History in a Hard Land
America's challenge in Iraq is more than sectarianism and insurgency
The truth of that account was open to debate, but behind it could be discerned a measure of pragmatism. A well-known "man of religion," Sheik Abdul Qadir Munir, on the outskirts of Tikrit, gave the same reporter a variation on that theme. "The Americans," he said, "had fallen into a great error. They insist on equating us here with Saddam Hussein. We have been trying to explain to them that the men of religion here have not authorized armed struggle or declared the jihad. Had we done so, no American would have been able to stay in Tikrit. ... We believe that the time has not come for legitimate armed resistance, because the Americans have declared that they will be leaving before long." This was the dictator's base of power, and then his hide-out, but the man had fallen, and revisionism had reared its head. It was not just the Tigris he had taken away from them. There were assertions and complaints now that he had been cavalier with the town, that he had taken Tikrit and its people for granted, that everything had been subjugated to his will.
Faith. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. If this was the way out of the culture of terror, this hypocrisy had its uses. Tolerance would not be so easy to find, though; a Sunni mosque in Baghdad that the dictator had named the Mother of the Drums Mosque had been given a new name after the fall of the despotism. It was named the Ibn Taymiyyah Mosque, for the zealous religious scholar of Damascus, Ahmad Ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328). Ibn Taymiyyah was no ordinary jurist: He was severe and vigilant; he hated the Shiites; he abhorred the Sufi tradition in Islam; he had a jaundiced view of philosophy and philosophers. His zealous and stern view of the faith had long endeared him to the die-hards.
A people in search of reconciliation would have picked a different ancestor. Here, the faith had remained a weapon, sharpened for very worldly purposes. Now the Ibn Taymiyyah Mosque had become a center of Sunni political militancy. It sits on the deadly road to the airport, and in the way of places that acquire a reputation, it gives a sense of unease to a passerby approaching it. I drove by once in the company of two young Shiite men, and a decided nervousness came over them as they surveyed the mosque and the neighborhood around it. The changes that had overtaken Islam in the world beyond Iraq had found their way to that country as well. In Arab-Islamic lands, and in the Islamic diaspora in Europe, the faith had become portable. The preachers had found their way to the satellite television channels and had become media celebrities. This phenomenon came to Tikrit and Fallujah as well, and to Baghdad and Kufa. A writer for al-Sharq al-Awsat, Tariq al-Homayed, caught the damage done by this new radicalized use of the faith. "The Friday prayer leaders," he observed, "have become political leaders who speak to the television cameras rather than men of religion who speak to the worshipers."
advertisement
