The Ayatollahs and Democracy in Iraq
Exported from Holy-Writings.com on 2026-07-04 - 1 clipping

Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Juan Cole, The Ayatollahs and Democracy in Iraq, Leiden: Amsterdam University Press / ISIM, 2006, bahai-library.com.
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

The Ayatoll ahs and Democracy in Iraq
The ISIM Papers represent individual lectures delivered at the ISIM. The aim
of this series is both to allow the papers, initially presented before limited
audiences, to be shared by the entire academic community and to contribute
to the further development of the study of Islam in the modern world.

Published by:
International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM)

i s i m pa p e r s :

1. James Piscatori
Islam, Islamists, and the Electoral Principle in the Middle East

2. Talal Asad
Thinking about Secularism and Law in Egypt

3. John Bowen
Shari’a, State, and Social Norms in France and Indonesia

4. Barbara D. Metcalf
‘Traditionalist’ Islamic Activism: Deoband, Tablighis, and Talibs

5. Abdulaziz Sachedina
The Role of Islam in the Public Square: Guidance or Governance?

6. Lila Abu-Lughod
Local Contexts of Islamism in Popular Media

7. Juan R.I. Cole
The Ayatollahs and Democracy in Iraq
T H E A Y A T O L L AHS
A N D D E M O C R ACY
IN IRAQ
Ju a n R . I . C o l e

i s i m pa p e r 7

a m s t e r da m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s
isim / leiden
Cover design and lay-out: De Kreeft, Amsterdam

isbn-13   978 90 5356 889 7
isbn-10   90 5356 889 1
issn      1568-8313
nur       717

© Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2006

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights
under copyright reserved above, no part of this
book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced
into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise) without
the written permission of both the copyright
owner and the author of the book.
The Ayatoll ahs and Democracy in Iraq

This ISIM Annual Lecture was delivered on 1 December 2005
at the Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam.

Clerically-led Shiism in Iraq is undergoing a reformation, in which leading
figures are attempting to reconcile the principles of Islam with those of the
Enlightenment. This encounter between the two systems is hardly new, and
the contradictions are hardly easy to work out. Yet the current attempt by
ayatollahs to engage with the ideals of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is among the
more thorough-going and institutionally promising in modern history. Here
we will look at the clerical discourse on popular sovereignty and elections
during the first eighteen months after the fall of Saddam.
What drove the Iraqi Shiite clerical leadership to champion elections and
popular sovereignty in post-Baathist Iraq? Was this stance wholly new in that
tradition, or were there precedents? Was the American administration help-
ful to them in developing this vision, or did it attempt to stand in its way?
How did their stance articulate with popular politics in the country, during a
time of both military and administrative occupation by the Americans? How
did these thinkers reconcile the secular implications of popular sovereignty
(after all the people are free to choose to be irreligious) with their own dedica-
tion to establishing an Islamic state in Iraq, ruled by Islamic law?
Notions of the basis of political and religious authority have changed con-
siderably within the Twelver Shiite tradition. They hold that after the death
of the Prophet Muhammad, legitimate authority should have passed to his
son-in-law, Ali b. Abi Talib, and thence to a line of his descendants. With the
exception of Ali himself, these “Imams” or divinely appointed leaders never
actually came to power, though they exerted spiritual influence over their
followers. That line of Imams ended with the Twelfth Imam, who is said to
have vanished into a mystical realm in CE 873, from which he will someday
return. The solution to the problem of legitimate authority in the absence
of the Prophet Muhammad was now itself problematic, since there were no
more Imams. Shiites dealt in various ways with the problem of who should

