Tag: Iraq war

The Ayatollah Who Spared Najaf

On By Martin Kramer

At yesterday’s military briefing in Qatar, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks announced that the leading Shiite cleric in Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Ali Husayni Sistani, had issued a fatwa calling on the city’s inhabitants to remain calm and not to interfere with U.S. forces. “We believe this is a very significant turning point and another indicator that the Iraqi regime is approaching its end,” Brooks told reporters. (Whether Sistani issued a fatwa or statement seems to be in dispute. His office in Iran announced to news outlets that it could not confirm American claims of a fatwa, which Al-Jazeera promptly turned into a denial. It doesn’t matter now: Ayatollah Sistani achieved precisely the effect he desired, which was to spare Najaf a vicious battle.)

Back in the fall, and then more recently, Iraqi media released various statements and fatwas attributed to Sistani, in which he supported the regime. On Tuesday, one dubious “expert” cited these as evidence that the Shiites were “resolved to resist” the coalition, because of “their loyalty to Iraq.” In fact, the next day the 101st Airborne entered Najaf in a triumphal march. Inhabitants later swarmed over a huge equestrian statue of Saddam in the center of the city, toppled by American sappers.

The fact is that Saddam’s regime bled Najaf dry, killing off its flower, and it’s a city built upon the memory of martyrs. Ayatollah Sistani’s apparent reversal, and the glee of many of Najaf’s inhabitants, is indeed an indicator that Saddam’s last-ditch appeals for jihad are set to fail, at least among Shiites. (All this with the caveat that no harm is done to the golden-domed shrine-tomb of the Imam Ali, the religious centerpiece of Najaf, where some Saddam loyalists have taken refuge.)

When the 101st Airborne entered Najaf, one Lt.-Col. Chris Hughes paid his respects to Sistani through intermediaries, assuring him that American forces did not intend to harm the Shiites or their holy places. According to Hughes, Sistani asked for American protection, but a crowd stood down the detail, fearing that U.S. troops intended to move on the shrine-tomb. Hughes got the impression that Sistani was overwhelmed by the situation: “He’s kind of in shock as to really how to handle the responsibility of everybody looking up to him, asking him advice.”

That’s unlikely. In fact, Ayatollah Sistani’s function is to hand out advice—just not on politics, about which he’s had to be extremely guarded. Now people are going to look to him for political guidance, and what he says will matter.

Sistani is unquestionably a leading authority in Shiite Islam, and one of perhaps half a dozen clerics in the Shiite world to whom believers turn with complex questions of Islamic law and practice. He is from Mashhad in Iran, but he was also schooled in Qom and Najaf. While he presides over a key seminary in Najaf, he has offices in Qom, Mashhad, Damascus, and London, a considerable following in the Gulf countries and South Asia, and a representative in New York. (That cleric, who supports the war, met with Mayor Bloomberg on Friday.)

Sistani’s followers offer him a fixed part of their earnings, which he spends for educational and charitable purposes. Sistani’s office claims he supports 35,000 students in Qom, 10,000 in Mashhad, and 4,000 in Isfahan. He himself has lived very modestly near the tomb-shrine in Najaf—for years, under the close supervision of Iraqi intelligence agents, who’ve now fled. (Click here for a video clip of Sistani, apparently at home in Najaf. Pull up a mattress.)

Ayatollah Sistani now is in a delicate position. For Najaf, the removal and eradication of the Baath regime is a blessing. It offers the prospect of a revival of Najaf as a place of learning, pilgrimage, and creative thought. Sistani leans toward an enlightened pragmatism. His first priority has been protection of the shrine and the seminary, come what may. But Sistani’s overseas network incorporates a good number of clerics, including many in Lebanon, who regard the United States as the incarnation of the anti-Islam. These people will be looking to establish a strong base under Sistani’s umbrella, and they will do everything to turn Iraq’s Shiites against the American presence.

Ayatollah Sistani is someone who warrants an overture at the highest political level, and at the earliest opportunity. At the same time, it would be prudent to omit his name from future briefings in Qatar, and to work quietly and behind the scenes to assure his neutrality, if not his friendship.

