Friday sermons from Iraq

Did I tell you that Bill and I have both been focusing a little on our Arabic-language
skills while we’ve been here in Beirut?  Yesterday, we worked through
the lead article in al-Hayat, which gave some interesting reports
of what was in some Friday sermons the day before.  I thought it was
pretty interesting, so I’ve typed out my rendering of the first half of the
article. Here it is:

Headline: A political-sectarian split in Iraq 100 days
before the elections; The Shiites threaten anyone who abstains from
voting with the fire of “hell” and the Sunnis see voting under the shadow
of occupation as “a sin”

Baghdad– al-Hayat, AFP, Reuters– With the approach of the date of the Iraqi
elections, which has been determined to be 100 days hence, the Friday sermons
in the mosques of Iraq yesterday displayed a sharp split between Iraqis concerning
them, along political and sectarian lines. At the same time that the
sermons of the Shiite imams showed an enthusiasm for participation
that reached the degree of threatening anyone who abstains from voting with
“entry into hell”, the sermons of the Sunnis were divided between those who
called for a boycott because the voting under the shadow of occupation is
“sinful” and those who urged a “negotiating” position [that urges participation
in] voting in return for conditions, among them removing from the city of
Fallujah the military option.

Al-Sayyed Ahmad al-Safi, the representative of the Shiite ayatollah Ali al-Sistani,
laid stress in the Friday sermon in the shrine of Imam Hussein in Karbala
on “obligatory participation” in the elections and he said, “He who contravenes
that will go to hell.” He confirmed that, “We must take responsibility
and participate in an obligatory way because this is a national duty, and
not taking part would signify treason against the right of the nation.” And
Safi added that, “Participation has an obligation based in religious law
because the transgressor will enter hell.” He clarified that, “The
topic of the elections represents something truly significant for Iraqis
in terms of following their destiny.” He continued, “We must get ready to
prepare ourselves to participate strongly in them in order to realize the
hopes whose realization we’ve been awaiting a long time,” without spelling
out what these hopes were…

He denied, “The things some information media have mentioned” about the marja’iya’s
preparation of a unified list [I think that means, of its own unified
list -HC] “because that is not true. The marja’iya guards its paternal
relationship to the whole society … and we are undertaking efforts to arrive
at a unified list comprising exceptional personalities.”

Ten days ago, Sistani called on citizens to register their names in the election
registers on which the work [of assembling them] will start at the beginning
of next month. He said in a fatwa, “It’s a duty for all citizens entitled
to vote–males and females–to make sure that their names are correctly registered
on the voting rolls.” And the Shi-i marja laid stress, either directly
or through those close to him, on the holding of the elections on the
decreed date at the end of January.

As for Shaikh Sadruddin al-Qabanji [Shi-ite–HC], he called in his sermon in Najaf on “The
people of Fallujah to take a good example from Najaf and Samara on
how to end their pain, so they can get themselves out of it and prepare themselves
for the elections.” He added, “We call on the (Sunni) Association of
Muslim Scholars which is still undecided to participate in the election process
and to avoid isolation … And we Shiites seek an Iraq for all …
Not participating means that the occupation stays and the chaos continues.”

On the other hand, Shaikh Mahdi al-Smaida’i [Sunni], the imam and preacher of the
Ibn Taimiya mosque in Baghdad said, “The elections will not happen without
the departure of the occupier even if in stages. And any candidate
in the elections should be people of authentic muslim Iraqi nationality,
and the only voters should be from the people of Iraq.” He added, “Without
those conditions fulfilled, anyone who enters the elections is considered
sinful.”

But the Sunni “Iraqi Islamic Party” which is participating in the provisional
government under the leadership of Ayad Allawi distributed a short flier
in Sunni mosques that called that, “Muslims should participate in the elections
to nominate and elect people they trust, people who have pure, clean hands
who seek the good of this country.” And the flier concluded by saying,
“Islam and Iraq are entrusted to your embrace, and do not let them
fall from it.”

Meanwhile, Sunni men of religion, and especially the “Association of Muslim
Scholars” are trying to link th issue of the “political participation” of
the Sunni sect in the Iraqi elections with the “battle” of Falljujah and
the official spokesman of the AMS Shaikh Muhammad Bashar al-Fidi said yesterday,
“If the destruction of the city occurs, and the air and artillery attacks
continue, then we are committed, with the ulema (muslim scholars) of Iraq
to the position in which we call for boycotting the elections and judging
their results invalid. He added, “But if the bombing of the city and
its destruction stops, and if the bombardment of other cities stops — in
that case we would return to another position.”

A meeting that the Sunni community held on Wednesday, with the participation
of a great number of men of religion, called for boycotting the elections
if Fallujah is confronted with a military operation. And those at the
meeting judged that, “Holding elections in the midst of the destruction of
cities is rejected, and people of good morals call on the sons of the Iraqi
people as a whole, should Fallujah undergo destruction and continue to be
bombed from aircraft and artillery, or if other cities should suffer this,
to boycott the elections and consider the results invalid.”

