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Søren Schmidt

THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN POLITICS. THE CASE OF SHIA-ISLAMISM IN IRAQ

Abstract

How are we to interpret the role of Shia-Islam in recent political developments in Iraq? What wasthe relationship between the Shia-Islamist parties and Shia-Islamic institutions in these develop-ments, and what is their relationship to-day? Was it about installing a new Shia-Islamic theocracy,or was Shia-Islam, its ritual practices, ideology and institutions rather the fulcrum which allowedthe historically marginalised Shiite population to assert itself politically within the Iraqi polity?These are some of the questions which are posed in this article in order to provide a better under-standing of the relationship between Shia-Islam and Shia-Islamist politics and, from a wider per-spective, between religion and politics. In answering these questions, the article applies the socio-political conflict explanatory model, which draws attention to the historical contingency of theinterplay between socio-cultural, political, and religious factors.

Keywords: Shia-Islamism, Shia-Islam, Iraq, politics, religion

IntroductionIn the 1960s, Nuri al-Maliki was a young student in the town of Abu Gharaq in centralIraq, where the population predominantly belongs to the Shiite branch of Islam. His-torically, the Shiites in Iraq, who constituted roughly 60% of the population, tended tolive in areas with access to few resources and on the poorest land.

The Government was in the hands of the Ba’th party and a narrow political elite.Although the Ba’th’s leaders (of which Saddam Hussein at the time was only one) andthe political elite predominately belonged to the Sunni Muslim minority of Iraq, theideology of the government was strictly secular.

Today, Nuri al-Maliki is the Prime Minister of Iraq and leader of the Shia-IslamistDa’wa party, which is supported by another major Shia-Islamist party, while toleratedby the third major Shia-Islamist party. His government is closely allied with thegovernment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and he consults regularly on politicalissues with the Hawza or Shia-Islamic religious leadership in Najaf and its leaderGrand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

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Until the end of the eighteenth century, the Middle East was not characterized bytheocracies, but instead by a practical division of labour between political rulers andthe Islamic religious institutions. While the latter upheld a formal demand on politicalrule that it should be executed by ‘promoting virtue and forbidding vice’ (Feldman2008), a quietist approach was to all intents and purposes applied, where political rulewas accepted without further qualification and its justification was based on the viewexpressed in the oft-quoted Middle Eastern maxim of «Better sixty years of tyrannythan one hour of anarchy» (Brown 2000: 7–77).

In a natural extension of this quietist approach to politics, and as a result of themeta-narrative of secular modernisation, which prevailed at the time, secular ideolo-gies such as liberalism, nationalism and socialism at first became the ideologicalbanners around which political mobilisation took place during modern times.However, when secularist nationalist parties gained power from 1958 and onwards andimmediately started to repress contending secularist political forces (such as the IraqiCommunist Party), new Shia-Islamist ideologies and movements gained in strengthand popularity in parallel with the weakening of the contending secularist politicalforces. The peak of this historical development was the 2005 elections, which broughtthe Shia-Islamist parties to power in Iraq. The January 2009 provincial elections in Iraqindicate yet another new turn, this time towards a more secular politics.

How are we to interpret this transformation of a secular nation state into a state inwhich Shia-Islam and its institutions clearly play an important role? Did this transfor-mation transfer the political power of the state into the hands of the clergy of Shia-Islam, or was Shia-Islam, its ritual practices, ideology and institutions rather thefulcrum which allowed the historically marginalised Shiite population to assert itselfpolitically within the Iraqi polity? What was the relationship between the Shia-Islamistparties and the Shia-Islamic institutions in this mobilisation, and what is the relation-ship to-day? Also, why did Shia-Islam become important in Iraqi politics, and whatwas its specific role in mobilising Iraqi Shiites?

These are the questions which are posed in this article with the aim of providing abetter understanding of the relationship between Shia-Islam and Shia-Islamist politicsand, from a wider perspective, between religion and politics. The focus of the article ison the role of religion in politics, and not on how Iraqi politics also turned Shia-Islaminto a more open and forward-looking religion. Furthermore, a number of factors seemto have influenced the increasing role of Islam in politics in the wider Middle Eastsince the late 1960s: cultural nationalism, resistance to Western ‘positivism’ and otherfactors which are not specific to Iraq (Crooke 2009). As this article attempts to under-stand the specific Iraqi factors explaining the surge in and role of Shia-Islamism in thatcountry, the more general factors mentioned above are not considered.

The article starts by laying out the framework on which the subsequent analysis isbased. It then proceeds to offer a historical account of the overall history of Shia-Isla-mism in Iraq before going into more specific accounts and analyses of the four mainprotagonists in this historical drama: Grand-Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Da’wa Party, theSupreme Islamic Council of Iraq and the Sadr movements. The conclusion will sum-marize the findings as well as revisit the theoretical discussion in an attempt to answer

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the overall question of the relationship between Shia Islam and Shia-Islamism in thecontext of Iraq’s recent history.

Analytical frameworkContrary to the classical theories of modernisation, religion did not wither away in Iraqin tandem with modernisation. Instead of challenging the fundamental concepts ofmodernisation theories, many observers now increasingly explain the rising role ofreligion in contemporary Middle Eastern politics as a counter-reactionary project tomodernity based on an essentialist reading of Islam.

These two interrelated approaches are both rejected in this article as simplistic andunhelpful and the article seeks instead to apply an approach that sees politics in theexplanandum as well as in the explanan in explaining the role of religion in politics.However, religion is not simply a proxy for other variables such as social class, ethni-city or region, and ‘politics’ should therefore not be understood in its narrow sense, asthe distribution of power, but also in a wider sense, namely as the assertion of commu-nal values and identity.

The explanatory model which will be applied here is called the socio-political con-flict model,1 which draws attention to the historical contingency of the interplaybetween socio-cultural, political, and religious factors. More specifically, the modelargues that religion offers ideological and organisational resources, and that socio-poli-tical forces will seek to mobilize these resources if the strategic situation is such thatthis tends to strengthen their position vis-à-vis their adversary. Although the socio-political conflict model is based on the notion that people undertake collective, ratio-nally motivated action in relation to shared interests, the mobilization of religiousresources is not to be understood as a deliberate, instrumental choice, but as a broadersocio-political process, combining the supply of resources from religion with politicalopportunity.