rule that ensued from the Imam’s disappearance or occultation, but for the
most part they were willing to suffer with a “common-law” (ªurfi) or civil
state until his messianic advent. The illegitimacy of political life under these
conditions was mitigated in the view of the majority school of jurisprudence
by the ability of a new corps of seminary-trained clerics to authorize some
state functions, such as the collection of religious taxes, the holding of Friday
congregational prayers, the appointment of religious jurisconsults, and the
declaration of defensive holy war. Monarchy and, in modern times, republics
and nation-states were thus seen as unfortunate necessities, only partially
legitimate, but the best one could do until the Imam returned.1 From the
late 1960s, Khomeini put forward a novel theory that in the absence of the
Imam, the trained Shiite clerics should rule, in accordance with Islamic law.
He was dismissive of democracy, saying that if the people disagreed with the
religious texts, the people would be wrong.2
Iraqi Shiite theorists of the Islamic state for the most part had a differ-
ent vision than that of Khomeini, and their writing on this matter much
preceded his.3 The Daªwah Party was formed in the late 1950s in Iraq, envis-
aged as a Shiite response to the Communist and Baath Parties.4 Its main
ideologue was Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr of Najaf, who envisaged

1   Many of these themes are treated in Juan Cole, Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics,
Culture, and History of Shi’ite Islam (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002).
2   Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993).
3   For the historical background of modern Iraqi Shiism, see Pierre-Jean Luizard, La formation
de l’Irak contemporain [The Formation of Contemporary Iraq] (Paris: Editions du Centre
national de la recherche scientifique, 1991); Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi’is of Iraq (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994); Meir Litvak, Shi’ite Scholars of Nineteenth Century Iraq
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Faleh ªAbd al-Jabar, ed., Ayatollahs, Sufis and
Ideologues (London: Saqi Books, 2002).
4   Salah al-Khursan, Hizb al-Da‘wa al-Islamiyya: Haqa’iq wa watha’iq [The Islamic Da’wa Party:
Facts and Documents] (Damascus: al-Mu’assassa al-‘Arabiyya li’l-Dirasat wa’l-Buhuth al-
Istratijiyya, 1999); Ruhaimi, “The Da‘wa Islamic Party,” in ªAbd al-Jabar, Ayatollahs, pp. 149-
161; Keiko Sakai, “Modernity and tradition in the Islamic movements in Iraq,” Arab Studies
Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Winter 2001), pp. 37-52; Mahan Abedin, “Dossier: Hezb al-Daawa
al-Islamiyya: Islamic Call Party,” Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, Vol. 5, No. 6 (June 2003) at:
www.meib.org/articles/0306_iraqd.htm ; Hanna Batatu, “Shi‘ite Organizations in Iraq: Al-
Da‘wah al-Islamiyah and al-Mujahidin,” in Juan R. I. Cole and Nikki R. Keddie, eds., Shi‘ism
and Social Protest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 179-200; Joyce N. Wiley, The
Islamic Movement of Iraqi Shi‘ites (Boulder, Co.: Lynne Rienner, 1992).

an Islamic republic, but not one necessarily ruled by clerics.5 The republic
was to implement Islamic canon law (sharia), and would have a consultative
council (shura). These are stock elements in any Islamist political program of
the twentieth century. It is seldom made clear by thinkers such as Muham-
mad Baqir al-Sadr (or by his contemporaries, such as Abu al-Ala’ al-Mawdudi
of the Jama’at-i Islami in Pakistan or Muhammad al-Hudaybi of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt) how the “consultative council” comes into being or
to whom it is responsible, apart from God. That is, the invocation of the
consultative element did not necessarily imply parliamentary democracy for
al-Sadr. A Leninist style democratic centralism would have fit the “consulta-
tive council” language just as well. Still, a parliamentary system with open
elections would not be incompatible with al-Sadr’s vision in any obvious way,
in contrast to the thinking of Khomeini, which was actively hostile to the
notion of popular sovereignty.
Although he was a quietist earlier in his career, Grand Ayatollah Ali Husay-
ni Sistani emerged in the twenty-first century as among the more important
shapers of democracy in modern Iraq. He was born in 1930 in Mashhad,
eastern Iran. Sistani, from a clerical family, carried out his initial studies
with his father and other great clerics in the city of his birth. Around 1948
he went off for higher studies to Qom, not far from the capital of Tehran
in the north-central part of the country. There he worked with the greatest
Shiite authority of the time, Ayatollah Husayn Burujirdi. Late in 1951, the
young Sistani went to Najaf in Iraq to complete his education, and ended
up staying there the rest of his life. For the next decade, he studied with the
leading jurists of that city. To any extent that Sistani thought about political
matters, he appears to have been shaped by the ideals of the Constitutional
Revolution in early twentieth century Iran (1905-1911). In post-Saddam Iraq,
Sistani referred proudly to the role of Najaf clerics in theorizing a synthesis
of Shiite Islam and Western-style constitutionalism in 1905-1911. That experi-
ment ultimately failed, but left behind a body of thought on which clerics of
Sistani’s generation continued to draw.
In 1968 the secular, Arab nationalist Baath Party came to power in a coup.
Sistani himself adhered to the quietism of Burujirdi (d. 1961), Grand Ayatol-

