Can Iraqis keep it together? Religion and politics a volatile mix | October 19, 2005

10-14-2005

By Harry Levins
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

On Saturday, Iraqis will cast yes-or-no ballots on a constitution that's aimed at stitching together a unified nation.

But Iraqis are a fractious lot, split along sectarian and ethnic lines. Those fault lines lead some outsiders to question whether any constitution can bring Iraq together.

The biggest fault line separates Iraq's Shiite Muslims from Iraq's Sunni Muslims. What divides these fellow Muslims, and why?

Interviews with people who study such issues suggest some answers. But — as is the case with Iraq itself — unanimity is elusive.

In general, Muslims worldwide split along Sunni and Shiite lines — but Sunnis far outnumber Shiites. Among the world's 1.2 billion or 1.3 billion Muslims, anywhere from 85 to 90 percent are Sunnis.

Iraq stands among the few exceptions. In all, 60 percent or more of Iraq's 23 million people are Shiites.

Perhaps 34 percent are Sunnis. But the Sunni share includes the Kurds of northern Iraq — and the Kurds are not Arabs. So the Sunni Arab hold embraces only about one in five Iraqis.

In democratic theory, the Shiite-Sunni split should mean little. But when the factions split in the 7th century, the cause was a here-and-now political issue — who would succeed the Prophet Muhammad as Islam's leader.

The Shiites wanted succession in the prophet's bloodline, while the Sunnis favored a leader — a caliph — chosen by the community of the faithful. Although the Sunnis prevailed, the caliphate folded after World War I.

Gradually, some purely religious divisions arose between the two factions. In Iraq, as elsewhere, Shiite Muslims have a formal structure of clerics ("imams"), while Sunnis hold that religion is a matter between God and the individual.

Another difference: Shiites are open to interpretation of the Quran, Islam's Holy Book. But Sunnis "say the door to interpretation is closed," says Middle East scholar Victor Le Vine of Washington University's political-science department.

Still, the theological divisions are arcane, and generalizations about Sunnis and Shiites come hard. As Le Vine notes, both factions have their fundamentalists and their reformists.

"With the fall of Saddam, the Shia and the Kurds gained — and the Sunnis lost. They're in a losing position, and that — not religion — seems to be the driving force for the insurgency," says political-science professor Stephen Quackenbush of the University of Missouri at Columbia.

The Iraq we see on today's map was invented by Winston Churchill, Britain's colonial secretary after World War I. He cobbled together three provinces from the empire of the defeated Ottoman Turks and called it a nation. But Iraq's three parts never quite meshed as one.

In the south sat the Ottoman province of Basra, named for its key city. There, Shiites dominated, as they do now. In the north sat the Ottoman province of Mosul, dominated then as now by the Kurds, those non-Arab Sunnis. Sandwiched in the middle was the Ottoman province of Baghdad, dominated then as now by the Sunnis.

Even so, the Sunnis held the upper hand throughout Churchill's new Iraq, as they had for almost three centuries of Ottoman rule.

Starting in 1501, the Ottoman Turks battled the Persian Safavids — the people we now call Iranians — for control of the turf we now call Iraq. Like today's Iranians, the Persians were Shiites. When the Ottoman Turks finally won out in 1638, they favored the native Sunnis. The Shiites dropped to second-class status.

In World War I, Sunnis in what is now Saudi Arabia joined the British in the war against the Ottoman Turks, allies of Imperial Germany. When the war ended, so did the Ottoman Empire — and British soldiers were on the ground in Iraq.

"As allies, the Arabian Sunnis had to be rewarded," says Washington University's Le Vine. "So the British installed Faisal, an Arabian Sunni, as the king of Iraq."

Until Faisal settled into his throne, the British had a mandate from the League of Nations to run Iraq. When they looked around for natives with experience as military officers and government ministers, they found only Sunnis

"The Ottomans had trained the Sunnis," says Phebe Marr, a historian of Iraq and a senior fellow in Washington at the congressionally chartered U.S. Institute of Peace.

She says the Iraqi uprising against the British occupation in 1920 was largely a Shiite affair, although some Sunnis joined in. After the British put down the insurgency, she says, "The Shia took themselves out of the running for positions of power."

Through the following decades of monarchs, military juntas and one-party Baathist rule, the minority Sunnis ran things, lording it over the Shiites and the Kurds. But when the statue of Saddam toppled in April 2003, so did the Sunnis' top-dog status.

Now, says historian Marr, "Power is at the core of the political differences." Le Vine says, "The Shia are in no mood to take any guff from the Sunnis. There's an undertone of revenge there."

The issue of pure power aside, the Sunnis and Shiites have specific political differences.

One is federalism — the division of power between the national government and Iraq's 18 provinces. Although the constitution calls for a federal system, "It leaves a great deal deliberately unsaid," Le Vine says. "Specificity will be the job of the new government."

That new government will have to decide the degree of free agency among Iraq's leading players.

In the north, the Kurds all but won their independence after the first Gulf War, thanks to a U.S. air umbrella in the 1990s. "The Kurds don't want much integration" with the rest of Iraq, says professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, a specialist in the history of Shiites in the region. "So they suggested federalism."

At first, he says, the Shiites were cool to the idea of a weak central government. "They wanted to rule the whole thing, not a moth-eaten Iraq," he says.

But in last January's elections, the Shiite parties carried nine provinces. As a result, Cole says, "They began to see some advantages to federalism — one of them being that the parties would control the resources."

That means the oil. The Kurds have some oil in the north. The Shiites have a lot of oil in the south. But in between, the Sunnis have almost none.

Cole says that in principle, the Sunnis are nationalists, "wedded to the idea of a strong central state." But they're also pragmatists. They know that in an Iraq of three largely autonomous regions, the two with the oil will prosper — while the Sunni region will come up dry.

That's why the Sunnis stack up as the main opponents of the constitution. Under the rules for the election, the Sunnis can reject the charter if they vote against it by a two-thirds ratio in any three of the four provinces where they dominate.

In an attempt at a compromise agreeable to Sunni Arabs, the Transitional National Assembly on Wednesday approved last-minute changes to the constitution, including a plan for making new amendments with more Sunni Arab input.

Le Vine and Marr see yet another issue dividing Shiites and Sunnis — the Islamization of Iraqi society.

Under Saddam, Iraq was largely secular. Among other things, women could wear Western clothing. But Marr says the Shiites have put a priority today on spreading Islamic rules.

Le Vine agrees, to a point. He notes that the new constitution declares, "Islam is the official religion of the state." But he also says Iraq's Shiites would probably stop short of an Iranian-style council of clerics, ready to pounce on any turn toward secularism by the elected government.

For one thing, Le Vine notes, the Kurds wouldn't stand for it in their part of Iraq. As Michigan's Cole puts it, "The Kurds don't have much use for fundamentalism."

For another thing, all brands of Islam lack any wall between church and state. In Islam, church and state join hands in a way that's hard for Westerners to grasp. It's been that way since Muhammad, whose rule was spiritual and temporal.

Posted by admin at October 19, 2005 02:53 PM