The Role of Religion in Politics. the Case of Shia-Islamism in Iraq

NJRS-2-2009.fm Page 123 Tuesday, October 13, 2009 9:32 AM Nordic Journal of Religion and Society (2009), 22 (2): 123–143 Søren Schmidt THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN POLITICS. THE CASE OF SHIA-ISLAMISM IN IRAQ Abstract How are we to interpret the role of Shia-Islam in recent political developments in Iraq? What was the relationship between the Shia-Islamist parties and Shia-Islamic institutions in these developments, and what is their relationship to-day? Was it about installing a new Shia-Islamic theocracy, or was Shia-Islam, its ritual practices, ideology and institutions rather the fulcrum which allowed the historically marginalised Shiite population to assert itself politically within the Iraqi polity? These are some of the questions which are posed in this article in order to provide a better understanding of the relationship between Shia-Islam and Shia-Islamist politics and, from a wider perspective, between religion and politics. In answering these questions, the article applies the socio- political conflict explanatory model, which draws attention to the historical contingency of the interplay between socio-cultural, political, and religious factors. Keywords: Shia-Islamism, Shia-Islam, Iraq, politics, religion Introduction In the 1960s, Nuri al-Maliki was a young student in the town of Abu Gharaq in central Iraq, where the population predominantly belongs to the Shiite branch of Islam. His- torically, the Shiites in Iraq, who constituted roughly 60% of the population, tended to live in areas with access to few resources and on the poorest land. The Government was in the hands of the Ba’th party and a narrow political elite. Although the Ba’th’s leaders (of which Saddam Hussein at the time was only one) and the political elite predominately belonged to the Sunni Muslim minority of Iraq, the ideology of the government was strictly secular. Today, Nuri al-Maliki is the Prime Minister of Iraq and leader of the Shia-Islamist Da’wa party, which is supported by another major Shia-Islamist party, while tolerated by the third major Shia-Islamist party. His government is closely allied with the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and he consults regularly on political issues with the Hawza or Shia-Islamic religious leadership in Najaf and its leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. 123 NJRS-2-2009.fm Page 124 Tuesday, October 13, 2009 9:32 AM Nordic Journal of Religion and Society 22:2 Until the end of the eighteenth century, the Middle East was not characterized by theocracies, but instead by a practical division of labour between political rulers and the Islamic religious institutions. While the latter upheld a formal demand on political rule that it should be executed by ‘promoting virtue and forbidding vice’ (Feldman 2008), a quietist approach was to all intents and purposes applied, where political rule was accepted without further qualification and its justification was based on the view expressed in the oft-quoted Middle Eastern maxim of «Better sixty years of tyranny than one hour of anarchy» (Brown 2000: 7–77). In a natural extension of this quietist approach to politics, and as a result of the meta-narrative of secular modernisation, which prevailed at the time, secular ideologies such as liberalism, nationalism and socialism at first became the ideological banners around which political mobilisation took place during modern times. However, when secularist nationalist parties gained power from 1958 and onwards and immediately started to repress contending secularist political forces (such as the Iraqi Communist Party), new Shia-Islamist ideologies and movements gained in strength and popularity in parallel with the weakening of the contending secularist political forces. The peak of this historical development was the 2005 elections, which brought the Shia-Islamist parties to power in Iraq. The January 2009 provincial elections in Iraq indicate yet another new turn, this time towards a more secular politics. How are we to interpret this transformation of a secular nation state into a state in which Shia-Islam and its institutions clearly play an important role? Did this transformation transfer the political power of the state into the hands of the clergy of Shia- Islam, or was Shia-Islam, its ritual practices, ideology and institutions rather the fulcrum which allowed the historically marginalised Shiite population to assert itself politically within the Iraqi polity? What was the relationship between the Shia-Islamist parties and the Shia-Islamic institutions in this mobilisation, and what is the relationship to-day? Also, why did Shia-Islam become important in Iraqi politics, and what was its specific role in mobilising Iraqi Shiites? These are the questions which are posed in this article with the aim of providing a better understanding of the relationship between Shia-Islam and Shia-Islamist politics and, from a wider perspective, between religion and politics. The focus of the article is on the role of