Sectarianism in Iraq

The Making of State and Nation Since 1920

Khalil Osman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317674863
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book links sectarianism in Iraq to the failure of the modern nation-state to resolve tensions between sectarian identities and concepts of unified statehood and uniform citizenry.

After a theoretical excursus that recasts the notion of primordial identity as a socially constructed reality, the author sets out to explain the persistence of sectarian affiliations in Iraq since its creation following the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Despite the adoption of homogenizing state policies, the uneven sectarian composition of the ruling elites nurtured feelings of political exclusion among marginalized sectarian groups, the Shicites before 2003 and the Sunnis in the post-2003 period. The book then examines how communal discourses in the educational curriculum provoked masked forms of resistance that sharpened sectarian consciousness. Tracing how the anti-Persian streak in the nation-state's Pan-Arab ideology, which camouflaged anti-Shicism, undermined Iraq's national integration project, Sectarianism in Iraq delves into the country's slide from a totalizing Pan-Arab ideology in the pre-2003 period toward the atomistic impulse of the federalist debate in the post-2003 period.

Employing extensive fieldwork, this book sheds light on the dynamics of political life in post-Saddam Iraq and is essential reading for Iraqi and Middle East specialists, as well as those interested in understanding the current heightening of sectarian Sunni-Shicite tensions in the Middle East.

1 A theoretical excursus

Sectarianism and the modern nation-state in the Arab East

State of theory of the making of nation and state

Despite the abundance of research on the dynamics that led to the emergence of the modern nation-state as a polity distinct from traditional states,¹ such as empires, the concepts of “state-making” and “nation-building” remain highly contested. Like in the case of most normative social science concepts,² position-taking by social scientists and researchers has congealed into an impressive array of contending theoretical constructs. Stemming from the distinct interests of researchers in key ontological and epistemological aspects of politics, the state, and modernization, these conceptualizations gave rise to an array of approaches to the study of state-building that encompass political development, democratization, the post-conflict reconstruction of dysfunctional or “failed states,” and peace-building.

Some social scientists have differentiated between the two terms of “state-building” and “nation-building.” For instance, Carolyn Stephenson argues that, “[t]he term nation-building is often used simultaneously with state-building … But each concept is different, though their evolution is intertwined.”³ Analogously, Mohammed Ayoob has stressed the “conceptual as well as real-world distinction” between the processes of nation-building and state-making.⁴ However, Ayoob acknowledges that these two process “may sometimes run parallel to each other and may even interact with each other – but they may have their own separate dynamics and discrete end-products, even though in the ideal type the end products merge into a composite creature called the nation-state.”⁵

While conceding that “state” cannot be equated with “nation,” I still opt for using the two terms interchangeably.⁶ The “evolution” of both processes is largely “intertwined” in the case of Iraq and, therefore, this book deals with the “composite creature called the nation-state” of Iraq. True, the courses of state-making and nation-building are in many ways historically and conceptually distinct, but they are still overlapping and somewhat inseparable processes. In the context of Iraq, the two processes describe similar activities designed to mold disparate ethnic, tribal, and religious communities into an integrated citizenry within a shared polity and construct a functioning administrative state and governance apparatus to manage society and societal change effectively.

On the face of it, the concepts of “state-making” and “nation-building” are premised on an architectural metaphor which assumes the existence of a conscious and integrative political agent, strategy, and social force or dynamic bringing about societal change. This metaphor presupposes a teleological process which involves redefining the relationship between local communities and members of society, on the one hand, and the state, on the other, mainly through the expansion of education and the introduction of modes of political participation. Ultimately, in the resulting new forms of political association, the “subjects” of the monarch are transformed into “citizens” who have legal claims vis-à-vis the state. The dialectic of this expansion of the public sphere is rather hegemonic in the sense that it entails the subordination of sub-state loyalties and identities to a new civic culture and loyalty to a larger political entity – the state.⁷

Interest in state- and nation-building as a distinct “research programme”⁸ in the social sciences first became fashionable in the aftermath of World War II and in tandem with the increasing pace of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. It was popularized by some prominent scholars in America such as Karl Deutsch,⁹ Charles Tilly,¹⁰ and Reinhard Bendix,¹¹ who attempted to describe the processes of societal reconfiguration and national integration and consolidation that lie at the heart of the formation of modern nation-states.

