Sistani’s Silent Partners

As Western pundits continue to laud or lament the United States’ occupation, Iraq’s Shiite leaders have been dealing with the more pressing matter of the election slated for the end of January. Estimated to represent 60 percent of Iraq’s population, the Shiites are struggling to capitalize on their numbers and form as large a bloc as possible out of their various parties. But predicting the results of Shiite political manoeuvring is like playing a game of blind man’s bluff—especially for the US, which went into Iraq blind to begin with and is still experiencing uncomfortable surprises.

One of those may well be the Al Dawa party. Observers are predicting that Al Dawa, with its massive yet silent network, will get the largest support in the election and form the backbone of the new government. If this is the case, the party would wield considerable influence over the extent of the American occupation.

Notoriously averse to publicity, Al Dawa has bided its time with an occasional, if opaque, presence in the press. Last November, for example, its leader, Ibrahim Jafari, cannily pointed to foreign jihadists as the main impediment to negotiating a settlement in the siege of Fallujah. The party has also emerged as an increasingly influential negotiator and intermediary. Party members were prominent in defusing the rebellion of Moqtada al-Sadr and his black-clad militia when Jafari took the bold step of bringing in Iran as a peace-broker. Al Dawa also helped negotiate an end to Sadr’s rebellion last August.

The party’s low profile, however, conceals a political agenda that comes close to an Iraqi common denominator: a nationalism that aims to keep Washington at arm’s length, a pluralism to include and placate the fractious Sunnis, and a moderate Islamic government run by the laity, as recommended by Iraq’s head Shiite cleric, the Ayatollah Sistani. In November 2004, Sistani endorsed a commission to broker a single 165-candidate slate with the hope of including all Shiite parties, thus unifying the Shiite vote. Al Dawa occupies a central place on a ticket which will pit a large Shiite bloc against Iraq’s secular, Sunni, and Kurdish parties.

Al Dawa is also favoured by the election rules adopted by the United Nations and Washington. With proportional representation, the parliamentary seats won by nation-wide candidates and party lists will reflect their share of the total vote. As a result, the election will be a contest of blocs and within the Shiite bloc, Al Dawa, in numbers alone, is a force to be reckoned with.

Al Dawa’s presence rises, like mist, from its roots in the past. Iraqis have long memories and for the Shiites, Al Dawa bore the brunt of persecution by Saddam Hussein, a fact which can only strengthen the party’s image. The party Al Dawa has also earned moral support, due to the political callousness of Washington in 1991, at the end of the first Gulf War. The Americans, having failed to give promised backing to the Shiite rebellion against Hussein, left thousands of rebels to perish at the hands of his army. Around the Shiite heartland town of Nasiriyah, and among the sun-baked villages of the south, are the mass graves of tens of thousands of rebels—many of whom were members of Al Dawa.

On April 15, 2003, after the second US invasion, the Bush administration, with typical ham-handedness, staged a conference in Nasiriyah. The better-known parties, such as Iyad Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord, Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (sciri), had co-operated to varying degrees, and even the radical Moqtada al-Sadr’s people remained silent. A thousand members of Al Dawa were almost alone in demonstrating against the US, using Nasiriyah, the place of betrayal, to rally opposition groups.

Al Dawa was founded after World War II, when secularism was spreading rapidly throughout Iraq. A cleric, Bahr al-Oloum, formed “action committees” to oppose religious persecution, and in 1958, the revered founder, Ayatollah Bakr al-Sadr (Moqtada’s uncle) named the movement “Al Dawa,” which means “The Call,” as in “The Call to the Faith.” Designed to oppose Communism in particular, Al Dawa distinguished itself by having the laity work alongside the clergy, a strategy which had wide appeal in an increasingly secularized world. With its policy of limited clerical rule through a secular, democratically elected government consistent with Islamic law, Al Dawa experienced a golden age throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Then, at the end of the seventies, everything changed. In 1979, after Hussein Hussein and his Baath party seized control of the country, Ayatollah Bakr al-Sadr sent student organizers all over Iraq to build Al Dawa. When driven underground by Hussein, the party created a classic revolutionary cell structure, which it still uses.

The other major change was the establishment of clerical rule in neighbouring Iran. Inspired by the Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakr al-Sadr abandoned his moderate doctrine for Khomeini’s radical style of clerical rule. Hussein had al-Sadr murdered, drove Al Dawa into seclusion, and forced its leadership to take refuge across the mountainous border in Tehran.