Iraq, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World

Ali Paya, John L Esposito

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136950919
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Iraq, democracy and Islam are powerful global forces which shape not only many aspects of the lives of Muslims, but the lives of other citizens of the world as well. This book explores many of the challenging questions posed by the interconnections between these three forces, concentrating on issues which have global significance and which have been less studied up until now. It contains contributions from many of the leading thinkers and academics from this subject area, including the former President of Iran, Seyyed Mohammad Khatami.

Topics such as the compatibility of Islam and democracy, and the question of whether democracy can be encouraged in the Middle East are looked at carefully. Contributors evaluate the circumstances under which democracy can be imposed by outside force, and asks what forces are driving the confrontation between the West and Islam, before looking at how this confrontation is likely to develop.

This book presents a comprehensive picture of dynamic change in the geopolitics of our time, and offers a timely contribution to research on Middle East Politics and Islamic Studies.

Part I
Iraq

1
Religion, sect, ethnicity and tribe

The uncertainties of identity politics in the new society

Faleh A. Jabar

Introduction

The dynamics of identity politics in post-conflict transition in Iraq has been crucial in motivating, shaping, cementing and fragmenting community-embedded political blocs, generating both political certainties and uncertainties, constructing and de-constructing voting patterns, and enhancing drivers of cooperation and conflict over power and resources since 2003.

Despite the obvious improvement in security and relative political stability in 2008–2009 that followed the insurgency of 2007, the unifying tendencies of identity politics seem to have waned, whereas the active or dormant fragmentative proclivities of identity politics have now reached a new phase. Big electoral and political blocs have sustained a measure of disunity or degeneration; new forces have emerged; and the old coalition and voting patterns would subsequently change. This involves the potential to disruptively modify, or perhaps, undo, the nascent power structures necessary for stable governance in the coming 2009 elections.

These state institutions were established under conditions of fierce, bloody competition mainly between communities, defined in terms of identity politics. Now, it is these holistic identity-based communities that are fragmented and segmented from within by city, class, tribe and family. These fissure lines devouring the bloc-unity of holistic communities have rendered their differentiation, the rise of new social forces, and the disintegration of the holistic political blocs of Kurds, Shi‘is and Sunnis, or the activation of dormant schisms.

The dual-track conflicts, between as within seemingly holistic ethnic communities and religiously-defined sects, have come about as a result of two sundry processes: the construction and spread of sub-national identity politics of ethnicity and religion, on the one hand, and the segmentary nature of communities caused by primordial and traditional social organization of tribe, family and city solidarities, or by different schools of theology (for example, religion) or by modern differentials of class and ideology.

This chapter is an attempt to examine the sociological dynamics of identity politics and the uncertainties they involve in shaping the political and social order. We shall focus on three major sociological categories: religion, tribe and middle classes, and the movements and actors flowing from them.

What is identity politics? The Iraqi case in general

Iraq’s peculiar strands of identity politics are best grasped in a comparative outlook when examining identity politics elsewhere. For example, in the ex-Soviet Union and ex-Yugoslavia, the official and declining socialist and internationalist ideologies were gradually replaced by the promotion of nationalism that soon encapsulated the power struggle into ethnic inter-fighting once the central authority and central-command economy had weakened (Kaldor 2006: 81–2). In Iraq, by contrast, failure of socialist nationalism had a different trajectory. Throughout the 1990s and up to 2003, religion and tribalism were encouraged and their institutions and networks were partly rehabilitated by state patronage, but they soon took on a life of their own across the Arabic part of Iraq (Baram 2004, 1997; Jabar 2003a and 2003b, 1998; and Cole 2006). Once authoritarian central authority and their central command-oil rentier economy collapsed, tribalism and religion emerged.

In the Kurdish region, Kurdish ethnic identity politics invited responsive identity politics on the part of the Assyrians-Chaldeans and Turkmen, spreading the new forms of social and political action across the region.

