In the streets below, throngs of Shiites were celebrating the festival of Arbaeen with ancient rituals of penance and devotion. Chanting men and a few black-shrouded women pounded their chests, while drummers filled the air with deafening rhythm. Other men circled the shrine, flogging themselves with heavy chains. Youths, dusty and bleeding, crept on hands and knees toward the shrine’s golden archway. Inside, other young men with shaved heads slashed their own scalps with ceremonial daggers. Attendants bandaged the wounds of some; others were half-carried onto donkey carts outside to be paraded around the courtyard in their bloodstained white shirts.
Abdullah was glad to be home. He had been living in Persian Iran since 1980, when he fled the Iraqi dictatorship. He has made a comfortable income selling cloth in Tehran’s main bazaar, but he hasn’t been happy. “The Iranians are racist,” he says. “They don’t respect Arabs.” At the bazaar his Persian neighbors sometimes snubbed him when he said good morning. Some cloth suppliers wouldn’t deal with him. Once a cabdriver refused to let him ride after hearing Abdullah’s Iraqi accent. The exile could only dream of bringing his family home to Iraq. The last thing he wants for his five children is an Iranian-style Islamic government. “There are many problems in Iranian society,” he says. “The people don’t have the freedom to express themselves.”
The crowds who enthusiastically expressed themselves in Karbala last week could change the face of Islam and redraw the map of the Middle East. Already the Shiites of Iraq, who represent 60 percent of the population, are challenging the U.S. presence; some prominent clerics are calling for the ouster of American troops, and more are vying to fill the power vacuum left by Saddam Hussein’s demise. Yet their potential influence is also causing tremors across the region, from Lebanon and Syria to the tiny Gulf principalities, and worry-ing not only the mullahs of Iran but the Sunni Muslim royals of Saudi Arabia. Both regimes, which are rivals within the Muslim world, have staked their very legitimacy on religious leadership. Now their stature is threatened by a religious revival in Iraq, where the two most revered Shiite shrines are located.
No one knows where the tectonic shifts will end. Before they’re done, however, Iran’s almighty Shiite clerics are more than likely to find that their religious authority has slipped away to Iraq, where it originated more than 12 centuries ago. And massive changes are looming not only in the mosques of fundamentalist Islam, but possibly at America’s gas pumps as well. The world’s largest oil reserves by far are beneath the feet of southern Iraq’s Arab Shiites and their ethnic and religious kinsmen in Saudi Arabia, where the Shiites are a downtrodden minority. Already the Shiite mullahs in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich but power-poor eastern province are speaking out as never before.
Even without a drastic overhaul of strategic alliances, the impending moral, religious and political upheaval is phenomenal. Its explanation begins, as so –many Middle Eastern stories do, many centuries ago, in a violent succession battle that erupted following the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632. One faction believed that the Prophet’s son-in-law, Ali, should inherit his religious authority; the descendants of those Muslims are today’s Shiites. The other faction said the mantle should pass to four caliphs who were chosen by Muhammad’s disciples; their descendants became the Sunnis.
The bitterness that separates the two groups began when Ali was murdered as he prayed in the great mosque at Al Kufah, beside the Euphrates. His body was entombed in Najaf, which would become the holiest Shiite city. Ali’s son, Hussein, was next to die, surrounded and vastly outnumbered by his enemies at Karbala and abandoned by all but a handful of loyal followers. The annual festival of Arbaeen, observed last week in Karbala for the first time in many years, commemorates the 40th day after Hussein’s death with an outpouring of guilt and self-flagellation. The holy city of Karbala rose from the bloody battlefield.
Many people wrongly imagine that Iran is the center of Shiism. The mistake is only encouraged by chauvinistic Iranians, who tend to view Tehran as the intellectual and cultural capital of the Middle East. But Iran became a bastion of Shiism only as a refuge from the merciless persecution of Iraq’s Shiite majority under the Sunni-dominated regime of Saddam Hussein. No shrine in Iran can equal the sanctity of Najaf and Karbala, and to this day Najaf remains the capital of Shiite learning–the bulwark of scholarship that defines and interprets Islamic law. Najaf is the place where Ruhollah Khomeini became an ayatollah. It’s the Shiite answer to Yale or Harvard, while Iran’s vaunted holy city of Qom is not in the same league–and Iranians know it. Even before Saddam was toppled, Tehran’s theocracy was facing unprecedented criticism from within; now it’s facing a crisis from without.
Last week Iranian officials angrily denied sending agents into Iraq, even as some clerics called on their brethren in Iraq to reject the Great Satan. “It is very interesting that Americans have occupied Iraq and are now accusing its neighbor of interfering in that country,” said Iran’s foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi. Tehran obviously doesn’t want a Western-style democracy next door. Iranian state TV has set up its own Al-Jazeera-style news station, Al Alam, on the Iraqi border to transmit diatribes against the Coalition “occupiers” and their “war of domination.” But few in the Iranian government see any serious chance for exporting a Khomeinist Islamic revolution to Iraq. The Kurds, the Sunnis and many Iraqi Shiites would reject it. Still, some form of Islamic government is certainly very possible.
