# The Ayatollahs and Democracy in Iraq

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Juan Cole, The Ayatollahs and Democracy in Iraq, Leiden: Amsterdam University Press / ISIM, 2006, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> The Ayatoll ahs and Democracy in Iraq
> The ISIM Papers represent individual lectures delivered at the ISIM. The aim
> of this series is both to allow the papers, initially presented before limited
> audiences, to be shared by the entire academic community and to contribute
> to the further development of the study of Islam in the modern world.
> 
> Published by:
> International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM)
> 
> i s i m pa p e r s :
> 
> 1. James Piscatori
> Islam, Islamists, and the Electoral Principle in the Middle East
> 
> 2. Talal Asad
> Thinking about Secularism and Law in Egypt
> 
> 3. John Bowen
> Shari’a, State, and Social Norms in France and Indonesia
> 
> 4. Barbara D. Metcalf
> ‘Traditionalist’ Islamic Activism: Deoband, Tablighis, and Talibs
> 
> 5. Abdulaziz Sachedina
> The Role of Islam in the Public Square: Guidance or Governance?
> 
> 6. Lila Abu-Lughod
> Local Contexts of Islamism in Popular Media
> 
> 7. Juan R.I. Cole
> The Ayatollahs and Democracy in Iraq
> T H E A Y A T O L L AHS
> A N D D E M O C R ACY
> IN IRAQ
> Ju a n R . I . C o l e
> 
> i s i m pa p e r 7
> 
> a m s t e r da m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s
> isim / leiden
> Cover design and lay-out: De Kreeft, Amsterdam
> 
> isbn-13   978 90 5356 889 7
> isbn-10   90 5356 889 1
> issn      1568-8313
> nur       717
> 
> © Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2006
> 
> All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights
> under copyright reserved above, no part of this
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> owner and the author of the book.
> The Ayatoll ahs and Democracy in Iraq
> 
> This ISIM Annual Lecture was delivered on 1 December 2005
> at the Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam.
> 
> Clerically-led Shiism in Iraq is undergoing a reformation, in which leading
> figures are attempting to reconcile the principles of Islam with those of the
> Enlightenment. This encounter between the two systems is hardly new, and
> the contradictions are hardly easy to work out. Yet the current attempt by
> ayatollahs to engage with the ideals of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is among the
> more thorough-going and institutionally promising in modern history. Here
> we will look at the clerical discourse on popular sovereignty and elections
> during the first eighteen months after the fall of Saddam.
> What drove the Iraqi Shiite clerical leadership to champion elections and
> popular sovereignty in post-Baathist Iraq? Was this stance wholly new in that
> tradition, or were there precedents? Was the American administration help-
> ful to them in developing this vision, or did it attempt to stand in its way?
> How did their stance articulate with popular politics in the country, during a
> time of both military and administrative occupation by the Americans? How
> did these thinkers reconcile the secular implications of popular sovereignty
> (after all the people are free to choose to be irreligious) with their own dedica-
> tion to establishing an Islamic state in Iraq, ruled by Islamic law?
> Notions of the basis of political and religious authority have changed con-
> siderably within the Twelver Shiite tradition. They hold that after the death
> of the Prophet Muhammad, legitimate authority should have passed to his
> son-in-law, Ali b. Abi Talib, and thence to a line of his descendants. With the
> exception of Ali himself, these “Imams” or divinely appointed leaders never
> actually came to power, though they exerted spiritual influence over their
> followers. That line of Imams ended with the Twelfth Imam, who is said to
> have vanished into a mystical realm in CE 873, from which he will someday
> return. The solution to the problem of legitimate authority in the absence
> of the Prophet Muhammad was now itself problematic, since there were no
> more Imams. Shiites dealt in various ways with the problem of who should
> 
> rule that ensued from the Imam’s disappearance or occultation, but for the
> most part they were willing to suffer with a “common-law” (ªurfi) or civil
> state until his messianic advent. The illegitimacy of political life under these
> conditions was mitigated in the view of the majority school of jurisprudence
> by the ability of a new corps of seminary-trained clerics to authorize some
> state functions, such as the collection of religious taxes, the holding of Friday
> congregational prayers, the appointment of religious jurisconsults, and the
> declaration of defensive holy war. Monarchy and, in modern times, republics
> and nation-states were thus seen as unfortunate necessities, only partially
> legitimate, but the best one could do until the Imam returned.1 From the
> late 1960s, Khomeini put forward a novel theory that in the absence of the
> Imam, the trained Shiite clerics should rule, in accordance with Islamic law.
> He was dismissive of democracy, saying that if the people disagreed with the
> religious texts, the people would be wrong.2
> Iraqi Shiite theorists of the Islamic state for the most part had a differ-
> ent vision than that of Khomeini, and their writing on this matter much
> preceded his.3 The Daªwah Party was formed in the late 1950s in Iraq, envis-
> aged as a Shiite response to the Communist and Baath Parties.4 Its main
> ideologue was Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr of Najaf, who envisaged
> 
> 1   Many of these themes are treated in Juan Cole, Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics,
> Culture, and History of Shi’ite Islam (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002).
> 2   Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (Berkeley: University of
> California Press, 1993).
> 3   For the historical background of modern Iraqi Shiism, see Pierre-Jean Luizard, La formation
> de l’Irak contemporain [The Formation of Contemporary Iraq] (Paris: Editions du Centre
> national de la recherche scientifique, 1991); Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi’is of Iraq (Princeton:
> Princeton University Press, 1994); Meir Litvak, Shi’ite Scholars of Nineteenth Century Iraq
> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Faleh ªAbd al-Jabar, ed., Ayatollahs, Sufis and
> Ideologues (London: Saqi Books, 2002).
> 4   Salah al-Khursan, Hizb al-Da‘wa al-Islamiyya: Haqa’iq wa watha’iq [The Islamic Da’wa Party:
> Facts and Documents] (Damascus: al-Mu’assassa al-‘Arabiyya li’l-Dirasat wa’l-Buhuth al-
> Istratijiyya, 1999); Ruhaimi, “The Da‘wa Islamic Party,” in ªAbd al-Jabar, Ayatollahs, pp. 149-
> 161; Keiko Sakai, “Modernity and tradition in the Islamic movements in Iraq,” Arab Studies
> Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Winter 2001), pp. 37-52; Mahan Abedin, “Dossier: Hezb al-Daawa
> al-Islamiyya: Islamic Call Party,” Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, Vol. 5, No. 6 (June 2003) at:
> www.meib.org/articles/0306_iraqd.htm ; Hanna Batatu, “Shi‘ite Organizations in Iraq: Al-
> Da‘wah al-Islamiyah and al-Mujahidin,” in Juan R. I. Cole and Nikki R. Keddie, eds., Shi‘ism
> and Social Protest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 179-200; Joyce N. Wiley, The
> Islamic Movement of Iraqi Shi‘ites (Boulder, Co.: Lynne Rienner, 1992).
