by Kanan Makiya
—
Poor Haider got sucked into the vortex of this war. I will never forget the day he came to me, visibly upset, and asked me to go with him to the courtyard of the Shrine to talk over something that was troubling him. He is good at feeling the pulse of a situation—a mood on the street or forebodings in the country; then he will perhaps jump unwisely into it, without thinking twice. I am by contrast the kind of a person who looks backward over his shoulder, neither perceiving nor feeling enough before he rationalizes. Haider was my weather vane for the mood of the city, and I assumed that was what was troubling him. I bought a pomegranate to share while we talked, cracked it open, and handed him the biggest seed-laden segment.
“I met this preacher in a small village,” he said, “just a few kilometers northeast of Najaf, an extraordinary man, mesmerizing to listen to; he calls himself the Judge of Heaven.”
“What?” I said in amazement. “That is not a name!”
“No. It is who he says he is. He was a student and ardent follower of our Sayyid’s father, Sayyid Sadiq, and has extended his mentor’s ideas concerning the signs that will precede the coming of the Awaited One, and the evidence suggesting his arrival is imminent. Sayyid Sadiq, as you know, is the only clerical authority in Najaf to ground his view of Islamic government on its proper theological foundations, namely the rule of the Rightly Guided One, who he says will return very soon. The preacher I met claims the Messiah is coming even sooner than Sayyid Sadiq thought; moreover, the Messiah actually speaks to him in premonitions and dreams.”
“So is he crazy…”
“I did not find him crazy at all! Quite the contrary: he speaks softly, is articulate and persuasive, giving reasons and proofs for everything, and he lives more frugally and simply than his followers! There is nothing crazy about him, unless you call the fervor and intensity of his beliefs signs of a deranged mind. I spent two days in a camp with hundreds of his followers, whom he calls Soldiers of Heaven. They are there with their wives and children.”
“You are convinced, then, that this preacher is actually the Awaited One, the Rightly Guided Imam after whom our army is named, come to bring Justice and usher in the end of the world?”
“I did not say that; I am confused. The preacher is, after all, one of us.”
“No, he is not!” I said, horrified. “I would be careful, my dear Haider, about saying such things in public.”
I did not expect Haider to take such nonsense seriously. But he said something that stuck in my mind about Sayyid Sadiq’s teachings, something I had not encountered before. A growing number of self-proclaimed Messiahs had been operating out of Najaf in recent years. Haider’s experience with that crazy preacher had planted a crucial clue: I should be looking into how the various doctrines dealt with the all-important issue of the Absent Imam, the Awaited One, with whom our Sayyid was so enamored.
The most fundamental theological difference among the three great clerical Houses of Shi‘ism—Khoei, Hakim, and Sadr—differences that men have killed for in the past, all boiled down to one’s interpretation of the meaning of the Absent Imam, the Rightly Guided One, whose appearance would restore Justice and usher in the end of the world.
The more remote in time one interprets the advent of the Imam to be, or the more one sees His Coming as having purely symbolic meaning rather than as a physical, literal Coming, the more separate are going to be the religious and political realms of authority, and the more qualified, mediated, and limited the role of religious authority in the present. This is the quietist extreme.
On the other hand, if the Coming of the Imam is imminent, then, depending on the degree of its imminence, the religious and political realms collapse into one another, entailing the absolute authority of the jurist in all matters personal and political. This is the activist extreme.
The House of Khoei, represented by its youngest scion, Sayyid Majid, lay at the quietest extreme of the spectrum, while the House of Sadr, as represented by its youngest scion, our Sayyid, was at the activist extreme. As for the House of Hakim, they were somewhere in the middle, seeing as how while in theory they advocated an Islamic state like ourselves, in practice they were colluding with the Occupier and did not have the religious authority to establish it. Haider’s rogue preacher, by defining himself as the Awaited One, was not even on the scale.