In a socio-political conflict in which the incumbent regime uses a secular ideologysuch as socialism, liberalism and nationalism to justify its rule, religion presents itselfas an alternative ideological asset for socio-political groups opposing the regime. In themodern era, when ideological mass politics plays an increasing role and social customsa decreasing role, the enervation of secular political ideology opens up a space for reli-giously inspired political ideology to take hold. Religion also offers more explicit orga-nizational and financial resources that may be applied to socio-political conflicts. Suchresources are particularly strong when a religion sees ritual life and priestly interven-tion as important for individual salvation (Gorski 2003: 118) – as is the case in Shia-Islam – upon which independently organized and financed clerical institutions arebuilt. In repressive political systems, such clerical institutions are often the only insti-tutions which are relatively independent of the state and which can therefore offerpotential organisational and financial resources to be harnessed in a socio-politicalconflict.


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Furthermore, the article draws on the understanding of the importance of groupidentity or ‘groupness’ in political systems with a low degree of institutionalization andan arbitrary exercise of power where brute force is the dominant way to solve socio-political conflicts (Posen 1993). Rather than being based on citizens’ rights enforcedby the rule of law, in such systems security and other social goods depend insteadlargely on ‘group membership’. The stronger the ‘groupness’, the stronger the groupbecomes relative to the state and other groups. Religion has the capacity to mark thesocially sacred, and because it connects people more organically and non-hierarchi-cally than secular organisations, it seems to be particularly suited to mobilising groupsin such political systems. While ‘groupness’ is important in repressive, non-institutio-nalized political systems, it becomes less important if the political game becomes moreinstitutionalized and therefore favours deal- and coalition-making between groups.

The potential to mobilise groups should be expected to be even stronger when reli-gion and social stratification overlap, as is the case for Shiites in Iraq. Religion is aspecial case of status honour which has always particularly appealed to the desperatelypoor living on the margins, who, in Max Weber’s words, are «nourished most easily onthe belief that a special ‘mission’ is entrusted to them … their value is thus moved intosomething beyond themselves, into a ‘task’ placed before them by God» (Weber[1919] 1946: 276–7). While religion thus has a particular potential to mobilise the poor,it retains the capacity to forge solidarity across social cleavages (Goldstone 2001) andtherefore allows for an alliance between privileged elites and negatively privilegedgroups (Hall 2003: 367).

This is the analytical framework I want to apply to the historical and ideationalprocess whereby Shia-Islam became politicized in Iraq. The article is based on secon-dary sources and begins by providing an overview of the process whereby Shia-Islambecame politicized in Iraq. The positions of each of the main contemporary politicalactors of the Shia community in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Da’wa Party, theSupreme Islamic Council in Iraq and the Sadr Movement, are then analyzed. In theconclusion, I will assess the degree to which the above analytical framework has beenhelpful in explaining the relationship between Shia-Islam and Shia-Islamism in Iraq.

The politicisation of Shia-IslamBackgroundThe pre-modern Islamic state was based on a subtle balance of power between the rulerand the Islamic scholars who interpreted the law or Shari’a. The role of the Islamicscholars was institutionalised in the religious institutions, who themselves organizedthe training of scholars and developed and adjusted legal theories on basis of which theIslamic courts ruled. These institutions had their own financial resources or waqf(pious endowments) and Islamic taxes such as zakat and khums, which made themfinancially independent of the state. A division of labour existed whereby Shia-Islamand its religious institutions provided ritual services which served to assert the commu-nal values and identity of Shiites, as well as services in the areas of education, social


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welfare and legal adjudication, while the pre-modern Ottoman state provided the‘harder’ public services in the form of security and physical infrastructure.

This arrangement was challenged by the forces of modernization. The state tookover many of the public services which religious institutions had supplied in the past,especially in the legal, educational and social welfare fields. Economic developmentalso had the result that a large part of the population moved from the countryside to thecities.

Modernization had other important socio-political consequences. While the popu-lation of rural pre-modern societies was predominantly organised within the bounds ofsocial customs and religious institutions, the modern era has been characterised by thepolitical and social mobilisation of the urban masses, which were greatly empoweredby the increased level of education and higher levels of income. While it was mucheasier in the past for rulers to rely on coercion as a means of control, political rulers inthe modern era were forced to legitimise their rule to a much greater degree vis-à-visthe new political actor: the people.2 Ideological, participatory (as distinct fromdemocratic) mass politics was the new ‘name of the game’.

The history of Shia-Islamism in IraqThe Shia-Islamic clergy had basically two different responses to this development. Oneresponse was very much in line with tradition and continued to accept the quietistdeferential role of religion and clergy vis-à-vis the state authorities. Grand AyatollahAli Sistani is the most prominent contemporary representative of this type of response.The other response was Shia-Islamism or political Shia-Islam, which reinterpreted theIslamic call for a just, equitable and compassionate community and the specific Shia-Islamic mythology of being a persecuted community into a modern political ideologyabout the contemporary nation state. While I shall later discuss the quietist tradition inmore depth in connection with Sistani, in the following I will outline the main histori-cal developments and critical elements of Shia-Islamism in Iraq.

An important watershed in Iraqi history took place in 1958, when the old monarchywas overturned and the new regime initiated an ambitious and far-reaching process ofmodernisation. This dramatic unsettlement of the previous ways of life and confronta-tion with the new social challenges of modern life led many Shiites to engage in secularpolitics. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Communist Party of Iraq (the largest in theMiddle East) and the Ba’th in particular were the preferred parties of Iraqi Shiiteswishing to influence the Iraqi state.

Although the Shia-Islamist organisation, the Da’wa (meaning the call or ‘invita-tion’ to Islam in Arabic), was also founded in the late 1950s, to begin with it embraceda pan-Islamist ideology in line with the Muslim Brothers and its founding ideologicalfathers, Sayyid Qutb and Abu al-A’la Mawdudi (Brown 2000). The Da’wa ‘invited’Muslims to engage in modern social life, based on reflections on how to implementGod’s will in modern social life, and in the beginning it had many Sunni-Muslim sup-porters, although the bulk of its supporters were Shiites (Jabar 2003).


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The leading ayatollah was at that time Mohsen al-Hakim. Although al-Hakimbelonged to the quietist strand, he encouraged the development of the Da’wa, believingit could be useful in preserving the prerogatives of the Shia clergy (Sakai 2001: 2) andin serving as bulwark against the spread of communist ideology. The expropriation ofso-called waqf land by the post-1958 regimes, which reduced the economic indepen-dence of the clergy, was a particularly vexing issue at the time, and al-Hakim hopedthat the Da’wa Party could help restore this land to the clergy.