> 
> an Islamic republic, but not one necessarily ruled by clerics.5 The republic
> was to implement Islamic canon law (sharia), and would have a consultative
> council (shura). These are stock elements in any Islamist political program of
> the twentieth century. It is seldom made clear by thinkers such as Muham-
> mad Baqir al-Sadr (or by his contemporaries, such as Abu al-Ala’ al-Mawdudi
> of the Jama’at-i Islami in Pakistan or Muhammad al-Hudaybi of the Muslim
> Brotherhood in Egypt) how the “consultative council” comes into being or
> to whom it is responsible, apart from God. That is, the invocation of the
> consultative element did not necessarily imply parliamentary democracy for
> al-Sadr. A Leninist style democratic centralism would have fit the “consulta-
> tive council” language just as well. Still, a parliamentary system with open
> elections would not be incompatible with al-Sadr’s vision in any obvious way,
> in contrast to the thinking of Khomeini, which was actively hostile to the
> notion of popular sovereignty.
> Although he was a quietist earlier in his career, Grand Ayatollah Ali Husay-
> ni Sistani emerged in the twenty-first century as among the more important
> shapers of democracy in modern Iraq. He was born in 1930 in Mashhad,
> eastern Iran. Sistani, from a clerical family, carried out his initial studies
> with his father and other great clerics in the city of his birth. Around 1948
> he went off for higher studies to Qom, not far from the capital of Tehran
> in the north-central part of the country. There he worked with the greatest
> Shiite authority of the time, Ayatollah Husayn Burujirdi. Late in 1951, the
> young Sistani went to Najaf in Iraq to complete his education, and ended
> up staying there the rest of his life. For the next decade, he studied with the
> leading jurists of that city. To any extent that Sistani thought about political
> matters, he appears to have been shaped by the ideals of the Constitutional
> Revolution in early twentieth century Iran (1905-1911). In post-Saddam Iraq,
> Sistani referred proudly to the role of Najaf clerics in theorizing a synthesis
> of Shiite Islam and Western-style constitutionalism in 1905-1911. That experi-
> ment ultimately failed, but left behind a body of thought on which clerics of
> Sistani’s generation continued to draw.
> In 1968 the secular, Arab nationalist Baath Party came to power in a coup.
> Sistani himself adhered to the quietism of Burujirdi (d. 1961), Grand Ayatol-
> 
> 5   Talib Aziz, “The Political Theory of Muhammad Baqir Sadr,” in ªAbd al-Jabar, pp. 231-
> 244; Chibli Mallat, The Renewal of Islamic Law: Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr, Najaf, and the Shi’i
> International (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
> 
> lah Muhsin al-Hakim (d. 1970), and Grand Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim Khu’i (d.
> 1992). He therefore avoided coming into direct conflict with the one-party
> state, though he clearly rued the way in which the seminary city of Najaf was
> reduced to a shadow of its former self and the Shiite clergy were driven into
> exile or killed in the dozens. Sistani also regretted the excesses of the Islamic
> Republic from 1979 in his homeland, where Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini
> instituted a clerical theocracy. He told one visiting scholar, “Even if I must be
> wiped out, I will not let the experience of Iran be repeated in Iraq.”6
> In 1979, Saddam Hussein made a coup within the Baath Party and took it
> in an increasingly draconian direction. Alarmed by the Islamic Revolution in
> neighboring Iran, Saddam cracked down hard on the Shiite political move-
> ments. He outlawed the Daªwah Party and made membership in it a capital
> crime. He had major leaders arrested and many of them executed. Others
> fled in droves to Tehran. There, in 1982, Khomeini urged them to organize an
> umbrella group, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).
> It initially included the Daªwah Party, but its leaders left in 1984 to maintain
> their independence. In 1984, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim became its leader,
> and the organization increasingly consisted of his loyalists.7 The Supreme
> Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq would emerge as among the more
> important political parties after the Americans overthrew the Baath.
> After leaving SCIRI, lay Daªwah Party leaders in Tehran became increasing-
> ly uncomfortable in clerically-dominated Tehran, and many left for London,
> which quickly became the center of gravity of the party. There, they began to
> see the benefits of the Westminster model of “consultation.” By 2002, Daªwah
> Party leaders in exile had increasingly moved to a full-fledged parliamentary
> model. It no doubt helped that affirmation of a commitment to parliamenta-
> ry governance was central to any alliance with the United States in the build-
> up to the invasion, an alliance into which the London branch of the Daªwah
> allowed itself to be drawn. In December of 2002, as the war was building, a
> Damascus-based leader of the Daªwah Party, Nuri Abu al-Mahasin, then going
> by his nom de guerre of Jawad al-Maliki, was asked by the Beirut daily al-Safir
> what sort of government he envisaged in post-war Iraq. He replied, “We pre-
> fer the democratic game. What the people decide is the thing that matters,
> 
> 6   Interview with Ghassan Attiyah, Ottawa, May 14, 2006.
> 7   Mukhtar al-Asadi, Al-Taqsir al-Kabir bayna al-Salah wa al-Islah [Mere Passive Goodness Falls
> Far Short of Active Reform] (Beirut: Dar al-Furat, 2001).
> 
> away from sects and ethnicity. This is although we call for an Islamic – not
> religious – state as long as the Iraqis voluntarily and willingly support such
> a state.”8 His distinction between an “Islamic” and a “religious” state is prob-
> ably actually between a lay-governed regime that foregrounds Islamic canon
> law and a clerically-ruled theocracy. The lay leaders of the Daªwah Party had
> never liked the Khomeinist model of rule by a supreme jurisprudent. What
> is remarkable here, however, is al-Maliki’s full endorsement of a universalist
> version of popular sovereignty.
> The Iraqi clerics in the post-Saddam period showed increasing openness
> to the idea of popular sovereignty as expressed at the ballot box. On May 10,
> the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Ayatollah
> Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, returned to his native country from exile in
> Iran. He arrived at a time when a new American civil administrator, Paul
> Bremer, had taken the reins of power. His predecessor, Jay Garner, had taken
> steps toward appointing a governing council made up of Iraqi expatriate
> politicians plus the Kurdish leaders, and from all accounts he hoped to move
> quickly toward holding a congress in summer of 2003 that would elect an
> Iraqi government, so that the Americans could swiftly depart. When Bremer
> arrived, however, he set aside Garner’s plans and intimated that he would
> rule Iraq single-handedly for some time, perhaps for years.
> Bremer intended to follow a seven-stage plan for putting Iraq back on its
> feet. One stage was to appoint a committee of Iraqis to work with Ameri-
> can advisers in drafting a new permanent constitution for Iraq. Bremer
> announced his intentions in early June. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim made
> this plan the center piece of the first Friday prayers sermon he preached in
> Najaf, on June 6. He observed, “The United States suggests that the coalition
> forces form a council, which it itself appoints. This council is to sit down,
> draft a constitution and present it to the people.” He then thundered, “This
> is a path that we and the authorities believe is an incorrect path.”9 Al-Hakim
> went on to say that if the new Iraqi government was to function well, it
> would have to be established on several key pillars. They included respect for
> the will of the people as expressed at the ballot box, respect for ethnic minori-
> ties via a federal system of government, and respect for Islam through the
> 
> 8   “Al-Da’wah Party Official on Iraqi Opposition Conference, Possible War,” Al-Safir,
> 17 December 2002, FBIS.
