Shiite Cleric Inspires Devotion, Doubts

Rasha Abdullah considers herself a devout and observant Shiite Muslim. She dresses modestly in full-length black robes, carefully covers her black hair with a hijab, or headscarf, and makes regular pilgrimages to Shiite shrines.

But she recoiled with distaste when asked whether she would support a breakaway government that Muqtader Sadr, a street-smart young Shiite cleric, is trying to launch, using his large following among disadvantaged, disaffected Shiites as a springboard.

“No, no, no,” said Abdullah, a 20-year-old student who lives in a middle-class Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad and hopes to become an engineer.

“They want there to be a Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice -- like the Taliban! -- that would beat women who didn’t veil themselves,” she said, shaking her head. “Things of that nature, wearing a veil, or not, should be our free and personal choice.”

Sadr’s stature as head of a self-declared alternative government and leader of a shadowy militia has, on the surface at least, caused only a minor ripple of concern in Iraq’s interim governing body and the provisional U.S.-led administration, which still makes all the important decisions here.

His burgeoning movement among the poor has caused consternation among moderate, educated and better-off Shiites, who fear it could undermine what until now has been a fairly cordial working relationship between Shiite community leaders and coalition military authorities -- and perhaps deprive Shiites, who make up about 60% of Iraq’s population, of some of the newfound political clout they expect to wield in postwar Iraq.

Even critics take Sadr seriously because of his pedigree and his popularity among the growing number of Iraqis unhappy with the U.S. occupation. Six months after the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the average Iraqi is long past the euphoria of the dictator’s fall, but still far from confident that the country will claim a place in the developed world any time soon.

The objections voiced by more mainstream Shiites to Sadr rest largely on his vocal and confrontational stance toward the Americans and Iraq’s U.S.-appointed interim authority, the Governing Council.

From mosques in Shiite strongholds like the Baghdad slum of Sadr City and the southern holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, the young cleric has denounced the Americans as clumsy aggressors who have overstayed their welcome, and lambasted the Governing Council as timorous and ineffectual.

Shiite religious eminences, who tend to be elderly and scholarly, can barely contain their distaste at the sight of the brash preacher, about 30 and with an undistinguished record as a seminarian who styles himself as a clerical authority.

But despite such rumblings, Sadr has a respected pedigree, in both religious and political terms: He is the son of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq Sadr, a much-revered Shiite religious leader who built social welfare programs in his neighborhood. He was killed four years ago, together with Muqtader’s two elder brothers, by assassins believed linked to Hussein’s security forces.

For the Shiites, to whom extraordinary suffering was meted out by the deposed Iraqi leader, these circumstances alone merit a degree of respect for the holy man’s surviving son. Even Shiite clerics and political leaders who feel threatened by Sadr and his movement are reluctant to denounce him publicly.

“We respect him and his views, but what he’s doing is dangerous,” said Sheik Hamid Rashid of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the largest Shiite political party, which is considered to be at the moderate end of the spectrum and is represented on the Governing Council. “We don’t want a civil war between us.”

Sadr’s power base rests largely among those who have both the least to gain and the least to lose in the new Iraq -- angry, jobless, uneducated young Shiite men, recruited to his ranks primarily in the gritty streets of Sadr City, an enclave that was once called Saddam City but was renamed for Sadr’s slain father after Hussein was toppled.

In Sadr City, the militant imam’s fundamentalist message squares neatly with highly conservative social mores that are already in place, and an unsophisticated street audience that rarely questions his teachings that Islamic law, or Sharia, should be applied to all Iraqis and that unveiled women and immorality of all kinds should be severely punished.

Outside his flag-bedecked headquarters on a broad, rutted street, big signs advise the faithful not to talk to outsiders without first clearing it with one of the sheiks who serve as Sadr’s deputies.

Few disobey.

Better-educated urban Shiites -- with jobs and futures -- feel discredited by association with Sadr, saying he represents the stereotypes against which they constantly struggle in a country where the Sunni minority has long been the ruling elite. The image of a young firebrand addressing hypnotically chanting crowds, they say, fuels the belief that all Shiites are firmly under the sway of their ayatollahs.

“I’m against Sadr, really against him. He makes us all look bad,” said Hussein Ali, a 37-year-old merchant from the predominantly Shiite district of Kadhimiya in Baghdad, a motley collection of neighborhoods that ranges from working class to affluent.

“Yes, the Governing Council is making some mistakes, but they haven’t had a chance yet,” Ali said. “And he shouldn’t be trying to undermine them.” Like many fundamentalist Islamic groups elsewhere, Sadr’s camp has been at pains to cultivate a power base in community social services, keeping a tight grip on schools, clinics and hospitals in Sadr City.

Coalition authorities, who have been trying to win Iraqi hearts and minds with much-needed infrastructure projects like a sewage system for Sadr City, complain that Sadr’s followers have halted or disrupted work on many such endeavors by taking over the neighborhood town hall and booting out any municipal official they consider to have been a collaborator with Hussein’s regime.

The degree of real support for Sadr is difficult to gauge. His deputies engage at times in obvious hyperbole, claiming, for example, that the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who turned out for a massive Shiite religious festival in the southern city of Karbala over the weekend did so to express their loyalty to him.

At the same time, though, Sadr has shown himself able to marshal large crowds for anti-American demonstrations, and his devotees are out in force at almost any large Shiite gathering, including the pilgrimage to Karbala.

“We love Muqtader Sadr because he serves the people,” said Ahmed Kasim, 29, of Sadr City, who made the 50-mile walk to Karbala. “If he calls for jihad, I will carry any weapon for him.”

Even if Sadr is making a splash now, some analysts suggest that impact may not be felt to such a degree months or even weeks from now.

“A phenomenon like Muqtader Sadr is very much a creation of post-liberation Iraq,” said Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Britain’s Royal Institute for International Affairs. “Right now, popular opinion among the Shia is extremely fluid, and a lot of the things we’re seeing are likely to be very short-term.”

For the U.S.-led coalition, the most crucial question regarding Sadr is not the government he announced last week but his ability to orchestrate armed attacks on American troops.

Coalition military authorities say they still do not know who was behind an ambush last week in Sadr City that left two American soldiers dead -- lured, their commanders said, by a false appeal for help.

But Sadr’s militia, which goes by the name Al Mahdi army, has been patrolling the slum for months now, carrying guns in defiance of a U.S. ban on weapons in the hands of those other than police.

A Sadr associate, asked how many armed men Sadr has and whether they had been trying to target American soldiers, gave an artfully calibrated response.

“He has many, many supporters, hundreds of thousands of them,” said Sheik Abbas Rubaieh, a newspaper editor and spokesman for Sadr’s group. “And all Iraqi families have guns. And many people are angry at American policies.”

A U.S. military official said if Sadr’s men provoked an armed confrontation, they would pay a heavy price.

“If they want to talk about killing us, fine, let them talk,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “But if they start showing themselves with weapons -- and there’s any indication that they are behind past attacks -- there won’t be any effort spared in putting them out of business in a hurry.”

Sadr has also been able to exploit the profound sense of unease over personal safety that is felt by nearly everyone who lives in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities. A string of unsolved car bombings has killed scores of people.

Sadr is “obviously very astute in choosing this moment to increase his criticism of the occupation, to choose to be a rejectionist and to gather a militia behind him as he did,” said Dodge, the analyst.

“He took a gamble that none of the other Shiite parties could afford to take, at least, not now.”

--- UNPUBLISHED NOTE ---

In stories after April 9, 2004, Shiite cleric Muqtader Sadr is correctly referred to as Muqtada Sadr.

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