The problem is you're leaving out the simple thing that under Sistani, the women of Iraq have the best chance. In no other religion are women guaranteed the right to vote, guaranteed rights of inheritance, and guaranteed the right of divorce.

Don't confuse arrogant cultural sexist behavior with that of the religion which Sistani espouses.

interesting post Weldon - looks like we have to keep on compromising to move forward. Thanks and welcome!

I would have eto do more research into weather it is Sisatani's supporters who are doing the threats and repressions or not. I think it might again be Sadr's militias, proving that some people just can't be educated.

>>Riverbend scoffs at the notion of a Nobel Prize for Sistani, saying that if anyone should get it, it's Ahmed Chalabi because he's the one thing virtually all Iraqis can agree upon.<<

I take it that what all Iraqis agree on is that Chalabi is a corrupt stooge?

As for Riverbend, the relentless negativism of her blog doesn't seem to actually mesh with reality in Iraq. Her feelings of persecution may have some basis in fact, but as far as one can tell from other reports they aren't part of a universal pattern of anti-female persecution. The society still remains quite secular and if you keep an eye on photos coming out of the country you'll see that plenty of women are going about uncovered and don't seem all that concerned.

After reading Riverbend quite extensively I'm inclined to think that there's something wrong with her objectivity. Her comments are so relentlessly negative and seem to consisitently run against what other Iraqi bloggers are reporting, It's almost like she's in a different country. There's something going on with her, either pyschologically or politically which isn't being expressed openly.

Dave

Quick followup to that last comment. If you want an explanation of what the deal is with Riverbend check out lies.com and follow some of the links which explain her background and why she takes the slant she does.

Dave

Dave, Sistani wants to implement Sharia law as the basis for the civil code. He's a conservative cleric. The people who headed his election list, such as the SCIRI guys--that's the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, not a title that'll bring a song to the hearts of secular Iraqis--are conservative clerics who spent most of the past twenty years in Iran.

Sistani is not Father Flanagan; he's just the most powerful single player in the country at the moment, and that has no bearing at all on whether religious law will be good for women or, getting back to the original impetus for the invasion, whether a government dominated by clerical parties will benefit us.

Riverbend is living in a city where the crime rate is up 800% over what it was before the invasion, where car bombs, kidnappings and drive-by shootings are daily occurrences, where people who want to go to the airport either get choppered out or run the risk of getting blown up or shot by insurgents or the US military, depending upon the circumstances, where the main thoroughfare is the scene of regular firefights between insurgents and US troops or Iraqi ones, where the electricity, despite all implications to the contrary, is sporadic, and where gasoline is now scarce enough to be a black market commodity. I think she can be forgiven for being a bit dour or unobjective, and recent polls regarding the favor in which the US is held indicate that a solid majority of her fellows share much of her thinking.

My basic point here is that Friedman, and apparently many other Americans, are looking to Sistani as a savior--or, more aptly, a salvager--and they're going to be sorely disappointed when the obvious, that he's acting in his interests and his religion's interest, not ours, sinks in.

P.S. - Eric, thanks for the welcome. I'm all for compromise when it's both necessary and possible. I just think we no longer have a lot of leverage in this situation--we can't very well re-invade the country if we don't like the way the government turns out, assuming it does turn out--and I think it's important to take a good look at what we're celebrating in Sistani.

Weldon - to correct you - he's acting in the interests of Iraq. Something that nobody else is doing. Nobody. Sure as heck no us!

Actually, Reilly, as far as I can tell we're about the only ones doing anything strictly for Iraq without looking out for our own advancement first. Which may only be because Iraq getting on its feet IS our best interest, but nonetheless...

Weldon B:"Riverbend is living in a city where the crime rate is up 800% over what it was before the invasion, where car bombs, kidnappings and drive-by shootings are daily occurrences, "

Ok, I'll accept her lot is hard - particularly compared to the easy life she had when she was in the inner circles of the Ba'athist regime.

What troubles me is that not a slight ray of sunshine reaches her at a time when so many other Iraqis are looking much more favorably on the US, and overwhelmingly - according to the latest polls - acknowledging that the problem is the terrorists and outside agitators who are basically acting like criminals, and not the US?

Dave

Oh, and I have no illusions about Sistani. He's no great prize. But at the same time, strong though his position is, it's never going to be strong enough for him to absolutely dictate policy under the current governmental organization. Which is pretty much why it was structured that way. Plus, so much of the Iraqi population is highly secularized he'd have a hard time pulling what they did in Iran without massive turmoil.

Dave

Sistanis own words have shown clearly over time that he doesn't consider it appropriate to form an Irani style government in Iraq because Iraq does not have an almost completely Shia population. That's out of the horses mouth.

His role in all of this has been to correct the errors of when the British last controlled Iraq - when the Shia's rebelled so much that when the British left, they sure as heck didn't give them any control.

Sistani's mission is not to cause a revolution through agression, but rather through democracy. And I know it's hard to swallow for those who haven't spent some time reading up on Sistani and the platform upon which his preaching stand, but his version of Islam is exactly the kind of populist democracy that even we here are loathe to attempt. Note his defiance against a caucus. If only someone could fix ours!