During the 1960s, a new figure emerged within the Shia clergy, namely AyatollahMuhammad Baqir al-Sadr or ‘Sadr 1’, as he is also called in the historiographic litera-ture, who became a central figure in the development of Shia-Islamism in Iraq (Mallat1993). Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr had the status of ayatollah and was a member of theHawza, the leading ayatollahs of the Shia community in Iraq. Sadr developed the the-oretical foundations of Shia-Islamist political philosophy in his books Our Philosophyof 1958 and Our Economy of 1961, which introduced an Islamic theory based onMarxist political economy (Abedin 2003:1). This line of thought was very similar toRuhollah Khomeini’s thinking, which stressed social justice, the notion of ‘just rule’(i.e. the rule of law and its equal application to everyone, including the ruler), the moralnorms and customs canonised by Shia-Islam and the ideology of theocracy (i.e. thenotion that political sovereignty belongs to God and not to the people). Like Khomeini,Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr appealed in particular to the Shiite urban poor, who did notfeel that the clerics of ‘high’ Islam3 catered sufficiently for their problems and inte-rests.

During the late 1970s, Shia-Islamism gained strength in Iran. This inspired Shiitesin Iraq to join the Da’wa Party, which Sadr envisaged indoctrinating a generation ofrevolutionaries who would one day seize power and establish a state that would imple-ment Islamic law. Saddam Hussein felt threatened by the Da’wa and tried to control theShia clergy, demanding that they stopped supporting the Shia-Islamists. The relations-hip between Saddam and the clergy turned from one in which each party accepted theexistence of the other but tried to interfere as little as possible into a relationship inwhich Saddam Hussein demanded total submission to his brutal and dictatorial regime.Saddam Hussein started a ruthless repression of the Da’wa Party, membership of whichwas made a capital crime. During the late 1970s, the leaders of Da’wa either fled thecountry or were imprisoned or killed.4

Saddam Hussein’s brutal repression of the Da’wa and the Shia clergy had two con-sequences. The first was that the Da’wa party was dismantled inside Iraq, and only con-tinued its existence as a number of disparate small elite groups in exile. The secondconsequence was that a new and distinctly political organisation, the Supreme Councilof Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), was created in Iran, led by Muhammad Baqiral-Hakim, son of Grand Ayatollah Mohsin al-Hakim and pupil of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr.

Al-Hakim had direct access to Khomeini and later to the incumbent wali, Ali Kha-menei. Iran funded the organisation, and its Revolutionary Guards helped it build aconsiderable military force. The Brigade recruited many of its soldiers from the priso-ners of war that Iran took during its war with Iraq and from the more than 100,000 Iraqi


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refugees who fled to Iran throughout the 1980s and again following the massacres ofShiites after the popular revolt against Saddam Hussein in 1991 (Nasr 2006: 3).

A new trend emerged during the 1990s among the Shiites in Iraq. This was themovement which Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (or Sadr 2) initiated amongst the urbanpoor of Baghdad and other large cities in southern Iraq. Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr wasa distant cousin of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and organised social and pastoral activi-ties for the Shiite urban poor. He built a large and well organised socio-religiousnetwork which was financed by the obligatory religious alms and contributions of hissupporters. His movement attracted in particular lower ranking Shiite clergy and estab-lished informal Shiite courts to adjudicate issues among Shiites outside the secularlegal system of the Ba’thist state. Sadr 2 accepted Khomeini’s theory of the guardians-hip of the jurisprudent and called upon his students and congregations to establish astate like that in Iran.

Although Sadr 2 attempted to keep a low profile in politics and to emphasise socialand pastoral work amongst Shiites, Saddam Hussein felt threatened by his rising popu-larity in the Shiite suburbs and his ability to build an independent power-base. In 1999he had him killed, along with two of his sons. Besides a mentally retarded son, his onlyremaining son is Moqtada al-Sadr (Sadr 3), leader of the contemporary Sadr move-ment. While Sadr 1 may be viewed as providing the theoretical basis for a broaderShia-Islamist movement in Iraq, Sadr 2 founded an activist, puritanical and populistmovement, to which Sadr 3 is the successor.

This short historical sketch suggests that it was the increasingly despotic regime ofSaddam Hussein which led Iraqi Shiites to turn away from secular parties as a vehiclefor political assertion towards Islamic inspired organisations. Since the late 1970s,political power in Iraq was in hands of Saddam Hussein and a coterie of individualswith a Sunni-Muslim identity and tribal or Ba’thist background. Along with the narro-wing of the regime’s political base, Shia elite groups and more impoverished Shiiteswere both blocked from access to political power. In addition to this political margina-lisation, the collapse of oil prices and the economic toll of the Iran-Iraq war during the1980s also meant that the Iraqi state was less and less able to provide socio-economicservices to the population as it had done during the oil-rich 1970s. The politicized andradicalized Shia-Islamist movement may be seen as a reaction to this sort of ‘bottledup’ situation, where the social changes brought about by the process of modernisationdid not find avenues to be expressed politically within the prevailing political system,nor were they any longer compensated by the state’s economic largesse. For the Shiiteurban poor, religion was in many ways the only social space in which the lost dignityof their previous rural lives could be compensated. This situation provided fertileground for political entrepreneurs both within and outside the Shia clergy to mobilisethe Shia community on the basis of its foundational myths of being a persecuted com-munity in search of justice, equity and compassion. Secular and non-secular Shia elitesjoined forces with the Shiite urban poor in a cross-social alliance strengthened by thegroup identity provided by Shia-Islam. The killing of the revered ayatollah, Muham-med Sadiq al-Sadr, greatly reinvigorated the Shia-Islamic myth of martyrdom, accor-ding to which the individual sacrifices himself for the collective, and it further harde-


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ned the Shia-Islamist ideology into a doctrinal political ideology, which both inspiredand became inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini. The subtle fungibility between theexiled, bureaucratically structured political organizations, the socio-pastoral move-ment inside Iraq and the quietist high clergy of Shia-Islam made it difficult for theregime of Saddam Hussein to repress the movement, thus turning into what he himselfconsidered his most feared enemy (Woods et al 2006).

The historical account of how Shia-Islamism developed in Iraq seems to suggestthat the interaction between religion and politics is highly historically contingent. Theideological and institutional resources of Shia-Islam were mobilised in a situation inwhich the secular ideology underpinning Saddam Hussein’s regime had been weake-ned. The concrete historical episode of a much wider macro-historical and socio-poli-tical conflict between groups on how to organize Iraqi society gave rise to a demandfrom Shiites for the resources to fight this conflict: Shia-Islam became a crucial sourcefor supplying them.