> 9   “SCIRI Spokesman Rejects US Proposal to Appoint Iraqi Council,” Jazeera TV, Doha,
> in AArabic 1716 GMT 6 Jun 03. BBC Monitoring, June 7, 2003.
> 
> enforcement of Islamic canon law (sharia). The notion of an American viceroy
> high-handedly appointing a committee to write the constitution offended the
> first of these principles, i.e. popular sovereignty as expressed through elec-
> tions and referenda. An American-sponsored constitution, moreover, would
> almost certainly lack a strong element of Islamic law. Al-Hakim did not see
> sharia and popular sovereignty as contradictory, but rather as overlapping.
> He had a point. In a society that is 96 percent Muslim, Islamic canon law and
> Muslim customary law clearly would be extensively incorporated into law
> and administration in any truly democratic system. He feared, however, that
> Bremer’s way of working would be neither democratic nor Islamic.
> In an interview with Der Spiegel that appeared the day after the sermon,
> al-Hakim reiterated his commitments. He told the interviewer, “We want
> no dictator, no one-man or one-party state. Iraq will be a democratic state,
> in which the rights of all the groups in society will be respected. It will be a
> state in which the values of Islam and all the other religions will be respected
> and served.”10 He went on to say that if Iraqis were given their head, they
> would be able to establish a government of their own within four weeks. It
> is likely that, ironically enough, it was not only the excesses of Khomeinism
> in Iran but also the figure of American viceroy in Iraq, J. Paul Bremer III, that
> helped push clerics such as al-Hakim toward democratic thinking. Iraq was
> in June of 2003 under one-man rule, that of Bremer. Democracy, and appeals
> to the ballot box and popular sovereignty, were emerging as tools whereby
> the Shiite clerics could undermine the legitimacy of Bremer’s rule and claim
> the mantle of the people’s choice for themselves.
> Al-Hakim was not alone in his commitment to both the ballot box and
> to sharia. Grand Ayatollah Sistani of Najaf, who had even more authority,
> adopted the same position. In his first major fatwa after the fall of Saddam,
> critiquing the American plan to appoint a committee to draft the Iraqi con-
> stitution, Sistani rejected the Khomeinist tradition by also accepting the prin-
> ciple of popular sovereignty. In his ruling or fatwa of 28 June, 2003, Sistani
> explained that there was no way of being sure that the American-appointed
> committee “will draft a constitution that conforms with the highest inter-
> ests of the Iraqi people and would express its national identity, one basis of
> which is the pure Islamic religion and noble social values.” Sistani insisted
> that any body that drafted the new constitution would have to be elected by
> 
> 10 Bernhard Zand, “Amerika ist parteiisch,” Der Spiegel, 7 June 2003. My translation.
> 
> the people. He said that the draft constitution should then be submitted to
> a national referendum.
> In other statements coming out of Najaf, it was clear that the high cler-
> ics, including Sistani, saw governmental legitimacy as deriving from two
> sources. One was the seal of approval (al-imda’) given by the grand ayatollahs
> in Najaf. The other is the approval or agreement of the people through a gen-
> eral election.11 In the absence of these two, the American-appointed Interim
> Governing Council lacked legitimacy, according to the communiqué. This
> statement recognizes two sources of legitimacy for an Iraqi government. The
> dual sources of legitimacy did not imply, in the thinking of Sistani and those
> around him, any sort of theocracy.
> On November 15, US civil administrator Paul Bremer made a pact with the
> Interim Governing Council that he himself had appointed, which called for
> council-based elections in May, 2004.12 The plan had five basic stages. First,
> the Interim Governing Council would craft a Basic Law allowing a transi-
> tional government to be elected and operate. Second, by the spring, each of
> Iraq’s 18 provinces would hold conventions made up of notables, elders and
> tribal chieftains. These conventions would elect altogether over two hundred
> members to an interim parliament, based on proportional representation.
> This interim parliament would in turn elect a prime minister. This process
> would be complete by June, 2004. Third, at that point, Mr. Bremer’s Coali-
> tion Provisional Authority would hand over power to the new government
> and close up shop. The US and UK military would remain in Iraq, however,
> and the new government could invite other international contributors of
> troops and other help. Fourth, the interim government would hold elections
> for delegates to a constitutional convention to draft the new constitution,
> in accordance with the fatwa or legal ruling of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
> Fifth, formal elections on the basis of one person, one vote, would be held
> to install a new government, to which the interim government will hand
> power. This plan clearly was intended to achieve a restoration of sovereignty
> to the Iraqi people without risking their voting in an anti-American govern-
> ment. The Americans appear to have believed that if genuine elections were
> permitted in spring of 2004 there was a risk that extreme Arab nationalists
> 
> 11 “Hawzat al-Najaf Tasdur Fatwa didd Qanun al-Jinsiyyah al-ªIraqiyyah,” ash-Sharq al-Awsat,
> October 7, 2003.
> 12 Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to bring
> Democracy to Iraq (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2005), pp. 50-52, 78-87.
> 
> and radical Sunni and Shiite Muslims might have undue influence in the par-
> liament. The system Bremer put forward involved voting by members of the
> provincial and municipal governing councils established by the Americans
> and British. These council members had gotten into power because of small,
> unrepresentative selection processes overseen by the occupation authorities
> and companies it hired.
> Signs of discontent with the November 15 agreement soon began sur-
> facing, even among members of the Interim Governing Council that had
> approved it. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council
> for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, had been assassinated on August 29, 2003,
> and was succeeded by his brother, Abdu’l-ªAziz. The new SCIRI leader com-
> plained on November 18 about the US plan for handing over sovereignty to an
> Iraqi government by June. He said the process whereby this plan was worked
> out was rushed, and was largely dictated to the Iraqis. The Associated Press
> quoted him as saying, “The Americans were insisting that they wanted to
> end this matter quickly. There was rushing and although there were reserva-
> tions by other council members … regrettably [the Americans] did not stop or
> give more time for unanimous consent to be reached. The Iraqi people were
> pushed aside and the Iraqi people should play an important role. This con-
> tradicts the principles of democracy.”13 The “caucus-based” elections pushed
> by the Bush administration were more oligarchical than democratic, and the
> Shiite clerics opposed to the scheme focused on this flaw in their critique,
> positioning themselves as champions of genuine popular democracy.