Could such doctrinal differences spill over to bring about the death of Sayyid Majid? Men kill over True Belief; it is in the history of all religions. But I had now gone behind the facade of ideas to the deepest doctrinal differences, the very essences of faith undergirding these ideas—the doctrine of the Hidden Imam. Was that too abstract and unsatisfying as an explanation for murder? The thought of it alone was too terrifying to contemplate. The Shiʻa of Iraq had never faced such a conundrum before. But could I rule it out completely as an explanation for what happened in the courtyard of the Imam’s Shrine on April 10, 2003? I did not know what to think.
—
I did not stop feeling uneasy about the murder, perhaps because I could still see my mother’s face when I returned from the scene that fine spring day in April. Could the scion of such a great House as the House of Khoei, I kept on asking myself, or of any of the great Houses of Shi‘ism, a man only a few years older than our Sayyid, and therefore a man of his own generation—why, they grew up as boys just a few streets from each other; perhaps they even played together in the street—could such a man be an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency?
Uncle claimed Sayyid Majid and about twenty of his friends were transported by plane from London to a spot in the desert a few kilometers from Najaf, landing ten days or so before he was killed. In the desert, they split up, and Sayyid Majid with his closest aides made their way into Najaf, where they started meeting with fellow conspirators. Was that credible? I had heard another story that he had been heading to the house of Najaf’s most senior Ayatollah, the Supreme Source of Emulation in the Shiʻa world and Ayatollah Khoei’s successor, until blocked by a cordon of our men. The Grand Ayatollah, in other words, was unable to leave his house on the day of the murder. The regime’s agents were still in control of the city at that time. Was it credible that the son of such an important Ayatollah would allow himself the indignity of having hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars strapped around his chest under his black clerical robe, as Uncle insisted he had done? Why was he in the Shrine of the Imam in the first place? Why, after all these years, was he in the holiest spot of the holiest city of Shiʻa Islam on the first day of the Occupation? What was he doing there?
If it were even remotely possible that our Sayyid had ordered the murder, why would the Occupier choose this moment in time, so long after the fact, to charge him with the offense? It didn’t smell right; our relations are at an all-time low with the Occupation, skirmishes between us are breaking out all over southern Iraq, and now they decide they are going to arrest our Sayyid!
The Sayyid
“The Sayyid can never be mistaken,” Uncle had said to me on our way to my long-awaited meeting with the Sayyid, a meeting Uncle had organized. “If he is, it is not your place to say so. Are we understood?” Then he told me a story about the Sayyid’s father, Sayyid Sadiq, whom Uncle clearly admired.
Uncle and Sayyid Sadiq were seated in the Sayyid’s formal quarters, where he received guests, when a man came in to ask the price of tomatoes.
“The question infuriated me,” Uncle said. “I rose from my seat with the intention of forcibly ejecting him from the room, and scolding him for his insolence. But the Sayyid grabbed me by the arm and pushed me down next to him on the carpet. Then he astounded everyone by giving the man a detailed answer, going into the price of different kinds of tomatoes, comparing them with their prices last week, and with other vegetables. He seemed to know everything there was to know about the price of tomatoes! I caught up with the man outside as he was leaving and asked him why he had asked that particular question. ‘In selecting a Source of Emulation,’ he rep
lied, ‘I choose the one who knows my problems.’ I thanked him and left feeling ashamed of myself.”
“That is a nice story,” I said.
“Sayyid Sadiq was not one for burying himself under a mountain of books, as other senior clerics do,” he said, a barb clearly directed at the House of Khoei, and Khoei’s chosen successor, the Grand Ayatollah of Najaf.
I asked Uncle if our Sayyid was as wise as his father had been.
