Iraq’s Shiites Show Restraint After Attacks

By ROD NORDLAND

BAGHDAD — Shiite clerics and politicians have been successfully urging their followers not to retaliate against a fierce campaign of sectarian bombings, in which Shiites have accounted for most of the 566 Iraqis killed since American troops pulled out of Iraq’s cities on June 30.

“Let them kill us,” said Sheik Khudair al-Allawi, the imam of a mosque bombed recently. “It’s a waste of their time. The sectarian card is an old card and no one is going to play it anymore. We know what they want, and we’ll just be patient. But they will all go to hell.”

The patience of the Shiites today is in extraordinary contrast to Iraq’s recent past. With a demographic majority of 60 percent and control of the government, power is theirs for the first time in a thousand years. Going back to sectarian war is, as both Sunni extremists and Shiite victims know, the one way they could lose all that, especially if they were to drag their Sunni Arab neighbors into a messy regional conflict.

It is a far cry from 2006, when a bomb set off at the sacred Shiite shrine in Samarra killed no one, but ignited a fury at the sacrilege that set off two years of sectarian warfare.

This year the equally important shrine of Kadhimiya in Baghdad, the tomb of two revered Shiite imams, was attacked by suicide bombers twice, in January and April. More than a hundred people were killed, but there was no retaliation.

Bombing Shiite mosques has become so common that Sunni extremists have been forced to look elsewhere to provoke outrage — much as they did in 2005, when Shiites similarly showed patience when attacked. They have attacked groups of Shiite refugees waiting for food rations, children gathering for handouts of candy, lines of unemployed men hoping for a day’s work, school buses, religious pilgrimages, weddings, marketplaces and hospitals in Shiite areas and even the funerals of their victims from the day before.

Iraq’s Shiites, counseled by their political and religious leaders and habituated to suffering by centuries as the region’s underclass, have refused to rise to the bait — for now. Instead, they have made a virtue of forbearance and have convinced their followers that they win by not responding with violence. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has brought once violent Shiite militiamen into the fold, while the Shiites’ spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has forbidden any sort of violent reprisals.

“I wouldn’t look for this to become a repeat of 2006,” said the American ambassador to Iraq, Christopher R. Hill. “It’s very different.”

No longer are there tit-for-tat bombings of Sunni mosques after Shiite mosques are hit.

Now, even some of the most violent of Shiite extremists of past years are clamoring to join the political process. Last week, the Maliki government announced that Asa’ib al-Haq, one of the so-called special groups that continued to fight after other Shiites had stopped in 2008, now had renounced violence against Iraqis.

To some extent, the recent attacks against Shiites were expected, as many Iraqis braced for a general increase in violence after the American military withdrawal from towns and cities on June 30. On Monday, several bombs went off around Baghdad, and two huge truck bombs destroyed an entire village of Shiites from the Shabak minority near Mosul, in the north.

Ten days earlier, five mosques were bombed during Friday Prayer in poor areas around Baghdad, where followers of the anti-American cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, are numerous. In the bloodiest attack, at the Shoroufi mosque in the Shaab area, a car bomb hit an outdoor prayer area, killing 41 of Mr. Sadr’s followers.

More mosque bombings followed during Friday Prayer last week, and on Tuesday night, at least eight people were killed in twin bombings at a cafe and a mosque in the predominantly Shiite Al Amin area of the capital.

Sheik Allawi, the imam at Al Shoroufi, recounted the lesson another preacher gave a week after the bombing there. “He reminded them of Imam Hussein and drew a connection between his suffering and the Shoroufi bombing,” he said. “Blood will spill on the ground until the Mahdi shows up.”

Shiite Islam is all about patience and the long view, waiting for the hidden 12th imam, the Mahdi, to return and redeem the faith’s followers. And it is also about enduring suffering, as illustrated by the annual and always passionate commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the seventh-century Shiite saint, when many flagellate themselves in bloody displays of regret.

Anger after such bombings is common, but now it is more likely to be directed against failures by Iraqi security forces, not against Sunnis.

In 2006, people had little confidence in the security forces to protect them, so they turned to the militias instead. “The Iraqi Army is not the one people worried about three years ago,” said Ambassador Hill. “They were considered part of the problem a few years ago; now it’s an army that is broadly understood not to be engaged in sectarian violence.”

