Kurdish Concern Over the Shiite Bid for Power

By: Dr. Sabah A. Salih

Feb 1, 2004

The Kurds of Southern Kurdistan have good reason to be wary of the current Shia bid for power, for ultimately what the clerical leadership of Ali al-Sistani and Abdel Aziz al-Hakim is after is not democracy but theocracy—a no less potent threat to Kurdish identity than Arab or Turkish domination. There is also the possibility of other forces in the region, though not necessarily supporters of theocracy, deciding to line up behind the Ayatollah—if only as an effort to see Kurdish hope for statehood dealt a mortal blow. This may sound like a wildly far-fetched supposition, but then politics, being more a matter of contingency than morality, deal making than principles, does indeed—and more often than not—create some very strange bedfellows.

The issue here is not Shia Muslim obsession with tear for tear’s sake, martyrdom, submission, and the afterlife. Wounded and overruled for far too long, Shiism has had no other recourse for venting its grievances. Ali’s murder after only five short years as caliph, the poisoning of his older son and the killing of the younger one in battle put Shiism forever at loggerheads with outsiders.

The issue is something far more ominous: viewing this history, not as a distant cultural and political past, but as a living present according to which a modern society is to be ruled. What this amounts to politically is the creation of a government that refuses to distinguish between a person’s private need for some sort of religion and a modern society’s need to transcend religion altogether through a system of laws and legislation.

What this amounts to culturally is giving the green light to dogma to paralyze society by turning a whole host of rights and ideas—change, uncertainty, progress—into crimes.

As they raise the anti, this much can easily be determined from the Shia clerics’ own persistently dogmatic declarations. The symbols, the banners, the sermons, the threats, the privileging of one language, of one idea, of one explanation, of one narrative, of one set of values above all the others: these do not pave the way for opening new doors in the mind; these pave the way for controlling the mind.

No mistake about it, theocracy is indeed the mother of all despotic governments. It is not just that it forces the individual to melt away; it also collapses the cultural and the political, the private and the public, and the mundane and the metaphysical into one frightening and overbearing order that closes the door forever on debate, openness, dissent, pluralism, women’s rights and a whole series of other issues that no forward-looking society can do without.

Taking inspiration from Khomeini’s stubbornly static model, and most probably being actively aided by Iran’s current mullahs in a bid to export theocracy well beyond southern Lebanon, the Shia clerical leadership is taking the first steps towards the eventual duplication of Khomeinism in Iraq. (Let us also not forget that, thanks to Saudi money, something close to that is also the goal of other hijackers of religion and occupiers of the mind in Southern Kurdistan, where they have been doing a brisk ideological business for sometime now right under the noses of Kurdish authorities. It is certainly no accident that in recent years antique Arabic names, once the source of derision, have had such a dramatic comeback all across this region.)

The tactics, too, are similar; they read like a handbook: While the political situation is in a state of flux, speak the language of democracy and elections as these will help you get ahead and make alliances – incredibly, some in the Bush administration seem to be already won by that—then, when the moment comes, hijack it all, and, with a steady supply of fatwas—the most extreme form of censorship—create a daily spectacle of terror—like the ones Khomeini created in Eastern Kurdistan—until all your opponents are crushed or subdued. Finally, turn rage into an obsession.

In his award-winning book Among the Believers, the Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul saw some of the manifestations of this rage first hand during a seventh-month Islamic journey. He writes: "Their rage—the rage of pastoral people with limited skills, limited money, and a limited grasp of the world—is comprehensive. . . . It serves their grief, their feeling of inadequacy," their unhappiness with a world that is "not their own" and is so different from their own (227).

If what I have been saying is not reason enough for concern, listen to the New Yorker magazine’s Jon Lee Anderson writing from Baghdad in the February 2, 2004, issue. The government the Shia leadership has in mind, Anderson rightly concludes, "might end up being closer to a theocratic state than even most Shiites imagined possible. There was a hint about this on December 29^th, when the Governing Council, during Hakim’s tenure at its head, abrogated Iraq’s civil code regulating domestic matters and replaced it with religious law. Under the new system, Shiite and Sunni imams would have authority over marriage, dowries, divorce, alimony settlements, and inheritance" (63).

That is why I believe the more noises the Shia clerical leadership makes, the more emphatic the Kurds need to be in their demand for statehood and democratic secularism. Now is the time for the Kurds to put their legendary niceties aside and take to the streets en mass in a demonstration of collective will against Arab, American, and Turkish attempts to undercut the Kurdish cause.

Dr. Sabah A. Salih is Professor of English at Bloomsburg University, USA. <Ssalih@bloomu.edu>