MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR SHI'ISM:

Iran is a hot destination for Iraqis seeking calm: Religious tourism healing old wounds (Anne Barnard, May 13, 2007, Boston Globe)

Jalil Abbas prayed at the Shi'ite Muslim shrine he had dreamed of visiting all his life, relaxed and energetic even after a 19-hour bus ride across Iran. Free for the moment from the fear and tension of their home in southern Iraq, his young nieces explored the busy market, showing off matching pairs of pink-tinted sunglasses they bought earlier in the family's religious pilgrimage. Abbas's wife, Shukriya Hadi, soaked in the calm of the shrine's vast courtyard, where knots of women and children relaxed on the smooth paving stones.

It didn't bother them that they were Iraqi Arabs in mostly-Persian Iran. Nor did Abbas, 45, feel nervous here, even though he spent most of his 20s as a conscript solder in Saddam Hussein's bloody eight-year war with Iran.

Making his first trip across the border, Abbas said he saw a different Iran from the dangerous, meddling power that Iraqi and US officials describe when they accuse the neighboring country of fueling the fighting in Iraq. Instead, he and many of his fellow pilgrims found a deep resonance with their Shi'ite faith, a social order they admired and, most of all, a respite from violence.

"We envy the Iranians for the way they live," Abbas said on his fifth day in Iran. He felt a kinship with them, he said, that was growing stronger than his ties to Iraq's Sunni Muslims, who share his nationality, Arabic language, and ethnicity.

He even said he would like to see Iraq adopt a system of government like Iran's -- the theocracy established by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after the 1979 Islamic revolution, in which ultimate power rests with Shi'ite clerics.

"I believe justice would come with this system," Abbas said, challenging a long-held US assumption that Iraqi Shi'ites want their religious leaders to shun a direct role in government.

A Shi'ite Republic could work quite nicely if the clerics played the role of the monarchy -- retaining the power to call electionss and perhaps some veto power -- but did not try governing directly.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 13, 2007 7:55 AM