Militias got a bad name during that period, even among the people they were supposed to protect. Many were blamed for extorting money from their neighborhoods and carrying out kidnappings for profit. “The time of the militias is over and they will not come back,” said Sheik Abdullah al-Shimary, leader of the Shiite Al Shimer tribe in Diyala. “There are security forces now, and they are the ones who have the responsibility to control our areas.”

Another important factor is the influence the Shiite clerical leadership has over its followers, with Grand Ayatollah Sistani and other members of the howza, the top religious leadership, condemning any sort of violent reprisals.

“Sayid Moktada al-Sadr has told us in his instructions that we have to follow the orders of the howza,” said Sheik Jalil al-Sarkhey, the deputy head of the Sadr office in Sadr City, the huge Shiite slum in Baghdad. “We are all agreed; there will be no spilling of Iraqi blood.”

Another important difference has been the rejection by Sunni politicians of attacks on the Shiites, which was rarely heard in 2006. “The Sunnis openly and clearly are condemning these attacks,” said Ghassan al-Atiyyah, a political analyst who directs the Iraq Foundation for Democracy and Development. “And they’re all emphasizing that this is trying to stir up sectarian violence.”

Majid al-Asadi, a cleric in Najaf, said, “We will not react against these efforts to ignite sectarian conflict because that is exactly what our enemies want and not what our Iraqi people want.”

Still, some Shiite leaders warn that their patience will not be infinite. “As human beings, every person has his limits,” Sheik Sarkhey said. “So we ask God to protect us from any sectarian war.”

Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Basra, Karbala, Diyala and Baghdad.

A Shiite Schism On Clerical Rule

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 17, 2009

NAJAF, Iraq -- As Iran simmers over its disputed presidential election, Shiite clerics in Iraq are looking across the border with a sense of satisfaction that they have figured out a more durable answer to a question that has beset Shiite Islam for centuries: What role should religion play in politics?

No one in this city, which stands as the world's most venerable seat of Shiite scholarship, is boasting. Nor is there any swagger among the most senior clerics and their retinue of turbaned students and advisers. Befitting the ways of the tradition-bound Shiite seminary, points are made in whispers and hints, through allegories and metaphor.

But three decades after the Iranian revolution brought to power one notion of clerical rule -- and six years after the fall of Saddam Hussein helped enshrine another version of religious authority here -- the relationship between religion and the state in Iraq, clerics here say, seems more enduring than the alternative in neighboring Iran.

"It's true," said Ghaith Shubar, a cleric who runs a foundation in Najaf aligned with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most powerful cleric. "The spiritual guidance of the people in Iraq has become stronger than the guidance offered under the system in Iran. The marjaiya" -- the term used to describe the authority of the most senior ayatollahs -- "has more influence in Iraq, spiritual and otherwise, than it does in Iran."

More than a debate over semantics or the sometimes arcane details of a cleric's role, the precise relationship between the clergy and the state goes to the heart of politics in Iraq and Iran, both with Shiite majorities but with different ethnicities and languages. Though unelected, clerics in each country enjoy a standing unparalleled elsewhere in the Middle East. Sistani played perhaps the most decisive role in politics of any Iraqi leader in the years after the U.S.-led invasion overthrew Hussein in 2003. In theory at least, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, wields power that is sanctioned by God, though discontent over the official results of last month's election has challenged his authority.

In reality, however, the two systems are radically different, manifesting in many ways a division that has shaped Shiite Islam for centuries. The division has been especially pronounced since 1970, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the eventual leader of the Iranian revolution, first elaborated the idea of clerical rule in a series of lectures during his tenure in Najaf.

Known as wilayat al-faqih, the theory holds that God's authority, passed down through a line of imams that started with Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the prophet Muhammad, and ended with the 12th imam, who disappeared in the 9th century, is held by a cleric chosen as the supreme leader. Enshrined in the Iranian constitution, this authority has served as the basis of governance for the country since the revolution.

The authority of clerics in Iraq, on the other hand, lacks any legal basis. It is derived instead from prestige, the notion that millions look to Sistani as their spiritual authority. The most devout of his followers consider his edicts to carry the force of law. The tall, ascetic, Iranian-born Sistani is thought to adhere to what is sometimes called the quietist school of Shiite Islam, in which the clergy disavow an overt role in politics. Often, politicians are left guessing what Sistani's position -- if he has one -- might be.

