History in a Hard Land
America's challenge in Iraq is more than sectarianism and insurgency
In his new book, The Foreigner's Gift, Contributing Editor Fouad Ajami, Majid Khadduri professor of Middle East Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, unravels the complex weave of hopes and frustrations arising from the American venture in Iraq.
The capture of Saddam Hussein was a milestone. The insurgency was not put down, but the American commanders and their civilian counterparts could be forgiven their moment of jubilation and perhaps the thought that jihadists pondering a passage to Tikrit or Fallujah across the Saudi or Syrian or Jordanian borders would have taken notice of the despot's surrender. What wealth the despot had stashed away in his hide-outs was anyone's guess. For yet another moment, Americans and a majority of Iraq's people had an occasion for common joy. Americans were beyond innocence this time, but while it lasted, the sense of deliverance from the despot recalled that buoyant, brilliant day months earlier when the dictator's statue in Firdos Square had been taken down in what seemed like a genuine coming together of Iraqis glad for their liberty and Americans thrilled to have provided it.
The large questions about Iraq's unity as a nation-state were still there the morning after. The evasions and the denials of sectarianism were still there, that debilitating insistence that sectarianism was alien to the land and an import brought to it by the foreign occupiers. The Sunni Arabs had yet to acknowledge the abnormality of what had passed for the familiar order of things under the despotism. But there were cracks even in the epicenter of Tikrit. As that Sunni stronghold hailed the anti-American insurgency, an undercurrent of pragmatism could be discerned in Saddam's birthplace.
It was a pragmatism born of fear that Sunni maximalism may leave the Shiites as the principal beneficiaries of the American interlude in Iraq. Raw power played its part. In the first year after the fall of the regime, the 4th Infantry Division was headquartered in Tikrit, then the 1st Infantry Division had relieved it, and the town came to a realistic sense of the balance of forces on the ground. Though no wholesale break with the Baathist legacy had swept Tikrit, there could be seen, in that town, the beginning of a separation from that legacy. A month after the dictator's surrender, an Arab reporter for Al-Hayat, Halim al-Aarji, found in Tikrit those second thoughts and the desire to be rid of the stigma of that association with Saddam Hussein. A man of 80 years took the reporter by the hand and pointed to the Tigris nearby. "Saddam Hussein deprived us of the joy of the river and its banks. He took from us the places of our fathers and forefathers to build palaces, which have now become fortresses of the occupiers." A younger and more educated man split the difference with the new order of things. Tikrit, he told the reporter, was a city proud of its history, aware of its responsibilities. This was why, the man added, it dealt with the anti-American insurgency with "some caution and reserve: It neither condemned the attacks against the Americans nor sanctioned them. None of its prayer and mosque leaders called for jihad against the occupier. Had they done so, they would have drowned the occupier in a sea of blood."
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."
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.
Few Arabs have dared challenge those deadly dreams of their own people. The Arabs have been living in a "false world," as a man of the business elite wrote to me in mid-April 2004. He could have added that it was both false and powerful at the same time, that reality often faltered as its bearers attempted to breach those walls of denial and illusion. That lone man urging caution in Fallujah was not about to alter age-old ways.
Excerpted from The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq by Fouad Ajami. Copyright ÃÂé 2006 by Fouad Ajami
This story appears in the August 7, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.