“He is the youngest son of his father, Sayyid Sadiq,” he replied, “who originally owed his position to a cousin, the first martyr and founding thinker of our movement, Sayyid Baqir of the House of Sadr. Sayyid Baqir differed from other clerics in that he did not issue rulings on trivia, such as how women must clean themselves and pray after their period or upon giving birth. He chose to think bold new thoughts, for which he died a martyr at the hands of the Tyrant in 1980. All the ideas of our movement go back to him. Sayyid Sadiq carried on the first martyr’s legacy. It was he who first returned to the doctrine of the Hidden Imam, whose return would bring Eternal Justice to the world. He wrote prodigiously on the subject and was murdered by the Tyrant in 1999 for doing so, along with his two eldest sons. That left only our Sayyid, the youngest and the last link in the chain of this great activist tradition. Our Army of the Awaited One is named in honor of Sayyid Sadiq’s great insights and his revival of the traditions of the Hidden Imam. Remember, also, that our Sayyid is an Arab, unlike the traditionalists, who are Iranians. This is most important. And his focus is the evil of foreign Occupation, which also distinguishes him from the other Houses.”
I could not help but notice how circumspect Uncle had been; there was no mention of the Sayyid’s personal attributes. Meanwhile, we had arrived at the Sayyid’s house, near the Holy Shrine, an alley away from where I had stumbled upon the corpse of Sayyid Majid.
Our Sayyid was a short, plump man in his twenties, with a dark complexion and a dour, round face; he never smiled, unlike his father, who liked a good joke. He looked grim when we were first ushered in, because, I am told, he sees in this facial expression great virtue. He was seated cross-legged on the heavily carpeted floor of a room much like Uncle’s office, only smaller. Cushions were spread along the four walls of the room, but he was not using any, hunched forward as he was, playing with his worry beads when Uncle and I entered. He rose in a single motion to greet Uncle, and then proffered his hand to me, which I bent down and kissed, the large turquoise and silver signet ring feeling cold against my cheek. After exchanging pleasantries with Uncle, who was exceedingly casual with him, he seated himself and turned to look at me.
“So this is the young man you have been telling me about! I hear you are doing important work for us and are highly educated. Well done, son.”
I blushed at that and lowered my eyes out of respect.
“Do you have any hobbies, my son?”
“Football.”
“Hmm…The law generally forbids this kind of activity, which distracts people from their duties to God.”
“I did not know, Your Eminence.”
“The West, you see, created in us certain needs that cut short our completeness as good Muslims. Football is a case in point. What is the meaning of a big strong man running after a ball? What happens, I ask you, to his manliness? Instead of shooting a ball into a silly net, he might as well aspire to a goal that is noble and devout, one that facilitates a man’s arrival at God’s feet. I ask you, do the Jews waste their time playing such silly games? No, of course they don’t. They leave such distractions to us. Did America or Israel ever win a World Cup? They spend their time on science and bettering their lives by inventing things like satellite television, leaving the silly games for us to get worked up about.”
“Are there games beloved by religion, my Sayyid?”
“Of course there are! Sword fighting, for instance…good horsemanship…Do you ride a horse?”
“No, my Sayyid.”
“Well, you should. If you need to learn dexterity or strengthen yourself, do so in a morally uplifting manner. You can exercise your muscles at the same time. Running is good, and comes in handy. Swimming is okay. Do you swim?”
“No, my Sayyid.”
“Why not?”
“Mother discouraged it; she said the Euphrates, which is nearby, had been polluted by Saddam.”
“Hmm…Right she is, right she is…God puts obstacles to test our faith…I must go and pray now…Obey your uncle in all things. He has spoken of your mission?”
“He has, my Sayyid.”
“Go with God’s blessings, my son.”
The Arrest Warrant
The events following my meeting with the Sayyid proved Uncle right and exposed the perfidy of the Occupier: our newspapers were closed and high-ranking leaders of our movement arrested, including a dear friend of Uncle’s. An American helicopter tore off an Islamic flag from a pylon, triggering fury among the people. But above all the arrest warrant issued for the Sayyid, which Uncle had predicted was on the way, signaled we were at war with the Occupier.
