by John McHugo
But the greatest transformation, of course, was ideological: from a conservative monarchy to a revolutionary, populist regime which trumpeted Arab nationalism, paid a noisy lip service (but little more) to ideals of Arab unification, and tried to create a new, socialist Iraq. Yet none of Iraq’s deep-seated problems of identity had been solved. The country’s elite remained Sunni Arab, even if the faces at the top table had changed beyond recognition. The Kurdish areas in the north felt alienated, and increasingly experienced insurrections. Throughout this time, and indeed until the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by the US-led coalition in 2003, Shi‘is remained poorly represented in the higher levels of administration and the officer corps.
The Iraqi branch of the nationalist and ultra-secularist Ba‘ath party was founded by a Shi‘i, Fuad al-Rikabi, in 1952. He did not manage to spread his Ba‘athist message successfully among his co-religionists, and left the party in 1959. The reasons for this failure were probably the two problems for Shi‘is with Arab nationalism that have already been mentioned: the association of pan-Arab nationalism in the minds of many Shi‘is with Sunni hegemony, and the fact that they felt excluded by a Sunni Arab elite.
Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim, who headed the blood-soaked coup that overthrew the monarchy, was, in theory at least, probably a more appropriate person to rule Iraq then anyone before or since. His father was a Sunni Arab and his mother was a Faili, a member of the Kurdish Shi‘i minority. He wanted to end the grotesque inequalities of Iraqi society, and made this his priority rather than starry-eyed visions of uniting Iraq with other Arab states. Whether or not he had a clear idea about how to go about transforming Iraqi society, he soon found himself trapped by Iraq’s tradition of patronage and its murderous twin, coercion. Real parliamentary life was now over. Even if it had continued, patronage and coercion would have been the best – or perhaps the only – ways for him to secure his powerbase and to get things done.
Qasim’s rule turned out to be the high watermark of the Iraqi Communist Party, and of Shi‘i participation in it. The Communists provided him with an important counterweight to the pan-Arab nationalists. He became authoritarian, possibly despite himself, and a personality cult grew up around him. Although his popularity grew, he was overthrown in a coup by Arab nationalist officers on 9 February 1963. He and his associates were brought before a summary court and shot. His bullet-riddled corpse was then displayed on television. This may have been because the plotters genuinely feared his popularity and therefore wished to quash any rumours that he was still alive.
By the time of Qasim, the first signs of religious politics were beginning to appear in Iraq. To an extent, this was a reaction against the threat of communism, materialism and atheism. It was also, however, a response to the prevailing secularist assumptions that both the elite and the intelligentsia had held under the monarchy and after the coup of 1958. Among Sunnis, an Iraqi branch of the Muslim Brotherhood was formed. In 1957, a similar organisation called al-Da‘wa, ‘the Call’, was set up by some Shi‘is. It was led by a young religious scholar, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr.
The impulse for an Islamic alternative thus occurred more or less simultaneously among a number of Sunnis and Shi‘is. Initially, they were told to form a single Islamic party, so as to avoid the risk of sectarianism. Its leader was a Sunni, but it was sponsored by the Najaf-based Shi‘i scholar Grand Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim. In 1960 it began to criticise legislation as contrary to the Sharia, and was harassed by the authorities. This harassment was part of a general crackdown that made open party politics difficult, and drove much political activity underground. Even though they were now often operating in secret, the Islamists were able to join nationalists in their fight against the communists. The communists turned out to be the big losers in the period after Qasim fell. They never recovered.
Apart from hostility to the old regime and anger at the state of the country, little united the officers who had overthrown Qasim. Factional bickering in the months following the coup led to another military strongman, Abd al-Salam Arif, taking power in Iraq in November that year. He followed a socialist path and issued a decree in July 1964 that nationalised banks, insurance firms and major industrial companies. Islamic organisations, both Sunni and Shi‘i, were among those who objected. There was a revival of religion-based organisations in the Shi‘i community, bolstered by leading mujtahids in the shrine cities denouncing the nationalisations as contrary to the Sharia. This may have had some effect, since Arif had always shown himself in public to be a devout Muslim, and he subsequently backtracked from this policy. However, it soon became apparent that the policy was disastrous for the economy – the probable reason for the political U-turn.
