The Sistani Paradox

Along with “moderate” and “democratic,” “progressive” is the label most frequently affixed to Sistani by his Western boosters, many of whom gushed over the Iraqi cleric last February when he roundly condemned the rioting and mayhem that broke out in response to the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. Sistani is the Great Shiite Hope–which means he’s also the Great Iraqi Hope. And, as such, it is only fitting that he embodies the awkward reality of Middle Eastern “moderates.”

Without putting too fine a point on it, Sistani’s thoughts on such social issues as, say, homosexuality, make Pat Robertson look like Barney Frank. Ditto his unusual brand of religious “tolerance.” To be sure, none of this detracts from Sistani’s staunch–and courageous–support for representative government, or his benign influence over Iraq’s Shiite majority. But it does suggest that Americans, especially those of us gung-ho on spreading liberalism in the Muslim world, perhaps need to recalibrate our expectations for an Islamic democracy.

Take the recent news that a Baghdad teenager was brutally murdered by Iraqi police for the “offense” of being gay. How did Sistani, Iraq’s much ballyhooed “progressive,” respond? Well, it turned out that some two months earlier Sistani had posted a fatwa on his website, sistani.org, demanding that homosexuals “should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.” According to the London Independent, “Ali Hili, the co-ordinator of a group of exiled Iraqi gay men who monitor homophobic attacks inside Iraq, said the fatwa had instigated a ‘witch-hunt of lesbian and gay Iraqis, including violent beatings, kidnappings and assassinations.'”

Such stories belie the (always fatuous) notion that the “soft” Islamists are somehow ideological brethren of America’s Christian Right. Opposing legal recognition of homosexual relationships, or defending the linkage between marriage and procreation, can hardly be conflated with a solicitation for murder. In other words, if you consider the “Christianists” and “theocons” a rabble of inveterate bigots, don’t look too closely at what Ayatollah Sistani has to say.

Definitely don’t look at his web page. A quick troll through Sistani Online reveals that all those who do not believe in “Allah and His Oneness” are infidels, and as such are deemed “najis” (or “unclean”). Jews and Christians may or may not be najis, but either way “it is better to avoid them.”

Then there’s Sistani’s official representative in the United States, a charming bloke named Sheikh Fadhel al-Sahlani. This past January, Sahlani told the New York Sun that the Holocaust “has been exaggerated,” which is why he endorsed Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s proposed Holocaust “conference” in Tehran. As for Ahmadinejad’s call that Israel be “wiped off the map”? Right idea, just too impractical, said the Queens-based imam. “It is a kind of dream, but we have to be realistic. Even we have to accept a fact that we don’t like.”

On the other hand, as journalist Walter Ruby has noted, Sahlani rejects suicide bombing, favors Western-style democracy over Iranian-style theocracy, and supports the continued presence of U.S. troops on Iraqi soil. So does Ayatollah Sistani. Iraq’s most senior Shiite cleric will invariably offend liberal sensibilities, and may at times come off as a bit loony. Iraq’s secular parties are surely more comforting to the Western palette. But as the December 15th elections proved, such nonreligious groups do not, as of now, command broad popular support among Iraqis. The various Islamist factions do. This is largely because the Baathists gave secular rule a bad name, and because the local mosque was the one institution in Saddam’s Iraq where people could organize and speak freely.

The notion of Islamists taking power thanks to U.S. efforts at first seems a bitter irony. As Reuel Marc Gerecht has put it, Americans may look at the turbaned religious parties that dominate Iraq and Afghanistan’s nascent parliaments and wonder, “We have gone to war for this?” But such parties signify a vital prerequisite for the liberalization of Middle Eastern societies, Gerecht argues. “Democracy will eventually succeed if the traditional community–particularly the religious classes and what is often called, somewhat inaccurately, the fundamentalist movement–becomes part of the great democratic debate.” So long as the religious classes remain outside that debate, it will be difficult for America to convince ordinary Arabs and Muslims that, yes, Islam is compatible with democracy.

More pragmatically, nation-building amidst a violent insurgency demands prudence, compromise, and a willingness to accept the human timber available. Whether we like it or not, devout Muslims–not, alas, liberal secularists–offer the best hope for salvaging Iraq’s democratic experiment, because they represent broad swathes of Iraqi opinion. Getting them to squabble peacefully over their grievances in a freely elected parliament is the crucial antidote to Zarqawi’s poisonous vision of chaos and terrorism. Put another way: Trimming the ranks of bin Ladenites, in Iraq as elsewhere, requires giving potential recruits a domestic political alternative.

This hardly means democracy is a foolproof solution. The challenge for post-Saddam Iraq will be to define the “national interest” broadly enough to mollify Kurdish and Sunni angst, and to gradually forge a public consensus behind a more tolerant, moderate interpretation of Islam that permits the growth of civil society. The West cannot make this happen. But we can push for constitutional government that enshrines minority rights into law, protects certain basic freedoms, and accomodates the vacillating trends of popular will. And we can stand by as the essential guardian of that government in its fitful infant stages. This is what, despite its many blunders along the way, the Bush administration has done in Iraq.

Ayatollah Sistani may be an imperfect vehicle for achieving our goals. (It is indeed depressing what passes for a “progressive” in the Muslim Middle East.) But he is a robust democrat who condemns terrorism and fervently wants to breach Islam’s separation from the modern world. In the great struggle of our time, that surely places Sistani on the side of the angels.

Duncan Currie is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.