History, religion, power: understanding Iraqi Shiites 

Roy Parviz Mottahedeh

The Daily Star, 8/30/03: Knowing events of the past would spare reporters from making many unnecessary mistakes.

No story has been more confusing for the Western news media to cover in post-war Iraq than the politics of the country’s Shiite majority. That they would be a central story was expected. They had suffered systematic repression under Saddam Hussein, especially after the 1991 Gulf War, when they staged a revolt in the south. If anyone required liberation in Iraq, it was the Shiites. 

After they failed to welcome their liberators with rapturous joy, and one of their religious leaders was murdered by followers of another one of their religious leaders, the rosy storyline of liberation collapsed amid a many unanswered questions. 

Were the Shiites pro-American or anti-American? Why did they have so many leaders? Did they look for direction to the Shiite religious leaders in neighboring Iran? What did they want? 

There were, of course, the normal orthographical problems associated with transliterating a strange alphabet, and some of these had more than merely orthographic significance. For example, after some floundering, the New York Times ­ followed by most other papers ­ decided to identify the leader of the Shiite Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq as Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, not realizing that “Bakr” is conventionally used by Sunni Muslims, “Baqir” by Shiites. 

Observing such linguistic niceties mattered less than making readers aware of the basic outlines of Shiite religious history. At best the news media offered brief accounts of the figures of Ali and Hussein, but while useful, that was not enough to make Shiite behavior in Iraq understandable.
Ali was the first cousin of the Prophet Mohammed and the husband of his eldest surviving child, Fatima. According to Shiite belief, he was designated by the Prophet as his successor, and endowed with divine guidance so that the community of Muslims would not go astray. 

In 661 Ali was murdered, an event that for Shiites represents the rejection by the Muslim majority of the opportunity for a truly godly government. His burial at Najaf, now an Iraqi city with a population of 585,000, established a religious center for Shiism. Shiites believe that a succession of Imams, each appointed by his predecessor from the line of Ali, possesses the same infallibility that Ali possessed.
After Ali, only the third of these Imams, Ali’s son Hussein made a bid to be an actual political ruler, and he was murdered in 680. To their eternal shame, his followers, afraid of the anti-Shiite government of the time, failed to come to his aid. It was not long before some Shiites began to flagellate themselves on the anniversary of his death, and his martyrdom is still commemorated on this date. 

Reliving Hussein’s passion is, for Shiites, what reliving the passion of Jesus is for many Christians. Hussein is buried at Karbala, which became the second most important Shiite shrine city and now boasts a population of 572,000. 

If some newspapers did get the bare bones if not the emotional significance of this early Shiite history right, they almost universally skipped everything between 680 and the 21st century. For present purposes the crucial issues in subsequent Shiite history are: the absence of a current Imam; the establishment of a madrassa, or seminary, at Najaf; and the change in Shiite leadership in the 19th century. 

In 941 Shiite leaders declared that the 12th Imam had disappeared to return as the Messiah at the end of time. Those Shiites who accept this disappearance are often called Twelvers. The Twelvers are the overwhelming majority of Shiites in the present day, maybe 14 percent of the 15 percent of Muslims who call themselves Shiites. This left Shiites with the same dilemma faced by the Jews in the absence of their Messiah. Many Shiites chose to withdraw from politics and quietly await his coming.
Around 1057 a man named Tusi, the leading Shiite scholar of his day, migrated from Baghdad, where Sunnis had burned his house and books, to Najaf, where he began the systematic teaching of Shiite learning. Shiites understand this to be the parent of all their madrasas down to the present. 

By the end of the 10th century, Shiite scholars had already developed full systems of theology and jurisprudence based like Catholic thought but unlike Sunni thought on natural law. In the 19th century, Shiite thought underwent a dramatic transformation when, after much controversy, the majority of madrassas accepted that only the most qualified jurists could establish norms of behavior for the ordinary Shiite believers.These few jurists, who seldom numbered as many as 10, were called “sources of imitation” (singular: marjacat-taqlid). Consequently, unlike most other Muslim groups, the Twelver Shiites have a semi-hierarchy with figures roughly equivalent to Catholic bishops or the Grand Rabbi of Vilna. 

Knowing this history would have saved English-speaking reporters from many mistakes. Take, for example, the hawza of Najaf, identified by the Los Angeles Times’ Megan K. Stack on April 29 as a “council of scholars” and by the Washington Post’s William Booth on May 15 as an “open university.” Abbreviated from “al-hawza al-ilmiya” (the learned area), the hawza was supposedly established by Tusi and is now used to designate that part of the city where the madrassas are located and, metaphorically, the seminary community as a whole. 

Western reporters sniffed but could not identify the Shiite hierarchy. By far the most important source currently on the scene in Najaf is Ayatollah Sistani, making him, as many reporters did say, the “senior” cleric. In fact, no other Iraqi mullah possesses his learning or piety, and he has more followers in the Twelver Shiite community than any other source alive. 

Also confusing to reporters were the Sadrs, an important clerical family that has been a source of at least two sources. Mohammed Baqir as-Sadr (or al-Sadr) was the most innovative Iraqi Shiite thinker of the 20th century.Aware that the Communists had a disproportionate appeal to Shiites in Iraq, Sadr studied Marxist thought with a view to fighting back.He believed in “Islamic government,” but felt the time was not ripe for it, and his exposition of the principles of Shiite jurisprudence has replaced older books both in Iran as well as Iraq. 

In the 1970s Sadr’s followers founded a political party, and excited by the success of the Iranian revolution in 1979, attempted to assassinate Foreign Minister Tareq Aziz.The shock was enormous when Saddam Hussein had him and his sister killed in 1980, because he seemed destined to head Iraqi (and possibly Iranian) Shiites. When the Shiites in the south revolted in 1991 it was Mohammed Baqir as-Sadr’s portrait that was seen everywhere. 

After the revolt, the Baathist government asked the leading member of the Kelidar family in Najaf to suggest, as the Kelidars had done for generations, an official head of the Shiite community.Rather than consult the sources or their close associates, the man put forward a list of clergymen considered to be politically pliant and of strong Arab identity. One of these was a remote cousin of Mohammed Baqir as-Sadr named Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr. Mohammed Sadiq was pious, and he had written on morality and the history of Shiism, but he was not a great legal expert. Nevertheless his “pastoral” ability gained him increasing favor with the ordinary Shiites and he was accepted as a Source. 

Eventually Sadr’s piety and pastoralism led him to voice the desires of his flock and he became his own man to an extent intolerable to Saddam Hussein. In 1999 he was killed along with two of his sons. But another son, Muqtada as-Sadr, survived, and now seeks to play an important role in post-Saddam Iraq. While the press caught the essence of this father-son story, the relationships were often jumbled. Thus on May 14, Peter Ford of the Christian Science Monitor wrote that Muqtada “derived” most of his popularity from his relationship with his grandfather, Mohammed Bakr Sadr, and his uncle, Mohammed Sadeq Sadr.

This is the first of a two-part article that originally appeared in Religion in the News (volume 6, Number 2, Summer 2003), published by Trinity College, and is published in THE DAILY STAR with permission.

Roy Parviz Mottahedeh is professor of history at Harvard University