Update from AIJAC

The Shi'is and building Iraqi Democracy

Today's Update moves away from the direct conduct of the war to look at an element of post-war reconstruction, particularly, the role that the Shi'is, the minority Muslim sect who make up the majority of Iraq's population, will have in a future Iraq moving  toward democracy.

Some have expressed fears that the Shi'is, who lively mostly in the south of Iraq, will seek to unite with the Shi'i clerics who run Iran after Saddam is toppled, creating regional instability. But an academic expert on Iraq's Shi'is, Professor Yitzhak Nakash, told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that Shi'is are more likely to serve as supporters of an Iraqi national identity. Moreover, they may even provide an alternative Shi'i religious focus which can help speed reform in Iran. To read his analysis, CLICK HERE

Steven Schwartz, who heads a project on Islam and Democracy, agrees wholeheartely, based on his contacts with Shi'is, mainly in the US. To read his argument from The Weekly Standard, CLICK HERE

But before these pieces, here is a letter written by Khanan Makiya, the well-known and courageous Iraqi dissident author, to his fellow emigres, about what they will have to do to build Iraqi democracy. It come from a new daily column he is writing for The New Republic, and can be read HERE

Readers may also be interested in:

• An informative roundtable forum on Democracy in the Middle East, featuring several top experts, in the latest edition of the Middle East Review of International Affairs.
• An article by Ambassador Dennis Ross on the acceptance by Arab states of Saddam's overthrow, and the window for reform this gives the US, if handled correctly.
• A good piece on the implications of the appointment of the new Palestinian Prime Minister, Abu Mazen, and the drama surrounding his appointment, written by Dr. Mark Heller.

KANAN MAKIYA'S WAR DIARY

February 20 was a particularly bad moment during the run-up to the conference of the Iraqi opposition in Salahuddin. A tremendous uncertainty hung in the air. It was unclear whether or not the United States delegation, led by envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, would show up. Some delegates had just been turned back at the Turkish border and were on their way back to London. Others could not or would not enter through Syria or Iran for political reasons. The conference had just been postponed for the umpteenth time, and reports that Mukhabarat--Baath Party intelligence--agents were infiltrating the nearby city of Irbil to sabotage the conference were gathering in frequency and seriousness. The reports were so severe that my daughter had been visited by FBI agents in Cambridge, who terrified her out of her wits with information they had picked up from Baghdad indicating that I was personally being targeted by the regime. I was effectively, and for my own protection, a prisoner in a gilded cage in Salahuddin, guarded by Kurdish peshmerga soldiers.

Meanwhile, ardent Western-based Iraqi democrats were writing and speaking in the West as if no one else in the opposition mattered and as if they could achieve alone some kind of utopian new democratic order solely through the agency of the United States. The idea of an American military rule for two years was looking attractive to them as a way of bypassing the traditional parties of Iraqi politics (Kurdish, nationalist, and Islamist), parties that I myself had harshly criticized in the run-up to the London conference--which turned out to be a very badly managed affair--for their exclusionary and Stalinist practices.

Whatever their shortcomings--and they are many--there is simply no alternative to engaging those parties in a new kind of politics inside Iraq. Ahmed Chalabi and I had staked everything on this idea. That is why we were in Iraqi Kurdistan. The point, we believed, was to include them, to take leadership of a process incorporating people whose democratic credentials are dubious at best.

Justice is going to be the first thing everyone in Iraq wants in the immediate aftermath of liberation, and the hardest thing for anyone--Iraqi or American--to deliver. Detecting among fellow Iraqis in the West the avoidance of such bitter and difficult truths, I wrote the following letter, distributed through various e-mail listservs, to every Iraqi democrat in the world--we who stand poised, now that the greatest test of our lives has begun.
 

Dear Iraqi friends in Europe and the United States,

In reading the e-mails commenting on my Observer article (both pro and con), I developed a disturbing impression of something that was not openly being said, but that was occasionally implied between the lines, almost certainly unconsciously and without bad intent. Since it is an issue of grave concern to the building of a post-Saddam Iraq, I thought I would bring it out into the open. My comments are not directed at anyone one person in particular, and they originate in an objective dilemma that we are certainly going to have to face tomorrow: the contrast between those of us who have been privileged to live outside in the West and those Iraqis who never have, and with whom we want to build a democratic society tomorrow inside Iraq.