The overly optimistic prognoses of the early proponents of liberal modernization theory, which predicted that newly independent Third World countries would experience the same patterns of economic growth and political and social stability as their Western predecessors, foundered on the rock of the actual pattern of events. It transpired that, confronted with the challenges of modernization, traditional institutions and communitarian values adjust to the onslaught of modernity and coexist with its institutional trappings, especially the modern nation-state. This effectively debunked the notion of a smooth path to modernization and gave rise to a series of critical challenges and rejoinders which shifted the focus of analysis towards the ways in which social traditions persisted and modified modernity.¹² The recognition that traditional forms not only survive modernity but also help set contextual parameters for the process of modernization allowed for a more nuanced view that captures the multiple trajectories of modernization for developing societies. This shift was influenced by research in social anthropology in the late 1960s which found that tradition and modernity are interdependent rather than analytically distinct categories. As put by one social anthropologist of the time, there are “continuities both of process and, in part, of content, suggesting the relevance of pre-state forms of organization to the political development of modernizing nations.”¹³

Redeeming the primordial

In the early 1970s, new vistas for research on nation-building were opened by a growing interest in the concept of “primordial attachments,” which was originally developed by sociologist Edward A. Shils in his attempt to plot the topography of different social bonds in modern societies. Shils argued that the susceptibility of modern societies to fall prey to serious communal divisions stems from the “ineffable significance attributed to ties of blood.”¹⁴ Such primordial attachments constitute wellsprings of identity. They address “man’s need to be in contact with the point and moment of his origin and to experience a sense of affinity with those who share that origin.”¹⁵ In other words, primordial attachments as they figure in the discourse of the primordialists provide a social solidarity reminiscent of what Emile Durkheim describes as a “collective consciousness.”¹⁶ But beyond contributing to the individual’s sense of security, they also give rise to feelings that produce resistance to assimilation in the impersonal culture of modern life.

Following in the footsteps of Shils, Clifford Geertz propounded a theoretically refined stance which stresses the resilience of “primordial attachments” or bonds that transcend kinship, such as race, language, tribe, region, religion, and custom, and how they sometimes stand at odds with various aspects of modern society. Newly independent states are “abnormally susceptible to serious disaffection based on primordial attachments”¹⁷ that are not necessarily mediated by blood. Geertz argued that these attachments provide

the “givens” … of social existence: immediate contiguity and kin connection mainly, but beyond them the givenness that stems from being born into a particular religious community, speaking a particular language … and following particular social practices. These congruities of blood, speech and custom, and so on, are seen to have an ineffable, and at times overpowering, coerciveness in and of themselves. One is bound to one’s kinsman, one’s neighbour, one’s fellow believer, ipso facto; as the result not merely of personal affection, practical necessity, common interest, or incurred obligation, but at least in great part by virtue of some unaccountable absolute import attributed to the very tie itself.¹⁸

In such a formulation, primordial attachments are presumed to be involuntary, automatic, and natural. They stir up “feelings of intense solidarity and are capable of inducing selfless behavior on the part of group members.”¹⁹ This has led some to place them beyond the realm of the rational.²⁰ At a certain level, and by dint of their potential to excite in human beings a complex mix of passions, myths, emotions, unquestioning devotion, and beliefs shared by members of a given community, they “come to acquire a power and control over humans that they elevate to the level of the sacred, in much the same way as they develop and maintain their beliefs about God and religion.”²¹ Yet, the potency and strength of these attachments are both relative and subjective, varying with person, space, and time. Geertz notes that,

The general strength of such primordial bonds, and the types of them that are important, differ from person to person, from society to society, and from time to time. But for virtually every person, in every society, at almost all times, some attachments seem to flow from a sense of natural – some would say spiritual – affinity than from social interaction.²²

