The Way Back: Shia Perspectives

The refinery on the highway into Baghdad pumps black fumes into the sky as if signaling the entrance to a vast crematorium. Convoys of hashad, bound for the front, weave through rush-hour traffic, testing their guns. Barricaded by iron gates, residential compounds resemble prison camps. America’s most visible legacy in Baghdad, the towering concrete blocs that link to form fortified walls, scar the cityscape like industrial weeds.

Yet once inside this fortified shell, signs of budding normalization begin to surface. New overpasses span clogged intersections. A sleek Chinese train pulls out of Baghdad’s grand railway station—built to the same model as the majestic Viceroy’s House in Delhi—bound for Basra, cutting the journey time to an almost bearable ten hours. Cranes haul the last glass panels onto a skyscraper sporting an office bloc, large mall, and five-story hotel. Suicide bombs, which once peaked at 17 a day, have fallen to perhaps one a week, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi proudly notes. Although Baghdad has as many checkpoints as most cities have traffic lights, the only time I heard gunfire was when that hashad convoy drove past. “We have yet to hear a mortar this year,” a Western diplomat in the Green Zone told me.

For the first time in decades, the country, too, has a leader with no militia or guard to his name. Al-Abadi is a rarity in the region—a leader who has come from neither a dynasty nor an army. Perhaps the militias wanted a weak and malleable incumbent, but when he challenged their remit, the public, tired of the militias and their sectarianism that have torn the country apart, rallied en masse in his support in cities across southern Iraq. His persona alone conjures up a presectarian past. Karrada, al-Abadi’s Baghdad neighborhood, had been home to Jews, Christians, and many Sunnis, and though almost entirely Shia today it still retains a bourgeois cosmopolitan air. Artists, musicians, and authors fill its cafés, reviving a civil society suppressed since the 1970s. A frustrated Western diplomat trying to whip up the war effort against IS, whose front lines lie an hour’s drive away, likened the atmosphere to the joie de vivre that marked Paris under Nazi rule—Iraqis, he complained, have long since learned to suppress their traumas. IS feels more threatening in European capitals than it does in Baghdad. Almost complacently, its inhabitants refer to IS in the past tense. Young men drive through the streets playing pop music that mocks IS’s “feminine” fighters at full volume.

Socialites say they have not felt so at ease since the 1970s. A splurge of hip eateries has opened around the University of Baghdad, where dressed-up girls go to smoke water pipes. Cafés spill onto sidewalks, their tables filled with families late into the night. Closed by Saddam Hussein’s faith campaign in the early 1990s, the bars that only tentatively reopened in 2010 are now packed. A banner over the entrance of a nightclub advertises the unveiled starlets who dance on Thursday nights until dawn.

Rather than head to the mosque for midday prayers the following day, thousands throng to Baghdad’s old book market on Mutanabbi Street. So crammed were the approach roads that I eventually abandoned my taxi and caught a boat up the Tigris. Undeterred by previous car bombings, university lecturers, senior civil servants, and politicians gather for a weekly literary festival that spills out of a cultural center into the surrounding alleys. In the courtyard a Baghdad Scouts troup performs a play denouncing sectarianism. Students shake buckets collecting money to buy back the Yazidi wives and daughters that IS is said to have sold to the Gulf’s brothels. Critics heckle the students for inadvertently financing IS. In the cafés lining the alleyways off to the side, disconsolate guitarists strum trying to be heard above the clatter. Never have I returned from a foreign assignment so laden with books from interviewees who had just published. The old adage—“Cairo writes, Beirut prints, Baghdad reads”—rings true again.

When in May 2015 a car bomb killed 16 people in Baghdad, Karim Wasfi, conductor of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra, arrived at the scene in his black suit and tie as if dressed for a concert, opened his cello case, and played for a gathering crowd. Baghdad’s bombs can still wreck lives, but somehow they no longer seem able to wreck a society. By sheer force of demography, Baghdad has won the identity struggle, and the confidence that results means it no longer has quite the same need to prove itself rigidly Shia.

In Najaf, too, the ayatollahs hosted a book fair.