I begin with an anecdote that happened to me the day before yesterday. A gentleman who had read a somewhat inaccurate translation of my Observer article on the web called late in the night and spoke to a colleague sleeping in the same compound with me to say that he was "going to wipe me off the face the earth." He was livid and deadly serious; it was a physical threat coming from a deeply disturbed man. Apparently he had read the article, the main idea of which he agreed with, as a personal attack on him because of one of its sentences. He was sure that in one tiny little phrase of that particular sentence I was "intending" him, even though I did not know anything about this man (who he was, or why he was even in Kurdistan to attend the Iraqi opposition conference) at the time that I was writing the article. The whole thing blew over the next day and he came up to apologize after a colleague patiently explained to him how he was mistaken in his interpretation.

The details of the incident are not important. It is important however to know that this is a person who has suffered as much as any human being can possibly suffer at the hands of the Baath Party--relatives murdered, his body the target of terrible, terrible atrocities, etc, etc. Try to imagine the worst and still you will not come close to the physical pain this man has suffered in his life. At one point he weighed 30 kilos. And remember while you are trying to imagine what this person went through, that this is the human raw material that you want to build democracy for.

Every day in the last five weeks of my travels I have come across such damaged and wounded people, people who breathe nationalism, sectarianism, without knowing that they are doing so, and people who are deeply chauvinistic and suspicious towards their fellow Iraqis. These are the facts of life for the next generation in this poor, unhappy and ravaged land. Don't even think of coming back to it after liberation if you are not prepared to deal with such facts.

Why do I write this? Because I developed the impression (and it is only an impression--targeting no one in particular, and arising from the hundreds of e-mails I must have received about the Observer piece) that some of you think you can lift your noses and ride into Iraq on American tanks, above the stink of it all, without having to wade knee-high in the shit that the Baath Party has made of your country. You cannot. That is a pipe dream. The Americans will be here for the shortest time that they can possibly get away with, and they will not understand during that time, nor even are they capable of imagining, exactly what it is they are dealing with, much less have they the stamina to move it all in the direction of the gentle and forgiving way of life (by contrast with Iraq) that we all have enjoyed for so many years in the West.

No one can rebuild and take responsibility for such a catastrophe other than the people who are in some way or another part of it, and even responsible for it. That is the most fundamental reason why we Iraqis must always insist on being partners of the United States and not its stooges. I am happy to be a stooge--I have no nationalist or patriotic problems with stooge-ism, believe me--if I thought it were in fact a stance towards the world that would actually get me to where I, and I believe you all, want to go. My problem is that I know it will not. And I do not know how to fool myself, or get myself into the mode of thinking, that maybe it will.

Among the people who are not attending the Salahuddin conference--it has to be said--are a rather high proportion of Western-based Iraqi democrats, who, it appears, do not want to smell unpleasant things and prefer to ride into Iraq atop American tanks. That is a sad and unpleasant but real comment on all of us, the so-called democrats of Iraq. Incidentally everyone has noted these absences here inside Iraq. (Can you blame them?) The subject of daily gossip is "Why is so-and-so not coming?" "Is so and so afraid?" etc, etc. History, in the shape of the people here in northern Iraq, is unlikely ever to forgive these absences.

I am getting too old to be going on wading in the shit of Arab politics, as I have been doing for over 30 years now. I write this e-mail in part because I am not sure how much more of it I can take, and in part so that those of you who are younger than I am will benefit from my experience and understand exactly what it is that you face when and if you decide to come back to Iraq after liberation. I write to warn you that the United States, to which I am supposed to have hitched my star more than any other Iraqi in decades, is bound to let you down if you think you can ask her for too much. Actually, if you think about it hard enough, it is not the United States that is letting you down; nor is it President Bush or even his CIA and his State Department that is letting you down; it is you, who by coming face to face with your own illusions, will end up letting yourselves down the most, and it is you and all those Iraqis who have put their faith in you, who will end up paying the biggest price of all.

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THE SHI'IS AND THE FUTURE OF IRAQ

YITZHAK NAKASH

On February 21, 2003, Yitzhak Nakash addressed The Washington Institute's Special Policy Forum. Dr. Nakash, a professor of Middle East History at Brandeis University, is author of The Shiis of Iraq (Princeton University Press, 1994), now in its fifth printing, as well as a forthcoming study focusing on Shi'a and nationalism in the Arab world.