His authority is distinct from political parties in Iraq that are avowedly Islamist and often count junior clerics among their senior leadership. The more senior ayatollahs deem those clerics politicians first and foremost, not clergy.

As one cleric put it, the difference between the two visions in Iraq and Iran is akin to different roles at a construction site. Under the wilayat al-faqih in Iran, the cleric might serve as the foreman, responsible for each aspect of the design and execution. In the quietist model in Iraq, Sistani would be considered the owner, but perhaps an absentee one.

A Lively Debate

Both visions represent an ideal that rarely translates into reality. In Iran, the discontent among senior clerics over the presidential election and the government's response has challenged Khamenei's ostensibly absolute authority. In Iraq, Sistani has often exerted decisive influence in the country's politics -- from undoing U.S. plans in 2003 for the country's political transition to self-rule to guaranteeing the turnout in landmark elections in 2005.

"Don't ever forget Sistani's influence," a senior Iraqi official said.

But the differences between the two still make for one of the liveliest debates among clerics, shaping the reputations of both the holy city of Najaf and its Iranian counterpart, Qom.

"The struggle [between the two] continues," said Mohammed Hussein al-Hakim, whose father serves with Sistani as one of the four most powerful ayatollahs in Najaf.

Most clerics in Iraq are reluctant to say anything about the crisis in Iran that began last month. The mantra heard in Najaf, filled with Iranian pilgrims and populated by clerical families with lineage in Iran, is that it is not their concern.

In part, their silence reflects courtesy among clerics, and a view that debates are better aired in the cramped seminaries and squat, brick residences that orbit the gold-domed shrine of Imam Ali. Others may want to keep their distance from Iran; a long-standing Sunni argument here is that religious Shiites are more loyal to their faith than to the Iraqi state.

"Truthfully, we don't want to interfere in the affairs of others," said Ali al-Najafi, the oldest son of another of the four most senior ayatollahs here, Bashir al-Najafi.

When clerics do speak, they are often dismissive, at least publicly, of the import of the crisis. "A tempest in a teacup," said one cleric, who asked not to be named, using an Arabic equivalent of the English phrase. "It still doesn't have the spark for a revolution."

"Britain and America, that's who's involved in Iran at this point," added Ali al-Waadh, a cleric and representative of Sistani's near the Kadhimiyah shrine in Baghdad.

But there is a sense among those same individuals that the political power wielded by clerics in Iran has threatened their religious authority. One cleric cited a proverb: "If you want to earn the love of the people, then leave their worldly affairs to them."

"When the marja" -- the title reserved for the most senior ayatollahs -- "removes himself from the political scene," Shubar said, "then his spiritual influence only grows."

Views of Sistani

The irony of a clerical state endangering clerics' religious standing has not gone unnoticed.

"It's true that the government in Iran is Islamic, but a great percentage of the population -- not the majority perhaps -- is secular," Shubar said, sitting in his office. "The government in Iraq is not religious, but the greater percentage of the people here are." In the Middle East, he added, "people tend to move in the opposite direction of their government."

The character of Sistani is rarely questioned. A deeply conservative man, steeped in the seminary since he was 10 years old, he has cultivated an image of asceticism so severe that he still sits on cheap carpets and bought a refrigerator only a decade or so ago.

When he is criticized, it is usually over his origins; his Arabic is still heavily accented by the Farsi of his native Iran, which he left nearly 60 years ago. Some view his intervention as excessive, blaming him for the deeply sectarian cast of politics here. Others deem it the opposite. Followers of Moqtada al-Sadr, a junior cleric who espouses a more assertive role for the clergy, often complain that Sistani is too reticent. In their stronghold of Sadr City, a vast, impoverished neighborhood in Baghdad, they call a street of stores selling mattresses and blankets "Sistani Street." The idea: that he is sleeping.

Hakim described the role of Sistani and his colleagues now as tawjiih, or guidance.

The confidence of the clerics in Najaf speaks to the sense that their city has returned to its preeminence in Shiite scholarship. For decades, its once-unquestioned influence was becoming eclipsed by that of Qom, and its clout reached a nadir under Hussein's nearly 25 years of rule. Today, Najaf seems on the ascent, building on the relatively monolithic authority of Sistani and his colleagues. An economic revival, meanwhile, has begun transforming the skyline, adding high-rise hotels and sprawling religious complexes to a city that was until recently dominated by low-slung, ocher buildings.

"We're not following Iran," Waadh said. "Iran should follow Najaf."