Notwithstanding the relativism of primordial attachments, there is an assumption underlying Geertz’s articulation of primordialism that sees them as being primary or a part of human nature. The underlying postulate is that they are ensconced a priori in the human mind and psyche. Geertz, who studied newly independent states in Asia and Africa, cautions that,

what the new states – or their leaders – must somehow contrive to do as far as primordial attachments are concerned is not, as they have so often tried to do, wish them out of existence by belittling them or even denying their reality. … They must reconcile them with the emerging civil order by divesting them of their legitimizing force … by neutralizing the apparatus of the state in relationship to them, and by channeling discontent arising out of their dislocation into properly political rather than parapolitical forms of expression.²³

The notion that primordial attachments are biologically and genetically fixed has found its most fervent expression in the socio-biological explanation of nationalism articulated by Pierre L. van den Berghe, who argued that relations between ethnic groups mirror fundamental bio-social processes. Van den Berghe, who sought to refine primordialism from the inside, criticized “classical” primordialists for “asserting the fundamental nature of ethnic sentiment without suggesting an explanation of why that should be the case.”²⁴ Van den Berghe’s socio-biological approach underscores the centrality of lineage and descent in defining ethnic groups, viewed as mere extended kinships conditioned both genetically and environmentally.

The propensity to favor kin and fellows is deeply rooted in our genes, but our genetic programs are highly flexible, and our specific behaviors are adaptive responses to a wide set of environmental circumstances. Ethnicity is both primordial and situational.²⁵

The socio-biological flair characterizing van den Berghe’s approach has also colored the work of Donald L. Horowitz who defines ethnic ties as kinship ties and ethnic groups as “super-families.”²⁶

The ontological weight attributed to primordial attachments as being ascribed and innate has exposed primordialists to attack by social scientists who castigated the ahistorical and essentialist bias inherent in primordialism. “Primordialism,” says Donald L. Horowitz, “has become the straw man of ethnic studies,” and its proponents have become “the most caricatured and most maligned for their naïveté in supposing that ethnic affiliations are given rather than chosen, immutable rather than malleable, and inevitably productive of conflict.”²⁷ The critics pointed out that since primordial attachments are generated in an historical process of social interaction then there is nothing that negates the possibility that they could be superseded by other attachments.²⁸ In the view of Joseph R. Gusfield, “[t]he boundaries that delineate the ‘us’ and ‘them’ are not ‘givens’ but are generated out of what people are attentive to and how they conceive the bounds of the group.”²⁹

Others, like Jack David Eller and Reed M. Coughlan, questioned the notions of primordial attachments as being endowed with emotional and affective content; given and fixed; and ineffable and non-amenable to explanation. They argued, instead, that social phenomena like ethnicity cannot be embedded only in the passions and emotions generated by primordial attachments because “emotion is not necessarily or ordinarily primordial but has a clear and analyzable sociogenesis.”³⁰ While banishing the term “primordial” to the realm of the “unanalytical and vacuous … unsociological and thoroughly unscientific,” they called for “dropping it from the sociological lexicon.”³¹

While highlighting some of the limitations of the primordialist approach, the critics fall short of providing their canons with ample theoretical and logical ammunition sufficient for dismissing its general claims altogether. Like all other social science approaches, primordialism is admittedly not without its own flaws and problems. Yet, these limitations do not amount to a situation of total crisis. Primordialism, as an approach that stresses the work...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 A theoretical excursus: Sectarianism and the modern nation-state in the Arab East
• 2 The legacy of history: nation-building, marginalization and ascendance of primordial sectarianism
• 3 Elite makeup and the politics of stratification
• 4 Education, resistance, and the reproduction of primordial sectarian identity
• 5 Contending visions of collective identity
• 6 Sectarianism and the crisis of the modern nation-state in Iraq
• APPENDIX I: The text of the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Abu al-Qassim al-Kho’i on March 5, 1991
• APPENDIX II: The text of the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Abu al-Qassim al-Kho’i on March 7, 1991
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index