The Rope

by Kanan Makiya

  The establishment clerical class backed by the wealthier merchants and upper middle class of Najaf rallied around Sistani, Ayatollah Khoei’s nominee. Sayyid Sadiq seethed with resentment because he had again been denied his rightful place under the sun, notwithstanding all the money he could dispose of to bribe students away from their traditional mentors. Armed with the authority to deny residency permits to students or scholars of theology he did not like, he launched an intensive anti-quietist crusade, accusing the traditional Shiʻa clerical establishment of remaining silent, or “quiet,” after his cousin’s execution and distancing themselves from the very poor and the very young by their preoccupation with abstruse and outmoded religious questions. Soon the establishment clerics found themselves the target of a smear campaign, one that insulted them personally, something previously unheard-of in conservative Najaf, where respect for the clerical class was a matter of honor. Vulgar leaflets and cheap cartoons and posters started to appear denigrating the quietist Ayatollahs and telling them to go back to Iran. In 2003, at the time of the murder, Sadrist activists surrounded the homes of Ayatollahs ‘Ali al-Sistani, Bashir al-Najafi, and Muhammad ʻIshaq al-Fayadh; Ayatollah Sistani was forced to call upon local tribes to drive Muqtada’s men away.

  This rising tide of nastiness would culminate in the murder of Sayyid Majid. Sayyid Sadiq, Muqtada’s father, had coined the notion of the “vocal” cleric and proceeded to use the monies flowing in to him not only to gain students and followers, but also to set up “popular bases” in anticipation of the long-awaited return of the twelfth Imam of the Ithna ʻAshariya branch of Shiʻism (the Twelfthists), the dominant branch in Iraq. The twelfth Imam, named al-Mahdi (literally “the Rightly Guided One”), had supposedly gone into Occultation and would return at the end of time as the last divinely chosen Imam. In accordance with his father’s writings on the imminence of the twelfth Imam’s return, Muqtada al-Sadr appropriated his father’s notion of the “vocal” or activist cleric and named his militia the Mahdi Army—or, as I have rendered it in English to give a sense of its wider meaning, the Army of the Awaited One.

  Sayyid Sadiq was no longer content to challenge just the quietist establishment, but Iran (by proclaiming his authority over the Shiʻa of Iraq and denying Khamenei’s claim to pan-Shiʻa leadership) and the Baʻthi regime itself. The latter was one enemy too many. By the late 1990s he seems to have become carried away with his own rhetoric about the imminent return of the Mahdi to the point of going about wearing a shroud, looking to become a martyr, which the regime duly obliged him with when it gunned him down along with Muqtada’s two older brothers in February 1999. From the date of that killing, the organization Sayyid Sadiq built went into hibernation, from which it emerged only after the last remaining son of Sayyid Sadiq, Muqtada, sanctioned the murder of Sayyid Majid on April 10, 2003, the event that sits at the heart of the novel and the seed from which sprung in that same year the gigantic tree of the Sadrist movement in Iraq.

  —

  Opinions differ as to the precise date of the fall of Saddam Hussein, with the American media and U.S. government insisting on April 9, 2003, because that is when the pictures of the statue in Firdaws Square being toppled were taken and aired all over the world. Many Iraqis, myself included, have settled on April 10, 2003, as the day of the tyrant’s fall, because Saddam Hussein was seen praying in the Mosque of Abu Hanifa and walking about in ʻAdhamiyah on that day. He fled Baghdad shortly afterward. April 10 is also the day of Sayyid Majid’s murder.

  I carried this union of liberation and murder with me for ten years, not knowing what to do with it. I felt it had to lie at the heart of anything I wrote about what went wrong in post-2003 Iraq. But how best to capture the enormity of the conjunction?

  The literary resolution of the nexus of liberation and murder takes place in the novel through the person, or character, of Saddam Hussein, standing in as he so obviously does for that long legacy of abuse—he was the past that would not go away because Iraqis had hanged him (the United States, it was my understanding at the time, was against the hanging, not in principle but because of the timing). One evil quickly replaced another, worse than the first, civil war, and the furies of killing and destruction are not over yet.

