The Shiite factor
Long vilified as extremists, these Muslims may hold the key to a new Middle East
Bridges to build. If Americans have tended to harbor little fondness for Shiites, it is a bias they can no longer afford, say Gerecht and other Middle East experts. Brandeis University historian Yitzhak Nakash, currently a fellow at Washington's Woodrow Wilson Center and author of The Shi'is of Iraq, put the challenge neatly in a recent presentation: "To contain the spread of Sunni radicalism, the United States will need to build bridges to those Shiites in the Arab world as well as to the reformers in Iran who have attempted to reconcile Islamic and western concepts of government."
Efforts to build such bridges were slow in coming in Iraq, even as a largely Sunni-led extremist insurgency grew in strength and lethality. While part of the U.S. administration for a time placed considerable stock in the Iraqi National Congress, led by Shiite businessman Ahmed Chalabi, it initially neglected the religious leadership in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. That neglect came in part from failing to discriminate between the largely nonpolitical, "quietist" orientation of Iraq's religious establishment and the hyper-activist theocratic tendencies of Iran's ruling clerics. Unlike Khomeini's successors, Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani embraces a more traditional Shiite commitment to a separation of mosque and state, as long as the latter respects Islamic traditions and law ( sharia ). But even many U.S. Middle East experts did not fully appreciate Sistani's importance until after he defused tensions between U.S. forces and Moqtada al-Sadr by ordering the radical Shiite leader to vacate Najaf's Imam Ali Mosque.
A major cause of upheaval within the Islamic world is a crisis of religious authority, which developed, Al-Khoei's Kazmi explains, in tandem with a crisis of governance in modern predominantly Muslim states. To bolster their power, authoritarian rulers in Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere have variously suppressed restive religious leaders or cynically exploited more compliant ones. Not surprisingly, particularly within Sunni Islam, where lines of religious authority are relatively weak, self-made sheiks and mullahs have popped up all over the Middle East, proclaiming fatwas that justify even the most un-Islamic practices (including the killing of innocent civilians in the name of holy war).
Tolerance. Amid this crisis of authority and governance, says Yusuf al-Khoei, a director of the Al-Khoei Foundation, the Shiites have many things to offer, including an appreciation for tolerance. Grandson of a Najaf grand ayatollah who died under Saddam-imposed house arrest in 1992 and nephew of cleric Abdul Majid al-Khoei, who was killed in Najaf in April 2003 shortly after returning to Iraq from England to work for peace in the newly liberated country, the soft-spoken man would have every reason to be embittered by decades of Sunni mistreatment of Shiites. But a key goal of the foundation he works for is cooperation and reconciliation with the Sunnis. "We have always maintained good relations with the Sunnis," Khoei says, "because we know in order for things to work in Iraq and throughout the world, we have to cooperate."
Al-Khoei is not alone in seeing the Shiites as a counterweight to intolerant Salafi Wahhabism, that narrow, literalistic, and increasingly widespread approach to the faith that declares all other interpretation of the sacred texts and all other sects, whether Shiism or mystical Sufism, as sinful innovations. Says Sami Zubaida, a professor emeritus of politics and sociology at the University of London's Birkbeck College, "By contrast with that [Salafist Islamist perspective], the Shia world is more hopeful and encouraging. It is more culturally complex--tolerating philosophy, mysticism, and other forms of learning. There are legitimate grounds for saying that there is greater hope for flexibility coming out of the Shiite world, where there is more nuance, complexity, and less fundamental antagonisms toward the West."
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