In the next section, I shall pursue this understanding of historical contingency byfocusing in more detail on the contemporary development and positions of the fourmajor contemporary political actors within the Shia-community: Ali Sistani,5 theDa’wa Party, SCIRI and the Sadr Movement.

Contemporary Shia-Islamic political actorsAli SistaniSistani has risen slowly and consistently through the ranks of the Shia-Islamic clericalsystem through peer recognition of his scholarship, succeeding the quietist Abd-alQasim Khoei in 1992 as the leading cleric in Najaf. The mosque where he preachedwas shut down in 1994 and did not reopen until after the American invasion. His schol-arly production has concentrated on traditional quietist subjects related to issues suchas personal hygiene, food preparations and sexual relations (Visser 2006: 6). TodaySistani is the mujtahid6 with the greatest number of followers and has built a formida-ble global network of social and religious institutions which extends far beyond Iraq toIran, Pakistan, India, the Arab Gulf and Western countries.7

Before the invasion of Iraq in April 2003, many regarded the quietist tradition ofSistani as apolitical, which explains why it was expected that the clerics in Najaf, atleast, would not oppose the plans of the Coalition. This was soon revealed to be aserious error of judgment. The tradition of the quietist clerics is indeed not to engagethemselves directly as politicians in current day-to-day politics. However, the clericsalso think of themselves as the overall guardians of the moral and social fabric of soci-ety, and in situations where they feel that crucial issues are at stake, the quietist clericshave a tradition of making their opinions known.8

Sistani’s first intervention in Iraqi politics after the fall of the Ba’thist regime in2003 was in April 2003, when he warned clerics against seeking political office9 andcondemned the looting of government property (Visser 2006: 9). Much more decisivewas his fatwa of 26 June 2003, in which he stated that the group of Iraqis which the


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Coalition had plans to select through a managed and convoluted process in order todraft a new Iraqi constitution had no mandate, and that the correct way to institute anew political system in Iraq was to hold a general election in which every Iraqi wouldvote for representatives to a constituent assembly, followed by a general referendumon the proposed constitution.10

When, in January 2004, huge demonstrations actively encouraged by Sistani werestaged all over the country to back his proposal, it became clear to the American admi-nistrator of the Coalition Authority, Paul Bremer Jr., that he had to cancel his originalplans and accept Sistani’s call for general elections as a basis for the transfer of sove-reignty from the Coalition Authority to the Iraqis.11 To implement such elections,Sistani called for the United Nations to send an envoy to investigate the political situ-ation in Iraq and to look into how such direct elections could be held (Cole 2006:16).Making a clear reference to Ahmed Chalabi and other exile Iraqis who cooperated withthe American forces, Sistani stressed that power ought not to be exercised by ‘thosewho came from abroad’.12 The ensuing process resulted in a general election beingheld in January 2005 for parliament-cum-constitutional assembly, a referendum on theproposal for the constitution being held in October 2005, and finally new parliamentaryelections in December 2005.

Sistani emphasised the virtue of participation in the elections, and voters were toldthat Sistani advised Shiites to vote for the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) list, his portraitbeing fixed to the election posters of the UIA.13 The UIA won a majority of the seatsin parliament in the January 2005 elections and 46% of the seats in the December 2005elections. While stressing democracy as fundamental to the Iraqi constitution, Sistanialso made it clear that it was not sufficient for the constitution to mention Islam as asource of legality. Instead Sistani demanded that Islam be declared the source, and thata Constitutional Court, whose members should be experts in Islamic canonical law(Shari’a), should be instituted as a bulwark against the possible irresponsibility of theenfranchised masses.14 In this way, Sistani tried to balance democracy with Islamrepresenting an important strand in the general Islamist movement.15 This was, ofcourse, a contentious point in relation to the Coalition authorities, whose claimedobjective for the occupation of Iraq was to install a Western type of democratic politicalsystem.16

Sistani apparently did not see any contradiction in the twin references to democraticand Islamic legitimacy, as it was self-evident to him that, where the overwhelmingmajority of the population were Muslims and political legitimacy was based on ‘thewill of the people’, political decisions would by definition also be in line with Islam.The Court would only assist ‘the people’ to ensure this, and should therefore not beseen as being in contradiction to ‘the will of the people’. Sistani seemed blind to theimportance of institutional arrangements in order to counter what non-Shia groupsfeared the most: a tyranny by the Shiite majority over the minorities and how the imple-mentation of Islamic law could disadvantage religious minorities as well as secularists.Sistani never mentioned the need for checks on majority power to protect minorityrights, and he may be said to represent a majoritarian version of democracy because hedoes not see the need for institutional arrangements to make democracy work.


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Although liberal and human rights were enshrined in the constitution, neither didSistani seem to appreciate the importance of such rights for citizens in order to ensuretheir ability to take part in democracy and to prevent the executive branches of the statefrom exploiting their power to influence the democratic process. However, while hedid see a role for Islamic scholars in balancing the power of the legislature, based on ademocratically mandated constitution, he did not advocate the direct rule of Islamicscholars as in the Iranian political system. Sistani warned against any kind of ethno-sectarian polity in which seats and ministries were distributed on the basis of languageor religion.17 His advice was heeded, although in creating the four top seats in thegovernment (the president, two vice-presidents and the prime minister), the intentionwas for them to be divided among the sectarian groups, which is what happened.

While the Da’wa and SCIRI have been reverential in their relations with Sistani andhave never openly challenged him, the young cleric and son of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, Muqtada al-Sadr, has openly criticised Sistani for not speaking up againstSaddam during the 1990s18 and also because he is Iranian and therefore not a properrepresentative of Iraqi nationalism.

2003 and 2004 were decisive years for Iraq, during which political developmentscould have gone in many directions, of which an all-out sectarian civil war was oneoption. In this situation, at this unprecedented historical strategic crossroads, Sistanirose to the occasion and used his moral authority to establish the overall parameters ofthe future political system in Iraq. His moral authority allowed him to speak directly tothe ordinary Shiites in Iraq, and through his wakils or clerical representatives, he wasable to spread his message through the only remaining public space that SaddamHussein had not been able to destroy: the mosque. At the elite level, leaders of the Shia-Islamist movement also knew that they depended on at least the tacit approval of thegrand ayatollah and that a direct confrontation with him would destroy their legitimacyamong ordinary Shiites. Although Sistani was known not to favour the Iranian politicalsystem, he probably also took into account the fact that, contrary to Iran, SunniMuslims make up roughly 40% of the population and that the Iranian system could the-refore never work in Iraq because it would require the two Islamic sects to agree on aprocedure for selecting a possible vali-e-faqih or Supreme Guide. While rejecting thedirect involvement of clerics in the execution of political power, Sistani favoured anoverall anchoring of the political system in Islamic legitimacy in line with his quietistphilosophy. It may be said that Sistani used his legitimacy as a community ‘shepherd’to work as an arbiter within the Shia community while at the same time reaching outtowards other sectarian groups through his conciliatory attitude.