> One subtext of the Shiite clerics’ disagreement with the Bremer plan,
> however, was the struggle between a secular and a religious vision of Iraq’s
> future government. A “democratic” process, in the eyes of the clerics and
> their supporters, was also one that would ensure the enshrining of indig-
> enous values, i.e. Islam. The Bremer plan made no mention of the place of
> Islam or Islamic law in the new government, and the provincial and munici-
> pal governing councils had been stacked by the Americans and British with
> relatively secular, pro-Western notables. This dimension of the dispute was
> made clear by Adil ªAbd al-Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolu-
> tion in Iraq, who told a Western wire service the next day, “This agreement
> lacks any reference to the respect of the Islamic identity of most of the Iraqi
> 
> 13 Bassem Mroue, “Shiite Governing Council member expresses reservations about
> sovereignty transfer agreement,” AP, November 19, 2003.
> 
> population and the guarantee of the rights of other religions and sects.”14
> Shiite leaders had other critiques of the Bremer plan. Among them was
> that the electorate he envisaged, members of the municipal and provincial
> councils, was a hodgepodge. IGC member Ahmad Shiyaª al-Barak, a human
> rights lawyer and a leader of the Al Bu Sultan tribe of Babil province, told
> al-Hayat that before elections could be held, the municipal and provincial
> councils had to be reformed.15 He pointed out that some municipal councils
> doubled as provincial ones (i.e. they have authority over the capital as well
> as the whole province). They differed in how they were chosen, differed with
> regard to how many members they had, and no standard set of regulations
> specified their functions. Al-Barak was clearly concerned that if the councils
> – many of them formed under watchful US eyes – were to function as the
> election commissions, they could have been crucial in shaping the elector-
> ate and the outcome of the polls. Therefore, their nature was the key to the
> elections as the Bremer Accord envisaged them. He wanted “vast reforms” in
> these councils before those elections.
> Although Abd al-Mahdi, ironically enough, had earlier been the one who
> assured Bremer that Grand Ayatollah Sistani accepted the outline of the plan,
> either he was prevaricating or it was not fully explained to the sage of Najaf.
> When the grand ayatollah understood that the Iraqi parliament was to be
> elected by what Americans called “caucuses,” rather than on the basis of one
> person, one vote, Sistani rejected this plan out of hand. In response to the
> questions of Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post, he gave his most explicit
> fatwa yet on popular sovereignty. Responding to Bremer’s council-based plan,
> he said, “The instrumentality envisaged in it for electing the members of the
> transitional legislature does not guarantee the formation of a parliament that
> truly represents the Iraqi people. It must be changed to some other method,
> which would guarantee it. And that is [direct] elections, such that the parlia-
> ment would derive from the will of the Iraqis and would represent them in a
> just manner and will safeguard it from any challenge to its legitimacy.”16 Sis-
> 
> 14 “Iraqi Shiites unhappy with ‘unclear’ agreement on handover of power,” Deutsche Presse-
> Agentur, November 20, 2003.
> 15 Al-Hayat, November 24, 2003, summarized at www.juancole.com for November 24, 2003.
> 16 “Fatwa for Anthony Shadid,” online in Arabic at www.sistani.org/messages/antoni.htm;
> reported in the Washington Post by Anthony Shadid and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Cleric
> Renews Call for Iraq Elections,” November 29, 2003, but with a less technical translation
> of the Arabic than the one I give above.
> 
> tani also told visitors in this period that he was concerned that the November
> 15 agreement made no explicit place for Islam and gave no guarantees that
> un-Islamic laws would be prohibited.
> Sistani’s position insisting on open elections met with immediate acclaim
> from the Shiite religious leaders and parties. Even the radical young cleric
> Muqtada al-Sadr weighed in on the side of one-person, one-vote polls. His
> spokesman came out to say, “All bodies that are not elected will be deemed
> illegitimate.”17 Bremer orchestrated a vote on the Interim Governing Council
> against Sistani’s plan for direct elections, but defying the grand ayatollah
> would not prove politic in the end. Ironically, Shiite religious forces that ear-
> lier had had little interest in democracy now rallied around the idea of Iraqi
> popular sovereignty and direct elections, including the Sadr movement. Paul
> Martin of the Washington Times reported that on December 3 :
> 
> Members of a Shi’ite Muslim movement demonstrated outside the local coalition
> headquarters yesterday to demand that elections be held before a new govern-
> ment and constitution are established. The protesters held up banners and daubed
> cement blocks around the headquarters building with slogans such as “Down
> U.S.A.” and “Death to America.” “At present, we are in the stage of peaceful nego-
> tiations,” said a white-turbaned sheik from the al-Sadr faction, the most hard-line
> of the three main Shi’ite political movements. “I pray to Allah that we do not have
> to move to violence and killing,” he said as he strode with 250 followers toward
> the heavily protected headquarters on the banks of the Euphrates River.18
> 
> The Hilla demonstrations in favor of free and open elections had a local con-
> text, insofar as many Shiites opposed the American-appointed governor of
> the province, Jawad Witwit, whom they accused of being an ex-Baathist, and
> they conducted demonstrations against this appointed figure in December
> that forced him to resign. Then the US appointed a former air force officer
> as governor, but the activist Shiites considered him unacceptable as well and
> mounted more demonstrations. Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post
> 
> 17 Nadra Saouli, “Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority seeks to exert its political weight,” AFP,
> November 27, 2003; for the Sadr Movement see Juan Cole, “The United States and Shi‘ite
> Religious Factions in Post-Ba‘thist Iraq,” The Middle East Journal, Volume 57, Number 4,
> Autumn 2003, pp. 543-566.
> 18 Paul Martin, “Shi’ite demonstrators demand elections,” The Washington Times,
> December 4, 2003.
> 
> reported on one such rally: “‘Yes, yes for elections!’ shouted the protesters,
> a collection of students, clerics and middle-aged professionals whose ranks
> swelled to more than 1,000. ‘No, no to appointment!’.”19 They said that they
> had taken heart from Sistani’s call for direct elections. They also no doubt
> feared that Bremer’s “caucus-based” elections would produce similar high
> officials for the whole country. The Hilla demonstrations of fall 2003 showed
> that the rhetoric of open elections was being taken up by the Iraqi street.
> The techniques of crowd politics pioneered by the Sadr movement in post-
> Saddam Iraq were to be adopted by other Shiite religious groups with great
> effectiveness.
> Other clerics who worked under Sistani’s penumbra, whether in religion
> or politics or both, took up the discourse of the popular will. Abd al-ªAziz al-
> Hakim became president of the Interim Governing Council, and in December
> he visited Germany for consultations with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
> The Lebanese Broadcasting Company satellite television news anchor report-
> ed that al-Hakim “has renewed his support for a bigger UN role in bringing
> democracy back to Iraq. Following his meeting with German Chancellor Ger-
> hard Schroeder in Berlin, Al-Hakim said that he aims to establish a demo-
> cratic and free state in Iraq that respects all religions and human rights.”20
> While in exile in Tehran in the 1980s and 1990s, the al-Hakims had gone over
> to Khomeinism, but clearly on their return to Iraq they had begun rejecting
> dictatorial clerical rule as a model and begun acknowledging at least some
> elements of popular sovereignty, though what they meant by “democracy”
> and “human rights” might not have mapped exactly onto contemporary
> Western ideals. Still, for Abdu’l-ªAziz al-Hakim to use this discourse is itself
> significant.
