Gandhi, King and the Elastic Sheik

In Iraq, a nonviolent cleric with the potential to reach the country’s angry youth is a rarity. Early last spring, I traveled between Baghdad, Fallouja and Najaf in search of a Generation-X incarnation of Mohandas Gandhi or the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. -- someone who could blend the sacred and secular, Western and Islamic, in the necessary proportions to build a pluralistic and powerful grass-roots political movement -- something that eludes Iraq three weeks before the country’s first post-Saddam Hussein election.

Most candidates I met were too angry, too heavily armed or too old to fit the bill. Twenty percent of Iraqis are between the ages of 15 and 24, according to the United Nations. Many moderate religious leaders and intellectuals are the age of these young Iraqis’ grandparents. On the other hand, it is telling that Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr, who last spring successfully led young Iraqis to unleash their anger and despair by attacking Americans, is about 30.

After I returned home, however, I heard about a young Shiite religious figure, known locally as the “Elastic Sheik.” He is virtually unknown outside Iraq but reportedly has a growing presence in Baghdad. We began communicating by phone and e-mail.

An innovative moderate, Sheik Anwar Ethari, 28, rejects violence in favor of building local political structures and rebuilding the country’s shattered infrastructure with the help of independent nongovernmental organizations in Iraq. Ethari has several mosques under his supervision in the same poor neighborhoods that are Sadr’s base. (Sheik is a common term for a member of the Shiite establishment.)

Like many Iraqis of his generation, he has degrees in both a secular field (sociology, from Baghdad University) and various religious subjects (from the Hawza, a network of Shiite seminaries). “People think Islam is rigid and inflexible,” Ethari said. “But most students in the Hawza are modern, use the Koran to find new solutions to new problems and want to work with and respect other cultures.”

Non-Muslims too often focus attention on other manifestations of Islam, he lamented. “They prefer Saudis, terrorism, [Osama] Bin Laden, when here we have an Islam that is not directly political, that is forward thinking.”

For Ethari, a flexible view toward religion is natural -- and necessary if Iraqis hope to weave a course past the Scylla and Charybdis of foreign occupation and Islamist extremism. “I’m not an idiot. I know the U.S. is here for power and oil,” he said. “It will engineer the elections to make sure its people win.”

Ethari does not see anti-U.S. violence as the solution. The U.S. may be in control of the country, he said, but at least Iraqis have gained back about 30% of their power under interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi -- however problematic a figure he may be.

“With the elections we’ll have perhaps 50%, and within a few years we will control our country, regardless of Bush’s dreams. But we have to be patient and willing to negotiate,” he said.

For now that “we” is primarily Shiite and Kurdish. Sunni Muslims, who held relative favor under Hussein, have tended to align with resistance to change, with an Islam that is closed, conservative and violent.

There are hundreds of like-minded Shiite sheiks, but only a few dozen sympathetic young Sunni leaders with whom he can work, Ethari said. He recently started a group of religious scholars with secular educations to discuss how to teach civic values to Iraqis. So far it has 73 members -- only three of whom are Sunni.

“[Sunnis] say violence has to be one of the solutions now, but I say that violence has to be the last choice, not the first,” he said. “They are very suspicious of me because they believe that the [Shiites] are working with the Americans and that nonviolence equals capitulation. But I say, ‘We can fight with peace.’ I’m hopeful that while they see violence as the solution now, maybe in a few months, after the election, they’ll no longer feel this way.”

This hope is why many Shiites grudgingly accept a continued American presence after the elections, fearing that their departure could turn Iraq into a regional battlefield, with foreign fighters fueling the Sunni-Shiite antagonism.

Like most Iraqis, Ethari reels under his country’s instability. His wife died in a car accident in the weeks after the invasion as the family was returning to Baghdad. He said U.S. soldiers repeatedly shot at him as he smuggled medicine and water to noncombatants in Najaf during last spring’s siege.

“Now the terrorists are working to destroy me, because I have a peace message,” he said. “But I won’t give up. I can’t give up. If we believe in God, we can say God is with us, not with terrorists. God is with peace.... God said he will protect those fighting for justice or reward them if they die.”

Ethari acknowledged this sounds like the discourse of jihad. “But the good jihad!” he said. “Even after my wife died, within a week I was rebuilding my area, cleaning my neighborhood of cluster bombs with my own hands, because if I didn’t, the children would find and play with them. This is jihad.”

But Ethari insisted that religion must not be a tool to gain power.

This view of the kind of depoliticized Islam championed by the country’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, also points to a change in Islam in which religion shapes the public sphere without trying to conquer and control the state. The oppression and economic foundering that followed the Iranian revolution taught a generation of Shiites the downside of fusing religion and government, Ethari said.

The main issue facing Iraq’s Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, he said, is trust. “We need to find strategies to build trust between Iraqis, and with international civil society against occupation and extremism.” Violence and chaos make trust that much harder to develop.

Indeed, the political process in which Ethari has placed his hopes has become so riddled with mayhem, corruption and duplicity that it’s hard to imagine a message of peace, trust and negotiation winning the day. But what’s the alternative? he asked. “Iraq has lived with death” since the Baathists came to power in 1968,” he said. Peace will win. It has to win.” On this, the Elastic Sheik refuses to bend.