While political entrepreneur exploit the legitimacy of being associated with reveredreligious institutions and customs to advance their cause, at the same time they becomedependent on these same institutions and their leaders. While Sistani tacitly agreed tolend legitimacy to the Shia-Islamist political entrepreneur in the time of Saddam Hus-sein, he played a much more active and formative role during the immediate post-Saddam period. Although Sistani’s indication during 2003–2005 that he wished thefuture political system to be based on genuine democracy was directed against the USproject of a more ‘guided’ process, at the same time he laid down the parameters within


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which he wanted Shia-Islamist parties to operate in the future. He could do thatbecause, as a leader of the Shia-Islamic religious institutions, he held the key tobonding the politicians with the broad population, without which they could not prevailin the modern polity of Iraq. In this way, religion did not play a reactionary role, but onthe contrary ensured that the exercise of political power in Iraq was embedded in muchbroader, deeper and less whimsical type of social legitimacy and consent. And further-more, this was not done in a rigid way, but incorporated ‘creative ambiguity’, whichalso allowed for future adjustments.

Sistani’s role in contemporary Iraqi politics and the positions he took on politicalissues could certainly not have been determined from his background and education.Like any social institution, he clearly developed his role and positions as a result of aninteraction between the inherited traditions and institutions and the challenges of con-temporary development. Sistani’s role may be viewed as a highly successful result ofsuch a historical interaction.

The following section takes up the development and positions of the oldest of theShia-Islamist parties: the Da’wa Party.

The Da’wa PartyAlthough the Da’wa drew inspiration from Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr whenit developed into a distinct political organisation, its leadership has always consisted oflaypeople rather than clerics. The fact that two of its most prominent leaders are formerPrime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and the incumbent Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki indi-cates that laypeople continue to play an important role in the party.

The Da’wa party has until recently been a rather elitist organisation and does nothave a grassroots political organisation (Marr 2007: 10), its ability to attract votes priorto the recent provincial elections (2009) being deemed to be much weaker than theother two Shia-Islamist parties. Because the party has a place in the popular mind dueto its long history of opposition to and persecution by the Ba’thist regime, it was ableto bargain for thirty seats in the December 2005 elections, equalling the leading con-tender, SCIRI. Although it was only allocated four seats in the cabinet, one of thosewas the important post of Prime Minster, an appointment which has been ascribed toits role as a sort of buffer party between the two other more important Shia-Islamistparties.

Historically, the Da’wa has always maintained a close alliance with the much largerSCIRI, whose own leaders received their political-ideological schooling in the clandes-tine study centres of the Da’wa. While there have been persistent reports of tensionsbetween al-Da’wa and SCIRI, their close political and military co-operation continuedduring the 1990s, partly with the help of mediation by Iran.

Although the historical goal of the party was to establish an Islamic state in Iraq,this did not prevent it from supporting democratic elections and a parliamentary system(Marr 2007: 10). The Da’wa has not offered more specific ideas on how it intends tocarry out its vision of an Islamic-cum-democratic state, but statements by Nuri al-Maliki suggest that the party does not favour the direct involvement of clerics or reli-


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gious institutions in political roles, but only that the overall orientation of the stateshould be in line with the basic tenets of Islam,19 as also indicated by its frequent con-sultations with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. As an indication of its moderate stand, theDa’wa has opposed the strict imposition of Islamic dress codes in Shiite areas.

Considering its history of terrorist activities, it was remarkable that, in January 2003,Ibrahim al-Jaafari travelled to the United States and met with the former US ambassadorto the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, in order to prepare for the US invasion of Iraq. Since then,the Da’wa has continued to show pragmatism in its relations with the US, recognising theneed for US support during the transition towards full Iraqi sovereignty. At the sametime, it has refused to subordinate itself to Iran and, in contrast to SCIRI, has remainedindependent of the Iranian clerical establishment (Abedin 2003: 1).

The development of the Da’wa party can be divided into three different periods: theinitial period after its foundation, when it could be characterized as a social and culturalorganisation; the period during Saddam Hussein’s reign, when it developed into adoctrinal religious party; and finally the present period since the overthrow of SaddamHussein, during which it has become quite pragmatic. Now, it emphasizes mundanesecular political issues such as security, the rule of law and welfare, instead of signatoryIslamist issues such as dress codes and the introduction of canonical Islamic law. In theJanuary 2009 elections this agenda gained the Da’wa a considerable increase in votesand gave it a large plurality in the important provinces of Baghdad and Basra, thusunderlining the strong resonance of these issues amongst the Shiite electorate. Duringthese latest elections, the Da’wa even appeared to have had some success in winningvotes from Sunnis (New York Times 2009).

A general moral inspiration in Islam rather than Islamist doctrines seems today tobe at the heart of the party’s Islamic identity.20 Although the party favours the Sistani’sconcept of having Islamic scholars preside as a constitutional guarantee of the overallIslamic virtue of the state, it does not advocate their direct rule. In light of its post-2003development, it would seem probable that the party will continue to shed its Shia-Islamic religious garb the more and longer it becomes involved in the dealing-and-wheeling of mundane politics.21

The Da’wa’s seamless and diligent transformation from an Islamic socio-culturalorganization into a hard-core Islamist party and finally into an Islamic political partysubscribing to democracy indicate that something else was at stake than the will torealise some essential historical Islamic identity. Its pragmatic transformation andadaptation to the different historical circumstances in which it operated indicate insteadan urge to assert the Shia-Islamic community and secure its influence within the Iraqipolity. The Islamic values of ‘justice, equity and compassion’ were powerful moraltenets for its political project, and during its many years in exile, Shia-Islam connectedit to a wider Shia-Islamic group identity, allowing it to survive and finally to achieve apolitical come-back after 2003. But it is difficult to deny that this project was political– i.e. about influence and the assertion of communal values and identity – and not reli-gious.


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SCIRI/ISCIIn May 2007, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution decided to omit ‘revo-lution’ from its name as a sign that the new Iraqi constitution had superseded the needfor revolution.22 This is testimony to the pragmatic policies of the organisation, forwhich gaining power seems more important than ideology (International Crisis Group2007: 11).