Would the Americans accept such a development? The Bush administration is sending ambiguous signals. “If you’re suggesting, how would we feel about an Iranian-type government with a few clerics running everything in the country, the answer is: that isn’t going to happen,” said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week. Meanwhile, President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell insist that Iraq’s future government is entirely for the Iraqis to decide, even as the White House publicly warns Tehran to keep its distance. The threats may only be an added incentive to Iran’s religious hard-liners. “You must understand that there are many different powers in Iran,” says a reformist member of Iran’s Parliament. “The Revolutionary Guards have a very different agenda. Real reform within Iran means an end to their power. It is in their interest to maintain a hostile relationship with the United States.” Short of open warfare, that is.
If Iraq’s neighbors keep their distance, Bush aides insist they’re not worried about the Iraqis themselves. Sure, there were anti-U.S. banners on the streets of Karbala last week, but not as many–and not nearly as vituperative–as some people had predicted. By and large, the signs only echoed the administration’s promises, saying things like IRAQ IS FOR IRAQIS and AMERICA LET US CHOOSE OUR OWN LEADERS. U.S. officials jubilantly quoted a report in the pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat that only a few pilgrims voiced anti-American views.
Iraqis have made it increasingly clear that foreigners can’t tell them what to do–not Americans, and not Iranians. Iraqi national pride has become a rallying cry even–perhaps especially–among the Tehran-based leaders of Iranian-backed groups like the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. “We do not aim to copy Iran’s revolution,” says SCIRI’s Ayatollah Mohamad Baqir Al Hakim. “Iranian and Iraqi people are very different.”
If so, the ayatollah might want a word with Qasem Hashemi, the man in charge of spreading his group’s message around Najaf. Last week Hashemi issued bullhorns and boxes of posters and leaflets to party members and sent them out to canvass the city and its surrounding villages. SCIRI’s vision for Iraq is not very different from Iran, he told NEWSWEEK. All women would wear head-to-toe shrouds and the country would be ruled by a supreme religious leader. “Religion cannot be removed from politics,” says Hashemi, who spent his youth at a Shiite seminary in Qom. What part should the Americans play? “None,” he says. “The sooner they get out, the better.”
Still, in the confusion of these early post-Saddam days, Hashemi’s voice is just one among many. Ayatollah Said Ali Sistani, the holiest leader in Iraq’s holiest city, Najaf, seems to reject clerical rule. His views on religion and politics are supported by many other Shiite clerics around the country, like Sheik Adnan Ashehmani. “The Islamic government in Iran isn’t perfect,” says Ashehmani, a respected Friday-prayers preacher in Baghdad. “Individuals [there] have changed religious laws. And individuals make mistakes.” Mohammad Javad al-Tamimi, 52, head cleric at Baghdad’s Imam Ali Haq mosque, agrees. “We only want to talk and act openly,” he says. “It’s not necessary for the government to be Islamic.”
These days the mosques are often the only semblance of government that remains. Muslim leaders like al-Tamimi have done all they could to fill the social—services vacuum that was left by the regime’s fall. For one thing, he persuaded a local doctor to volunteer his services in the neighborhood. The doctor sees approximately 350 patients every day. Some need only antibiotics and other basic drugs, while others require thorough examinations and follow-up care. Al-Tamimi has also coordinated a drive to return looted goods to their rightful owners or the needy. A corner of his courtyard is filled with gunnysacks of confiscated rice, sugar and tea. Residents say he also organized volunteers to restore the neighborhood’s electricity and water service. “The Americans destroyed many things and haven’t done any repairs,” says al-Tamimi. “So we had to act.” In fact, the Americans have been working to get the city’s lights and water on again. Even so, they need any help they can get from the Iraqis.
Elsewhere the volunteers make no secret of their political ambitions. Some 250 SCIRI activists have arrived in Najaf in recent weeks. Since then they have been wooing the townspeople by restoring electricity to parts of the city and mediating small-claims cases. Sadruddin Qobanchi, the group’s chief representative in the city, issues edicts to return stolen property or distribute goods looted from the city’s Baath Party offices. In return, local residents were asked for a show of support last Friday when Abdulaziz Hakim, the ayatollah’s brother, returned to Baghdad after two decades of exile. Nearly 500 people, many of them from Najaf, were driven to the Seyed Idris mosque in the center of the capital. There they chanted, “No to America! No to Israel! Yes to Islamic unity!” and hoisted their homecoming hero on their shoulders. “Iraqis are capable of ruling themselves,” Hakim told the crowd of sweating worshipers packed inside the mosque. “We won’t accept a forced government.”
Bush aides can only throw up their hands at speeches like that. “You in the media simply haven’t taken onboard what we see here as the central fact,” a Defense Department official says. “We haven’t gone into Iraq as occupiers. We have gone in as liberators. That’s what we say; that’s what we mean.” There’s only one problem: it’s not the American press that needs to be convinced of America’s noble intentions. It’s the Iraqi people. And many of them, feeling the full flush of their own freedom for the first time in decades, will take a lot of convincing.