Modern middle classes, co-opted by the old authoritarian regime, changed direction and joined the newly invented politics of religion, tribe, and ethnic and counter-ethnic identity politics. As they had been impoverished by sanctions (1991–2003), crippled by state police control over their ‘autonomous associations’, and controlled by economic state patronage, they found in the new forms of religion, tribe and ethnicity the only available ways of mobility.

Prolific identity segmentation and fragmentation that characterized Iraq paled into the holistic trio of Kurds, Shi‘is and Sunnis and rendered them segmented by the power of the other layers of social organization, religion, tribe and middle classes.

The other trio of sundry religious institutions and movements, tribe and modern middle classes played different and overlapping roles in constructing and deconstructing identity politics in pre- and post-war Iraq, a feature that either eluded examination or was disregarded by socio-political studies, yet it was gradually but not evenly grasped by international and native actors on the ground.

The categories of religious institutions, tribes and middle classes have specific dynamics of their own, as well as specific dynamics of their correlation, interaction, and overlap. Their pre-war dynamics, however, were quite different from those of post-conflict transition. These dynamics were mutated in many and changing ways by obtaining new conditions, which will be discussed further below.

Transition and communal division

The demise of the Ba‘th regime in April 2003 resulted in the end of the police state control over social institutions, and the abrupt termination of state patronage of them. In that sense, all old and new social institutions and the social movements flowing from them were freed in a dual sense, relieved of police control, but also deprived of patronage. The US sponsored transitional politics that followed opened the arena for socio-political and economic-cultural contests between major communities (however these are defined) as within each. But the US also destroyed state patronage that was the very life line of rehabilitated tribes and all salaried and propertied middle classes. This condition raised religion to a paramount force, and reduced tribes and middle classes to nothing. And the latter had to join religion as the only efficient vehicle of social and political mobility although they did not entirely give up their attempts to act on their own as well. Thus, in the first phase of transition, grand communal identity politics among Shi‘is and Sunnis began to crystallize, catching up with the previous grand ethnic identities of Kurds, Turkmen and Chaldo-Assyrians that took shape in the 1990s.

As the new state-formation (the creation of political structures: provisional cabinet, army, police, judiciary, and provisional legislator), and nation-building (the distribution of levers of power and resources) began, political actors constructed their communal blocs and vied each other for slices and layers of political power and resources, and strove to secure proportional representation in the Governing Council (July 2003–June 2004), in the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) (March 2004), and in the provisional cabinet of Ayad ‘Allawi, a replica of the Governing Council.

In the realm of state-formation, the nascent power and administrative structures were also approached by different contenders in similar vein. Community labels were represented as demography, and demography as democracy. Proportionate quotas in the administration, police, army and other agencies, among other things, assumed a paramount importance to communal politics.

The Kurdish catch word was federalism; that of the Shi‘is was that demography is democracy (the Shi‘is being the majority of the nation), and that of the Sunnis was restoration.

Within these grand blocs Communal labels and unity at this stage were conceived of as an assured vehicle to reach out for power and fair distribution of national wealth. By dint of their overwhelming demographic weight, the Shi‘i-Sunni polarization and confrontation were at the heart of the new, macabre identity politics. This identity was projected so forcefully that it overshadowed all other modern and primordial identities. This is best seen in the grand electoral blocs that emerged in the first and second constituent and general elections of January and December 2005. But the different segments within each community, in which tribe, clan, city-family and class were crucial ingredients, never waned. Once the major contests to shape the political order and lay down the key foundations for the new distribution of power and resources were ensured in the elections and constitution-writing, sub-identities came out again so vehemently that they shattered the façade of holistic unity, the Sunni-Shi‘i communal uncivil war of 2006 notwithstanding. Sub-communal identities of tribe, city, and family or class, brought about Shi‘i-Shi‘i Sunni-Sunni, Turkmen-Turkmen, and, to some extent, Kurdish-Kurdish, fierce or ‘soft’ conflicts, cutting across areas of compliance and agreement.

A universal tendency towards division began to engulf communal politics from within. As a result, the large electoral blocs and communal-embedded alliances and coalitions began to falter.

