 387, 412, 423; ‘Adil Ra’uf, Hizb
al-da‘wa al-islamiyya: al-masira wa al-fikr al-haraki (Beirut:
Markaz al-Dirasat al-Istratijiyya wa al-Buhuth
wa al-Tawthiq, 1999) pp. 42-43; Faleh A. Jabar, The
Shi‘ite Movement in Iraq (London: Saqi, 2003),
pp. 257-258.
[3] Mahmoud
al-Amir, “Al-i’tilaf al-‘iraqi al-muwahhad fi
rub‘ qarn,” Kitabat.com, November 21,
2005.
[4] Interviews
conducted in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion
confirmed the association of the Haraka with
regional currents in Basra. See International
Crisis Group, Iraq’s Shiites Under Occupation (Amman/Brussels,
September 2003), p. 12.
[5] Khurasan,
p. 185.
[6] ‘Izz
al-Din Salim, Khatt al-Imam al-Khumayni (Tehran,
1982), particularly pp. 27-31 and 64-76.
[7] On
the struggle between separatist and Iraqi nationalist
forces in Basra in the twentieth century, see
Reidar Visser, Basra, the Failed Gulf State:
Separatism and Nationalism in Southern Iraq (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006).
[8] Gulf
News, February 24, 2004; Ulrich Ladurner,
“Die Schöne und ihre Wunden,” Die Zeit,
March 18, 2004.
[9] Interview
with ‘Ali Hamid al-Nouri, July 14, 2005, posted
at www.niqash.org; al-Ittihad, July 28,
2004; al-Zaman, July 28, 2004.
[10] Al-Manara,
September 2, 2004.
[11] For
a short while, this branch was known as Hizb
al-Da‘wa Tanzim Urubba. Their London fax number
was used later in 2002 on letterhead from the
Tanzim al-Iraq branch, where a post office box
address in Qom, Iran, also appeared. Due to its
choice of name, some Western analysts have tended
to associate this branch with the elusive “domestic
Da‘wa” of which there was much talk prior to
the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Yet its leadership,
at least, is just as émigré as that of the main
branch associated with Nouri al-Maliki and Ibrahim
al-Jaafari.
[12] Al-Manara,
October 10, 2004. In these oil-related developments,
there seems to be some convergence of the position
of the Basra factions of SCIRI and Da‘wa (Tanzim
al-Iraq), and the stand of ‘Adil ‘Abd al-Mahdi
of SCIRI’s central leadership during the February
2004 Transitional Administrative Law negotiations,
as recounted in Larry Diamond, Squandered
Victory (New York: Owl Books, 2005), p. 173.
Within the Da‘wa current, the Tanzim al-Iraq
branch has been the object of the most specific
accusations of Iranian support. See, for instance,
Rory Stewart, The Prince of the Marshes (Orlando:
Harcourt, 2006), pp. 237, 245; and International
Crisis Group, op cit, p. 12. An “Iran factor”
might perhaps be discerned in these demands.
On the other hand, both ‘Abd al-Latif’s precursor
movement and Fadhila’s more recent federal project
have firmer links to “domestic” Iraqi politics.
[13] Al-Mada,
October 16, 2004; al-Manara, October 3,
2004.
[14] Knight
Ridder, May 24, 2005.
[15] Al-Hayat, March
14, 2005; al-Bayan, April 14, 2005; al-Mashriq,
April 23, 2005; al-Mu’tamar, May 4, 2005.
[16] The
contrasts between the two competing projects
were discussed in a meeting between Basra governor
Muhammad al-Wa’ili and tribal sheikhs in early
2006. Government of Iraq, Office of the Prime
Minister, Reports on the Activities of the Governors,
April 4, 2006. The alternative of Basra as a
stand-alone federal entity has also resurfaced. Al-Manara, October
14, 2006.
[17] Fadhila
press release, dated May 31, 2006. On its website,
the Da‘wa Movement also published a spirited
article defending the idea of converting Iraq’s
existing governorates into federal entities.
See Nizar Haydar, “al-‘Iraq al-fidirali,” June
12, 2005, accessible online at http://www.aldawamovement.net/4articles/17.6.2005%20Nazar%20Haidar.htm.