In an annex of the Imam Ali Shrine, an Egyptian bookseller displayed his collection of works by Karl Marx, Kant, and Spinoza. Another bookseller from Baghdad kept watch on a cleric who vetted displays. Whenever the censor approached, he turned over the covers of his collections of Sappho’s poetry, which sported disrobed women, and turned them face up again as soon as he had passed. He tells me that his best-selling book was a new Arabic translation of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, a study in the genetics of evolution. It was, he said, particularly favored by seminarians.

Occupying pride of place near the entrance, Lwiis Saliba, a Lebanese theology professor and self-professed Buddhist, sat by his stall selling translations of the religious texts he publishes. Within two days of the opening he had sold all 50 copies of his new book, Toward a Christian-Shia Dialogue, which had a picture of Jesus on its front cover. Arabic translations of the Bible, Talmudic tractates, and Baha’i texts, banned in neighboring Iran, were all selling fast. When a cleric politely requested he remove such heresies, Saliba replied that if the books went, he would go with them. The cleric idled away. While we talked, turbaned seminarians perused an Arabic text of Jewish law first published in Cairo between the wars. “Ninety percent of the books published about Jews in Arabic are anti-Semitic,” Saliba explained. “We wanted believers to write about themselves and express their beliefs.”

The Najaf book fair is a remarkable testament not just to the openness the ayatollahs have instituted in their Vatican, but to the pliability of religious creeds. Shias like to claim that their faith has long been more broad-minded than Sunni Islam. Ayatollah Khomeini was an expert in Ibn Arabi, a medieval Sufi mystic who some consider an apostate and whose books have been burned in Saudi Arabia.

The glasnost is a fairly recent development. Historically, Shia Islam was xenophobic, hounded, and defensive—more hostile and suspicious of non-Muslims than Sunni Islam. Muhaqqiq al-Hilli, a thirteenth-century scholar and perhaps the greatest exponent of classical Shiism, not only derided non-Muslims as kuffar, but prohibited any contact with them lest they corrupted Muslims. Non-Muslims were banned from Shia holy places and at the dinner table. Only after the 1920 revolution against British rule did Grand Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim exercise the legal tool of ijtihad, which in Shia Islam allows qualified clerics to derive new legal opinions based on reason, and overturned the millennium-old injunction ostracizing the People of the Book.

The sheikh of the Beni Hasan, a vast tribe extending from the Iranian to the Tunisian borders, had been instrumental in the transformation. In his tribal seat outside Najaf, his grandson, Al-Muthana Hatem al-Hassa received me in the same diwan where Ayatollah al-Hakim had ruled in favor of eating with Jews. Several sheep had been slaughtered for the cleric’s reception, and when guests were summoned to lunch, al-Hassa’s grandfather discreetly led his Jewish guest to an outhouse. “Is Itzhak not also of the People of the Book?” interrupted the ayatollah, and summoned the Jew to eat at his side. (His grandson also slaughtered a sheep for me. Unfortunately, I’m a vegetarian. With a tray of mutton in front of us, he reeled at the insult. “Do non-Muslims now refuse to eat with Shia?” he protested.)

Najaf’s twenty-first-century ayatollahs are actively engaged in outreach, even with vegetarians. Sistani’s representative in Beirut preaches in churches. Another Najafi ayatollah has opened a hawza for women. The Hakims shepherd non-Muslims around the Imam Ali Shrine, even bishops with outsized crucifixes swinging on their chests. In contrast to the Wahhabi warriors who banned the mahmal, or musical procession that used to accompany the pilgrimage to Mecca, a large crowd of worshippers congregated around a tour group of Shias from Lucknow as they chanted hypnotic Urdu qasidas.

Some clerics have begun partnering with the local university, Kufa, to promote inter-faith studies. When I had last visited its campus, the university was a burnt-out shell used as an American base. By 2015, it had a new campus and 22 new faculties, including a medical school and a science wing. Encouraged by a grand ayatollah, the turbaned dean of the Islamic Law Faculty gave a course in comparative religion, and met me after his Talmud class. “Man is made of two types—a Muslim like you, or a man like you. So be just,” he said, quoting Imam Ali. “God, not man, decides who enters paradise.”