The prospect of American military action in Iraq has raised concerns that dismantling the Ba'ath regime will weaken the state and spur the defection of its Shi'i majority under the influence of Iran. Yet, much of the pessimism surrounding this assessment obscures the historical role that the Shi'i community has played in supporting the Iraqi state, not to mention the vital interest it has in preserving the country's territorial integrity. If war in Iraq leads to a more representative government that is willing to address Shi'i political aspirations, the likely result would be stability and the establishment of a more moderate religious leadership quite different from that seen in Iran.

The Shi'i Stake in Iraq

With shrines throughout the country and religious centers at Najaf and Karbala, Iraq has long been a locus of Shi'i learning and history. Yet, Shi'is did not constitute the majority of Iraq's indigenous population until the beginning of the nineteenth century. As nomadic Arab tribes abandoned their itinerant lifestyle in favor of agriculture, a large number of them became Shi'is. They did not attain political power, however. Since the creation of modern Iraq in 1921, the country's Sunni minority has wielded disproportionate influence over the Shi'i majority (which constitutes some 65 percent of the population) and the Kurdish minority. Sunni dominance has been bolstered by both the preponderance of Sunni governments in the Arab world and by the West, which until recently viewed Saddam Husayn's regime as a bulwark against the influence of revolutionary Shi'a.

Although Iraqi Shi'is had long been politically marginalized, sectarian confrontation did not become salient until the 1970s, when conflict emerged between the Sunni-dominated Ba'ath Party and the Shi'i Islamic Dawa Party. Despite the apparent influence of Iran's Islamic Revolution, however, Iraqi Shi'is harbored no aspirations to replicate the political theology of the Islamic Republic. The vitality of the Dawa Party was the product of Shi'i frustration with the exclusivity of state politics rather than any desire to follow the Iranian model. The bulk of Dawa's supporters were inhabitants of Baghdad slums and university students who had become disillusioned with the Iraqi Communist Party's failure to bring about political change.

Differences between Iraqi and Iranian Shi'is increased during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War and the Shi'i uprising that followed the Gulf War in 1991. In the former case, Iraqi Shi'is constituted the majority of the Iraqi infantry and fought against their Iranian co-religionists despite Saddam's systematic repression. In the latter case, Iraqi ayatollahs failed to exploit the Shi'i rebellion, offering little in the way of guidance, much less open advocacy for the formation of a separatist Islamic government. Historically, the vast majority of Iraqi Shi'is have rejected calls to implement a political system favoring the rule of the Islamic jurist (velayet y-faqih), instead choosing to reaffirm their commitment to Iraqi nationalism.

Iraqi Shi'is also have a vested interest in preserving the country's territorial integrity. If Iraq were divided into separate statelets following a war, the Shi'is would likely lose Baghdad (where they constitute nearly half the population), the shrine cities of Kazamin and Samara, and any share in the revenues from northern oil wells. Given that they already compose the core of the country's middle class and secular intelligentsia, the Shi'is would much prefer to seek power within a unified postwar Iraq. Moreover, the states that would emerge from a divided Iraq would be too weak to influence regional affairs, whereas a united Iraq might allow Iraqi Shi'is to become a strong regional voice.

Possibilities for a Post-Saddam Iraq

The Iraqi nationalism long favored by the Shi'i majority would likely prevail over a revitalized pan-Arab ideology as the foundation for a post-Saddam Iraq. Building on the political thought of literary ideologues such as Ali al-Sharqi, the country could well develop a nationalist ideology grounded in both the Arab and tribal character of Iraqi society. The Iraqi military would be pivotal in this transition; once purged of its pro-Saddam elements, the army could be transformed into a symbol of national unity with a specific mission closely tied to the aims of the new state.

Under such conditions, the emergence of an influential Shi'i presence in the new Iraqi government would probably not cause internecine strife. Moreover, the Ba'ath would be unlikely to resurrect themselves as a vociferous political force. Although the United States would probably engage in some level of "de-Ba'athification," Washington would also strive to avoid alienating Iraqi Sunnis, primarily by maintaining the technocratic elements of the Ba'ath system and by mitigating any threat of Shi'i reprisals.

The most positive scenario would be the destruction of the Ba'ath regime and its replacement by a pluralistic state in which the Shi'i majority can gain access to power and the Kurds can enjoy a degree of autonomy. For its part, Washington should encourage Iraqis to adopt a representative system based on a written constitution, with parliamentary seats distributed proportionally among the country's ethnic and religious groups. In lieu of a single national leader, a triumvirate representing Iraq's major constituencies (e.g., a Shi'i president, a Sunni prime minister, and a Kurdish parliamentary Speaker) could share interim political power.

