Sectarianism and fundamentalism in the new Iraq. posted by Richard Seymour

How are Iranian fundamentalists linked to Iraqi fundamentalists*? According to the British government, of course, Iran has been behind recent attacks on UK troops in Southern Iraq - something which the client regime in Iraq has denied. The charge is even more curious, since it is suggested that elements in the Mahdi Army are involved.

Islam and revolution
It is reasonably widely known that Iran has been backing the SCIRI and the Da'wa Party since 1982. But the relationship goes back much further. The modern Shi'ite fundamentalist movement in Iraq really began to take shape in the 1950s, although its roots go back even further than that. The reason I'd situate its rise in the 1950s is that it began to take on a shape familiar across the Middle East and North Africa in which secular regimes with varying degrees of authoritarianism began to be challenged by leftist, minority and Islamist forces. A series of regimes, both revolutionary and conservative, were enacting similar reforms whose effect was to enlarge the role of the state, break the power of landowners, transfer resources from the rural to urban sector and build up a new urban state-based elite of bureacrats and army officers. These regimes were authoritarian and centralist in large part because they had no particular right to survive as states: the national boundaries were largely arbitrary colonial constructs; they cut across ethnic and cultural clusters and were therefore internally weak and lacked cohesion. Many believed they would hardly survive. Pan-Arabist opponents of the new regimes believed that a new state should be founded on the larger Arab community, while Islamists argued that the Umma should form the basis of an extended polity. Similarly, there were competing nationalities in several of these states: notably, the Kurds, spread across the axis of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Hence, extensive state-building and modernisation measures, often vicious authoritarianism, and the intensification of resistance.

Back to Iran and Iraq. It was Iraq that had since 1964 hosted Khomeini when he was in exile from Iran, and indeed the Baathist leadership was very willing to coopt leading Iranian religious figures in its war of position with the Iranian government - until the Algiers agreement of 1975, in which Iraq agreed to place Iranian exiles under tight scrutiny, while Iran surveilled and even incarcerated some leading Da'wa Party figures who were based in Tehran. In 1978, Khomeini was to be deported from Iraq to France in an agreement with the Shah. But had already started to accrue a profile among Shi'ites in Iraq, such that when he was turned back at the border of Kuwait, he was greeted by hundreds of Shi'ites as he arrived at the holy shrine of Kazimain to bed for the night.

When the rising tide of strikes and protests in Iran turned into a revolution whose almost unanimous leader was Ayatollah Khomeini (even many secular left forces and the liberal National Front which Mossadeq had led into government backed the cleric), Iraqi Shiites were electrified. The Baathist regime, which had been remarkably complacent in the face of a growing internal challenge, was shocked. It had expected the Iranian revolution to fail, but when the Shah fled to Panama, one Saddam Hussein suddenly announced a fear that if all Iraqis didn't declare loyalty to the Iraqi nation, it would be divided into three mini-states: "one Arab Sunni, one Arab Shi'i and one Kurdish".

The Dawa Party sensed a historical opportunity, and sought the advice of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadir, the esteemed Najafi cleric. Although an enthusiast of the Iranian revolution, he was cautious, and felt it would take years to build up a significant base in Iraq. The Iraqi Islamists had grasped the importance of mass street politics, but were suddenly of an exaggerated opinion about their ability to galvanise activism. Spontaneous demonstrations and actions emerged across Iraq, particularly in al-Khadhra. But these both over-estimated the possibilities for agitation and under-estimated the determination of the Baathist state to break the movement in its incipience. The security forces, notoriously most efficacious in their brutality, allowed demonstrations to proceed smoothly. But this was deceptive. They filmed the demonstrators, took names and awaited the moment for a crackdown, which began with the arrest of al-Sadr. This prompted a mass political campaign to free him, which was ruthlessly crushed. Nineteen of al-Sadr's wukala' (representatives) were executed, while several thousand Dawa Party members were arrested - hundreds of them dying either by execution or during torture. Mass action was instantly disabled, leaving a vacuum that was filled by small-scale terrorist activities often initiated by the MAI (Islamic Action Committee), a group with touch cadres trained in Beirut.


Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr.


