The Politics of Religion in Iraq
Religious divides have the potential of igniting major conflict in Iraq.
June 2004
Iraqi Shiite men hold a banner that reads: "Islam is the religion of peace" as they march to the al-Rohman mosque for prayers in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, May 2, 2003.
What role does religion play in contemporary Iraq? Is it a largely secular country, like Turkey, its neighbor to the north? Or does it tend more toward theocratic rule, like Iran, its neighbor to the east? With sectarian conflict looming as an ever-present danger and Iraq seemingly undergoing something of a religious revival, the Institute held a workshop in mid-December to address these questions.
The presenters at the workshop were Faleh Jabar, senior fellow at the Institute and author of several books on religion in Iraq; Amatzia Baram, senior fellow at the Institute focusing on state-mosque relations in Iraq; and Ahmed al-Rahim, who teaches Arabic at Harvard University. The workshop was moderated by David Smock, director of the Institute's Religion and Peacemaking Initiative.
Baram started the workshop by noting that Iraq's current religious revival began as a political survival strategy engineered by Saddam Hussein more than a decade ago, in the aftermath of the disastrous Gulf War. Hussein, who had previously governed as a largely secular Arab leader, began putting Islamic clerics on the payroll; favored the Sunni with state-sponsored construction of large mosques; and, in 1994, introduced sharia into the Iraqi penal code.
The overthrow of Hussein has given new political space to the Shiite community, and into this space have emerged several highly regarded ayatollahs. The most important of these is the Grand Ayatollah Ali Muhammad Sistani, known recently for rejecting the Coalition Provisional Authority's proposal to institute democracy via a caucus system of elections. Yet Sistani is among the moderates; unlike religious leaders such as Muqtada Sadr, he does not advocate an Islamic republic or Iranian-style clerical rule.
The workshop participants agreed that it is tempting to regard the three major religious blocs—the Sunni, the Shia, and the Kurds—as monolithic and mutally antagonistic, but this is to oversimplify. The majority of the Shia, for example, think of their religion as a private matter that should not intrude into state affairs and governance. In addition, as Jabar noted, such crosscutting divisions as social classes, clans and regions, urban and rural areas, and secular and religious orientations are likely to become increasingly salient as parties form and the political process matures.
After decades of privilege, the Sunnis now find themselves underrepresented in the political discourse—even in relation to their numbers. Proportionately more of them were implicated in the process of de-Baathification and, in contrast to the Shia, they lack charismatic religious leaders to trumpet their interests. But there is little doubt that Sunnis, both secular and religious, will find their way back into politics. Secular Iraqis, too, will become more assertive over time, enhancing the prospect that a moderate secularism will emerge as the nation's dominant ideology.