5   Talib Aziz, “The Political Theory of Muhammad Baqir Sadr,” in ªAbd al-Jabar, pp. 231-
244; Chibli Mallat, The Renewal of Islamic Law: Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr, Najaf, and the Shi’i
International (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

lah Muhsin al-Hakim (d. 1970), and Grand Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim Khu’i (d.
1992). He therefore avoided coming into direct conflict with the one-party
state, though he clearly rued the way in which the seminary city of Najaf was
reduced to a shadow of its former self and the Shiite clergy were driven into
exile or killed in the dozens. Sistani also regretted the excesses of the Islamic
Republic from 1979 in his homeland, where Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini
instituted a clerical theocracy. He told one visiting scholar, “Even if I must be
wiped out, I will not let the experience of Iran be repeated in Iraq.”6
In 1979, Saddam Hussein made a coup within the Baath Party and took it
in an increasingly draconian direction. Alarmed by the Islamic Revolution in
neighboring Iran, Saddam cracked down hard on the Shiite political move-
ments. He outlawed the Daªwah Party and made membership in it a capital
crime. He had major leaders arrested and many of them executed. Others
fled in droves to Tehran. There, in 1982, Khomeini urged them to organize an
umbrella group, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).
It initially included the Daªwah Party, but its leaders left in 1984 to maintain
their independence. In 1984, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim became its leader,
and the organization increasingly consisted of his loyalists.7 The Supreme
Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq would emerge as among the more
important political parties after the Americans overthrew the Baath.
After leaving SCIRI, lay Daªwah Party leaders in Tehran became increasing-
ly uncomfortable in clerically-dominated Tehran, and many left for London,
which quickly became the center of gravity of the party. There, they began to
see the benefits of the Westminster model of “consultation.” By 2002, Daªwah
Party leaders in exile had increasingly moved to a full-fledged parliamentary
model. It no doubt helped that affirmation of a commitment to parliamenta-
ry governance was central to any alliance with the United States in the build-
up to the invasion, an alliance into which the London branch of the Daªwah
allowed itself to be drawn. In December of 2002, as the war was building, a
Damascus-based leader of the Daªwah Party, Nuri Abu al-Mahasin, then going
by his nom de guerre of Jawad al-Maliki, was asked by the Beirut daily al-Safir
what sort of government he envisaged in post-war Iraq. He replied, “We pre-
fer the democratic game. What the people decide is the thing that matters,

6   Interview with Ghassan Attiyah, Ottawa, May 14, 2006.
7   Mukhtar al-Asadi, Al-Taqsir al-Kabir bayna al-Salah wa al-Islah [Mere Passive Goodness Falls
Far Short of Active Reform] (Beirut: Dar al-Furat, 2001).