Baghdad, Babylon, Brandeis

On By Martin Kramer

The Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, who has been working with the State Department on Iraq’s “transition,” has started writing a “war diary” for one of the weeklies. In one entry, he reports that “there are hundreds—if not more—of Iraqis in America, Britain, and the rest of the diaspora who are quitting their jobs and boarding planes to help rebuild their ravaged country.”

It’s a noble notion—perhaps too noble. To gain just a bit of the flavor of what the encounter might involve, see the documentary film Return to Babylon by the Iraqi film director Abbas Fahdel. Fahdel left the country at the age of 18 for France, and returned last year after an absence of 25 years, to see what had become of his house, his town (Al-Hillah), and his childhood friends.

This place, in Babil (Babylon) province a short drive south from Baghdad, is remembered by Fahdel as a busy provincial capital, graced with movie theaters that filled him with wonder for the cinema, and lush parks and playgrounds. It’s now bleak and forlorn. The parks have turned to dust, the theater is a decrepit shell, where sullen young men watch old films recycled year after year. His friends—those who haven’t “disappeared” or died on some battlefield—have had their dreams dashed. In their sparse shops and homes, he hears of an entire generation lost, and marvels (with a mix of guilt and gratitude) at his own incredible luck. Fahdel has brought along a batch of old photographs; each poignant comparison of what was and what is evokes loss.

The smooth-shaven Fahdel, in his neat white jacket and sunglasses, looks like a tourist. In the marketplace, a boy mistakes him for a foreigner, and calls out “Mister!” I’m not a “Mister,” he replies in Arabic with hurt and embarrassment, I’m an Iraqi. One has a gnawing feeling that even the most patriotic Iraqis in exile will be mistaken for so many “Misters” when (and if) they do reappear.

Makiya quotes an e-mail he’s sent to Iraqi “democrats” living abroad, and it’s a sharp rebuke:

Some of you think you can lift your noses and ride into Iraq on American tanks, above the stink of it all, without having to wade knee-high in the shit that the Baath Party has made of your country. You cannot. That is a pipe dream. The Americans will be here for the shortest time that they can possibly get away with, and they will not understand during that time, nor even are they capable of imagining, exactly what it is they are dealing with, much less have they the stamina to move it all in the direction of the gentle and forgiving way of life (by contrast with Iraq) that we all have enjoyed for so many years in the West.

Makiya, who left Iraq 35 years ago, has been an adjunct professor at Brandeis University since 1997. He’s been on leave this year, to work on Iraq’s “transition.” But he won’t be among the returnees. Two weeks ago, Brandeis named him incumbent of the new Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Chair in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. “We look forward to his return to Brandeis,” said the president of Brandeis on the announcement.

I assume that Makiya is looking forward, too. “I am getting too old to be going on wading in the shit of Arab politics, as I have been doing for over 30 years now,” he wrote in his e-mail. “I am not sure how much more of it I can take.” No one can blame Makiya, and certainly the job description of his chair—to assist in “the development of a new Center for Middle East Study at Brandeis”—is as important a task as any in American academe. Somewhere there must develop an alternative to what now passes for Middle Eastern studies. I wish Makiya well. I advise him not to throw away his high boots. He’ll still need them.

FILMOGRAPHY: I saw Return to Babylon on La Cinquieme, but it was also broadcast in Canada in December. It’s distributed by an outfit in Paris, and there is a version with English subtitles.

Professorial Pundits Place Iraq Bets

On By Martin Kramer

The war is underway, and most of the rationales for and against it are based on predictions. No one reasonably expects professors of Middle Eastern studies to predict military outcomes. But political outcomes, especially in the long term, are supposed to be their forte. And so here, for the record, are the predictions of four chaired professors of Middle Eastern studies, at leading American universities. At the end of the day, events will prove two of them right, and two of them wrong.

John Esposito is a University Professor (his university’s highest professorial honor) at Georgetown. His prediction, looking five years past a war:

It is likely that the Arab world will be less democratic than more and that anti-Americanism will be stronger rather than weaker. A military attack by the United States and installation of a new government in Iraq will not have fostered democratization in the Arab world but rather reinforced the perception of many… that the United States has moved… to a war against Islam and the Muslim world. To move to a military strike before exhausting nonmilitary avenues, and without significant multilateral support from our European and Arab/Muslim allies, as well as from the United Nations, will have inflamed anti-Americanism, which will have grown exponentially in the region and the non-Muslim world.

