NAJAF ABHORS A VACUUM

Mosque and State: Theocracy in Iraq? Not to worry. (ZACHARY KARABELL, May 19, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

There's a growing apprehension that fundamentalist Islam is on the rise in postwar Iraq. It seems that not a day goes by without some publication featuring a photo, meant to be ominous, of Shiite Muslims celebrating a pilgrimage to the shrines of Najaf or Karbala, or of Sunni Muslims praying fervently at mosques in Baghdad or Mosul. As law and order continue to deteriorate, it's also been easy enough to find a mullah here or an imam there angrily denouncing the United States in the name of Allah. But while these stories make good copy, they distort what is going on, and add one more level to the layer cake of misunderstanding that most Americans, and yes, Europeans, have about the role of Islam not just in Iraq but in the Middle East as a whole.

In the political vacuum of Iraq, Islamist groups are among the most organized and cohesive forces. One area of civil society that Saddam Hussein did not completely obliterate was the mosque, though his hand there was not exactly light (he did execute a number of leading Shiite clerics and drove a number more into exile). In other parts of the Arab world--including Morocco, which has now witnessed a rash of suicide bombings--the mosque or the Sufi lodge is the only place where some form of dissent can be safely voiced, and, as in the U.S., religious groups often tend to local needs such as feeding and housing the poor.

That said, the notion that Islamic government is the preferred path for people in Iraq, or that it has been the common path for people in the Middle East historically is simply wrong. In fact, Islam as a force in political life is a recent and still marginal phenomenon. There may be no explicit church-state divide in Islam, but that's mostly because, outside of Iran, there is no church. Typically, religious authorities have been answerable to the state and to rulers, and those rulers, with very few exceptions, have been uninterested in religious government. [...]

So for every image of Shiites in prayer meant to evoke the specter of another fundamentalist revolution, it's vital to remember one fact: In spite of the organized and passionate efforts of fundamentalist groups in the past decades to take advantage of economic and political stagnation and exploding population growth, the only country that has been taken over by fundamentalist theocrats is Iran. And in the Sunni world, except for the rise and fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the influence of the repressive Wahhabi sect in Saudi Arabia, Islam as a political force has been a minority movement that has never enjoyed widespread appeal.

The danger, of course, is not that most or even many people in Iraq want Islamic government. It's that fundamentalist groups are the best organized and most cohesive and can take advantage of the vacuum and the chaos to seize control. That is a concern. But in Iraq no Sunni imam will accept the religious authority of a Shiite mullah, and the same holds true the other way around. But even more, the notion that Islamic government and fundamentalism are what most people secretly crave has little basis in the history of the region or in its recent past. There is enough to worry about in Iraq; let's stop worrying about the wrong things.

Mr. Karabell ignores what would seem to be an important point, that in the West too the Church was the best organized institution and most serious rival to the State, often better organized than the State itself. But in the West the Church was a force for freedom, not totalitarianism. A religious culture which contains no notion of rendering unto Caesar is obviously not trying to balance government power but to exercise it. That's a problem. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 23, 2003 8:36 AM