> When Bremer and his Interim Governing Council rejected Sistani’s
> demands, the grand ayatollah orchestrated a campaign to rescind the Novem-
> ber 15 agreement. Democracy and popular sovereignty were emerging as
> central tools for the assertion of an indigenous, Iraqi, Shiite national identity,
> enshrined in a constitution that flowed from the sovereign people. Bremer
> 
> 19 Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “A troubling wound opens for the U.S. in Hilla,” Washington Post,
> December 13, 2003.
> 20 “LBC: IGC’s Al-Hakim Meets Schroeder, Renews Support for ‘Bigger UN Role’ in Iraq,”
> Beirut, LBC Satellite Television in Arabic 1500 GMT, 18 December, 2003. FBIS. See also
> Program Summary: Al-Manar Television, in Arabic 1830 GMT, Thursday, December 18,
> 2003, FBIS.
> 
> and his caucuses and his high-handed interim constitution were the anti-
> thesis of the autochthonous, the popular and the authentic.
> Sistani then demonstrated the sort of hold he had on the Iraqi street. In
> mid-January, 2004, he called tens of thousands of demonstrators into the
> streets of Basra and Baghdad, demanding direct elections. He also said that
> the United Nations should send an envoy to investigate the political situa-
> tion in Iraq and to look into the feasibility of holding direct elections in May,
> 2004.
> On January 14, Sistani held a meeting in Najaf at which he encouraged
> visiting clan leaders of Rumaitha, Samawah, and other middle Euphrates
> areas to insist on general elections as a means of achieving a new, sovereign
> Iraqi government. He promised the sheikhs of that region that they would
> exercise power, not “those who came from abroad.” He was referring to the
> members of the Interim Governing Council, many of whom returned from
> long years of exile in the West or in Iran after the fall of Saddam. Raghida
> Dergham quoted him in as saying, “Authority must be yours, and the coming
> parliament must be composed of elected children of the people.”21
> The tribal leaders from these areas had allied with the Shiite clergy in the
> spring, 1920, Great Rebellion against the British Mandate, which the British
> put down with difficulty and which led to the British colonial experiment
> in Iraq being much briefer than hawks such as Churchill had envisaged (it
> ended in 1932). Sistani invoked this history at the Najaf colloquy. He said, “We
> want you to be revolutionaries, just as we want you to exercise sovereignty.”
> He added, “You must play a great role, just as you played a role in the 1920
> Revolt.” In rural areas of Iraq, the sheikhs still have substantial authority,
> though most Iraqis are now urban.
> The invocation of 1920 was not, however, intended to signal that Sistani
> wanted a violent struggle. Sistani’s representative, Shaikh Muhammad Taha
> al-Husayni, told a crowd of students at Kufa on the same day as the Najaf
> meeting, “We must be conscious of our rights and demand them, as is appro-
> priate to a prepared people, since no one has the right to impose even one
> article of the Iraqi constitution.”22 He went on to urge non-violent action,
> saying that armed resistance would not serve the Iraqis at that point. Just as
> 
> 21 Al-Hayat, January 15, 2004, via www.juancole.com for January 15, 2004.
> 22 “Mumaththil al-Sistani yuªarid al-Muqawamah al-Musallahah fi al-Waqt al-Hali,” al-Sharq al-
> Awsat, 15 January, 2004.
> 
> Bremer’s one-man rule had helped push Iraqi clerics toward a discourse of
> popular, national sovereignty, so too had the prospect that a foreign, impe-
> rial power, might impose an alien constitution.
> On Thursday, January 15, 2004, Sistani’s representative in Basra, Hujjat
> al-Islam ªAli ªAbd al-Karim Safi al-Musawi, led a huge demonstration of some
> 40,000 in a procession through public streets. The crowds carried placards
> with slogans on them such as “Yes, Yes to Sistani, No, No to an Appointed
> [Government],” and “We Want a Constitution Written by Elected Iraqis.”
> When the crowd arrived at the mosque toward which they had marched,
> Safi al-Musawi addressed them, criticizing the November 15 agreement that
> forestalled open elections. He said that it had “been prepared with a haste
> that was not just, and that it did not “reflect the pluralism of Iraqi society”
> and would cause trouble among Iraq’s ethnic groups. He defended the idea
> of holding general elections, considering that it was possible to call Iraqis
> holding food ration cards to participate in the polling. Pamphlets circulated
> through Basra with slogans written on them, such as “Peaceful demonstra-
> tions are the best way of showing your support for the new democratic order,
> and the multinational forces are here to support your mobilization.” (The
> pamphleteers appear to have wanted to assure crowds that it would be safe to
> come out.) The demonstrations were supported by the Daªwah Party and the
> Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, though secular parties were
> absent.23 That Friday, Shaikh Abd al-Mahdi al-Karbala’i, Sistani’s representa-
> tive in the shrine city, warned that the coming days would witness demon-
> strations, strikes and even possibly confrontations with American forces if
> the Coalition insisted that it was impossible to conduct elections before the
> transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis.
> On January 19, the following Monday, the Shiite religious forces organ-
> ized a demonstration estimated at 100,000 strong in the capital. According
> to the Gulf daily al-Watan, they were expressing their support for Sistani’s
> demands that elections be held before sovereignty was transferred to Iraq
> by the US.24 The demonstration clearly was dominated by religious forces
> and was led by young Shiite clergymen who said that they represented vari-
> ous seminaries in Baghdad. The procession began at 8 am. They crossed the
> 
> 23 “Tazahurah daªman li al-Sistani fi al-Basrah,” Middle East Online, 16 January 2004, at www.
> middle-east-online.com/iraq/?id=20692.
> 24 “Muzahirat fi Baghdad,” Al-Watan, January 20, 2004, at www.alwatan.com/graphics/2004/
> 01Jan/20.1/dailyhtml/news1.html.
> 
> Muhammad al-Qasim bridge and headed for the Mustansiriyyah cathedral
> mosque in the center of Baghdad. The young clerical leaders carried post-
> ers and placards, most prominently of Sistani, while others functioned as
> parade marshals, urging the crowd to remain calm and to refrain from
> chanting insults against the Interim Governing Council. When asked, the
> young clerics said that no one movement had called the demonstrations,
> but that rather they represented the whole Iraqi people, and that the crowd
> had gathered to express its support of the grand ayatollah. Shaikh Muham-
> mad al-Kawarani said, “There is no party that organized the demonstration.