  Saddam Hussein understood the unwritten rules of Iraqi governance and statehood that were so effortlessly imbibed by those who followed him. In the first part of the book, which sticks closely to the known facts about the hanging, Saddam says very little. But the little he does say is factual. I chose to adhere as closely as possible to the known facts concerning how he died.*6 I did not witness the hanging myself, but worked to re-create the context and scene from innumerable sources. The story of “The Rope,” for example, comes from one of those sources, a young aide to the prime minister attending the execution who had lost a close relative to Saddam.

  The Saddam who reappears on the other side of Sayyid Majid’s murder in the third part of the book is, on the other hand, a completely fictional construct, as brutal as the historical Saddam but far smarter and better read. And he likes to talk, lecturing the narrator regarding “the truth of my dictatorship.”

  In the world that he built, Saddam explains, betrayal was everywhere. To betray was to survive and was therefore morally justifiable, or at least morally ambiguous, and difficult for outsiders to condemn. Betrayal was the place where character and politics met for the duration of his rule. No one understood betrayal, and used it as a political tool, better than Saddam. He made the rules of this terrible world; he knew best how to manipulate its sources and passions. That is why in the fictionalized portrait I have created of him in Part Three it is he who best understands the failings of Iraq’s new crop of leaders. They are all, he points out, “my children,” including, needless to say, those who lived for decades in London, Washington, and Tehran.

  Why did betrayal persist and live on, even flourish, after the tyrant was gone? And why did Foreigner Iraqis, men who had lived abroad for so many years, betray more than Iraqis who knew no better, who could not be expected to shed overnight the mistrust and cautionary habits of a lifetime? I don’t know, and dare not hazard a guess. I only try to show in this book how it did.

  In a simplistic view of sectarian behavior, it is assumed that if leaders betray, at least they don’t betray members of their own sect. This may be true in a zero-sum world, but that was not the world of post-2003 Iraq. The long-suffering community of the Shiʻa are the greatest victims of their leaders’ sectarian politics.

  Which brings me to the challenge of this book: the argument that the failure of post-2003 Iraq is one of leadership, and of Shiʻa Iraqi leadership in particular; it is a “subjective” failing, not one explicable by the brutal facts of tyranny alone or by a disastrous occupation. Failure of the kind I am writing about cannot be predicted; it was not a foregone conclusion before the war. People made it so. Civil war and a complete breakdown in Sunni-Shiʻa relations were not inevitable consequences of war and occupation; Iraqi leaders knowingly or unknowingly willed them into existence. Individuals with weight, who would not cater to the basest sentiments, might have made a difference. Others have convincingly portrayed the many failures of the American occupation. There is no point rehashing those here. But the deeper failure, the one that this book is about, was always an Iraqi one.

  Since one could not expect Kurds or Sunni Arabs—both fearful and prickly minorities, always on guard and on the defensive—to be the driving forces of a new Iraq, the failure I am referring to has to be laid at the door of the Shiʻa leaders who emerged and who were knowingly handpicked by the Americans to become the dominant force of the governing elite in Iraq.

  They had the most to lose by failure; they represented a majority that had potentially an entire country to gain. No one would have benefited from success as much as ordinary Iraqi Shiʻa; that was the promise that the Americans held out and that Shiʻa leaders failed to deliver; they played instead the game of competing over who had suffered the m
ost, and scheming to make Sunni Arabs, or former Baʻthis (which was virtually everybody), pay for the decades of abuse, maliciously now attributed to them as an entire community.

  De-Baʻthification in Iraq, which to my shame I defended before the war, was in practice witch-hunting or de-Sunnification. Nothing else. The same is true of the Commission of Public Integrity, perhaps the most corrupt and sectarian institution of the post-2003 state. The Shiʻa elite fought for these institutions, administered them, and implemented their provisions, even as they failed in everything else (providing electricity, repairing the shambles that is Baghdad, building infrastructure, expanding and modernizing the country’s oil production and refining capabilities). Americans had very little to do with de-Baʻthification beyond authorizing it. De-Baʻthification went along with, among other things, rewriting Iraqi history to claim that the state had always been a sectarian Sunni enterprise, a politics belied by the facts and doomed to bring out the worst in the very people they needed to win over the most. Much of Western academia and the media followed suit in a quest to find simple, pseudoscientific “causes,” supposedly rooted in “age-old” hatreds, for what were in fact crass political tactics, and choices of the worst sort. Those choices amounted to the invention and the institutionalization of the new politics of our times: sectarianism.