John, what Sistani wants to avoid is an Iran-style theocracy. He has made clear, though, that he very much desires the replacement of Iraq's civil code with Islamic law. Populist he may be, but it is unlikely in the extreme that he'll be a progressive one, and there is not the slightest chance in the world that representatives of the two primary clerical parties, SCIRI and Da'awa, will be moderate in any sense of the word. At best, they'll graft a Democratic Socialist-style economy onto an oppressive civil code.

If his version of Islamic law turns out to be tender and egalitarian, I'll apologize. As you note, though, he doesn't favor direct clerical rule, which means the politicians from the religious parties will be making the legislation in tandem with the Kurds. The Kurds want oil; the religious parties who ran under Sistani's imprimatur want religious civil law. I expect they'll both get what they want, and even the most moderate among them won't be able to prevent interpretations of the law that lead to things like this.

Anyone who places Sistani on a level with Nelson Mandela and Mikhail Gorbachev is in for a shock. The closer analogies would be along the lines of Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats or Tom DeLay. Except DeLay doesn't value separation of church and state even to the extent Sistani does.

Weldon, what militiamen from Sadr's camp do has always been and continues to be very different from Sistani's vision of Islam.

I only state that because the issue discussed on this page is Sistani, and mixing issues like this may make your pessimistic point, but it doesn't support your point about Sistani. Actually, Sistani's opposition to Sadr's general practices should speak against your argument against Sistani.

The behavior of the Sadrists, their annointment of themselves as the cultural arbiters in Basra, and the unwillingness of the Basra police to intervene, speak directly to the limits of Sistani's influence; he's either unwilling or unable to rein them in, and to this point he hasn't indicated that he wishes to. He's warned them off participating in the insurgency, but they're apparently free to firebomb liquor stores and beat up women as it pleases them.

What I'm warning against is mythologizing Sistani, which is what seems to me to be occurring. He is not Nelson Mandella or Mikhail Gorbachev or any other liberal reformer. He's a conservative Muslim cleric who wants the civil order in Iraq to be the province of Islamic law. He may be at the liberal end of the conservative Muslim spectrum in Iraq, but that doesn't make him a liberal; his views on the subject are spelled out in meticulous detail on his website.

When he comes out and says that he wants women to be equal members of the society there, I'll change my mind. I don't think that will happen. To this point, at least so far as I'm aware, he hasn't even spoken out against the abuses that are occurring--not just things such as the Basra incident, but any of the cultural and physical crimes against women that are becoming more and more widespread in the country.

The lone difference between Sistani and his Iranian counterparts is that he doesn't believe in direct clerical participation in politics. There's not the slightest shred of evidence that his cultural mores are different from theirs, and I find it baffling that people somehow assume this to be the case, particularly when his own words make the opposite case.

I think you're expecting some kind of Gandalf-like swooping down and fixing everything of Sistani, and of course anything less would serve to disappoint. The thing is, at any given moment in Iraq, there are dozens upon dozens of crimes against citizens being committed, mostly by Sunni insurgents. That is, sunni by name - definitely not by practice. He's made it clear in all his published works on the matter, that abuse of any human is unnacceptable under Shia Islam, be they your friend or your enemy, your husband or your wife. In all the readings I've done of Islam, including the Quran itself, it's pretty clear on the subject and requires no further clearing up. It's the government's role to actually implement said protections of citizens, but as we can all agree, the government is not yet capable of this. Even our enormous military presence has not proved capable of this. It's just too big a nation, and too much in chaos.

I for one do indeed consider him to be a Mandela type figure for Iraq. What you personally want for Iraq may not be what you see Sistani wanting, but he is nonetheless, providing Iraq with a figure of peaceful stability, and one who moved mountains in US policy in the area - proving the strength of peaceful discourse, providing an example that made things a LOT easier for the US.

Heck, that's even better than Mandela, in my book.

>>He may be at the liberal end of the conservative Muslim spectrum in Iraq, but that doesn't make him a liberal; his views on the subject are spelled out in meticulous detail on his website.
<<

I sure would like to read that, but the link you provide is to the arabic version of the site and as far as I can tell there's no English language translation available.

Dave

Dave, click on the word "English" to the left of his photo on the splash screen graphic, or go directly to here.

John, I'm not the one looking to Sistani as the saviour of Iraq. I think he's a guy who has done some good stuff and whose power has sharp limits. I would urge you to, rather than relying on your own interpretation of the Koran, go to Sistani's site and read for yourself his pronouncements on social issues, which is the realm he sees as belonging to Islam. Because it is, after all, his interpretation of Islam that's relevant here, not yours.

Blaming the increase in crime on faux Sunnis is just avoiding the issue. Kidnapping in Iraq, particularly Baghdad, has become an entrepeneurial enterprise akin to the situation in Colombia and Brazil, and the police and hospitals distinguish between victims of the insurgency and US or Iraqi police/military actions, and simple crime. There is little security and non-ideological criminals flourish in that environment. And one certainly can't blame the actions of radical Shiite fundamentalists, such as the attacks on women in Basra and elsewhere and the attacks on liquor stores and music stores, on the insurgency. Sistani has been silent on those problems.