> The people organized themselves, since they want their right to an elec-
> tion.” Another young cleric, Muhammad Saªid, who was urging the crowd
> to stick to the route and not to spill onto side streets, said, “We are all Mus-
> lims and all of us are participating. What we want is free elections, noth-
> ing else.” Observers could distinguish thick concentrations in the crowd
> of supporters of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and
> of Muqtada al-Sadr. The crowd mingled slogans demanding elections and
> stressing the right of the Iraqi people to choose their leaders with religious
> chants, such as “Yes, yes, to Islam!” and “There is no deity but God and
> Muhammad is his Prophet!” They held aloft placards in Arabic and English
> urging elections, with phrases such as “Yes, yes to the religious leadership,
> and yes, yes to elections” and “The Surest Guarantee of True and Just Rep-
> resentation is Elections” and “Citizens, the Future will be Decided in the
> Coming Months! Be Zealous in Excercising your Rights in Determining the
> Course of Events!” The 5,000 out by the bridge called on the United Nations
> to exert pressure for elections, and carried placards with slogans such as,
> “We Ask the United Nations to Intervene in the Method of the Elections.”
> A representative of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq,
> Sabah al-Musawi, told Agence France Presse, “We support the position of
> Sistani, since democracy accords with his views. We desire wide partici-
> pation through free elections, not imposed appointment.” He added, “We
> cannot in the future defend Iraqi representatives elected by small groups.”
> One of Sistani’s representatives, who helped organize the demonstrations,
> said, “We Iraqis are a civilized people and are capable of deciding our fate.”
> He said that no appointed government could be depended on to give Iraqis
> their rights. He stressed, “The government would have no legitimacy, and
> the Iraqi people would neither cooperate nor interact with it, save if it is the
> Iraqi people who elect it.” The Bush administration immediately backed off,
> faced with these massive rallies, and cooperated with the sending of a UN
> 
> envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, to determine when and how (rather than whether)
> open elections would be held.25
> Meanwhile, members of the Interim Governing Council who earlier had
> favored the US approach to carefully controlled elections, based on the Coali-
> tion-appointed provincial councils, defected to Sistani. Ahmad Chalabi told a
> skeptical audience at the arch-conservative American Enterprise Institute in
> Washington, DC, that he now favored open elections and believed they could
> be held. And ªAbd al-ªAziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic
> Revolution in Iraq with its 15,000-strong Badr Corps paramilitary, told Reu-
> ters the same thing in late January: “It can be done, if we want it and make
> the effort. I believe they can be run.” Az-Zaman reported that al-Hakim admit-
> ted, “Ideally elections would depend on the existence of a census, an electoral
> law, and a law governing parties … There are problems … But I believe that
> [elections] will express the opinion and the will of the people … will give a
> voice to all, and holding them is feasible.”26
> In a February 2004 interview with the German magazine, Der Spiegel, Sis-
> tani said that he felt that the only way forward out of the quagmire was
> democratic elections.27 When the German interviewer inquired as to whether
> they might not produce a tyranny of the Shiite majority, Sistani demurred.
> “Not at all. Even if a certain community holds a majority in numbers, this
> will not lead to the creation of a political majority, because in every com-
> munity there are different political orientations.” He felt it was important
> that governments succeed one another peacefully, something that had been
> rare during his lifetime in Iraq. He added, “Also, since the majority of the
> Iraqi people are Muslims, they are sure to choose a system which will respect
> the principles of the Islamic Sharia, and also protect the religious minori-
> ties.” Sistani’s generousness of spirit blinded him to the need for constitu-
> tional and institutional protections for minorities, and to the ways in which
> implementation of Islamic law would disadvantage Chaldean and Assyrian
> Christians, heterodox Yazidis, and secularists, including secular women. His
> analysis of the fractured character of Shiite politics and the ability of minori-
> 
> 25 Diamond, Squandered Victory, pp. 135-139.
> 26 Al-Zaman, January 26, 2004, via Informed Comment, January 26, 2004 at www.juancole.
> com/2004/01/question-of-elections-in-iraq-in-past.html.
> 27 The interview is in Arabic at Sistani.org; the translations here are from “Newspaper
> Interview with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani . . . translated from a German Interview by
> Der Spiegel, Posted Feb 22, 2004,” Federal News Service, February 24, 2004, Lexis-Nexis.
> 
> ties such as the Kurds and Sunni Arabs to make their voices heard would be
> shown to be inaccurate in 2005, when the religious Shiite bloc, the United
> Iraqi Alliance, gained a majority in parliament. The subsequent elections of
> December, 2005, however, would produce a deeply divided parliament more
> closely resembling the one Sistani envisaged for Der Spiegel.
> A United Nations envoy prepared to come to Iraq to make a determination
> as to whether open elections were possible as early as that May, as Sistani
> believed. On February 4, Shaikh Abd al-Mahdi al-Karbala’i, Sistani’s repre-
> sentative in the holy city, “said that if the UN team ruled elections were not
> feasible before the 30 June handover deadline, the Shia clergy would ‘insist
> on a formula closer to elections than designations.’”28
> The issue continued to resonate at the local level, just as it had at Hilla. The
> next big struggle was in Nasiriyah. On January 28, a very large crowd, esti-
> mated by the Iraqi press as in the thousands, demonstrated against the Coali-
> tion-appointed governor of Dhi Qar province, Sabri Hamid Badr al-Rumayd.
> On Wednesday, February 4, another big rally was held, according to the Bagh-
> dad daily al-Zaman. The Virtue Party of Ayatollah Muhammad Yaªqubi, led
> in Nasiriyah by Shaikh Asªad al-Nasiri, and the Sadr movement of Muqtada
> al-Sadr, led locally by Shaikh Aws al-Khafaji, had repeatedly demanded that
> the local provincial council be dissolved, since it had been appointed by the
> Coalition Provisional Authority, and they viewed the governor elected by this
> appointed body as illegitimate. Under popular pressure, several of the mem-
> bers of the provincial council resigned.
> The Iraqi police in Nasiriyah declined to intervene against the demonstra-
> tion, and stood aside as spectators. The representative of Paul Bremer in the
> city, John Bourne, went on local television to explain that direct elections
> could not be held to select a new provincial council. He called on everyone to
> remain calm. Despite having announced the resignation of some members
> of the current provincial council “for private reasons,” he declined to ques-
> tion its legitimacy, and merely promised to add other members to replace
> the ones who had resigned. With the prospect of national elections sometime
> later that year, popular dissatisfaction with the US- and British-appointed pro-
> vincial councils was used by the Sadrists and the Virtue Party in an attempt
> to force direct elections at the provincial level before national elections were
> held. The distinction between “appointment” by a foreign power and popular
> 
> 28 Ahmed Janabi , “US hints at Iraq election rethink,” Aljazeera.net, 05 February 2004.
> 
> sovereignty as expressed at the ballot box was key to these local demonstra-
> tions in 2004.29
> The issue remained hot at the national level as well. On February 8, a
> political adviser to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Sayyid
> Muhsin al-Hakim (a brother of Abd al-ªAziz) gave an interview on issues in
> democracy and elections in the Persian newspaper Iran.30 He began by defin-
> ing what the Iraqi Shiites wanted. “Democracy can be regarded as one of the
> important parameters that create security and stability in a country. Democ-
> racy means that each person in society enjoys the rights of a citizen, can play
> a decisive role in determining his social and political fate, and can elect a
> government of his own choice. This is the accepted definition of democracy
> in political philosophy.” He condemned the apparent tendency among “all
> the three higher levels” of Iraqi politics at that point (presumably Bremer, the
> Interim Governing Council and the United Nations) to engage in “suspicious
> moves that want to bypass the vote of the Iraqi nation on various pretexts.”