away from sects and ethnicity. This is although we call for an Islamic – not
religious – state as long as the Iraqis voluntarily and willingly support such
a state.”8 His distinction between an “Islamic” and a “religious” state is prob-
ably actually between a lay-governed regime that foregrounds Islamic canon
law and a clerically-ruled theocracy. The lay leaders of the Daªwah Party had
never liked the Khomeinist model of rule by a supreme jurisprudent. What
is remarkable here, however, is al-Maliki’s full endorsement of a universalist
version of popular sovereignty.
The Iraqi clerics in the post-Saddam period showed increasing openness
to the idea of popular sovereignty as expressed at the ballot box. On May 10,
the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Ayatollah
Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, returned to his native country from exile in
Iran. He arrived at a time when a new American civil administrator, Paul
Bremer, had taken the reins of power. His predecessor, Jay Garner, had taken
steps toward appointing a governing council made up of Iraqi expatriate
politicians plus the Kurdish leaders, and from all accounts he hoped to move
quickly toward holding a congress in summer of 2003 that would elect an
Iraqi government, so that the Americans could swiftly depart. When Bremer
arrived, however, he set aside Garner’s plans and intimated that he would
rule Iraq single-handedly for some time, perhaps for years.
Bremer intended to follow a seven-stage plan for putting Iraq back on its
feet. One stage was to appoint a committee of Iraqis to work with Ameri-
can advisers in drafting a new permanent constitution for Iraq. Bremer
announced his intentions in early June. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim made
this plan the center piece of the first Friday prayers sermon he preached in
Najaf, on June 6. He observed, “The United States suggests that the coalition
forces form a council, which it itself appoints. This council is to sit down,
draft a constitution and present it to the people.” He then thundered, “This
is a path that we and the authorities believe is an incorrect path.”9 Al-Hakim
went on to say that if the new Iraqi government was to function well, it
would have to be established on several key pillars. They included respect for
the will of the people as expressed at the ballot box, respect for ethnic minori-
ties via a federal system of government, and respect for Islam through the

8   “Al-Da’wah Party Official on Iraqi Opposition Conference, Possible War,” Al-Safir,
17 December 2002, FBIS.
9   “SCIRI Spokesman Rejects US Proposal to Appoint Iraqi Council,” Jazeera TV, Doha,
in AArabic 1716 GMT 6 Jun 03. BBC Monitoring, June 7, 2003.

enforcement of Islamic canon law (sharia). The notion of an American viceroy
high-handedly appointing a committee to write the constitution offended the
first of these principles, i.e. popular sovereignty as expressed through elec-
tions and referenda. An American-sponsored constitution, moreover, would
almost certainly lack a strong element of Islamic law. Al-Hakim did not see
sharia and popular sovereignty as contradictory, but rather as overlapping.
He had a point. In a society that is 96 percent Muslim, Islamic canon law and
Muslim customary law clearly would be extensively incorporated into law
and administration in any truly democratic system. He feared, however, that
Bremer’s way of working would be neither democratic nor Islamic.
In an interview with Der Spiegel that appeared the day after the sermon,
al-Hakim reiterated his commitments. He told the interviewer, “We want
no dictator, no one-man or one-party state. Iraq will be a democratic state,
in which the rights of all the groups in society will be respected. It will be a
state in which the values of Islam and all the other religions will be respected
and served.”10 He went on to say that if Iraqis were given their head, they
would be able to establish a government of their own within four weeks. It
is likely that, ironically enough, it was not only the excesses of Khomeinism
in Iran but also the figure of American viceroy in Iraq, J. Paul Bremer III, that
helped push clerics such as al-Hakim toward democratic thinking. Iraq was
in June of 2003 under one-man rule, that of Bremer. Democracy, and appeals
to the ballot box and popular sovereignty, were emerging as tools whereby
the Shiite clerics could undermine the legitimacy of Bremer’s rule and claim
the mantle of the people’s choice for themselves.
Al-Hakim was not alone in his commitment to both the ballot box and
to sharia. Grand Ayatollah Sistani of Najaf, who had even more authority,
adopted the same position. In his first major fatwa after the fall of Saddam,
critiquing the American plan to appoint a committee to draft the Iraqi con-
stitution, Sistani rejected the Khomeinist tradition by also accepting the prin-
ciple of popular sovereignty. In his ruling or fatwa of 28 June, 2003, Sistani
explained that there was no way of being sure that the American-appointed
committee “will draft a constitution that conforms with the highest inter-
ests of the Iraqi people and would express its national identity, one basis of
which is the pure Islamic religion and noble social values.” Sistani insisted
that any body that drafted the new constitution would have to be elected by

