Shiites’ Struggle Turns Inward

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein last year, worshipers from across the Muslim world have thronged to the Imam Ali shrine on Fridays to hear the sermon and celebrate the Shiite sect’s newfound freedom.

But for the last five Fridays, the mosque’s carved wood pulpit has stood empty -- visited by more pigeons than pilgrims.

The midday prayer service is the latest casualty in a struggle in the Shiite community resulting from the takeover of Najaf in April by followers of militant Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr.

The shrine’s Friday imam has been chased from the pulpit by Sadr’s Al Mahdi militiamen, who have thrown stones and shoes and shouted down the preacher’s words, witnesses said.

Sadr’s forces, who entered Najaf to keep out U.S.-led forces, have now turned their sights on more moderate Shiites.

The continuing conflict has been a catastrophe for the holy city, destroying the local economy by disrupting the flow of pilgrims, who are Najaf’s lifeblood. Residents had hoped that religious tourism would revive when the fighting ceased between Sadr’s militia and the troops.

It has also created a division of national dimensions among Iraq’s religious Shiites. At the moment when this long-oppressed majority seems poised to claim national political power, the sect instead has been weakened by internal strife. The Shiites’ freedom after the fall of Hussein’s Sunni Muslim-dominated government has become a freedom to fight among themselves.

“It is well known in Najaf that the one who controls the shrine controls Najaf. The shrine is the heart, the soul, the body of Najaf, and it is part of all Shias,” said Abu Muntadar Amili, 36, a custodian at the shrine.

Sadr’s office has denied any connection with the cessation of the Friday prayer. His spokesman in Najaf, Sheik Ali Smaysim, insisted that the group was not preventing the preacher from leading the prayer.

“It’s up to him whether to hold the prayer. If he comes, he can do it,” Smaysim said. “It’s his choice and the choice of the people associated with him.”

But it is hard to dispute that Sadr’s men control the Imam Ali shrine. Smaysim’s office is within the shrine, just across the courtyard from the office for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, also set up by Sadr.

A statement last Friday from Sadr’s representatives to local newspapers said the prayer had been canceled “to avoid sedition or problems.”

The conflict has immediate political consequences for Iraq’s Shiites. Friday sermons at the Imam Ali shrine, which were followed closely by local journalists, were delivered by a cleric affiliated with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite religious party that backs the interim secular government and is allied with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. That moderate voice has now been silenced.

The suspension of the Friday prayer at one of the Shiite world’s holiest mosques has a particularly bitter taste for members of the sect, given Iraq’s recent history. When Hussein and his Baath Party ruled Iraq, the Shiites were generally forbidden from holding the Friday prayer, the only service of the week led by a preacher whose task was to instruct the faithful on politics as well as religious subjects.

It is also Muslims’ only mandatory group prayer of the week and often attracts thousands of faithful, in contrast to the daily prayers, which many followers perform alone at home or in their workplace. The combination of the crowd and the political content of the sermons had made Hussein fear that the Friday service would be used to incite rebellion.

Resumption of the services after his ouster was widely greeted as a potent symbol of the Shiites’ revival, and thousands flocked to hear them in the blue, turquoise and yellow-tiled mosque that is believed to be the burial place of the sect’s founder, Imam Ali. But now that the services have again gone silent, it seems that the Shiites’ moment of freedom has revealed fault lines within the community.

“There has not been a strong Shiite leader who has emerged, either a political leader or a religious one. It is very much of a twilight zone at the moment,” said Laith Kuba, an Iraqi politician living in London who has closely tracked Shiite politics.

The absence of such a leader among mainstream Shiites has created a political vacuum, which Sadr appears to be exploiting, Shiite experts said.

Sadr speaks to a broad swath of the poor, jobless, urban underclass, as well as to educated Shiites who followed his father, a man who understood how to use mass religion to express political ideas. Sadr maintains that Iraq is still under occupation and has refused to support the interim government and participate in the National Assembly, which will be chosen this month.

These themes are emphasized in Sadr’s Friday sermons and those of his followers, which are held in nearby Kufa and in the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, named after the cleric’s late father.

By contrast, the Supreme Council appeals to middle-class Shiites. It has its own counterpart to Sadr’s Al Mahdi army, the Badr Brigade, which is also composed of armed men willing to fight, although it claims to be mainly a civic organization.

Both groups have a martyr as their inspiration: Sadr’s father, Mohammed Sadeq Sadr, was killed on Hussein’s orders in 1999, and Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim, the former leader of the Supreme Council, was killed last August, shortly after his return from Iran, by a car bomb that exploded after he finished leading the Friday prayer at the Imam Ali shrine.

At stake is far more than the right to say Friday prayers at the shrine in Najaf. The battle is for political control and, more immediately, control over the shrine’s coffers.

In the six months before the Najaf fighting began, the shrine collected more than $500,000 in Iraqi dinars from foreign pilgrims and worshipers, along with substantial contributions in Iranian, Syrian and Lebanese currencies, said Abu Hadid Kilidar, 55, who worked as a custodian at the shrine until Sadr’s forces took over this spring.

Notably absent from the debate is Sistani, the white-bearded senior cleric who commands respect from Shiites of all stripes. He said little during the siege of Najaf other than to urge both the Al Mahdi army and U.S. troops to leave the city. In recent days, he has said even less.

His silence may be understandable. He has a history of tension with Sadr, whose followers tried to force Sistani out of his Najaf residence in the days after Hussein’s fall. Now, although Sadr claims deference to the elder cleric, Sistani keeps his distance, and the alleys that lead to his home and office are heavily guarded.

Sistani’s followers said he had concluded that overt criticism of Sadr would do more harm than good, increasing divisions among Shiites.

“There are some elements which are trying to undermine the Shiites, especially because we are on the threshold of elections,” said Sheik Jalaluddin Saghir, the leader of the Bratha Mosque in Baghdad, who is allied with the Supreme Council.

“The Marjaiyah is trying to deal with it quietly,” he said, referring to the four most senior clerics in Najaf who form the Shiites’ religious leadership. The choice of silence, he said, is “bitter medicine,” but the better course.

Saghir said the religious authorities disapproved of some of those now running the Imam Ali shrine, branding them “thieves and criminals.”

A prominent Shiite member of the interim government who asked not to be identified said Sistani feared that his involvement would worsen the divisions rather than resolve them. “In his mind, both groups are Shiites, and the divisions are a bad thing, so why should he move toward one or the other?”

Supporters of the Supreme Council have refrained from an armed confrontation and instead are waging a war of words. They disparage Sadr’s followers as “hooligans” and describe their presence in the shrine as “the second occupation” -- the first being that of the U.S.-led forces. But the verbal assaults seem unlikely to restore order in Najaf, which now receives one-tenth the number of pilgrims it did six months ago.

“I feel unwell because there are no Friday prayers here now,” Razzaq Arkan, a bearded, unemployed 30-year-old, said last week as he loaded his family of 16 back into his van for the drive home two hours south. It was Thursday, and Arkan and the members of his family had thought they would stay to hear the prayer Friday.

“We were deprived before of this prayer under Saddam Hussein, and now we are deprived again,” he said.