The article concludes (my precis here) by reporting on the demands voiced
by the representatives of Fallujah that they be allowed (once again) to have
units of the police and national guard formed only of people from the city
itself take over responsibility for it, and an end to the bombing, etc. But
the minister of state for national security affairs, Qasem Daoud told Hayat
that the people of Fallujah are part of the Iraqi people and we can’t get
into partitioning-type ideas. He seemed to accuse the people who were
speaking for Fallujah of being under the thrall of “foreign terrorists” when
they made their demands, and repeated that the government was resorting to
violence against Fallujah only as a very last resort…

So it seems that those negotiations weren’t going very far, right then.

… Okay, so what does all this mean? Below, I’ll make a couple
of observations on the text that I translated above. But first I just
want to note the way the Allawi/US alliance seems to have tied the situation
in Fallujah into the same knot that the Americans tied the whole Iraqi situation
much earlier, in the run-up to the invasion. In both cases, the Americans
were demanding–under threat of extremely dire punishment–that their
opponents prove a negative.

In the earlier instance, vis-a-vis Saddam, he was being asked to prove
that he didn’t have WMDs. He tried. He agreed to the entry of
the UNMOVIC inspectors and to the extremely intrusive kinds of inspections
the international community demanded… But how, at the end of the
day, can you prove a negative? When the inspectors failed to
find the weapons, George Bush and his cohorts just said, “Well that proves
two things: it proves how tricky and duplicitious Saddam is, and it
proves how weak and insufficient the inspections system is. So now,
the only thing we can do is go into the whole country by force, ourselves,
in order to prove that Saddam was lying, and hiding his WMDs in a
very sneaky fashion, all along.”

Well, we all know just what they ended up “proving” in that regard…

But that doesn’t stop them from now using the same tactic toward the people
of Fallujah, accusing them of harboring (and being held in thrall by) the
“foreign terrorists” in their midst, and calling on them–essentially–to
“prove the negative”, that Zarqawi is not runing everything in their city…
And the more the people of Fallujah say, “Look, we are the people of
the city, and it is overwhelmingly us whom you are harming with your attacks”,
the more that seems to “prove” to Allawi and the Americans that Zarqawi is
holding them in his thrall.

This is a situation that cries out for creative diplomacy
and de-escalation Any number of nonviolent ways could be found to end
the stand-off over Fallujah in a way that meets the desire of the Fallujans
for an end to the attacks and that of the Americans to receive reassurance
that the Fallujans are not, in fact, harboring Zarqawi. This de-escalation
would also meet the need that both those parties presumably have to see the
elections go ahead on the appointed date, successfully and in a situation
of general calm.

(Some people have questioned whether the Americans in fact want to see the
elections be successful in Iraq, because as Shaikh Qabanji indicated in the
Hayat article above, such an election will be seen by most people in Iraq
as opening the way to the end of the occupation. Others have questions
whether, in the case of many Iraqi Sunnis, they really see elections in which
their clear minority status will be revealed as in their interest. I
prefer, however, to stick with the hope that wiser heads in both of these
groups really understand that de-escalation and successful elections are
in their interests.)

Will we see the US/Allawists actively pursuing a negotiated de-escalation
in Fallujah? We yet might. The alternative–for everyone concerned,
including the Americans–is too hrrible to contemplate.

I note that they did opt for the negotiations route with respect to
Moqtada Sadr’s militia and its positions in Sadr City– and that, after lots
of fairly hard-line rhetoric from Daoud and others about the essential “unreliability”
of Sadr in making good on previous commitments, etc. So the fact that
Daoud is sounding off in a fairly blowhard way on Fallujah doesn’t necessarily
mean that no overtures to negotiation are being pursued there, too.

Let’s all really hope for some wisdom.

No, back to those Friday sermon texts. I guess I was struck by the
nationalist dimension even of Sayyed Safi’s sermon– or perhaps, more accurately,
his melding of nationalist discourse with that of the extreme theological
discourse of people being consigned to “hell”.

I was also struck by his view that, “The marja’iya guards its paternal relationship
to the whole society”. From one point of view, that’s rather reassuring…
You have the highest religious body of the Shi-ite community describing
itself as committed to looking out for the interests of all
members of Iraqi society, rather than seeking to optimize purely Shi-ite
advantage. Especially given that the Shi-ites form over 60% of the
country’s people, that has to be a reassuring statment, even if perhaps in
the execution things turn out a little different (and honestly, I haven’t
seen any evidence yet that they have done so.)

On the other hand… “paternal”??

Oh well, what could you expect from these old guys anyway? Not, I guess,
an instantaneous conversion to the view of female equality.

(This AP story has some of the same material.)