THINGS HIDDEN:

The Ungovernable Shiites: It’s their tradition. (Steven Vincent, 4/08/04, National Review)

There is a story told among Shiites today that as the revered Imam Hussein lay dying on the fields of Karbala in 680 A.D., he cursed the people of what is now Iraq for having deserted him in his hour of need. "May you never satisfy a ruler," he gasped. "And may you never be satisfied by a ruler."

While I'm not sure how widespread that legend is among rank-and-file Shiites, it's worth remembering as we watch radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr lead his nation off a cliff. As Hussein's anathema implies, there is something unstable and ungovernable at the heart of Shiism — something that is not specific to Sadr's intifada, but which in fact runs through the entire religious sect: a deep attachment to lost causes, alienation, failure, and death. And this, in turn, suggests that our struggle with radical Islam has only just begun. [...]

Seen in this light, it's not surprising that the first eleven of Shia's twelve sinless imams died by unnatural causes, their infallibility apparently unable to detect the poisons that dispatched each to Allah. (The 12th imam, Mohammad al-Mahdi, disappeared down a hole in Samarra and won't be seen again until Judgment Day.) Contemporary imams have likewise met grisly fates. Last August, a car bomb killed Mohammad Baqr al-Hakim in Najaf. An interesting Shia poster depicts the slain cleric along with over 60 extended family members — all of whom were executed by Saddam Hussein — superimposed over a bleeding map of Iraq. More prevalent is a poster that shows a stunned Moqtada al-Sadr cradling his father, whom Saddam's thugs murdered — along with Sadr's two eldest brothers — in 1999. In 1980, Sadr's uncle, Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Baqr al-Sadr, and his aunt, Bint Hoda, also met death at Baathist hands — a legacy of martyrdom that gives the 31-year-old cleric a spiritual authority his youth would not otherwise warrant among the age-revering Shiites.

Not all Shia festivals are death-related, of course, nor are most Shiites radicals. But the religious sect is bound together in large part by a reverence for Hussein, who, in the Shia imagination, combines infallibility in the secular realm with absolute piety in the religious The problem is, of course, this creates an image of perfection that no human being — not even Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamofascist successors — can realize, leading to the Shiites' perpetual disappointment, alienation and eventual violence against governing authorities. Like the man or woman searching for the perfect spouse, no one living person is ever quite "right" for the Shia. For them, the best is always enemy to the good.

This messianism though is also what makes Shi'ism potentially just as good a basis for liberal democracy as Judeo-Christianity. The only thing that has to be driven home is that all merely human governments will always be terribly flawed until the Hidden Imam returns. This is not an argument against government, just against expecting much of them. Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's --those things which only concern worldly authority. Save the best part of yourself, your utopian hopes and dreams, for Judgment Day.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 10, 2004 11:25 PM