Abd al-Salam Arif was killed in a helicopter crash in April 1966 which seems to have been a genuine accident. His brother Abd al-Rahman, the acting army chief of staff, took over, but he lacked his brother’s political abilities. He was overthrown in July 1968 in a coup mounted by the nationalist, socialist and secularist Ba‘ath Party under Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who became Iraq’s fourth president. Saddam Hussein, who was then thirty-one and secretary of the Iraqi Ba‘ath party, was a relative of the new leader. He would now begin his rise to the very top and take full power in 1979.
The officers who were central to the new regime came disproportionately from the Sunni Arab areas of the north-west of Iraq.2 They instinctively considered themselves superior to the Shi‘i Arabs and non-Arab Kurds. It was thus first and foremost among fellow Sunnis in these areas of the north-west of the country that the regime would dispense its patronage, and from which it would recruit those to be given key positions. This was a disguised patron-client relationship, even if on the surface it appeared sectarian. The new rulers tightened their grip on power by purges in response to fictitious conspiracies and coup attempts. There was no ideological struggle. The Iraqi Ba‘ath Party had become a vehicle with the sole purpose of supporting the rulers’ power and control.
III
It was hardly surprising that the new regime’s reliance on the support of a relatively narrow section of the population led to discontent. There were insurrections in Kurdistan. Troubles loomed with the Shi‘i community when the Shah of Iran used his greater military muscle to pressurise Iraq into making concessions regarding the Shatt al-Arab waterway, where the boundary between the two states lay. Part of Hassan al-Bakr’s response to the Shah’s aggressive approach was an attempt to reach out to the leading Iraqi Shi‘i religious scholars for support. He had a reputation as a devout (Sunni) Muslim; he was able to remind them of his hostility to communism and how the Ba‘athists had been the major force that had defeated them. These points counted in his favour. On the other hand, the religious leaders could not overlook Ba‘athist support for socialist policies which they believed conflicted with Islam. Probably most significant was the fact that Hassan al-Bakr’s regime was built on a tight circle of Sunni Arab army officers who kept themselves in power by promoting their kinsmen and tribal connections. Socialist rhetoric increased, and was often mouthed by secularists who had risen to prominent positions because they came from Sunni tribal cliques; the disquiet of Shi‘i religious scholars grew.
Matters came to a head in 1969 when Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim refused Hassan al-Bakr’s request to condemn the Iranian government’s position over the Shatt al-Arab. This began a process that turned into a nightmare for the narrowly based regime. It began with government measures expelling from the country many Iranian religious students in the shrine cities, and closing down a university in Najaf. The security services harassed Shi‘is, citing ‘the Iranian threat’ as justification. This led to a reaction. Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim led a protest march from Najaf to Baghdad, and was greeted by thousands of Shi‘i well-wishers when he arrived in the capital. The authorities stopped people visiting him, but protests only intensified. When a Sunni scholar, Sheikh Abd al-Aziz al Badri, gave a sermon at a Baghdad mosque in support of the ayatollah, he was seized and executed.
The regime was mindful of past cases of cooperation between Sunnis and Shi‘is, perhaps especially those at the end of the First World War and time of the British occupation. Such inter-sectarian cooperation between religious scholars of both persuasions was probably what the regime feared above all else. In the big cities of Iraq, ordinary Sunnis and Shi‘is co-operated together at grass-roots level and there was considerable intermarriage.3 If their religious leaders could cooperate against the government this might have truly devastating consequences for the regime. The authorities therefore reacted with a clampdown on religion that was to some extent reminiscent of practice in the Soviet Union: Islamic instruction in schools was ended, and the state broadcasting networks stopped recitations of the Qur’an. Such moves were unprecedented in an Arab country. They triggered riots and demonstrations in the Shi‘i south. As he fled into exile, Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim issued a fatwa banning membership of the Ba‘ath party.
