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THE JOYS OF CIVILIZATION
Of all the pathologies that have developed in Iraq since and because of invasion and occupation, the most hellish has been the breakdown of religious tolerance. Not many expatriates have lived in Iraq. But those who did in the 80s could testify to the pluralism of Iraqi life. Indeed what the crusaders expected in 2003 was that, if there was to be ethnic or religious fissure, the fault line that would most likely develop would be between Arab and Kurd in semi-autonomous northern Iraq (which more or less has not happened); and certainly not between Sunni and Shia Muslims in the mainland areas of the country (where it has). Why it has is a matter of the most profound importance for all of us.
I worked as an urban planner and civil engineer between late 1984 and spring 1987 mainly in the central region of Iraq, which hosts about 40% of the country's total population and encompasses what has become known as the 'Sunni triangle' but which also enshrines large swathes of 'Shia' territory around Kerbala, Hilla and Najaf in south-western Iraq. The dominant force was, of course, Baghdad itself, once the seat of the great Abbasid Caliphate and now the melting pot and capital of Iraq. Metropolitan Baghdad represents nearly 33% of the country's total population of 26 million. My own expertise was in water resources, demography and related epidemiology.
Half of all marriages were between Sunni and Shia and this plurality was reinforced, indeed overarched, by clan, tribal, blood, community and historical loyalties which bind and bond whole communities. Although I left in 1987, Iraq has been a 'frozen' state since then, 'frozen' by the ravages of war with Iran, then the Gulf War followed by genocidal sanctions, while atrophying politically under a savage tyrant. "Where there is no politics," the writer Mark Allen has noted, "everything is political" Nonetheless, Iraq was a functioning state with a secularist framework and a sophisticated civil society, where, the role of women, for example, was very progressive and medical services were estimated as the "star of the Middle East". The embodiment of Iraq was not in Saddam but in the persons of ordinary Iraqis. Whatever its many needs Iraq's would never be met by invasion, the solution offered by those twin impostors, Blair and Bush.
The Iraq/Iran war had helped force the advance of very young women into the professions where I met many, working as lawyers, architects, doctors, teachers and engineers. The Arab root 'hrm - denoting what is not permitted - is connected to the collective for women, al-Harim (hence harem). But this is emphatically not the situation I found in Iraq. It was the antithesis of the doctrine of Taliban. However, ignorance of the Arab world in general remains a striking feature in the West. As the writer Mark Allen has pointed out: "the number of outsiders who have a working knowledge of Arabic and a personal depth of experience of the region is tiny in comparison with its present significance to our own well-being".
Before the invasion on 19th March 2003 I found it tiresome to hear, from Blair downwards, the mantra of 'Kurds in the north, Shia in the south and the Sunni in the middle', a canard of grotesque and toxic stupidity. Moreover, a former US ambassador (to Croatia) Peter Galbraith recalls being summoned to the White House in January 2003 to explain to George W Bush what the difference was between a Shia and a Sunni Muslim [sic]. With ignorance so profound, nuances such as a grasp of "jizz" or spirit of the Arab, were thus well beyond the ken of the leaders of the coalition. For the zeitgeist wasn't separateness but ethnic and religious integration. Iraq's 700,000 Christian community was part of that sense of wholeness. (The West, with its loose talk of partition, still appears not to know of the population mix of Baghdad, roughly 50/50 Shia/Sunni.)
Despite the internecine inferno that represents life in Iraq today, the fact is the preference of the Arab for consensus, the traditional abhorrence of fitna or communal strife, together with enduring patterns of tribal authority and loyalty will ultimately prevail. Nor, whisper it, are they well suited to the mores of multiple democracy. If you ask me they never will be. For what it means to be an Arab is a discourse we haven't yet begun, never mind resolved.
While it is tragically true that the incubus of al-Qaeda was introduced into Iraq by the invasion, because it most definitely was not present before, the resistance was largely made up of a pan-Iraqi insurgency both Shia and Sunni. Indeed, albeit with shifting allegiances as part of the dynamic, this obtained until February of this year 2006. Then something truly seminal occurred.
The Golden Mosque of Askariyah in the town of Samarra was badly damaged. I visited this interesting and sacred place with my wife in the summer of 1986, almost twenty years ago. We were on a weekend trip to a 5th Century BC Greek settlement called al-Hatra on our way to Mosul in the north. We climbed its perilous open-spiral staircase, and gazed upon the mosque itself which is/was breathtakingly beautiful.
But here's the dreadful end to this chapter of the larger tragic Iraq story. This is a 'Sunni town' defined by the majority of its denizens being Sunni. But Askariyah is the burial place of the 12th Imam, a Shia martyr who will rise again, in Shia ideology, to save the world. So for more than a thousand years or more Sunnis have been the custodians of just about the most sacred place in Iraq for Shi'ites. In less than three years of occupation by the West this has been transmuted for ever. And the civil war - actually it has gone beyond that now into anarchy - between Shia and Sunni finally triggered by the demise of Askariyah mosque has raged ever since. A terrible beauty has been born. But these are the aesthetics of the doomed. Askariyah symbolises, for me, the worst aspect of the larger tragedy of Iraq and in a grammar so hellishly eloquent. And perpetrated in the name of Western civilization. Little wonder Ghandi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, said, "it would be a very good idea.".
How to disentangle Iraq from this quagmire is a story for another day. Perhaps I could address it then.
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