In the summer of 2004, Haider and I were in awe of the Sayyid, holding him to be the embodiment of the religious idea on earth, a man blessed with a special relationship to God, one that devotees like Haider and myself could not hope to fathom. However, I never went as far as some of my more featherbrained comrades in the Army of the Awaited One, who said of our Sayyid that he was the true Redeemer, the long-awaited Rightly Guided One for whose return we Shiʻa prayed.
I believed our Sayyid, scion of a great line of martyrs of the House of Sadr, was being set up by the Occupation authority, accused of being the prime instigator of the mob attack on his archrival, the collaborator Sayyid Majid. To pin the murder on him was the Occupier’s way of weakening his standing among the Shiʻa, and avenging the murder of their friend Sayyid Majid.
The Sayyid took to dressing in a white burial shroud instead of the dark robes he was accustomed to wearing, a sign that he was embracing his martyrdom, just as his father had done in 1999. “Continue the resistance,” he said to his supporters in a sermon. “Do not use my death or arrest as an excuse not to finish what you have started.” Having launched the war, he went into hiding.
—
A flurry of meetings began with the government to negotiate the rescinding of the arrest warrant and arrange a cease-fire. The national security advisor, a former supporter of our House who had returned from a quarter century in exile, represented the government. But he was as mistrusted by the government he represented as he was by us. He was also a member of the Cabal of Thirteen, which was the intermediary in the negotiations even though its interests were not those of the government, which it tried to undermine at every opportunity. The House of the Shiʻa pressed hardest for a cease-fire, and was represented by its architect, the president of the Governing Council, a long-standing and formidable foe of Saddam Hussein, who had done more perhaps than all the Foreigner Iraqis put together to bring about the downfall of the Tyrant. Uncle led our delegation and brought me along as an aide.
The national security advisor and the Cabal of Thirteen had the same overriding goal: to get the Occupier’s arrest warrant rescinded, a precondition of ending the war. One might have thought that, being appointees of the Occupier, and friends of Sayyid Majid from their days in exile, they would believe there was merit to the case against our Sayyid. But it was not so. Uncle was surprised to discover that the members of the Cabal of Thirteen were drooling at the prospect of being able to do our Sayyid a favor. They would, Uncle said, have kissed the Sayyid’s shoes to be granted the kind of audience I had with him the previous month.
We met at the president’s home, away from the prying eyes of Occupier and government officials. Chairs and softly cushioned sofas lined all the walls; in the middle was a large, formless expanse of marble tiles, with a few Persian carpets scattered about like lost souls. It was not a room to be enjoyed, but to leave an impression.
Upon our arrival, the preside
nt sprang up from his seat in the center of the wall farthest from the doorway, where the chairs were higher, fuller, and more spacious. “You are doing God’s work” was the first thing our host said to Uncle as he shook his hand. “The Sayyid is leading a genuine Uprising against the American Occupier, one as important to the Shiʻa of Iraq as that led by his great-grandfather against the British Occupier. It is God’s work, God’s work. Welcome to my house!
“Did you know,” he went on, still standing, “there were eleven thousand of the brave men of Najaf, a number twice that of the Ottoman army, fighting a well-armed British force many times their number in April 1915? Did you know that? They were led by the brave scholar Muhammad al-Haboobi of Najaf, whose family was a great friend of ours. Haboobi fought like a lion for three days, repeatedly repelling the much larger and more well-equipped forces of the British Empire, before falling in battle on the banks of the Euphrates. The Ottoman commander committed suicide out of shame at his soldiers’ performance. But there was only glory in the fighting spirit of our men of Najaf—a spirit we see once again bright and alive in the shape of our Sayyid from the noble and illustrious House of Sadr…” And then suddenly in an aside, he said, “The Holy Shrine in Najaf has just fallen to your forces, has it not?”
The president was in the habit of displaying his knowledge, down to the details of who said what and when, and then shifting gears to pry out an apparently innocuous piece of information. Uncle knew he was dealing “with a fox,” as he later put it, prone to spellbinding digressions designed to elicit information; he knew he had to be mindful to steer the conversation back to the repeal of the arrest warrant, the subject that was uppermost in his mind.