> Sayyid Muhsin conceives of the intervention of Sistani as an operation
> of civil society, the public sphere that is neither governmental nor private.
> Western theorists of civil society, from Hegel to Habermas, had not empha-
> sized the role of religious institutions, in part because in European countries
> such as Germany the Protestant-Catholic divide was so significant as to make
> religion an unlikely platform for truly public, neutral interchanges, and so
> religion was increasingly conceived as part of the private sphere. The role
> of the Catholic Church in overthrowing Polish communism and the global
> religious resurgence of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,
> however, have led many social theorists to look at religion as part of civil
> society. Sayyid Muhsin positions the Najaf religious establishment in this
> light, and defends its neutrality. He notes, “Analyses sometimes carried out
> by some sources show that the true motive in this has not yet been clarified.”
> This is a way of saying that these observers suspected that Sistani was act-
> ing out of private or sectional motives, not out of truly public and national
> ones. He denies this charge, however: “Actually, one can say that the only
> objective that the religious reference point pursues is the institutionalization
> of democracy in Iraq and stabilizing the rights of the citizens based on the
> 
> 29 Al-Zaman, February 7, 2004, via www.juancole.com/2004/02/sadrists-occupy-provincial-hq-
> in.html.
> 30 “Iran: SAIRI Official Says Badr Organization Can Provide Security for Elections,” Iran in
> Persian 09 Feb 04, FBIS, February 9, 2004.
> 
> formula of one person, one vote.” Sayyid Muhsin uses the universal refer-
> ence-points of “the citizens,” of the individual voter, of stabilized rights and
> democratic institutions, to characterize Sistani’s program, eliding its sectar-
> ian and sectional context.
> He adds, “A look at Iraq of the past shows that destabilization efforts were
> carried out on three major levels: dictatorship on all levels, the religious sup-
> pression of Shiites; and racial apartheid against the Kurds, the Turkmen, and
> the Assyrians.” Here, he posits a parallel between the “religious suppression”
> of his own community and the “racial” repression against the ethno-linguis-
> tic groups. Both kinds of Iraqi ethnicity suffered under the Saddamist dicta-
> torship. He continues, “Thus, the only alternative is elections and democracy,
> which takes into mind the Islamic identity of the Iraqi nation and includes
> all the elements that form the Iraqi nation’s social fabric.” The uneasy co-
> existence here of particularistic Shiite demands (majority rule and Islamic
> law) with national claims to rights for all citizens is mediated by “elections
> and democracy.” This mechanism is envisaged as ending the threat of dicta-
> torship, ending religious discrimination, and ending racial or linguistically-
> based discrimination, all at once. He challenges the idea that the Shiites
> want elections only because they are the majority and will inevitably come
> to power that way. He insists that “the Iraqi Shiites and their sagacious reli-
> gious point of reference [highest spiritual authority] have always wanted the
> vindication of the rights of the other nationalities in Iraq and the recognition
> of their basic rights and freedoms.” In acting for their rights, the Shiite cler-
> ics insisted, they are securing the legitimate rights of all Iraqis. He goes on
> to threaten that if the Shiite community is thwarted in its demand for open
> elections, it would turn obstructionist and boycott the political process.
> Other SCIRI leaders, such as Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, wove the new discourse
> of national liberty through parliamentary elections into particularistic tradi-
> tions of Shiite piety. In early March of 2004, he gave a sermon on the ninth
> of Ashura, commemorating the martyrdom of Husayn, the grandson of the
> Prophet Muhammad, the central ritual commemoration of Shiite Islam. It
> was carried in the newspaper al-Adalah (Justice) on March 4. In the Shiite
> narrative, Husayn had stood with the masses in what is now Iraq against
> the oppression of the Umayyad Empire, then was cut down at Karbala by the
> armies sent out by the Caliph Yazid on October 10, 680. Al-Hakim addressed
> the crowd, saying, “We … pledge to our Imam al-Husayn to walk along his
> path, which calls for adherence to right, justice, and freedom, and rejects
> injustice, arbitrariness, and tyranny.” In this litany, “freedom” is perhaps the
> 
> only truly modern element, added by al-Hakim to the more traditional values
> of justice and right. Al-Hakim tied the passion of Husayn to the Iraqi Shiites’
> yearning for an end to occupation and the advent of an elected, democratic
> government:
> 
> The land of Iraq is the land of the holy places and the cradle of freedom, and our
> Imam Al-Husayn may peace be on him, is the leader of the martyred and father
> of the free peoples. In order to close the road to all kinds of dictatorships and to
> prevent a repetition of the bitter experience of Saddam’s tyranny, our demand for
> this dangerous and sensitive stage of our struggling people’s life is to insist on
> the holding of free and fair elections to enable our peoples to have their say and
> express their opinion about whom they may choose to represent them.31
> 
> He here suggests a cycle of descent into tyranny and ascent into liberation.
> The identification of Saddam Hussein with Yazid, the Umayyad persecutor
> of Imam Husayn, was by then a hackneyed trope in Iraqi Shiism. But in the
> context of March, 2004, al-Hakim’s reference to preventing further dictator-
> ship is an oblique reference to Bremer’s one-man rule of Iraq. In folk Shiism,
> it had been said that whoever weeps a tear for the slain Husayn was guaran-
> teed entry to paradise. That is, he is a salvific figure. Likewise, here, al-Hakim
> ties the symbology of the martyr’s sacrifice for spiritual salvation to a rheto-
> ric of the people’s sacrifice for national liberation. Al-Hakim thus sets up a
> neat parallel between the martyrdom of Husayn in the seventh century and
> the rise of democracy in the early twenty-first century. Iraq was the scene
> of both epiphanies. In both cases a long period of tyranny led the people
> to rise up. Inspired by the sacrifice of the Prophet’s scion, the Iraqi people
> now had the opportunity to institutionalize the values inherent in Ashura’
> of refusal to countenance oppression. Not only free and fair elections but
> also the rule of law are key to this new, continuous liberty. “The conferring
> peoples confirm the need to issue a permanent constitution in the country.
> The constitution should ensure the free and effective participation of all
> sectors of society in the administration of their country in legitimate and
> decentralized ways.” In this passage, we hear an early echo of al-Hakim’s
> largest disagreement with Sistani, over whether Iraqi governance was best
> 
> 31 “SCIRI’s Al-Hakim Demands Elections, Denounces Sectarianism,” Baghdad, Al-Adalah in
> Arabic 04 Mar 04, FBIS, Thursday, March 4, 2004.
> 
> pursued through a strong central government or through a decentralized,
> loose federalism.