10 Bernhard Zand, “Amerika ist parteiisch,” Der Spiegel, 7 June 2003. My translation.

the people. He said that the draft constitution should then be submitted to
a national referendum.
In other statements coming out of Najaf, it was clear that the high cler-
ics, including Sistani, saw governmental legitimacy as deriving from two
sources. One was the seal of approval (al-imda’) given by the grand ayatollahs
in Najaf. The other is the approval or agreement of the people through a gen-
eral election.11 In the absence of these two, the American-appointed Interim
Governing Council lacked legitimacy, according to the communiqué. This
statement recognizes two sources of legitimacy for an Iraqi government. The
dual sources of legitimacy did not imply, in the thinking of Sistani and those
around him, any sort of theocracy.
On November 15, US civil administrator Paul Bremer made a pact with the
Interim Governing Council that he himself had appointed, which called for
council-based elections in May, 2004.12 The plan had five basic stages. First,
the Interim Governing Council would craft a Basic Law allowing a transi-
tional government to be elected and operate. Second, by the spring, each of
Iraq’s 18 provinces would hold conventions made up of notables, elders and
tribal chieftains. These conventions would elect altogether over two hundred
members to an interim parliament, based on proportional representation.
This interim parliament would in turn elect a prime minister. This process
would be complete by June, 2004. Third, at that point, Mr. Bremer’s Coali-
tion Provisional Authority would hand over power to the new government
and close up shop. The US and UK military would remain in Iraq, however,
and the new government could invite other international contributors of
troops and other help. Fourth, the interim government would hold elections
for delegates to a constitutional convention to draft the new constitution,
in accordance with the fatwa or legal ruling of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
Fifth, formal elections on the basis of one person, one vote, would be held
to install a new government, to which the interim government will hand
power. This plan clearly was intended to achieve a restoration of sovereignty
to the Iraqi people without risking their voting in an anti-American govern-
ment. The Americans appear to have believed that if genuine elections were
permitted in spring of 2004 there was a risk that extreme Arab nationalists

11 “Hawzat al-Najaf Tasdur Fatwa didd Qanun al-Jinsiyyah al-ªIraqiyyah,” ash-Sharq al-Awsat,
October 7, 2003.
12 Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to bring
Democracy to Iraq (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2005), pp. 50-52, 78-87.

and radical Sunni and Shiite Muslims might have undue influence in the par-
liament. The system Bremer put forward involved voting by members of the
provincial and municipal governing councils established by the Americans
and British. These council members had gotten into power because of small,
unrepresentative selection processes overseen by the occupation authorities
and companies it hired.
Signs of discontent with the November 15 agreement soon began sur-
facing, even among members of the Interim Governing Council that had
approved it. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council
for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, had been assassinated on August 29, 2003,
and was succeeded by his brother, Abdu’l-ªAziz. The new SCIRI leader com-
plained on November 18 about the US plan for handing over sovereignty to an
Iraqi government by June. He said the process whereby this plan was worked
out was rushed, and was largely dictated to the Iraqis. The Associated Press
quoted him as saying, “The Americans were insisting that they wanted to
end this matter quickly. There was rushing and although there were reserva-
tions by other council members … regrettably [the Americans] did not stop or
give more time for unanimous consent to be reached. The Iraqi people were
pushed aside and the Iraqi people should play an important role. This con-
tradicts the principles of democracy.”13 The “caucus-based” elections pushed
by the Bush administration were more oligarchical than democratic, and the
Shiite clerics opposed to the scheme focused on this flaw in their critique,
positioning themselves as champions of genuine popular democracy.
One subtext of the Shiite clerics’ disagreement with the Bremer plan,
however, was the struggle between a secular and a religious vision of Iraq’s
future government. A “democratic” process, in the eyes of the clerics and
their supporters, was also one that would ensure the enshrining of indig-
enous values, i.e. Islam. The Bremer plan made no mention of the place of
Islam or Islamic law in the new government, and the provincial and munici-
pal governing councils had been stacked by the Americans and British with
relatively secular, pro-Western notables. This dimension of the dispute was
made clear by Adil ªAbd al-Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolu-
tion in Iraq, who told a Western wire service the next day, “This agreement
lacks any reference to the respect of the Islamic identity of most of the Iraqi

13 Bassem Mroue, “Shiite Governing Council member expresses reservations about
sovereignty transfer agreement,” AP, November 19, 2003.