Toward an Arab Alternative

Should political conditions in post-Saddam Iraq allow for the revitalization of Iraqi Shi'i clerical training schools, a reinvigorated Iraqi Shi'a based in Najaf could rival Qom as a center of influence in the Shi'i world. Historically, Shi'a has been a somewhat laissez faire sect, emphasizing competitiveness rather than conformity in its ideology. The rise of an alternative power center in Iraq could therefore encourage the defection of dissident clerics in Iran. In fact, if Najaf were to produce moderate clerics who became well integrated with the new Iraqi state, the positive repercussions would likely be felt throughout the Middle East. A moderate Najaf would present an alternative to the ideology of Hizballah spiritual leader Shaykh Mohamed Hussein Fadlallah and other extremist elements. Similarly, Iraqi Shi'a could function as an important counterweight to the predominant radical force in the region, Sunni wahhabism, which is as vitriolic toward Shi'a as it is toward the United States.

Washington can and should help to create a post-Saddam Iraq in which Shi'is can prosper. Iraq has many resources that could facilitate this process and ease the political transition: oil reserves, a tradition of market economics, a talented bureaucracy, and a strong agricultural sector. Should the United States repeat its post-Gulf War failure to address Shi'i aspirations, opposition to U.S. efforts will grow.

This Special Policy Forum Report was prepared by Evan Langenhahn.

Property of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy © 2003.
All rights reserved.

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Fear Not the Shias

Their tradition recognizes the rights of minorities, because they have always been a minority.

The Weekly Standard, 03/24/2003, Volume 008, Issue 27
 

New York - Sheikh Fadhel Al-Sahlani, an Iraqi American and president of the largest Shia Muslim congregation in North America, speaks perfect English. He sits with quiet dignity in his mosque, the Imam Al-Khoei Islamic Center in Queens, New York. Middle aged and slender, with a neat salt-and-pepper beard, he is draped in robes and wears a turban. Yet his words are anything but alien--rather, they are startlingly direct, articulate, and even familiar, at least to supporters of President George W. Bush and his vision for the future of the Middle East.

"The problem in Arab countries is simple," Sheikh Al-Sahlani says. "We are ruled by dictators. We want this to end. I cannot trust any Arab regime," he continues. "None of them has ever helped us. They did not accept Iraqi refugees after the [Gulf] war, except for some who were admitted to Syria. Only America helped us by taking in many refugees, and now there are thousands of us here. Only America really helped us," he repeats. "If the United States removes Saddam's fascist regime, I will support them. But also, we live here and we are loyal."

I told Sheikh Al-Sahlani how much his comments resembled those of President Bush himself and of Paul D. Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary and point man for the strategy of regional transition to democracy. He nodded, with a smile. "We understand them," he said. He described the impact of Wolfowitz's recent visit to Iraqis living in Dearborn, Michigan, and said, "Many believe a change in American policy has come."

A week before, in a Manhattan restaurant, I'd heard a similar message from another Iraqi-American religious figure, Sheikh Kedhim Sadiq Mohammed of the Islamic Guidance Center, a Shia mosque in Brooklyn that serves a large Hispanic, African-American, and Arab-American community. "I am telling all the Arabs the moment has come to support the United States, to see the end of this evil dictatorship in Iraq," he said. "Many of them do not know how to react, but I am telling them to trust the Americans. I am an American citizen and I am loyal to President Bush."

I interviewed Sheikh Al-Sahlani on the night of March 9, after the annual Shia religious procession in midtown Manhattan, called to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of the prophet Muhammad, at the battle of Kerbala--the defining event in the history of the Shia sect. (I had been invited to address the gathering.) Following the procession, in the main hall of the Al-Khoei mosque, a Pakistani-American medical doctor and religious teacher of great eloquence, Sakhawat Hussain, described the events at Kerbala, in which Imam Hussein and a small party of his supporters were killed at the order of tyrants who had seized control of the Muslim community.

The battle of Kerbala occurred in the year 680. Yet as Dr. Hussain preached to a gathering of hundreds that evening in Queens, grown men wailed at the evocation of Imam Hussein's death and the slaying of his infant son in his arms as if it had happened yesterday. Young men came forward bare to the waist, and began rhythmically beating their breasts in grief at the bloodshed so many centuries past.

Kerbala is located in Iraq, where the majority of the population--up to 65 percent--are Shia Muslims. For Shias, the drama that took place at Kerbala so long ago is emblematic of a struggle that persists throughout history, but never with greater resonance than now. In the Iraqi dictator Saddam, the Shias see the latest successor to Yezid, the evil ruler who ordered the murders of Imam Hussein and his partisans. The Iraqi Shias and their clerics again and again strive to defend truth, justice, and Islam cleansed of tyranny and terror.