When the ayatollah died a year later, many Shi‘is who had been his followers transferred their loyalty to another scholar, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, who had been one of the founders of al-Da‘wa. He had been much more engaged in politics, and also had an appeal to many devout Muslims who were not Shi‘i. He carried widespread respect, and this presented difficulties for the government. Its strategy was to undermine the social solidarity that he and other religious scholars might succeed in building across the Sunni-Shi‘i divide, on the basis of common Muslim values. The way it could do this was through patronage, that old standby of every Iraqi government since independence.
The Ba‘athist regime was shortly to have greater resources at its disposal than any previous government. Subsidies, welfare payments and other benefits were now introduced. They were expanded massively when Iraq received its windfall from the oil price rises following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Between October 1973 and December 1975, Iraqi oil revenues increased by 800 per cent. Even though 40 per cent of the budget was earmarked for defence, vast sums were available to foster patronage networks.4 Unsurprisingly, some of this was directed at Shi‘is, many of whom responded by allowing themselves to be co-opted.
Yet Shi‘i discontent continued to simmer. This was inevitable given the close-knit, in some ways almost tribal, nature of the regime. In 1977 at the time of Ashura, the commemorations of Hussein’s martyrdom, the security services were caught off guard when a traditional march from Najaf to Karbala turned into a massive protest against the regime and degenerated into riots. When the army was called in, some soldiers deserted. The response was harsh. Two thousand arrests were made, and a special tribunal was set up to deal with them. Many of those involved were imprisoned, but eight religious scholars were executed.
But toughness was not the only response of the regime. There was the carrot, as well as the stick. By this time, Saddam Hussein was the real ruler of Iraq, although Hassan al-Bakr was still head of state. Saddam Hussein began to use Islamic rhetoric in a way that was new for a senior Ba‘athist. He extended his patronage to religious scholars as part of a wider strategy by which he would be the sole dispenser of patronage across all sections of Iraqi society.5 He also appointed some Shi‘is to the Revolutionary Command Council, the supreme organ of government. This had never happened before.
But Saddam Hussein also had to cast his eyes to the east, where events were building up over which he could have no control. There was now increasing unrest in Iran, and it had a religious flavour. Some of this was linked to scholarly activity in the shrine cities of Iraq. An exiled Iranian ayatollah called Ruhollah Khomeini had been quietly lecturing in Najaf for some time, expounding his ideas on Islamic government. The Shah asked Iraq to expel him. Relations between Iraq and Iran were not good, but eventually, in November 1978, the Iraqi government did so, and the ayatollah took up a new residence in France. In Iraq, there was much Shi‘i discontent, but it was not a force that seemed able to threaten the Ba‘athist state.6
IV
At the start of this period, Syria was probably the Arab country where secularism was most deeply entrenched. The last French troops withdrew in 1946. The new, fully independent Syria was a parliamentary republic in which the members of parliament elected the president. Although the notables who dominated the Syrian parliament were chiefly Sunni Muslims with socially conservative, Muslim attitudes, religious politics were not a major factor. It would be several decades before this would change and sectarianism would become significant.
Although the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood set up branches in the major cities, it was chiefly engaged in campaigning against the Westernisation of society, not in trying to find a route to power. In politics, it showed itself to be flexible. The most powerful political force of the era aimed to remove all religious and sectarian divisions from politics. During the Second World War, Michel Aflaq, a proudly Arab, Orthodox Christian in Damascus, was formulating an Arab nationalist ideology based on aspirations for freedom, unity, and socialism. He fought passionately against religious involvement in politics, but also saw Islam as the supreme achievement of the Arabs. For him Islam was something that all Arabs, Muslim or non-Muslim, Sunni or Shi‘i, believer or atheist, should recognise as the crowning glory of the civilisation their people had created. The Ba‘ath (‘renaissance’) party which he co-founded had the slogan ummah arabiyyah wahidah dhat risalah khalidah, ‘one Arab nation with an eternal message’. The Ba‘athists had considerable success recruiting among Syria’s Shi‘i minorities, the Alawis, the Druze and the Ismailis.