population and the guarantee of the rights of other religions and sects.”14
Shiite leaders had other critiques of the Bremer plan. Among them was
that the electorate he envisaged, members of the municipal and provincial
councils, was a hodgepodge. IGC member Ahmad Shiyaª al-Barak, a human
rights lawyer and a leader of the Al Bu Sultan tribe of Babil province, told
al-Hayat that before elections could be held, the municipal and provincial
councils had to be reformed.15 He pointed out that some municipal councils
doubled as provincial ones (i.e. they have authority over the capital as well
as the whole province). They differed in how they were chosen, differed with
regard to how many members they had, and no standard set of regulations
specified their functions. Al-Barak was clearly concerned that if the councils
– many of them formed under watchful US eyes – were to function as the
election commissions, they could have been crucial in shaping the elector-
ate and the outcome of the polls. Therefore, their nature was the key to the
elections as the Bremer Accord envisaged them. He wanted “vast reforms” in
these councils before those elections.
Although Abd al-Mahdi, ironically enough, had earlier been the one who
assured Bremer that Grand Ayatollah Sistani accepted the outline of the plan,
either he was prevaricating or it was not fully explained to the sage of Najaf.
When the grand ayatollah understood that the Iraqi parliament was to be
elected by what Americans called “caucuses,” rather than on the basis of one
person, one vote, Sistani rejected this plan out of hand. In response to the
questions of Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post, he gave his most explicit
fatwa yet on popular sovereignty. Responding to Bremer’s council-based plan,
he said, “The instrumentality envisaged in it for electing the members of the
transitional legislature does not guarantee the formation of a parliament that
truly represents the Iraqi people. It must be changed to some other method,
which would guarantee it. And that is [direct] elections, such that the parlia-
ment would derive from the will of the Iraqis and would represent them in a
just manner and will safeguard it from any challenge to its legitimacy.”16 Sis-

14 “Iraqi Shiites unhappy with ‘unclear’ agreement on handover of power,” Deutsche Presse-
Agentur, November 20, 2003.
15 Al-Hayat, November 24, 2003, summarized at www.juancole.com for November 24, 2003.
16 “Fatwa for Anthony Shadid,” online in Arabic at www.sistani.org/messages/antoni.htm;
reported in the Washington Post by Anthony Shadid and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Cleric
Renews Call for Iraq Elections,” November 29, 2003, but with a less technical translation
of the Arabic than the one I give above.

tani also told visitors in this period that he was concerned that the November
15 agreement made no explicit place for Islam and gave no guarantees that
un-Islamic laws would be prohibited.
Sistani’s position insisting on open elections met with immediate acclaim
from the Shiite religious leaders and parties. Even the radical young cleric
Muqtada al-Sadr weighed in on the side of one-person, one-vote polls. His
spokesman came out to say, “All bodies that are not elected will be deemed
illegitimate.”17 Bremer orchestrated a vote on the Interim Governing Council
against Sistani’s plan for direct elections, but defying the grand ayatollah
would not prove politic in the end. Ironically, Shiite religious forces that ear-
lier had had little interest in democracy now rallied around the idea of Iraqi
popular sovereignty and direct elections, including the Sadr movement. Paul
Martin of the Washington Times reported that on December 3 :

Members of a Shi’ite Muslim movement demonstrated outside the local coalition
headquarters yesterday to demand that elections be held before a new govern-
ment and constitution are established. The protesters held up banners and daubed
cement blocks around the headquarters building with slogans such as “Down
U.S.A.” and “Death to America.” “At present, we are in the stage of peaceful nego-
tiations,” said a white-turbaned sheik from the al-Sadr faction, the most hard-line
of the three main Shi’ite political movements. “I pray to Allah that we do not have
to move to violence and killing,” he said as he strode with 250 followers toward
the heavily protected headquarters on the banks of the Euphrates River.18

The Hilla demonstrations in favor of free and open elections had a local con-
text, insofar as many Shiites opposed the American-appointed governor of
the province, Jawad Witwit, whom they accused of being an ex-Baathist, and
they conducted demonstrations against this appointed figure in December
that forced him to resign. Then the US appointed a former air force officer
as governor, but the activist Shiites considered him unacceptable as well and
mounted more demonstrations. Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post