  The Iraqi state created by the British in 1932 was no more intrinsically sectarian than the American republic was intrinsically racist. To be sure, Iraqi society was sectarian, perhaps profoundly so, as profoundly as American society was racist. But I am referring in both cases to the state, not to society. Politicians, parties, leaders, and intellectuals could choose to work against racism (Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Kennedy, Johnson in the United States), or they could go along with it, to the point, in Iraq, of promoting and instituting sectarianism into the body politic, as the Shiʻa political class has been doing since 2003. Neither racism nor sectarianism is easy to eradicate, but at least racism was pushed back in the United States (where it flares up from time to time, as it did in Baltimore and Ferguson in 2014). In Iraq, however, driven from the political top down into the social and cultural base, it had to become the be-all and end-all of politics; it is now very hard to eradicate. And, of course, the rest of the Middle East is following suit, adding to and embellishing the contribution of Iraq’s Arab Shiʻa leaders to civilizational breakdown in the Muslim and Arab world.

  Sayyid Majid’s murder, and its cover-up, showed from the outset that no one in the country had that intangible mix of foresight and generosity of spirit to rise to the great historical occasion of the tyrant’s downfall. It may be fortuitous that he was murdered on the same day as the Baʻthi state collapsed. But there was nothing fortuitous about the cover-up that ensued. And this, of course, is the price that sectarianism, like racism, always exacts: it dehumanizes the sectarian and the racist, even as it violates and punishes his victim. Society as a whole is debased.

  An anecdote may be helpful here. In the 1990s I engaged in a standard sort of argument with my friend Barham Saleh (former deputy prime minister of Iraq) concerning the possibility of Kurdish secession from a post-Saddam Iraq. The argument would play itself out with Barham talking about how “artificial” the Iraqi state was, and how logical a Kurdish state was, and, while agreeing, I would defend the idea of Iraq, saying something like “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” meaning Kurdish secession could end up being more costly to the Kurdish people than staying in a new federal Iraq (something that may no longer be true, as the Kurdish leadership is starting to realize).

  The irony is that in the end it was the Kurds who stayed, providing the more responsible ministers to successive Iraqi governments, and it was the Iraqi Arab Shiʻa leadership who threw the Iraqi baby out with the bathwater, and gave us ISIS.

  —

  It is extremely painful for me personally that Sayyid Majid al-Khoei was Iraqi Shiʻa sectarianism’s first victim; here is yet another variation on the story of Cain and Abel: a murder between first brothers, at the dawn of a new world, unleashing mayhem onto their race. Thus are laid the seeds of continuing and ever-escalating violence as we heirs of Cain try to be who we are at someone else’s expense.

  I am not religious; I knew Majid only, as others did, as a good and ordinary man, the first of many hundreds of thousands of good and ordinary Iraqis to be murdered by their fellow Iraqis out of hatred or revenge. But he was also the son of Grand Ayatollah Abu’l-Qassim al-Khoei. There is nothing ordinary about that. His murder, and its cover-up, should have sounded a warning to the whole community into which I was born. It didn’t. What does that tell us? It tells us that when Sayyid Majid died, something in all of us died with him. Perhaps it was dead already on the day that Saddam fell. As my narrator realizes at the very end of his quest: Sayyid Majid is an ordinary man, but he is also everyman; he is “us.”

  He is Ammar. He is Mustafa. He is my cousin Sa’ad, who was shot dead in his car by Sunni jihadis intent on driving him out of his neighborhood. He is the Sunni Arabs who were evicted from their homes in Baghdad and Diyala, or those who had holes drilled through their skulls by the likes of Haider during the first civil war of 2005–2006. He is the Iraqi Christians today being driven out of homes that belonged to them centuries before Islam even existed. He is the little Yazidi girls sold into slavery by ISIS.

