'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Friday sermons from Iraq

Posted by Helena Cobban at October 24, 2004 07:22 AM
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.)