> In the end, the plan Lakhdar Brahimi worked out with his American and
> Iraqi interlocutors gave Sistani most of what he wanted, though he did not
> get his May elections. Open elections were planned for late January 2005,
> after an initial transition from a purely American administration of the coun-
> try to an American-backed interim government. Sistani also got a United
> Nations resolution midwifing the new Iraq, internationalizing the process
> far beyond what the Bush administration had wanted.
> In the build-up to elections in January 2005, other high Shiite religious
> authorities also weighed in on democracy and popular sovereignty. The Bagh-
> dad newspaper al-Furat reported on October 10, 2004, that Grand Ayatollah
> Muhammad Ishaq Fayyad, a colleague in Najaf of Sistani who originally hailed
> from Afghanistan, also supported the electoral process. He demanded that the
> elections be held on schedule (i.e. no later than January 30, 2005) and “added
> that the elections represent the first step in the right direction toward build-
> ing a free Iraq and achieving justice and stability for the Iraqis.” He elaborated
> on the security issue, saying “that the security situation is connected to the
> holding of the elections, which would lead to a free and democratic govern-
> ment.” Implicit in the ayatollahs’ statements was a conviction that only an
> elected government would have the authority and legitimacy to begin work-
> ing on ending the foreign occupation of the country. Another Najaf grand aya-
> tollah, Muhammad Saªid al-Hakim, was asked if the religious establishment
> had a plan for the elections. He replied, “Its plan is to hold real and national
> elections that lead to the composition of a truly sovereign and independent
> government.” He stressed that the objective of the religious establishment is
> to unify the national ranks and underscore efficiency and national will. The
> Rousseauan language of the national or general will recurs here, and it shows
> that Sistani was not alone in his interest in Enlightenment ideals about popu-
> lar sovereignty. Sistani cobbled the Daªwah Party, the Supreme Council for
> Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and other Shiite religious parties into a single list,
> the United Iraqi Alliance. He advised Shiites to vote for it, and on January 30,
> 2005, it won a simple majority in the new parliament.
> 
> In conclusion, one can trace from April 2003 through January of 2005 a
> remarkable development in Shiite religious and legal thinking about democ-
> racy in Iraq. The ideals of elections, representation of the people, the expres-
> sion of the national will, and a rule of law are invoked over and over again
> 
> by the most prominent religious leaders. Unlike Khomeini in 1979, they are
> completely unafraid of the phrase term “democracy,” and generally see no
> contradiction between it and Islam. These democratic convictions, of course,
> have an immediate context. They give the religious establishment a means to
> ensure that the Shiite majority in Iraq gains its political voice after decades
> of severe repression. They also pave the way to an independent, sovereign
> Iraq that may finally escape foreign domination. This instrumental utility of
> democracy, however, cannot entirely explain the ayatollahs’ infatuation with
> it. Rather, they survived the dictatorships of Saddam and Khomeini alike,
> becoming disillusioned both with secularism and with authoritarian theoc-
> racy.
> The Shiite clerics were both helped and hindered by the Americans. The
> Bush administration, having proved unable to discover the weapons of mass
> destruction on which it had premised the war, increasingly turned to democ-
> ratization as the justification for the continued occupation of Iraq. This rheto-
> ric of democracy could thus be appropriated and used against the US by Iraqi
> actors. The “one-man rule” of Paul Bremer became an easy target of criticism
> when the Shiite clerics expressed their new commitment to popular rule.
> The Americans also provoked a backlash. The Coalition Provisional Authority
> under Paul Bremer stopped local elections and sought through the agree-
> ment of November 15, 2003 to forestall open, one-person, one-vote elections
> in Iraq for years to come. The Americans sought reliable local elites as allies,
> and feared the unpredictability of open elections. The Shiite clerics were able
> to enlist the Iraqi masses in their quest to pressure the Occupation Powers
> into permitting open elections, both at the local and the national level. Local
> protests at Hilla, Nasiriyah, Amara, Kut and elsewhere were important in
> putting pressure on the CPA, and reflected discontents with lack of fuel and
> services as well as a feeling of being blocked politically by foreign appoint-
> ees. But most dramatic of all were the massive demonstrations in Basra and
> Baghdad called in mid-January 2004 by Sistani.
> The Shiite clerics were convinced of the compatibility of popular sover-
> eignty with Islamic law at that point in Iraqi history, because they were sure
> that the Shiite masses in the South – constituting some 60 percent of the
> population – would vote for the Islamic parties and so ensure the triumph of
> sharia. Their vision of democracy therefore involved a conception of dual sov-
> ereignty, wherein clerical authority provided a bulwark against the possible
> irresponsibility of the enfranchised masses. Despite adoption of the language
> of “pluralism” (taªaddudiyyah) and expressing confidence that the rights of
> 
> minorities would be protected, the clerics seemed remarkably unafraid of
> the consequences of a tyranny of the Shiite majority. They therefore seldom
> supported any practical checks or balances to protect minority rights. The
> language they favored was that of the general will of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
> a democratic tradition notable for its lack of checks on majority power. Nev-
> ertheless, the clerics did speak clearly of minority rights and the need for
> pluralism, in a way that Khomeini never would have bothered to do. Some-
> thing new is clearly being born in Iraq that does not in the least resemble
> the theocratic systems of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr or Ayatollah Khomeini. It
> is being born of Iraqi history and thought, and as much in reaction against
> the US as in cooperation with it. Constitutionalism, open elections, and par-
> liamentary bargaining are key to this new thinking among the Shiite clerics.
> In the phrase of sociologist Asef Bayat, their democratic thinking is a mani-
> festation of “post-Islamism,” and very possibly the beginning of the Islamic
> Enlightenment.
> Juan R.I. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History at
> the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on modern Islamic
> movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His current research
> focuses on Shiite Islam in Iraq and Iran and on the “jihadi” or “sacred-war”
> strain of Muslim radicalism, including al-Qaeda and the Taliban. His publi-
> cations include Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural
> Origins of Egypt’s Urabi Movement (Princeton, 1993), and Modernity and the Millen-
> nium: The Genesis of the Baha’i Faith in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East (Colum-
> bia, 1998). His most recent book is Sacred Space and Holy War (IB Tauris, 2002),
> a collection of some of his papers on the history of the Shiite branch of Islam
> in modern Iraq, Iran, and the Gulf. He has given numerous media and press
> interviews on the “War on Terrorism” since 11 September 2001, as well as on
> the 2003 Iraq War.
> International Institute
> for the Study of Isl am
> i n t h e M o d e r n Wo r l d ( I S I M )
> 
> Visiting address:
> Rapenburg 59
> 2311 gj Leiden
> The Netherlands
> 
> Postal address:
> P.O. Box 11089
> 2301 eb Leiden
> The Netherlands
> 
> Telephone:
> +31-(0)71-527 79 05
> 
> Fax:
> +31-(0)71-527 79 06
> 
> E-mail:
> info@isim.nl
> 
> Website:
> www.isim.nl
>
> — *The Ayatollahs and Democracy in Iraq (Used by permission of the curator)*