Although the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), as it is now called, was estab-lished in Iran with the active help of Ruhollah Khomeini, at that time adopting thetheory of the Vilayat-e-faqih, it has since managed to form an alliance with both theKurdish parties in Iraq and the US to become one of the most important political partiesin Iraq. It has successfully positioned its cadres in many important political and secu-rity positions of the Iraqi state.

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, ISCI was in a relatively good position to takeadvantage of the situation. Its leader, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, built up a coherentand effective organisation during the years in Iran and commanded a militia with morethan 10,000 men funded by Iran and organised by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein, ISCI embraced the principle of liberaldemocracy. On 6 June 2003 Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim said that, if the new Iraqigovernment was to function well, it should be founded on several key pillars, includingrespect for the will of the people as expressed at the ballot box, respect for ethnic mino-rities through a federal system of government, and respect for Islam through the enfor-cement of Islamic canon law or Shari’a (Cole 2006:10).

Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim himself was an ayatollah, and most other leaders ofISCI are clerics, although not of the highest ranks. Hakim was killed in a massive carbombing outside the Shrine of Ali in Najaf in August 2003 and was succeeded by hisyounger brother Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, who was previously the leader of the Badr Bri-gade.23

When the Americans discovered that their preferred Iraqi partner, Ahmad Chalabi,did not possess sufficient political capital in Iraq for them to make use of him, ISCI,the Da’wa and the Kurdish parties quickly filled the gap. From the very first day afterthe invasion, ISCI decided to cooperate with the US and became a member of theInterim Governing Council. When the first general elections took place in January2005, ISCI participated and won 140 seats on the 275-seat council of representatives.Sunni parties and the Sadrists both boycotted these elections, and because they werecombined with elections to the Governorate councils, ISCI gained control of nine outof eleven provinces where there is substantial Shiite populations, including Baghdad.

From the very start, ISCI managed to establish itself in the important ministries ofFinance and the Interior, as well as filling one of the two posts of Vice-President. Thecombination of control of the political and security apparatus in a majority of provin-ces, as well as of important national political posts and associated economic resources,has enabled ISCI to establish itself as a sort of political machine. This ‘machine’ isbased on a system of patron-client relations where its supporters are motivated moreby self-interest and personal benefit than by ideological and religious conviction.

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Until the recent provincial elections, its main contender in the on-going intra-Shiitepower struggle in Iraq was the Sadrist Movement and its leader Moqtada al-Sadr.ISCI’s constituency is largely middle class and from central Iraq, while the constitu-ency of the Sadr movement is the working class and urban poor of Baghdad and thesouthern cities. This difference seems to lie behind the conflict between ISCI and theSadr movement (International Crisis Group 2007: 19).

Another conflict with the Sadrists (and the Da’wa) relates to the ISCI proposal toestablish a nine-governorate province in the south. Sunni-based parties, the Da’wa andthe Sadrists are all opposed to the idea, which they believe will lead to the disintegra-tion of the Iraqi state and deprive them of access to the oil revenues of the south, whichaccount for 85% of Iraq’s total oil reserves. These different positions on the federalissue are, of course, related to the divergent interests of the parties and their respectiveregional constituencies. According to Cole (2006:24), al-Hakim’s largest disagreementwith Sistani is over whether Iraqi governance is best pursued through a strong centralgovernment or through a decentralized, loose federalism. In spite of this disagreement,ISCI leaders have constantly consulted with Sistani and sought to convey the picturethat the party has the backing of the Shia-Islamic establishment.

Since 2003 ISCI has full-heartedly entered the political fray in Iraq and dealt withits main political issues, including security, economic development and the relations-hip between the provinces and the central state, with pragmatism and without muchrecourse to its previous religious vocabulary. It has been these political issues, as wellas the geographical and social background of its electorate, which has been crucial indistinguishing the party from the other two Shia-Islamist parties, rather than philosop-hical differences in the interpretation of Islam.

Established in exile with the help of the Iranian government, ISCI is not well rootedwithin Iraq and gives the impression of being a vehicle for power-grapping rather thanan organization pursuing a political project, although this is somewhat countered by itsoverall ideological anchoring in the commitment to public service as expressed inShia-Islam. Its ability to mobilize Shiites to vote for it in elections is strongly connec-ted to Shia-Islamic legitimacy, which has tied it into a symbiotic relationship with theShia-Islamic leadership, and even more significantly, because the leaders of the partyare themselves clerics. As clerics, these leaders are in an overall relationship of subor-dination to the Hawza and Grand Ayatollah Sistani. While under other circumstancesa similar opportunistic party with a similar powerful militia could seek to monopolizepolitical power, its ideological anchor within Shia-Islam and its institutions ensuresthat such tendencies are kept in check and moderated.

As the communal identity of Shiites, Shia-Islam inspired the party all along. Whenhard-core Iranian-type Shia-Islamist doctrines served it well in its exile in Iran, thisinterpretation of Shia-Islam was adopted as its ideological position. When democracybecame ‘the only game in town’ because of the circumstances produced by the USinvasion and was designated as the desired political system by Sistani, ISCI also easilyaccommodated its interpretation of Shia-Islam to this position. Both the genesis and theobjective of ISCI seem to have been politics in the wider sense.


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The Sadr MovementThe last Shia-Islamist actor to be analysed is the Sadr movement, a puritanical and pop-ulist movement among poor, religious Shiites.

In the 1970s in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini created a political movement whichopposed the traditional leaders within Shia-Islam, the quietist ayatollahs, and alsomobilised the people, who had been uprooted from the countryside and moved into cityslums. Inspired by his relative, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiqal-Sadr started a similar activist, political Islamist movement in Iraq under Saddam,which provided a combination of social and religious services to the poor. UnderSaddam Hussein, these destitute masses were without many basic social services,including minimum social insurance, as well as law enforcement. The sheer survivalinstinct of these masses forced them to organize self-help services, mutual insuranceschemes and the community enforcement of public order and justice. All this had to bedone outside the institutional framework of the state, and the only available organiza-tion around which these services could be organized was the mosque. The lower clergy,who lived with the population in these areas and who themselves were poor, started toorganize the necessary services. The ethical ethos and norms of Shia-Islam providedthe ideological underpinnings, while the religious taxes and the clerical organisationprovided the institutional framework.