That’s a grim prophecy, although the very first part may already be falsifiable: could Esposito now name an Arab country that might be less democratic in five years—given that not one of them is democratic now?

In the opposite corner is Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, past member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and best-selling author. He makes the opposite prediction:

I see the possibility of a genuinely enlightened and progressive and—yes, I will say the word—democratic regime arising in a post-Saddam Iraq. They will have been fully inoculated against the Fascist-style governments that otherwise seem to prevail.

Lewis again, with a bit more caution, but a steady optimism:

Clearly, Iraq is not going to turn into a Jeffersonian democracy over-night, any more than did Germany or Japan. Democracy is a strong medicine, to be administered in gradually increasing measures. A large dose at once risks killing the patient. But with care and over time, freedom can be achieved in Iraq, and more generally in the Middle East.

Do you prefer that your experts on “the Arabs” have Arabic names? Then take your choice. In one corner: Rashid Khalidi, who in September will become the Edward Said Professor at Columbia University. His prediction:

Irrespective of its cost or length, this war will mark not the end, but the beginning, of our problems in this region. Because, however much Iraqis loathe their regime, they will soon loathe the American occupation that will follow its demise. No expert on Iraq… believes that the creation of a democracy in Iraq will be a swift or simple matter; some believe it is not possible as a consequence of an American military occupation…. So we will not have democracy in Iraq. We will have a long American military occupation that will eventually provoke resistance…. Via a lengthy and bloody occupation of Iraq, via the establishment of U.S. bases there, via the direct control of Iraqi oil, we will be creating legions of new enemies throughout the Middle East.

In the other corner: Fouad Ajami, the Majid Khadduri Professor at Johns Hopkins. Ajami argues that the United States should aim high: “The driving motivation of a new American endeavor in Iraq and in neighboring Arab lands should be modernizing the Arab world.” His prediction: an American commitment will be decisive.

In the end, the battle for a secular, modernist order in the Arab world is an endeavor for the Arabs themselves. But power matters, and a great power’s will and prestige can help tip the scales in favor of modernity and change…. [U.S. victory] would embolden those who wish for the Arab world’s deliverance from retrogression and political decay…. It has often seemed in recent years that the Arab political tradition is immune to democratic stirrings. [But] the sacking of a terrible regime with such a pervasive cult of terror may offer Iraqis and Arabs a break with the false gifts of despotism.

So there you have them: the divided opinions of America’s leading authorities on the Middle East. Needless to say, they can’t all be right, so some of these predictions are going to come up losers. Will anyone remember? Possibly. But here is a safe prediction: it won’t matter, certainly not to the professional standing of the professors. Another professor (Robert Vitalis, head of the Middle East Center of the University of Pennsylvania), has put things in precisely the right perspective. The future, he maintains, “is unknowable.”

Administration figures are in fact gambling but there are real and predictable consequences to their betting wrong. Consequences for them personally I mean. This is not the case for virtually any op-ed writer or trusted ally of the Saudis or scholars who, from their perches in Palo Alto and Morningside Heights (or Center City), tell us what is really going to happen. There are no costs to them to being wrong, which is in part why so many pretend to be able to see the future with such remarkable acuity. Even after getting it wrong time and time again in the past 10 years.

How very, very true.

(Palo Alto and Morningside Heights…. Has Professor Vitalis been reading my Ivory Towers on Sand?)

ASIDE: Edward Said, who disagrees with Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, now claims that neither “has so much as lived in or come near the Arab world in decades.” Anyone with an ear to the ground knows that both of them show up somewhere in the Arab world every year. And I believe it’s been thirty years since Said left Morningside Heights to spend one of his sabbaticals in an Arab country. The amazing thing is that in the very same article, Said makes this admission: “In all my encounters and travels I have yet to meet a person who is for the war.” New York Times/CBS reports: “74% [of polled Americans] now approve of the U.S. taking military action against Iraq, up from 64% among these same respondents two weeks ago.” Perhaps it is Professor Said who ought to get out more.