17 Nadra Saouli, “Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority seeks to exert its political weight,” AFP,
November 27, 2003; for the Sadr Movement see Juan Cole, “The United States and Shi‘ite
Religious Factions in Post-Ba‘thist Iraq,” The Middle East Journal, Volume 57, Number 4,
Autumn 2003, pp. 543-566.
18 Paul Martin, “Shi’ite demonstrators demand elections,” The Washington Times,
December 4, 2003.

reported on one such rally: “‘Yes, yes for elections!’ shouted the protesters,
a collection of students, clerics and middle-aged professionals whose ranks
swelled to more than 1,000. ‘No, no to appointment!’.”19 They said that they
had taken heart from Sistani’s call for direct elections. They also no doubt
feared that Bremer’s “caucus-based” elections would produce similar high
officials for the whole country. The Hilla demonstrations of fall 2003 showed
that the rhetoric of open elections was being taken up by the Iraqi street.
The techniques of crowd politics pioneered by the Sadr movement in post-
Saddam Iraq were to be adopted by other Shiite religious groups with great
effectiveness.
Other clerics who worked under Sistani’s penumbra, whether in religion
or politics or both, took up the discourse of the popular will. Abd al-ªAziz al-
Hakim became president of the Interim Governing Council, and in December
he visited Germany for consultations with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
The Lebanese Broadcasting Company satellite television news anchor report-
ed that al-Hakim “has renewed his support for a bigger UN role in bringing
democracy back to Iraq. Following his meeting with German Chancellor Ger-
hard Schroeder in Berlin, Al-Hakim said that he aims to establish a demo-
cratic and free state in Iraq that respects all religions and human rights.”20
While in exile in Tehran in the 1980s and 1990s, the al-Hakims had gone over
to Khomeinism, but clearly on their return to Iraq they had begun rejecting
dictatorial clerical rule as a model and begun acknowledging at least some
elements of popular sovereignty, though what they meant by “democracy”
and “human rights” might not have mapped exactly onto contemporary
Western ideals. Still, for Abdu’l-ªAziz al-Hakim to use this discourse is itself
significant.
When Bremer and his Interim Governing Council rejected Sistani’s
demands, the grand ayatollah orchestrated a campaign to rescind the Novem-
ber 15 agreement. Democracy and popular sovereignty were emerging as
central tools for the assertion of an indigenous, Iraqi, Shiite national identity,
enshrined in a constitution that flowed from the sovereign people. Bremer

19 Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “A troubling wound opens for the U.S. in Hilla,” Washington Post,
December 13, 2003.
20 “LBC: IGC’s Al-Hakim Meets Schroeder, Renews Support for ‘Bigger UN Role’ in Iraq,”
Beirut, LBC Satellite Television in Arabic 1500 GMT, 18 December, 2003. FBIS. See also
Program Summary: Al-Manar Television, in Arabic 1830 GMT, Thursday, December 18,
2003, FBIS.

and his caucuses and his high-handed interim constitution were the anti-
thesis of the autochthonous, the popular and the authentic.
Sistani then demonstrated the sort of hold he had on the Iraqi street. In
mid-January, 2004, he called tens of thousands of demonstrators into the
streets of Basra and Baghdad, demanding direct elections. He also said that
the United Nations should send an envoy to investigate the political situa-
tion in Iraq and to look into the feasibility of holding direct elections in May,
2004.
On January 14, Sistani held a meeting in Najaf at which he encouraged
visiting clan leaders of Rumaitha, Samawah, and other middle Euphrates
areas to insist on general elections as a means of achieving a new, sovereign
Iraqi government. He promised the sheikhs of that region that they would
exercise power, not “those who came from abroad.” He was referring to the
members of the Interim Governing Council, many of whom returned from
long years of exile in the West or in Iran after the fall of Saddam. Raghida
Dergham quoted him in as saying, “Authority must be yours, and the coming
parliament must be composed of elected children of the people.”21
The tribal leaders from these areas had allied with the Shiite clergy in the
spring, 1920, Great Rebellion against the British Mandate, which the British
put down with difficulty and which led to the British colonial experiment
in Iraq being much briefer than hawks such as Churchill had envisaged (it
ended in 1932). Sistani invoked this history at the Najaf colloquy. He said, “We
want you to be revolutionaries, just as we want you to exercise sovereignty.”
He added, “You must play a great role, just as you played a role in the 1920
Revolt.” In rural areas of Iraq, the sheikhs still have substantial authority,
though most Iraqis are now urban.
The invocation of 1920 was not, however, intended to signal that Sistani
wanted a violent struggle. Sistani’s representative, Shaikh Muhammad Taha
al-Husayni, told a crowd of students at Kufa on the same day as the Najaf
meeting, “We must be conscious of our rights and demand them, as is appro-
priate to a prepared people, since no one has the right to impose even one
article of the Iraqi constitution.”22 He went on to urge non-violent action,
saying that armed resistance would not serve the Iraqis at that point. Just as