The present leader of this movement, is the young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, son ofMohammad Sadiq al-Sadr (Sadr 2). Sadr does not possess the virtues which traditio-nally characterise Shia-Islamist politicians: eloquence, charisma and high status withinthe religious hierarchy. The reason why Sadr is one of the most important politicalplayers in Iraq today is that he represents the massive group of Iraqis living in the slumdwellings outside the big cities and in the poor provinces in the south of Iraq, whom heis able to mobilise for demonstrations and acts of violence. The movement does nothave an elaborate and philosophically explicated ideology but is based on the relations-hip between a leader and the masses, in which the latter worship Sadr and believe he istheir only chance to rise out of poverty and hopelessness. Like Khomeini in his time,Sadr has criticised the quietist ayatollahs, for example, mocking Ali Sistani for havingreduced Najaf to a ‘dormant seat of learning’. Sadr himself claims to have created an‘articulate’ (i.e. activist) seminary (Visser 2006: 21).

Moqtada al-Sadr’s popularity rose in parallel with the failure of the reconstructionof Iraq after the invasion in 2003. He also criticized the former exiled politicians fortheir cooperation with the foreign coalition forces and for having gone into exile in Iranand other places, while he and his family had paid the price for staying in the countryunder Saddam. He accused the politicians of being dependent on Iran and the U.S. anddemanded that the foreign forces leave the country.

The fact that Sadr positions himself as an Iraqi nationalist has made him a potentialpartner for the Sunni-Islamist parties and during the Coalition’s attack on Faluja in2004, the Sadr Movement organised assistance to the Sunni-Islamist fighters in thatcity. Sadr has also taken a strong position in favour of Iraqi unity, opposing any decen-tralisation and federalism that would divide Iraq. This position has led the Sadr move-ment to take a critical stand on the attempt of the Kurdish parties to have the oil-rich


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Kirkuk region attached to the Kurdish-ruled provinces, as well as supporting the posi-tion of the Sunni-Islamist parties in preventing an autonomous super-region from beingcreated in southern and central Iraq.

When Sistani brokered a ceasefire between the Mahdi army and the US militaryafter three weeks of fighting in Najaf in August 2004, he forced Sadr to recognise hissupreme authority. Sadr’s submission to Sistani’s authority was repeated in 2007 whenfights broke out in Karbala between Sadr’s forces and other Shia militias. Sadr lostpolitical legitimacy in both cases because he unsuccessfully attempted to contest Sis-tani’s supreme authority (New York Times 2007). When Sadr left the coalition govern-ment in late 2006, Sistani advised Sadr to re-enter it, a move in which Sadr acquiescedin early 2007. Although the movement distinguished itself from the religious represen-tatives of high maintained at the same time an overall reverence for the Grand Ayatol-lah, whose advice it could not allow itself to oppose without risking its Islamic legiti-macy. The Grand Ayatollah used this legitimacy to lead this puritanical, millenarianmovement into expressing its legitimate political concerns within the bounds of thenew political system, which had been established with broad Shia-Muslim consent inIraq. The Sadr movement has increasingly shed some of its religious garb during thisprocess and has steadily focused more on secular issues, which has also increasinglydetermined its choice of non-sectarian allies. At the recent provincial elections, candi-dates from the Sadr movement gained roughly 20% of the seats in the Baghdad and thesouthern Iraqi cities.

Sadr himself is presently undergoing scholarly training in Iran to become an aya-tollah – yet another sign of the important legitimacy which such rank bestows on itsholder. The Iranian government has supposedly played an important role in pressuringSadr into compromise with the Maliki government in last year’s violent conflict inBasra and into allowing the government to take control of the city.

The Sadr movement is particular testimony to the importance of ‘groupness’ inrepressive political systems, and likewise of the enervation of such ‘groupness’ whenpolitical systems become more institutionalized and demilitarized. Group solidaritybuilt around the Shia-Islamic identity, coupled with close interaction between clergyand people, provided a successful survival strategy under Saddam Hussein. Shia-Islamand its communal values were powerful means of organizing the downtrodden Iraqimasses, since it provided a warm and inclusive feeling of solidarity and hope which theIraqi state failed to do under Saddam Hussein. Instead, Saddam Hussein becamedefined as ‘the other’: the secular, God-denying tyrant. In the chaos which ensuedduring 2003–2007, ‘groupness’ became also an important means of physical securityand sheer survival when the prospects of sectarian civil war increased during thatperiod.

After 2003 the Sadr movement was not crushed, which would have left the unpri-vileged Shiites without political representation. Instead, the high clergy – the Hawzaand Ali Sistani – managed to soften its hard edges and to lead it into the political fram-ework of the Iraqi constitution, thus ensuring that these under-privileged Shiites acqui-red a stake in the new Iraq. The subtle interplay between religious institutions and poli-tical movement in this case is yet another example of how religious institutions may


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play a constructive role in facilitating a more modern political system by ensuring abetter bonding between the people and the state.

ConclusionSaddam Hussein’s regime was underpinned by the secular Ba’thist ideology. For histor-ical reasons, this secular regime was dominated by individuals with a Sunni-Muslimbackground and had particularly strong ties with the minority Sunni-Muslim populationin Iraq. This allowed Sunni-Muslims as individuals to influence state decisions andaccess the state’s economic resources through personal, party or tribal connections. Shia-Muslims did not have such means, and when the regime became increasingly repressiveand personalized in its exercise of power, Shia-Islam became a crucial strategic ideolog-ical asset in this socio-political conflict in mobilising and organizing opposition to theregime. For poor Shia-Muslims in the city slums, religion was a particularly potentmeans of mobilisation because it offered enhanced status and social services.

The history of Shia-Islamism in Iraq shows how existing Shiite religious institu-tions provided the social space, leadership, resources and ideological inspirationaround which Shia-Islam could be reinterpreted and used to mobilize Shiite groupidentity and build a Shia-Islamist political movement. In methodological terms, poli-tics in its wider meaning may be said to have constituted the explanandum.

Shia-Islamist political actors mobilised Islamic identities in order to seek politicalinfluence over the state within the overall moral tenets of Shia-Islam. In this regard,Shia-Islamist politics was not about religion but about politics. At the same time, Shia-Islamism was embedded within a much broader and deeper socio-cultural legitimacywhich made sure that the objectives of seeking political influence were of a publicservice nature, rather than for personal gain or for the sake of power itself.

