February 28, 2005

From Juan Cole in the American Prospect:

Not since the Islamic revolution of 1979 has the Middle East witnessed a political upheaval of the magnitude of the Iraqi election held on January 30. The Shia majority has now come decisively to power in the new parliament, and it may make the Kurds its junior partner. The core of the new government consists of two old-time revolutionary Shia parties now somewhat mellowed, the Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which will pursue the ?Islamization? of formerly secular Iraq (they have not mellowed that much).

The U.S. media coverage concentrated on the magical moment in which Iraqis braved mortar shells and car bombs to vote. But few Americans realized that, in fact, the Bush administration had tried hard to avoid having anything like one-person, one-vote elections in Iraq. It had tried handing the country over to expatriate politicians with little local support, installing an American administrator to rule by fiat, and persuading Iraqis to allow U.S.?installed provincial council members to elect the parliament.

Instead, the demand for free elections was led by the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq?s 16 million Shiites. When the White House initially rejected his demand, al-Sistani brought tens of thousands of protesters into the streets in January of 2004, convincing the Bush administration to acquiesce in general elections, though it managed to postpone them until the following year. In the meantime, al-Sistani — a native of Iran who had come to Najaf in 1951 — and his advisers looked at the electoral system installed by the Americans and saw that if they could create a united coalition of the Shia religious parties, they might dominate the parliament…

For many American commentators, the elections were a vindication of Bush administration policies and a demonstration that Iraqis wanted U.S. tutelage on democracy. In fact, many Iraqi Shia said they voted in large part because of their fear of the hellfire with which their clergymen threatened them if they did not come out to the polls. Other voters were convinced that only an elected government would have the legitimacy to demand that U.S. troops depart the country…

The Sunni Arab boycott of the elections was so extensive that in early returns, the solidly Sunni province of Salahuddin, site of Saddam Hussein?s birthplace, Tikrit, returned the Shia UIA as the leading list — a sign that a small Shia minority came out to vote and the mainstream Sunni Arab majority did not. The Association of Muslim Scholars roundly denounced the elections as fraud on their completion, and as soon as traffic, which had been halted on election day, could move again, the bombings began once more…

Now that the Shia religious parties have come to power, what will they want? Clearly, religious law will be high on their agenda. Consider the SCIRI, founded in 1982 in Tehran as an umbrella organization for Iraqi Shia expatriates chased abroad by the persecution of Hussein?s Sunni-dominated Baath Party. SCIRI leaders grew close to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and other clerical hard-liners in Tehran, accepting the doctrine that clerics should rule. It formed a paramilitary group, the Badr Corps, to carry out operations against the Baath, slipping over the border into Iraq from Iran. The Badr, trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, carried out assassinations and bombings for 20 years.

The behavior of the SCIRI in Basra, where it came to run the local government in the course of 2004 and into 2005, telegraphs what its hegemony is likely to mean. The Washington Post?s Anthony Shadid reported in January that Basra?s mayor and many members of its security forces came from the Badr Corps. In Basra, the SCIRI and the Badr Corps have closed the once-numerous liquor stores and imposed veiling on women high-school and college students. Some local secular politicians suspect that the Badr Corps is implicated in a series of assassinations of former Baath officials.

The other major component of the victorious UIA is the Dawa Party, founded in the late 1950s by Shia activists in imitation of the Communist Party. For the Dawa, the utopia is not a worker?s paradise but a Shia republic, where Islamic canon law (Shariah) supplants British-derived civil law and where economics is ordered in accordance with Islamic codes and principles. The Dawa is a lay rather than a clerical party, and has long sought a sort of Islamic parliament (called shura, or ?consultation,? in Arabic), but does not want it to be dominated by clerics. Its more moderate faction is led by Ibrahim Jafari, but a more militant branch (also on the UIA ticket) is headed by Abdul Karim Unzi.

These Shia religious parties do not seek clerical rule. Rather, their major program is the implementation of their version of Islamic law…

At the very least, the Shia religious parties will want ?personal status? law — which governs marriage, divorce, inheritance, burial, and other such issues — to replace the uniform civil code. The kind of Islamic law most fundamentalists favor also has negative implications for women. Girls? inheritances would be half that of their brothers. Men could take second, third, and fourth wives. In Shia law, temporary marriage contracts may be drawn up wherein women are wives for two weeks or six months, after which the contract runs out. Men could initiate divorce, but women would find it more difficult. Men would owe women only three months support on divorce, to ensure that they were not pregnant, after which they would pay no alimony. In some Muslim countries, a woman?s testimony is now considered to be worth only half that of a man, which has made rapists hard to prosecute. Some of these problems could be addressed by women through a Muslim version of a prenuptial agreement, such that they could specify payment of alimony on divorce and prevent the taking of a second wife, by inserting these clauses in the marriage contract. However, only relatively well-off and educated women would likely be able to benefit from this practice.

The Shia religious parties may go beyond implementing Islamic personal-status law for Muslims. They may wish to see criminal law Islamized as well. The Dawa Party has a long-standing dedication to social justice based on the implementation of Islamic commercial law and economic principles…



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