The March 9 procession brought 10,000 Shia Muslims from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut into the streets of the Big Apple, behind a banner denouncing Saudi-backed Wahhabism, the extremist dispensation that has encouraged the mass murder of Shia Muslims for two and a half centuries, and which underpins the hellish discrimination Shias suffer today in the Saudi kingdom. Shias are the majority in the oil-bearing Eastern Province and the southern border region of Saudi Arabia. The banner named the cruelest enemies of innocent Muslims: Saddam, Mullah Omar, and bin Laden.

The parade ended at the Pakistani mission to the United Nations, on the East Side, where Istafa Naqvi, a Shia community leader, passionately denounced Saddam and proclaimed that U.S.-led forces would remove him. Naqvi invoked the American eagle, with its sharp claws, which he envisaged tearing the head off "the worst dictator in the world." Agha Jafri, the main Shia leader in New York, cried, "President Bush, why are you waiting? We want you to liberate Kerbala!" Fox News and a couple of network television outlets picked up the story of Muslims marching against tyranny and terrorism in downtown Manhattan. But the print media, even conservative dailies like the New York Post and the New York Sun that had reported on the anti-terror stance of Shia Muslims in the past, ignored the event.
 

THIS DECISION is understandable. To some reporters, the parade no doubt seemed a typical New York ethnic observance, colorful but irrelevant to the broader public. But in the aftermath of September 11, we can little afford to neglect Muslim voices raised against terrorism. The simple truth, recognized by every Shia community and religious leader in America, is that the Shia Muslims suffer from a terrible public image. Shias are labeled wholesale in the Western media, and in the high circles of the State Department, as suicide bombers. This problem dates, naturally, from Khomeini's revolution in Iran in 1979 and the seizing of U.S. hostages, an unhealed wound in the minds of most Americans. For the New York print media, as well as the functionaries at State, sorting out the differences among Iraqi Muslims, and moving past the shallow assumption that all Arab Muslims are anti-American, is too big a job. In recent weeks, anti-Shia propaganda has emerged as a staple of the liberal media, full of dire predictions that the fall of the Butcher of Baghdad will result in Iraq's being torn apart, as Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds fight each other for power.

According to the naysayers, an unreformed and irredeemable Iran stands behind all Shias everywhere, and is prepared to impose a new extremism in post-Saddam Iraq. Incompetent voices at the State Department proclaim the need to back old, exhausted politicians, who will presumably serve as pliable tools, in preference to Shia leaders like Ahmad Chalabi, of the Iraqi National Congress, and his secularist ally Kanan Makiya, author of Republic of Fear and the intellectual conscience of the Iraqi people.

The Iraqi Shias in America firmly deny that they are agents of Iranian reactionaries. They are ethnically Arab--not Persian, like the Iranians--as they never tire of pointing out. And unlike certain Iranians, they are inclined to forgive America--even for its disgraceful betrayal of 1991, when, in the aftermath of the Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush incited the Shias to rise up, then had the U.S. military stand aside as Saddam's forces slaughtered them.

Iraqi Shias look forward not to a clerical regime, but to a federal, constitutional Iraq in which all communities enjoy equal rights. After two years of discussions, they recently produced a major document, the Declaration of the Shia of Iraq (see www.defenddemocracy.org). The signatories "believe that Iraq can only be reviv[ed] if its future is based on the three principles of democracy, federalism, and community rights." The text itself summarizes the demands of the Shias as: "1. The abolition of dictatorship and its replacement with democracy; 2. The abolition of ethnic discrimination and its replacement with a federal structure for Kurdistan; 3. The abolition of the [Saddam] policy of discrimination against the Shias." In describing the political future of Iraq, it calls for "a democratic, parliamentary, constitutional order, that carefully avoids the hegemony of one sect or ethnic group," and "a single citizenship for all Iraqis." In addition, it proposes a healthy basis for the new Iraqi order: "a civil society and its community bases."