Just as Hussein was eliminating his internal Baath foes (accusing many of conspiring with Syria), he was imposing a brutal new rule over Iraq. Baqir al-Sadr was executed on the quiet and buried the following day, while a new decree in March 1980 made membership of the Da'wa Party punishable by death. In large part, it was panic at the sudden perceived potency of Iraqi Shi'ism that caused the Baathists to allow Saddam to take such total control, cracking down most bloodily on internal dissent, while launching what would prove to be a lengthy and costly war with Iran. From then on, the Shi'ite movement in Iraq would largely operate in exile.

Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq
Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim announced the formation of the SCIRI on 17th November 1982 from Tehran. Unlike previous forms of political Islam in Iraq, this was to be Islamism as practised in Iran - in particular, the ulama would not merely have an advisory role, as it was conceived by al-Sadr, but rather would make a total claim over the affairs of both the state and citizen, as with the Iranian vilayet al-faqih. Al-Hakim became speaker for the group while Mahmud al-Hashmi assumed leadership of the organisation, although it was riven by faction-fighting and ideological contest. Its geographical axis was, of course, sourthern Iraq, and most of the first SCIRI council was composed mainly of Najaf and Karbala exiles. The membership was mainly exclusively SCIRI, although many early members of the council were also Da'wa Party members, while the MAI maintained some representation.


Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, original founder of SCIRI.

Initially, the SCIRI was an Iranian-sponsored bureacracy aimed at creating some sort of pan-Shiite unification. However, organisational restructuring was shortly undertaken to include Sunni Kurdsn (like the Haraka al-Islamiya) and other groups in order to lend at least the appearance of a pan-Iraqi structure. It was then arranged in different units: information; military; administrative & financial; intelligence; and social welfare. All of these were answerable to al-Hakim. As noted, this new organisation - inclusive though it tried to appear - was devoted to Khomeini's notion of the absolute guardianship of the jurisconsult. The only way to achieve an Islamic society was to openly argue for, agitate toward and achieve an Islamic state. The tactics that flowed from such a goal could be various: the MAI emphasised mass popular revolution, one that mobilised all classes and strata, while others argued for clandestine, elite armed action. Others still felt that winning Iraqi fighters over to the Iranian war effort was key. In the end, it was the war effort that was to determine the scope for action by the SCIRI.

For example, another branch of SCIRI was the Badr Corps. Named after the first battle fought by Muslims against the polytheistic Meccans, it was initially composed of Iraqi deportees and Shi'i prisoners of war. The latter could gain an amnesty from al-Hakim or another religious authority and would join the Badr Corps in penitence. It fought in the war alongside the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and was later transformed into a full, regular division. But one consequence of this was that while Shi'ite militancy in Iran had acted and continued to act as a nationalist force, it became by virtue of its entanglement with the Iranian government an anti-nationalist force in Iraq. And this contrasted sharply with the rise of statist nationalism in Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. And since the Islamist groups were convinced that an Iranian victory was imminent, they made no efforts to develop logistical or political cooperation with any anti-Saddam secular or Marxist groups. Finally, as soon as the war ended in 1988, the exile Iraqi Islamist movement lost its direction.

War and revolution
SCIRI, like many opposition movements in Iraq, had come to conclude that war and revolution were intricately linked, inasmuch as the former would often precipitate the latter: the evidence on this thesis is slight. Nevertheless, Iraq's military victory was not matched by economic success, and it began to experience growing social disintegration. At the same time, the Ba'ath regime, which drew much of its ideology from Stalinism, was appalled and threatened by the collapse of the Soviet Union. And uprisings in both Jordan and Algeria had threatened similarly authoritarian regimes. The Iraqi state had either to reform, or use its military dominance to its advantage - which it swiftly did after a green light from April Glaspie of the State Department, invading Kuwait in an attempted annexation. The hope was that the new oil revenues would fund reforms and economic growth, while rekindled nationalism would underpin support for the Ba'ath party.

The response to this from the SCIRI was intriguing - when Bush declared war on Iraq, they ordered their supporters to join the recruitment for the Iraqi army and urged them to stand firm against US aggression. It was a curious shift toward nationalistic rhetoric, just as Saddam was abandoning it in favour of a more religious discourse. However, the war did in the end prove to be a disaster of the kind that led to revolution. Angry soldiers returned to southern towns and began firing at Saddam's murals. From Basra to Najaf, Karba, Hillah, Kut and so on. Prisons, secret police units, mayoral offices and Ba'ath headquarters were taken over by angry crowds. The Badr Corps poured in through the porous border with Iran, heading for Najaf, Karbala and, to a lesser extent, Basra. The SCIRI, however, demolished whatever credibility it had by hoisting aloft Khomeini's banner and raising divisive slogans. Having been built up in exile, cut off from Iraq's major urban centre, they could not even offer a unified command and control system. The uprisings, however briefly and yet phenomentally successful, were swiftly drenched in blood.