  Yes, Sayyid Majid is every Iraqi who allowed his patrimony to be betrayed by men (and they were always men) claiming to be acting in the name of that new chimera of post-2003 Iraq: “Shiʻa rule.”

  * * *

  *1 Sheikh Ahmed al-Kubaisi is one of the Sunni jihadis who bussed insurgents to Najaf and Karbala from Fallujah and other areas in the Sunni triangle, according to Paul Bremer. The first public statement of Hamas in support of the Mahdi Army dates to August 12, 2004; it focused on condemning “the barbarian American aggression against Iraq” and Najaf, in particular, and solidarity with the Iraqi people. The second statement, dated August 19, 2004, was much more specific, mentioning solidarity with Muqtada al-Sadr in particular.

  *2 See Patrick Cockburn’s account in Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), 196–97.

  *3 Evidence for the cover-up can now be adduced from documents released by WikiLeaks. See wikileaks.org/​cable/​2004/​07/​04BAGHDAD119.html. An article drawing the same conclusions by Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi appeared in the Lebanese Daily Star. See www.dailystar.com.lb/​Opinion/​Commentary/​2011/​Sep-20/​149186-iraqs-politicians-hover-above-the-law.ashx#axzz21GNFbOP8. The House of the Shiʻa was desperate to keep the cover-up a secret, which is why they took the extraordinary step of not allowing the Coalition Provisional Authority to make a copy of the letter, as noted in the WikiLeaks documents. The same was true of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who in a letter dated January 14, 2007, smuggled out of his office, advised the senior leadership of the Mahdi Army and their fighters, including some of the men personally involved in Sayyid Majid’s murder, to withdraw from Baghdad so as to “retain our [Shiʻa] great gains” and not get caught up in the American-led surge, which would then target only Sunni militias. The letter stresses this would be “temporary,” lasting for the duration of the American military surge. Were the Americans, Maliki’s big backers at the time, aware of this ploy? I wouldn’t be surprised.

  *4 Diwan al-Kufa was a London-based Iraqi cultural center established by my father, Muhammad Makiya, and named after the first private Shiʻa University, which he tried to establish in southern Iraq until the Baʻth shut it down in 1970, expropriating all its privately donated assets.

  *5 From International Crisis Group, Iraq’s Muqtada Al-Sadr: Spoiler or Stabiliser? (Middle East Report no. 55, July 11, 2006), 3. This report includes interviews with Sadrists from the leadership and the rank and file. Clearly compiled by Iraqis working for the ICG, it includes background on Sayyid Sadiq and his conflict with Sayyid Sistani. See also International Crisis Group, Shiite Politics in Iraq: The Role of the Supreme Coun
cil (Middle East Report no. 70, November 15, 2007), which covers the war between the Houses of Hakim and Sadr. On the al-Hannana interview, see Loulouwa al-Rachid, “Du bon usage du chiisme irakien,” Politique Internationale 101 (Autumn 2003). I have also benefited from the book by Harith al-Qarawee entitled Imagining the Nation: Nationalism, Sectarianism and Socio-Political Conflict in Iraq (Bacup, UK: Rossendale Books, 2012).

  *6 The chanting and the opening of the trapdoor before Saddam had finished reciting the Shahada were captured on a smart phone belonging to an Iraqi government official and are available on the Internet. A photograph of Saddam on the platform showing the pulley and the three men in ski masks was published in an article in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Anbaa on February 9, 2011. See also the report in The Advertiser, December 20, 2005. The scene of Saddam’s body being exhibited in front of the prime minister’s office, with the chanting crowd, and the shroud being lifted from his face, can be seen on YouTube: www.youtube.com/​watch?v=lOo37ky6TtI. See also another clip with voice-over from Iraq’s Biladi TV station, owned by Ibrahim al-Ja‘fari: www.youtube.com/​watch?v=lgJ4CPy7zeE.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Kanan Makiya was born in Baghdad. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling Republic of Fear, The Monument, The Rock, and the award-winning Cruelty and Silence. He is currently the Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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