As in any other modern polity, Shia-Islamist parties also differed according to theirsocial and regional constituencies, rather than according to differences in philosophicalreligious ideology. While the Sadr movement has thus pursued the interests of theurban poor in Baghdad and the cities in the south, opposes decentralization of the Iraqistate and emphasizes Iraqi nationalism, Da’wa and ISCI have been more elitist, morein line with the special interests of the middle classes in central Iraq and in favour ofdecentralization. All Shia-Islamist political actors have also shown remarkable flexibi-lity with regard to their religious-political ideologies since the fall of Saddam Hussein.When the democratic political system was established in Iraq after the invasion, andindeed was considered the only system which could allow some form of peaceful co-existence between the Iraqi sects, the Da’wa and ISCI pragmatically embraced thissystem in the absence of any other realistic alternative, although this was in clearcontradiction with their previous ideological doctrines. The Sadr movement was alsoultimately manoeuvred into de facto accepting this as the ‘new game in town’. Theconsolidation of such clear new rules of political competition, as opposed to the perso-nalized, arbitrary political rule of Saddam Hussein, allowed in turn a developmenttowards de-emphasizing religious ideology and Islamist signature issues and a growing


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focus on ordinary issues of state-building and secular politics. Not only was politics thedecisive ingredient in the explanandum, it may indeed also be said to be the crucialingredient in the explanan.

In mobilizing Islamic sentiments in order to strengthen group identities, actorsbecame dependent on religious institutions, which were therefore allowed to play anindependent role. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani applied this role deftly to conciliate thedifferent Shia-Islamist strands and avoid an all-out confrontation between them, aswell as between these Shia-Islamist actors and the other sects in Iraq. In this process,Shia-Islam has been a crucial source of legitimacy facilitating the bonding betweenpoliticians and the masses, and embedding political rule within a broader social legiti-macy. It may be said that in his way the clerical establishment represented the broaderand longer term interests of the Iraqi people.

In conclusion, the socio-political conflict model has proved helpful in understan-ding the role of Shia-Islam in Shia-Islamist politics in Iraq. Shia-Islam and its institu-tions became strategic resources for the Iraqi Shiite community in asserting themselvesduring the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. When the political situation changed, therole of Shia-Islam changed accordingly, which supports the understanding of the roleof Shia-Islam in Shia-Islamist politics in Iraq as neither being a result of a zero-sumrelationship with modernization nor an expression of historical essentialism, but ratheras a resource applied to a historically specific socio-political conflict.

Notes1 The best known proponents of the sociopolitical conflict model are David Martin and Hugh

McLeod (Martin 1978; McLeod 1995). The term ‘sociopolitical conflict model’ was coined by Gorski 2003).

2 See Huntington and Nelson 1984.3 The difference between ‘high’ and popular Islam is quite distinct in Iraq. The clerics of Najaf

and other shrine cities consisted to a large degree of Iranians and other non-Iraqi clerics and focused on developing the canonized doctrines of Shia-Islam, while the main attachment to Shia-Islam of the Shiite tribes of southern Iraq was through their participation in the rituals such as the lamentation over Hussein’s death – the so-called ‘Arba’iin’/Muharram rituals. The existence of religious institutions of Shia-Islam in the shrine cities predates the conver-sion of the tribes.

4 The Da’wa Party claims to have lost 77,000 members to Saddam’s regime. In addition some 40,000 Shiites were deported by the Ba’thist regime during 1969–1971 after being labelled ‘Iranians’.

5 Although Sistani cannot be directly compared with the other Shia-Islamist political actors, he is a political actor in his own right, as it is a social convention in Iraq that the most senior grand ayatollah in Najaf can speak on behalf of the Shiite community on overarching ques-tions of principle (Cole 2003: 547).

6 A mujtahid is an authorized cleric who may exercise ijtihad, a particular canonized Shia tra-dition of applying reason and logic to the holy scriptures in order to use them in relation to contemporary issues. Ijtihad may be seen as being in contrast to a more literal reading of the scriptures, which is more predominant within Sunni Islam.


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7 His network consists of seminaries, libraries, residential housing for seminary students, mosques and welfare-based organizations. Institutions also include an eye hospital and an astronomy centre. This last institution provides information on the movements of the moon, which is important in fixing the calendar of religious rituals.

8 Historical examples where leading quietist clerics have engaged themselves directly in po-litical issues are the anti-British tobacco boycott in Iran in 1891–2, the Iranian ConstitutionalRevolution of 1905–11, the 1920 riots against the British in Iraq and the criticism by GrandAyatollah Burujirdi of the Iranian land reform of the 1950s.

9 Fatwa dated 20 April 2003. Quoted from Visser 2006:10.10 This fatwa was followed up by a fatwa of 29 November 2003, in which Sistani made his

point even more clearly, saying that only direct elections could ensure the legitimacy of theparliament (www.sistani.org/messages/antoni.htm).

11 It is claimed that Bremer contacted Sistani to meet in order to agree on a plan of implemen-tation. Sistani, who never met any representatives of the Coalition, is said to have responded to Bremer’s proposal by saying that, considering that Bremer was American and he –Sistani – an Iranian, he found it much wiser to leave it to the Iraqi themselves to sort out the political arrangements. The story is an unverified anecdote, but illustrates very well Sistani’s think-ing.

12 Al-Hayat, 15 January 2004 via www.juancole.com for the same date.13 Fatwa dated 11 October 2004. Quoted from Visser 2006:13.14 The call for a Constitutional Court to ensure compliance with Islamic law was also inscribed

in the Iranian constitution of 1911 and has a long tradition in quietist political theory. Sistani often referred to the role of Najaf clerics in theorising a synthesis of Shiite Islam and Western-style constitutionalism in the events leading to this first Iranian constitution (Cole 2006: 7).

15 The Islamist parties belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood movement – whether Hamas in Palestine or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – all belong to this strand.

16 At the end of the constitutional process, the following compromise article (Article 2) was agreed upon: Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation: (a) no law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam; (b) no law can be passed that contradicts the principles of democracy.

17 Bayan of 19 March 2004.18 As a token of Sadr’s claim that Sistani represents the ‘silent Hawza’ in contrast to himself,

a well-known anecdote tells the story that Sadr sent Sistani a sleeping pillow embroideredwith the words ‘here sleeps the Hawza’.

19 See, e.g. Al Safir, 17 December 2002. Quoted from Cole 2006:8.20 Not unlike the way Christian Democratic parties in Italy and Germany supposedly used to

find moral inspiration in their Christian faith.21 In this it confirms the general hypothesis that religious radicalism grows best in opposition

and withers when radicals are faced with practical responsibility for running their country.22 www.almejlis.org/news_article-13.html23 Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim’s clerical rank is hojjat-al-islam, which is a lower clerical rank.


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