History in a Hard Land
America's challenge in Iraq is more than sectarianism and insurgency
The preachers in Fallujah--like their Shiite counterpart, the leader of the Mahdi Army, Moqtada al-Sadr--had disfigured and bent the faith to their will and to their needs. The fact that Iraq had been at heart a secular society was now of little practical consequence. Religion here had formerly yielded to tribalism; religious parties had historically been weaker in their pull than the secular political parties of the left and the pan-Arabists. But now the faith had been summoned. The preachers and prayer leaders had stepped forth to fill the void left by the collapse of despotism and by the inability of the foreign power to master the ways of the country. "Iraq was held together by the Army before," a self-described secular Sunni academic at Baghdad University, Wamid Nadhmi, said of the new landscape. "Now it's held together by the mosques."
The clerics were happy to oblige. This was the road to power that Hamas had taken in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in the Shiite slums of Beirut. And the religion that came was cut to the fury, and the combat, of the moment. In Fallujah, amid the siege and the fighting, a Sunni cleric, Ali al-Juburi, gave an Arab reporter a sense of this new faith: "America is a handmaiden of Israel, a creation of the minds of Jewish rabbis. Warring against America is a duty incumbent on every Muslim man and woman." This town prided itself on the lore of tribal solidarity and the blood feud and the "unforgiving life that pleases the friend and the death that smites the enemy." The religion that sprouted here was but a response to the demise of the old Sunni, pan-Arabist regime. Fallujah was known as madinat al-masajid, the city of mosques. It was home to more than 80 mosques, and a whole new political--and military--role was to be given them.
Tribute. A price would be paid for this terrible use of religion. The vigilantes murdering and mutilating American contractors and fighting American soldiers were to exact their tribute from Fallujah. They would come to be known by the honored name of mujahideen Fallujah, and with the honor and deference came a reign of virtue and bigotry. Masked men turned up in the center of the town and applied the whip in public to vendors of wine and liquor and pornographic videos. The rule of the sharia had come to Fallujah, they announced. In the back of a pickup truck, on one occasion, four "guilty" men were slowly driven through the town. The men were blindfolded, naked from the waist up. A young man of Fallujah, in his mid-20s, gave the deed his blessing. "This is the duty of the mujahideen. They are our example," he said. Yet another gave vigilante rule its real warrant. "The mujahideen liberated the city from the Americans, and it is their right to protect its reputation."
Occasionally, a voice could be heard breaking through the bravado, the voice of someone knowing that the armed men and the fiery sermons would beget nothing save the familiar ruin and retrogression. From Fallujah itself, a man of the Sunni religious class, Sheik Muhammad al-Hamdani, allowed himself a dissenting thought: "Words are useless. We are suffering here, and the world is indifferent. We have no choice but to reach an accord with the Americans. We are an occupied people, and the occupier has a big war machine." The man had done the prudent thing; he had read the balance of material power and delivered a reading of the world as it was. He was the exception that proved the rule. This is not a culture that has ever been kind to those who tried to tell it verdicts it did not want to acknowledge. "They live like this, they will die like this, and their sons will do so after them," a wise and shrewd character in the Lebanese novelist Amin Maalouf's brilliant work of allegory on the Arab condition, Leo Africanus, says of the Muslim exiles of Granada in the year 1500.
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