Although the party contested elections, Ba‘athist army officers soon began to conspire to take control of the government. They finally eliminated their rivals in a coup in 1966. After a chaotic period, Hafez al-Assad, a Ba‘athist general who was an Alawi, took control. He proved to have hands of steel, and he kept the country in his grip until his death in 2000. He was the dictator who reduced the Ba‘ath party to an instrument to maintain him in power. Alawis had been a despised and very poor peasant minority at the bottom of Syrian society. However, Hafez al-Assad selected many Alawis for key positions, and as the foot soldiers of the security and intelligence networks which expanded vastly under his rule. The military also expanded. In 1973, the army had five divisions. Two were commanded by Alawis. By 1992, it had nine divisions, and seven were commanded by Alawis.7
The resentment of those who had lost property in the Ba‘athist revolution – a group that included many Sunni merchants – was joined by the anger of those who missed out on opportunities because of the regime’s corruption and cronyism. Then there was a third category: those who had suffered at the hands of the security state. Parliament was now just a rubber stamp, while the security services had been exempted from judicial oversight since 1963. There was no legal opening for political opposition, or even for any public criticism. Yet after the end of real parliamentary life in Syria, there was still one possible source of opposition that was harder to control: rallying behind the banner of Islam. The mosque was a natural meeting place for men, especially after the noon prayers on Fridays. It became much easier for religious elements to organise demonstrations or shopkeepers’ strikes than it was for secular forces.
Hafez al-Assad always took care to portray himself as a devout Muslim. There is no reason to be cynical about this in itself, but he definitely saw religion as an item to be deployed for political purposes when appropriate. He was also well aware of the dangers of sectarian politics. Conscious that some doubted whether Alawis were true Muslims, he obtained a fatwa from Musa al-Sadr, the eminent Twelver Shi‘i religious scholar in Lebanon, that Alawis should be considered Muslims of the Shi‘i persuasion. During Ramadan and at Muslim festivals, the public would see their president praying in some of the country’s most famous mosques, flanked by eminent Sunni religious scholars. His son Bashar, who was chosen to take over the presidency when his father died in 2000, married a Sunni Muslim, as did the children of many other Alawi Ba‘athists.
Yet the Alawism of so many figures at the top of the regime,
and the easily identifiable accents of secret policemen from parts of the country where there were many Alawis, made sectarianism a potent weapon for the government’s opponents. In the second half of the 1970s, militants started to take action against the regime of Hafez al-Assad. In 1976, assassinations of prominent Alawi figures began, coupled with bomb attacks on government targets. Many people felt excluded from the Ba‘athist revolution and hated the path on which it was taking Syria. They saw it as intended to take them away from their roots and, perhaps most of all, from their Islam. The regime responded by encouraging Sunni scholars and preachers who were prepared to work with it, some of whom publicly stressed the dangers that sectarianism would bring. Some pro-regime scholars would pay with their lives for supporting it.8 It also succeeded in co-opting many Sunnis. Yet the absence of any other way for expressing opposition to the regime made Sunni Islamist politics a kind of default option for many people. Trouble was being stored up for the future.
V
Oil was discovered in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia in 1938. Its wealth from this new resource would transform the country – and to some extent the world – in many different ways. It also made Saudi Arabia a crucial American strategic interest, since it was ARAMCO, a consortium of American oil companies, that would be responsible for production.
As the 1950s progressed, the secular Arab nationalism of Egypt’s President Nasser had a strong appeal to the workers in the oil fields. Many of them were native Saudi Shi‘is, who were the inhabitants of the area where the oil was exploited. Nasser’s policies also attracted many other Saudis, notably in the kingdom’s most sophisticated province, the Hejaz. Political awareness grew. A Saudi branch of the Ba‘ath party was formed in 1961 which, like other nationalist organisations, was cross-sectarian. It attracted recruits among intellectuals and in Shi‘i areas, but dissolved into factions following a split in the Syrian Ba‘ath in 1963.9 After the Six Day War in 1967, the Ba‘athists and other organisations successfully staged demonstrations. Attempts to plot a coup (which cannot have involved many Shi‘is, as there were very few, if any, in the army) led to arrests in 1969-70. This dealt a serious blow to the Saudi Ba‘ath and other opposition networks.