The ayatollah insists that an Iraqi constituent assembly must be chosen through direct elections and that ''any basic law written by this assembly must be approved by a national referendum.'' He makes only cursory reference to Koranic law as the basis for that legal code. Any attempts to postpone general elections because of security concerns, especially in the Sunni areas, have also been fiercely resisted. In mid-October, he issued a fatwa requiring all men and women to vote, equating voting with such basic religious duties as fasting during Ramadan. It is the duty of the Shiites, according to the ayatollah, to protect Sunni and Christian interests as well. And although he opposed a plan to allow Kurds, who make up 15 to 20 percent of the Iraqi population, veto power over the constitution, he has not squelched Kurdish hopes of preserving some degree of autonomy under a new government. All these are fine words, of course, yet to be tested in reality. But they are remarkable words for a Shiite cleric born in Iran and should be taken seriously.
Despite the recent surge of conservative Christian activism in the United States, the received opinion in the Western world is that in democracies, church and state do not mix. Islam, we are often told, is particularly unsuited to democracy because in Muslim countries the state was never untangled from the clergy. But Iraq was supposed to be a special case, because it was largely secular. In fact, both these assertions were too sweeping. Muslims have rarely been ruled by clerics. Worldly and spiritual authority have usually been kept separate in the Middle East. And until not so long ago, religious minorities, like Jews, were treated with more tolerance in the Muslim world than in Christendom. When worldly authority becomes intolerably oppressive, however, religion is often the only base of resistance. Such was the case in Poland under Communist rule, when the Catholic Church provided a source of dissent. Under Saddam Hussein, the mosque had begun to play a similar role. Political Islam was a way to fight back against secular Baathism, and Ali al-Sistani was its main Shiite spokesman. The pope played a somewhat comparable role under Communism.
Still, the neoconservatives around President Bush mostly favored a secular route toward democracy in Iraq. In the early days of the war, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz frequently cited Turkey as a ''useful model for others in the Muslim world,'' and the administration pinned its hopes on secular exiles like Ahmad Chalabi, not Shiite mullahs exiled to London and Tehran. This line of thinking fell in easily with the views of another administration favorite, Bernard Lewis, the Princeton scholar who says that Kemal Ataturk got it right in Turkey: to promote modernism, religious authority must be forcibly expunged from politics. Ataturk said in 1917 that he would change Turkish social life in one blow. And that, in 1923, is what he proceeded to do. Women were stripped of their veils, Islamic schools were closed and dervish brotherhoods were banned. Even wearing the Turkish fez was forbidden in the new society ruled by ''science, knowledge and civilization.''
Similar revolutions happened or were tried elsewhere. After the Meiji Restoration in Japan in the 1860's, Buddhist temples were razed in the name of civilization and enlightenment. The May 4, 1919, students' revolt in China was an attempt to replace Confucian tradition and religious ''superstition'' with ''Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy.'' In Persia, during the 1920's, Reza Shah Pahlevi tried to modernize his nation, later to be called Iran, by leveling mosques, murdering or arresting clerics and banning the chador. And the pan-Arabism of the early Baathists, some of whom were Christians in Syria, was a secular movement inspired by pan-German nationalism.
Unfortunately, what came out of all this secularizing zeal was not democracy but militarism, absolute monarchy, fascism and variations of Stalinism. The religious revolution that now stalks the Muslim world has come as a reaction, in part, to the failure of modern secular politics. And yet many Middle East analysts sympathetic to the Bush administration, like Daniel Pipes, see a secular strongman, along the lines of Ataturk or Chiang Kai-shek, as the best option in Iraq, since elections in the short term would bring ''Khomeini-like mullahs'' to power. Neoconservatives are not alone in their distrust of clerics. This distrust split the left-leaning anti-Communist opposition in Poland too. It was hard for some dissidents to support the priests against the commissars. As Jerzy Urban, one of the last spokesmen for the Communist regime there, once remarked, it's either us or the Black Madonna of Czestochowa. But does it always have to be one or the other? Is the choice in Iraq really between Ataturk and Khomeini? (four more pages to this essay)
An Islamic Democracy for Iraq?
By IAN BURUMA, NYT Magazine
Is ''Islamic democracy'' really possible? Or is it something meaningless, like ''Jewish science,'' say, or contradictory, like ''people's democracy'' under Communism? This is the question that will determine the future of Iraq, since the man with the greatest credibility in that broken country is Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shiite cleric, who refuses to run for office himself but says that he supports the idea of Islamic democracy.