religion in politics, and not on how Iraqi politics also turned Shia-Islam into a more open and forward-looking religion. Furthermore, a number of factors seem to have influenced the increasing role of Islam in politics in the wider Middle East since the late 1960s: cultural nationalism, resistance to Western ‘positivism’ and other factors which are not specific to Iraq (Crooke 2009). As this article attempts to under- stand the specific Iraqi factors explaining the surge in and role of Shia-Islamism in that country, the more general factors mentioned above are not considered. The article starts by laying out the framework on which the subsequent analysis is based. It then proceeds to offer a historical account of the overall history of Shia-Isla- mism in Iraq before going into more specific accounts and analyses of the four main protagonists in this historical drama: Grand-Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Da’wa Party, the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq and the Sadr movements. The conclusion will sum- marize the findings as well as revisit the theoretical discussion in an attempt to answer 124 NJRS-2-2009.fm Page 125 Tuesday, October 13, 2009 9:32 AM Søren Schmidt: The role of religion in politics. The case of Shia-Islamism in Iraq the overall question of the relationship between Shia Islam and Shia-Islamism in the context of Iraq’s recent history. Analytical framework Contrary to the classical theories of modernisation, religion did not wither away in Iraq in tandem with modernisation. Instead of challenging the fundamental concepts of modernisation theories, many observers now increasingly explain the rising role of religion in contemporary Middle Eastern politics as a counter-reactionary project to modernity based on an essentialist reading of Islam. These two interrelated approaches are both rejected in this article as simplistic and unhelpful and the article seeks instead to apply an approach that sees politics in the explanandum as well as in the explanan in explaining the role of religion in politics. However, religion is not simply a proxy for other variables such as social class, ethni- city or region, and ‘politics’ should therefore not be understood in its narrow sense, as the distribution of power, but also in a wider sense, namely as the assertion of commu- nal values and identity. The explanatory model which will be applied here is called the socio-political conflict model,1 which draws attention to the historical contingency of the interplay between socio-cultural, political, and religious factors. More specifically, the model argues that religion offers ideological and organisational resources, and that socio-political forces will seek to mobilize these resources if the strategic situation is such that this tends to strengthen their position vis-à-vis their adversary. Although the socio- political conflict model is based on the notion that people undertake collective, ratio- nally motivated action in relation to shared interests, the mobilization of religious resources is not to be understood as a deliberate, instrumental choice, but as a broader socio-political process, combining the supply of resources from religion with political opportunity. In a socio-political conflict in which the incumbent regime uses a secular ideology such as socialism, liberalism and nationalism to justify its rule, religion presents itself as an alternative ideological asset for socio-political groups opposing the regime. In the modern era, when ideological mass politics plays an increasing role and social customs a decreasing role, the enervation of secular political ideology opens up a space for reli- giously inspired political ideology to take hold. Religion also offers more explicit orga- nizational and financial resources that may be applied to socio-political conflicts. Such resources are particularly strong when a religion sees ritual life and priestly interven- tion as important for individual salvation (Gorski 2003: 118) – as is the case in Shia- Islam – upon which independently organized and financed clerical institutions are built. In repressive political systems, such clerical institutions are often the only institutions which are relatively independent of the state and which can therefore offer potential organisational and financial resources to be harnessed in a socio-political conflict. 125 NJRS-2-2009.fm Page 126 Tuesday, October 13, 2009 9:32 AM Nordic Journal of Religion and Society 22:2 Furthermore, the article draws on the understanding of the importance of group identity or ‘groupness’ in political systems with a low degree of institutionalization and an arbitrary exercise of power where brute force is the dominant way to solve socio- political conflicts (Posen 1993). Rather than being based on citizens’ rights enforced by the rule of law, in such systems security and other social goods depend instead largely on ‘group membership’. The stronger the ‘groupness’, the stronger the group becomes relative to the state and other groups.

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