The anti-SCIRI position of the Da‘wa Movement
in Basra is interesting in light of the relatively
close ties between the Hakim family and ‘Izz
al-Din Salim. In fact, Salim had been one of
the few Shi‘i leaders to toy with the idea of
federalism as a mechanism for advancing specifically
sectarian aims prior to 2003, but the stance
taken by his party in Basra suggests that regional
loyalties ultimately proved stronger for the
movement as a whole. See “Hiwar ma‘a al-shahid
‘Izz al-Din Salim hawla al-fidiraliyya fi al-‘Iraq,”
a pre-2003 interview (no exact date given) reproduced
at http://amged.friendsofdemocracy.net/default.asp?item=198314.
[18] Al-Manara, August
2, 2005.
[19] Based
on texts from the original Ahmad al-Hasan website,
http://ansaralmahdy.freewebpage.org, accessed
on August 2, 2005, now defunct. Some but not
all texts are now available from his new site,
at http:// www.almahdyoon.org. Key documents
include “Bayan al-thawra,” dated December 12,
2003; “Ila al-dajjal al-akbar,” dated May 23,
2004; “Mukhtasar al-sira al-dhatiyya lil-Sayyid
Ahmad al-Hasan” and “Al-Yamani al-maw‘ud Ahmad
al-Hasan wasiyy wa rasul al-Imam al-Mahdi” (both
undated).
[20] Hasan,
calls 2 and 3, December 2003. Rayy is a city
in northern Iran associated with some of the
prophecies concerning the appearance of the Mahdi.
[21] Hasan,
unnumbered call, December 2003.
[22] Letter
from Ahmad al-Hasan, February 22, 2006, accessible
at www.almahdyoon.org.
[23] Letter
from Ahmad al-Hasan, November 2005, accessible
at www.almahdyoon.org.
[24] Hasan
and his followers sometimes strayed from their
revolutionary anti-establishment path and quoted
the late cleric Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr as an
authority, for instance in questions concerning
jihad. See an undated letter from the Nasiriyya
office of Ahmad al-Hasan to As‘ad al-Nasiri,
accessible at www.almahdyoon.org.
[25] For
a while, Iraqi authorities claimed that Ahmad
al-Hasan was directly involved, although they
later changed their account and came instead
to focus on Dhia’ ‘Abd al-Zahra from the middle
Euphrates area. There is conspicuous ideological
overlap between these two Mahdist groups’ ideologies,
and only days prior to the armed confrontation,
Ahmad al-Hasan followers in Najaf had been complaining
about harassment by local authorities. Hence
some kind of linkage, perhaps involving a split
within a larger movement, cannot be excluded.
[26] For
Qazwini, see Visser, Basra, the Failed Gulf
State, p. 125; for Sistani, see bayans
(pronouncements) issued by his office, dated
April 9, 2002 and July 30, 2006.
[27] Reidar
Visser, “Shi‘i Perspectives on a Federal Iraq,”
in Daniel Heradstveit and Helge Hveem, eds. Oil
in the Gulf: Obstacles to Democracy and Development (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2004), pp. 145-147.
[28] Al-Hayat,
September 11, 2006; al-Sharq al-Awsat,
September 24, 2006.
[29] Visser, Basra,
the Failed Gulf State, pp. 121-125.
[30] For
an overiew of the Afrasiyab period, see Stephen
H. Longrigg, Four Centuries of Modern Iraq (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1925), pp. 99-122.
[31] For
the Mazyadids, see ‘Abd al-Jabbar Naji, al-Imara
al-mazyadiyya (1970) and Hugh Kennedy, The
Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates (London:
Longman, 1986), pp. 294-297.
[32] The
contradictions and the anti-democratic import
of this position are often overlooked. Iraq already
has a constitutional and legal procedure for
demarcating the units of its new federal system,
and the emergence of three ethno-religious cantons
(instead of, for instance, five non-sectarian
entities) is by no means a foregone conclusion.
But by constantly evoking the image of tripartite
divisions, US politicians are actively interfering
in this debate, consolidating the position of
the forces that already enjoy the lion’s share
of international media attention.
[33] See
Reidar Visser, “Iraq Federalism Bill Adopted
Amid Protests and Joint Shiite-Sunni Boycott,”
October 12, 2006, accessible online at http://historiae.org/devolution.asp.
[34] During
the summer of 2006, tribal forces in Dhi Qar
and Maysan voiced their support for the “southern
region” project through meetings and demonstrations. Al-Zaman,
August 5, 2006.
[35] For
an interesting perspective on Iranian policy
toward the Shi‘a of Iraq, see Peter Harling and
Hamid Yasin, “Unité de façade des chiites irakiens,” Le
Monde Diplomatique (September 2006).