The ayatollah insists that an Iraqi constituent assembly must be chosen through direct elections and that ''any basic law written by this assembly must be approved by a national referendum.'' He makes only cursory reference to Koranic law as the basis for that legal code. Any attempts to postpone general elections because of security concerns, especially in the Sunni areas, have also been fiercely resisted. In mid-October, he issued a fatwa requiring all men and women to vote, equating voting with such basic religious duties as fasting during Ramadan. It is the duty of the Shiites, according to the ayatollah, to protect Sunni and Christian interests as well. And although he opposed a plan to allow Kurds, who make up 15 to 20 percent of the Iraqi population, veto power over the constitution, he has not squelched Kurdish hopes of preserving some degree of autonomy under a new government. All these are fine words, of course, yet to be tested in reality. But they are remarkable words for a Shiite cleric born in Iran and should be taken seriously.
Despite the recent surge of conservative Christian activism in the United States, the received opinion in the Western world is that in democracies, church and state do not mix. Islam, we are often told, is particularly unsuited to democracy because in Muslim countries the state was never untangled from the clergy. But Iraq was supposed to be a special case, because it was largely secular. In fact, both these assertions were too sweeping. Muslims have rarely been ruled by clerics. Worldly and spiritual authority have usually been kept separate in the Middle East. And until not so long ago, religious minorities, like Jews, were treated with more tolerance in the Muslim world than in Christendom. When worldly authority becomes intolerably oppressive, however, religion is often the only base of resistance. Such was the case in Poland under Communist rule, when the Catholic Church provided a source of dissent. Under Saddam Hussein, the mosque had begun to play a similar role. Political Islam was a way to fight back against secular Baathism, and Ali al-Sistani was its main Shiite spokesman. The pope played a somewhat comparable role under Communism.
Still, the neoconservatives around President Bush mostly favored a secular route toward democracy in Iraq. In the early days of the war, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz frequently cited Turkey as a ''useful model for others in the Muslim world,'' and the administration pinned its hopes on secular exiles like Ahmad Chalabi, not Shiite mullahs exiled to London and Tehran. This line of thinking fell in easily with the views of another administration favorite, Bernard Lewis, the Princeton scholar who says that Kemal Ataturk got it right in Turkey: to promote modernism, religious authority must be forcibly expunged from politics. Ataturk said in 1917 that he would change Turkish social life in one blow. And that, in 1923, is what he proceeded to do. Women were stripped of their veils, Islamic schools were closed and dervish brotherhoods were banned. Even wearing the Turkish fez was forbidden in the new society ruled by ''science, knowledge and civilization.''
Similar revolutions happened or were tried elsewhere. After the Meiji Restoration in Japan in the 1860's, Buddhist temples were razed in the name of civilization and enlightenment. The May 4, 1919, students' revolt in China was an attempt to replace Confucian tradition and religious ''superstition'' with ''Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy.'' In Persia, during the 1920's, Reza Shah Pahlevi tried to modernize his nation, later to be called Iran, by leveling mosques, murdering or arresting clerics and banning the chador. And the pan-Arabism of the early Baathists, some of whom were Christians in Syria, was a secular movement inspired by pan-German nationalism.
Unfortunately, what came out of all this secularizing zeal was not democracy but militarism, absolute monarchy, fascism and variations of Stalinism. The religious revolution that now stalks the Muslim world has come as a reaction, in part, to the failure of modern secular politics. And yet many Middle East analysts sympathetic to the Bush administration, like Daniel Pipes, see a secular strongman, along the lines of Ataturk or Chiang Kai-shek, as the best option in Iraq, since elections in the short term would bring ''Khomeini-like mullahs'' to power. Neoconservatives are not alone in their distrust of clerics. This distrust split the left-leaning anti-Communist opposition in Poland too. It was hard for some dissidents to support the priests against the commissars. As Jerzy Urban, one of the last spokesmen for the Communist regime there, once remarked, it's either us or the Black Madonna of Czestochowa. But does it always have to be one or the other? Is the choice in Iraq really between Ataturk and Khomeini? (four more pages to this essay)
Posted by Ted Belman at December 6, 2004 04:41 PM