The reason why religion became so powerful and why it had lost some of its unifying potency, and the reason why the tribe was first overshadowed, but the managed to revive, and the reason why the modern middle classes progressively lost their autonomous political appetites and largely acquiesced to sectarian and tribal politics, have to do with their relevant dynamics. We shall examine these three categories of religion, tribe and middle classes under the conditions of the US-led transition. We shall first examine the US policy in this regard, and then move to religion, tribes and the middle classes as follows:

1 the new US policy;

2 the dynamics of institutional versus political religion (Islam); and the dynamics of city-family and native-exile dynamics within political religion;

3 the dynamics of tribes, tribal chiefs and ‘modern’ tribal associations;

4 the dynamics of the middle classes;

5 the Maliki new drive to impose law and order.

Religion-sect: unity and division¹

Institutional Religion: Religion has many faces. It is an informal institution of authority, and as such it has multiple centres. It is also a system of theology that has diverging nuances and conflicting schools, with sundry trends within each school. It is also a value-system constrained by the social nature of its advocates (urban, rural, Bedouin, traditionalist, or modernist); it is also social movements that have diverse political, economic or social interests (pragmatists, radicals, or centrists). Informal institutions of religious authorities, networks of mass rituals and pilgrimage, and legal or clandestine social movements adjacent to or flowing from them, were now free players to act and fight.

Informal religious authorities of Shi‘i and Sunni Islam were first disconnected from the ministry of religious endowments (as of July 2003); the flow of funds for these institutions was also liberalized. Overnight, the informal religious institutions emerged as powerful players, wielding vast infrastructure (hundreds if not thousands of mosques), staff (hundreds of well-coordinated but loosely disciplined mosque preachers), domestic political connections (with the Ba‘th, Islamist Kurds, tribal chiefs, old institutional staff etc.) regional relations (governments, and Islamic groups across the Middle East), official and lucrative private and public funding from worried or hopeful constituencies and/or political and social actors.² With such a powerful machine the informal institutions of religious authority, notably on the Shi‘i side, acted more like a political agent, information, and ideological centre, and, in the Sunni case, a recruitment, mobilization and insurgent agency.

Shi‘i political Islam

While the Shi‘i highest religious authority was already in place, the Sunni counterpart was wanting and fragmented. The Shi‘i institution had the benefit of this new freedom, but the Sunni counterpart had not, having lost state patronage, and lacking a unifying figure such as Sistani.

While the Shi‘i institution had multiple centres of authority, the seniority of age and status of higher learning, together with political prudence and moderation, this ensured that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani outshone all and guaranteed his uncontested influence.

This forceful rise of Shi‘i institutional religion overwhelmed the socio-political scene, outshining the social movements of Shi‘i Islam and their native and exiled political elites, who, with few exceptions, voluntarily and necessarily placed themselves under the wing of the grand authority in Najaf. These elites were still weak, unknown to the public at large and lacking legitimacy, resources and commanding symbols. Thus Sistani could literally decide every detail of the newly formed, predominantly Shi‘i electoral bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance in late 2004. But Sistani was alien to the rulership of the jurisprudent (wilayet al-faqih) authored by his Iranian rivals; paradoxically this theology opened up the opportunity for the Shi‘i Islamic political groups to strive for independence from Sistani’s patronage; and as the political elites leading Shi‘i Islam assumed power and vast state resources (of the oil-rentier state), they grew stronger, bolder, and autonomous to such an extent that Sistani could not have any say in the formation of the second United Iraqi Alliance just thirteen months on. The new United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) was decided by the Islamic Shi‘i leaders who limited the share of ‘independents’ (non-partisans had 50 per cent of slots in the first UIA), and increased their shares in the electoral bloc. The more powerful the Shi‘i political elites were, the less powerful Sistani was. Correlations between institutional and politi...

Table of contents

• Durham Modern Middle East and Islamic World Series
• Contents
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Iraq
• Part II Democracy
• Part III The future of the Muslim world
• Index