Other clerics are preparing to introduce inter-faith studies into the hawza itself. Facing the threshold of Imam Ali’s shrine, Jawad al-Khoei, the son of a former grand ayatollah and a confidante of Sistani, is constructing an 11-story inter-faith academy, designed to be the center point of the hawza. As he shows me round the building site, he points out the location of seven auditoria, a library for 1.5 million books, and a Turkish bath.

While most of the students will be Shia seminarians, there will be a smattering of non-Muslims as well. Al-Khoei is hiring non-Muslim academics to lecture about their respective faiths. “Yazidis will teach us the Yazidi faith,” he says. “Our problem in Iraq is our ignorance and denial of the other. The ayatollahs are resolute in their determination to see equal rights for all.” His principle of equality is uncompromising: “If the people elect a Christian as leader, he must lead.”

As I entered his office, members of a delegation of Yazidi, Christian, Mandean, and Sunni women from Baghdad were taking their leave to meet a grand ayatollah. That evening I found the women again addressing a packed audience at Najaf’s writers union about the difficulties of living as a minority under Muslim rule. Najaf had changed them. “After your welcome today, I don’t want to return to Baghdad,” a Christian housewife said. “I want to stay here. The lowest of you is worth more than our greatest politician. Your doors are open to all.”

While IS erases the past in the north, the south seems set on rediscovering it. Iraq’s once vibrant Jewish community has long since left, but the country remains gripped by a strange fascination with their memory. “If they’d have stayed the country would have worked better,” lamented an Iraqi aid worker. Local television airs documentaries about Baghdad’s lost Jews, based on old footage and telephone interviews with exiles. A Baghdad academic, Saad Salloum, has published a collection of essays depicting interaction in Ottoman times: In the seventeenth century the Ottoman sultan Murad IV counted 10,000 Jewish civil servants on his staff; in the nineteenth century, the president of Baghdad’s Jewish community, Saleh Sassoon, was also the city’s treasurer; and when the British entered Baghdad in the twentieth century, Jews were the city’s largest religious group, comprising 80,000 of its 200,000 residents.

As if to compensate for IS’s pillaging in the north, curators across southern Iran are rushing to refurbish and open their museums. The National Museum of Iraq, which Americans failed to protect from looters in 2003, reopened in February 2015 after a $40 million renovation. Nasiriya, a city famed for its step ziggurat of Ur, reopened its antiquities museum a month later for the first time since the 1991 Gulf War.

Convention has it that Sunni-Shia relations are locked in an existential struggle dating back to the first generation of Islam. Fighters, politicians, and televangelists from both sects portray their conflict as an elemental schism coursing through Islam’s 1,400 years, from Ali’s assassination to Saladin’s destruction of the Fatimid caliphate to the battles between the Ottoman and Persian empires for supremacy in Iraq. But for much of their history, sectarian strife was an aberration. The Sunni Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad relied on Shia Buyids to keep order. For 350 years, the Ottoman and Persian Empires upheld the Peace of Amasya of 1555, which demarcated borders and gave Shias free passage to visit their holy places and practice their rites in Ottoman-ruled Iraq. The Muntafiq federation, though led by Sunnis, protected Shia from the ravages of Wahhabi raiders from Arabia.

Even after a decade of sectarian strife, Iraqis never tire of emphasizing how Sunnis and Shias share the same dialects, tribes, Prophet, and love of masqouf, the fatty carp Iraqis barbeque on the banks of their two rivers. Statisticians say 26 percent still marry outside their sect. “When I travel abroad, I see Sunnis as fellow countrymen, with the same language,” a writer from Najaf tells me. “We frequent the same cafés, we share taxis. Why can’t we do that at home?”

At his philosophy class in Najaf’s Hindi Mosque, Ezzedin al-Hakim, a senior cleric, posits that sectarianism is a man-made corruption. “The terms Sunni and Shia were not revealed by God. Religion is made by God, but division made by man,” he says. Muqtada al-Sadr, though a firebrand cleric when confronting American troops, has reached out to Sunnis, leading prayers in their mosques.

And the country’s leading cleric broadcasts appeals for unity. “Do not say Sunnis are our brothers,” cautions Grand Ayatollah Sistani. “Say they are us.”