New religiosity, domestic Shi'ite dissent
The defeats of 1991 were followed by an extraordinary elevation in religiosity and piety across Iraq. The religious charities could provided food and medical care, as well as spiritual alleviation, as the devastation of post-war Iraq, the sanction-crushed economy and high unemployment pushed people to greater despair. At the same time, new domestic forces of dissent began to emerge. Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (known widely as Sadr II) in particular slowly built a an apparatus and a cadre around himself. He worked through charity and sermons, and appeared on the surface to be safely apolitical. He built extensive networks of support among the rural peasantry and urban working class - notably in what has come to be known as Sadr City. He also built up constituencies among the educated middle class and expanded through Baghdad, into Najaf, Nasiriya, Basra and elsewhere. He began to pepper his sermons with sharp criticisms of the government, and consequently found himself in conflict with the then apolitical Najaf cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Supporters dubbed him 'the White Lion'. But whereas the Da'wa Party and the SCIRI ideologised Shiite identity along deeply fundamentalist lines, Sadr II did not. The Ba'ath regime would not tolerate the kind of religious fervour that could be directed against the state, and they did not: Sadr II, father of the young Muqtada al-Sadr, was assassinated along with two of his sons in February 1999.


Muqtada al-Sadr.

Muqtada al-Sadr was placed under house arrest following the assassination, whereupon he has been recognised by his fathers' followers as the heir to that movement. Like his father, he has been a proponent of a homegrown Arab clerical leadership, which has placed him it adds with exile groups like the SCIRI. Neither does Sadr support the desire for a fundamentalist state - rather, in his ideological comportment, he upholds his family's intellectual legacy, which opposes Khomeini's Guardianship of the Jurisprudent. He also introduces a new cleavage into the Shi'ite community, inasmuch as he takes an Iraqi nationalist position against the occupation, opposing the pro-government exiles. This too threatens the SCIRI and Da'wa, who have been among those cooperating with the occupiers - much to the surprise of Washington, which expected the Badr Corps to cause trouble. Instead, they are helping out what with the death squads and the sectarian murders. And the final point of division which Sadr introduces into the Shi'ite political movement is his attitude to federalism. SCIRI know for sure that they will be unable to control all of Iraq with their particularly communal and reactionary brand of Islamism. The next best thing for them is therefore control of a large geographical area with a nice allocation of oil revenue. They are opposed in this not only by their coalition partners the Da'wa Party, but also by al-Sadr, who has organised joint Sunni-Shi'ite demonstrations for pan-Iraqi solidarity. His present outlook is much closer in this respect to the position of Ahmad Kubaisi, founder of the post-occupation Islamic Party, which has called for a Sunni-Shia alliance against the occupation.


Present SCIRI leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim.

The pro-occupation position of some of the largest and most well-funded Shi'ite organisations is unsurprising since they have been immensely empowered by it, and nor is the fact that they are supported in this position by Iran. Iran can claim to be advancing the Islamist cause in Iraq for one audience, while at the same time it can curry favour with the other, the one in the White House. The alignments within Iraq, however, do not quite conduce to the televisual mythemes in which the pro-occupation forces are enlightened, moderate and even secular, while anti-occupation forces are fundamentalist, ravers, muderous fanatics etc. The history and trajectory of these divisions certainly militates against the ridiculous tale about Iran supporting a political and religious opponent like Muqtada al-Sadr at the same time as they are known to be funding, directing and arming his movement's most immediate foes.

*A note on the terms: TV words like 'fundamentalist' are here used as shorthand to avoid elaborate descriptions, but it is worth acknowledging that they occlude and obscure significant differences and nuances between groups. Similarly, terms like Ayatollah and Hujjat al-Islam are often contested designations. Baqir al-Sadr, for instance, was generally acknowledged as an Ayatollah, but Khomeini called him Hujjat al-Islam, a lower designation in the Shiite hierarchy, in a telegraph.