The Iraq I would like to see is the one the US government and most US citizens to the left of Randall Terry would like to see: a secular state with guaranteed, egalitarian rights for everyone. It's just that as the insurgency grew and it became apparent that the center of gravity in the country was located in Sistani's office, expectations were lowered. If you think the administration invaded the country in hopes of establishing an Islamic state, I would refer you to its intention of installing Ahmed Chalabi as designated puppet and its refusal to permit popular elections until Sistani forced them into it.

The comparison to Mandela is spurious in so many respects that I don't have the patience to enumerate them all, but the fact that Sistani's version of ending discrimination against an entire class of people, Shiites, involves placing them under strictures that at least officially didn't exist prior to his ascension to a position of influence, is sufficient for me.

I think you will have to enumerate them at least a bit in order to get your ideas some traction.

Sistani is very influential, and I think that in keeping with his idea of low profile clerics, he will only speak out when absolutely necessary.

Thanks for that link. I found reading Sistani's interpretations of Islamic law very informative. He's conservative, but clearly not an extremist, and he seems to have some understanding of the need to accomodate non Moslems and Moslems who live in the west or in a western lifestyle. More sense than I expected, really. Except the outlawing of chess - I have to assume that's some sort of old anti-Persian thing.

Dave

Thanks forthe link, this is enough Arabic to keep me busy for the month.

Reasons why Sistani is not equivalent to Mandela:

1) Mandela spent three decades in prison for refusing to compromise with the racist leadership of his country. Sistani accomodated. No shame there, particularly given his beliefs regarding clerical involvement in politics, but it's a profound difference.

2) Mandela's brief was for a secular, egalitarian society. Sistani's, as he has repeatedly said, is for a society grounded in Islamic practice. He does not enjoin against more strict interpretations of Islam than his, but there isn't the slightest indication he'll countenance more liberal ones.

3) Mandela's revolution was home grown. He neither asked for nor expected nor, ultimately, needed outside military intervention.

4) Mandela spoke out vehemently against the excesses of his fellow anti-apartheid militants when those occurred, to the the extent that many denounced him as a quisling. Again, so far as I know, Sistani has said not one word about the religious murders and beatings in Basra and elsewhere, or the theocratic crimes against people and property, things which fall directly under his purview.

5) Mandela actually brought peace to his country. Sistani has not, and the question of whether he can is still very much open. We're in a period of suspended animation between the election of a transitional government and the actual seating of that government with its mandate to create a constitution which Sistani insists must enshrine Islam as the source of civil law.

So before we go handing out Nobel Peace Prizes or comparing Sistani to Mandela or Gorbachev or anyone else who helped shepherd their country from one state of being to another, I'd suggest it's wise to wait until we see whether Sistani gets what he wants and how he'll react if he doesn't, and how the rest of the country reacts if he does.

Meanwhile, it's absurd to pretend that clerical authority over civil matters won't have a profound effect upon the rights of women or anyone who thinks a drink and a dance is a reasonable way to spend an evening. And as usual, it will be the poorer women who are most severely affected.

It might be said that considering Saddam's killing of outspoken Shia clerics instead of jail, Sistani may have been opting for discretion as the better part of valor.
TO tell you the truth, I would have to look more into Sistani's history before I say anything more. I just remember being in Iraq when Sistani starting speaking out against Shia uprising, and he definitely had influence over Shia who might otherwise have gone to Najaf to support Sadr. Sistani is still a bit of a cipher, but if Arrafat cvan get the NPP, why not Sistani? j/k

Weldon, I am going off what I've read on Sistani and other Shia sites. I haven't been studying any Sunni laws on these matters since Shia law is more educational for this particular purpose. Also...

1) Sistani was under house arrest under Saddam. Khoei, his predecessor, was also, and was eventually executed by Saddam.

2) Mandela being secular doesn't really seem relevant. The needs of each locale are different. And sometimes these needs boggle the minds of those not of that locale. You and I sure are not Iraqi, and it may scare you and I to have Sistani affect politics, but every Shia I've encountered recently, male and female alike, seem ecstatic at his involvement. The fact that his camp has so rapidly reached agreements with the Kurds is something even Sunni rule was never able to do, and it all seems positive so far.

3) Sistani didn't ask for nor expect outside military intervention, and was against it. His role was not in politics, but the role of Ayatollahs in politics as I've read it is traditionally only when the nation is in turmoil. Sistani seems to have fulfilled that well. Iran is a separate matter on their shift from traditional clergy roles.

4) From what I understand, Sistani has indeed issues fatwas condemning several insurgent activities, including the bombing of churches, kidnapping, etc. There's one mentioned smack dab in the middle of his site's home page.

5) To say Sistani hasn't significantly reduced turmoil in Iraq is just not correct. His work is not done yet. How much did Mandela get done in 1 year?!