Regarding the Iranian "threat" to the new Iraq, Khomeini has been dead for 14 years, and "Khomeinism" is slowly but surely passing away before our eyes, as the new generation in Iran pushes the national leadership toward a goal similar to that of the Iraqi Shias--a "civil society" within a nonreligious state. Even leading clerics like Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, designated successor of Khomeini, have declared the experiment in Islamic rule formulated by the latter a failure. Rather than fear Tehran, we should anticipate that a democratic Iraq in which Arab Shias exercise a significant influence will provide an incentive for the consolidation of the reform process in Iran. After that may come major steps in a Saudi transition to a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy. Liberating Iraq, applauding reform in Iran, and assisting the subjects of the Saudi kingdom in dismantling the Wahhabi terrorist network, as well as removing the Wahhabi ideological monopoly over Mecca and Medina, means facilitating the definitive entry of the Arab and Muslim world into the global system of pluralism, capitalism, prosperity, and stability.

The beginning of such a transition also means that America can fulfill its promise as a liberator, making clear to millions of Muslims that we have turned a page in our history, and will no longer support corrupt regimes in the name of immediate interests or the amoral principle of loyalty to our putative friends, no matter who they are or who they kill. That kind of thinking led us straight to September 11, when the products of the Saudi-Wahhabi order demonstrated that 60 years of accommodation to the Saudis had only made it easier for them to strike at our heart.

Of course, to an outsider observing a Shia ceremony, it is unsurprising that the extremist reputation attached to these Muslims by the Iranian revolution should have stuck. Shia Islam is hot, not cold, and passionate, rather than passive; its adherents express an obviously authentic anguish over the cosmic drama in which their heroes took part, in Iraq, a millennium and a half ago. The trauma of Kerbala occurred in the century after Muhammad's death, when issues of authority were unsettled, civil war spread throughout the Muslim community, and extremist tendencies flowered. Muhammad was succeeded as the leader of the Muslims by four caliphs from among his companions. The third of the caliphs, Uthman ibn Affan, established the hegemony of his own family, a dynasty known as the Umayyads, over the Muslims. This nepotism was resisted by many, and among the dissenters there emerged an extremist group known as the Khawarij, who attacked all who differed from them.

Like the Khawarij, Wahhabi terrorists today massacre Muslims who differ from them, along with Christians, Jews, Hindus, and others--from the twin towers and the Pentagon to the teeming cities of Pakistan, where Saudi-backed terrorists, who have slain a hundred Pakistani Shia doctors, also conspired to murder the American journalist Daniel Pearl. Thus, for the Shias little has changed; the eternal confrontation of good and evil unfolds. The corrupt Umayyads have become the depraved followers of Saddam and the Saudi reactionaries, polluting Islam in the interest of political power. To liberate Islam from corruption, dictatorship, and terrorism is for the Shias a sacred mission. The story of Kerbala, which always lies heavy on their hearts, is the story of Muslims' resistance to tyranny and terror. It is the story of a righteous and pure leader, Imam Hussein ibn Ali, who led a small force to battle through the darkest night. That legacy inspires his heirs to confront the September 11 terrorists, the murderers of Daniel Pearl, and the hypocrites who squat in Mecca and Medina, usurping the vaunted role of "guardians of the Holy Sites."

Unlike the Saudi Wahhabis, Shia Muslims have never sought to impose their dispensation on the whole of the Islamic world community; nor have they attempted to impose theological conformity within their own ranks. Their tradition recognizes the rights of minorities, because they have always been a minority, and esteems differences in opinion, because their very existence arises from controversy and debate. In Iran, Shia Islam took an anti-Western direction that had more to do with the history of the Iranians and their relations with Britain and the United States than with their understanding of Islam. Elsewhere in the Islamic world--in places like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the Albanian lands--Shias are best known for their commitment to education, enlightenment, the liberation of women, social justice, progress, and, most important, independence of thought, or ijtihad.

In 1991, America abandoned the Iraqi Shias to the mercies of Saddam's killers. Now, we have an opportunity to repair that mistake and, with their help, to establish an Iraq that will pioneer the new Arab and Muslim reality. They are there, waiting for our help, and eager to give us their help. We are asking them to leave their fears behind; so let us also move beyond our own anxieties. A good start would be to bring Sheikh Fadhel Al-Sahlani, Sheikh Kedhim Sadiq Mohammed, and others like them to Washington, to meet with the men and women guiding our efforts in Iraq, and to meet with the capital's press, the better to explain the future of Iraq as envisaged by Iraqis themselves. With or without our aid, they will always march in the footsteps of Imam Hussein, ready to confront evil. Let us give them the tools that may permit them to prevail.
 

Stephen Schwartz is the author of "The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror" and director of the Islam and Democracy Program at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

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Last Updated 21 March, 2003