21 Al-Hayat, January 15, 2004, via www.juancole.com for January 15, 2004.
22 “Mumaththil al-Sistani yuªarid al-Muqawamah al-Musallahah fi al-Waqt al-Hali,” al-Sharq al-
Awsat, 15 January, 2004.

Bremer’s one-man rule had helped push Iraqi clerics toward a discourse of
popular, national sovereignty, so too had the prospect that a foreign, impe-
rial power, might impose an alien constitution.
On Thursday, January 15, 2004, Sistani’s representative in Basra, Hujjat
al-Islam ªAli ªAbd al-Karim Safi al-Musawi, led a huge demonstration of some
40,000 in a procession through public streets. The crowds carried placards
with slogans on them such as “Yes, Yes to Sistani, No, No to an Appointed
[Government],” and “We Want a Constitution Written by Elected Iraqis.”
When the crowd arrived at the mosque toward which they had marched,
Safi al-Musawi addressed them, criticizing the November 15 agreement that
forestalled open elections. He said that it had “been prepared with a haste
that was not just, and that it did not “reflect the pluralism of Iraqi society”
and would cause trouble among Iraq’s ethnic groups. He defended the idea
of holding general elections, considering that it was possible to call Iraqis
holding food ration cards to participate in the polling. Pamphlets circulated
through Basra with slogans written on them, such as “Peaceful demonstra-
tions are the best way of showing your support for the new democratic order,
and the multinational forces are here to support your mobilization.” (The
pamphleteers appear to have wanted to assure crowds that it would be safe to
come out.) The demonstrations were supported by the Daªwah Party and the
Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, though secular parties were
absent.23 That Friday, Shaikh Abd al-Mahdi al-Karbala’i, Sistani’s representa-
tive in the shrine city, warned that the coming days would witness demon-
strations, strikes and even possibly confrontations with American forces if
the Coalition insisted that it was impossible to conduct elections before the
transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis.
On January 19, the following Monday, the Shiite religious forces organ-
ized a demonstration estimated at 100,000 strong in the capital. According
to the Gulf daily al-Watan, they were expressing their support for Sistani’s
demands that elections be held before sovereignty was transferred to Iraq
by the US.24 The demonstration clearly was dominated by religious forces
and was led by young Shiite clergymen who said that they represented vari-
ous seminaries in Baghdad. The procession began at 8 am. They crossed the

23 “Tazahurah daªman li al-Sistani fi al-Basrah,” Middle East Online, 16 January 2004, at www.
middle-east-online.com/iraq/?id=20692.
24 “Muzahirat fi Baghdad,” Al-Watan, January 20, 2004, at www.alwatan.com/graphics/2004/
01Jan/20.1/dailyhtml/news1.html.

Muhammad al-Qasim bridge and headed for the Mustansiriyyah cathedral
mosque in the center of Baghdad. The young clerical leaders carried post-
ers and placards, most prominently of Sistani, while others functioned as
parade marshals, urging the crowd to remain calm and to refrain from
chanting insults against the Interim Governing Council. When asked, the
young clerics said that no one movement had called the demonstrations,
but that rather they represented the whole Iraqi people, and that the crowd
had gathered to express its support of the grand ayatollah. Shaikh Muham-
mad al-Kawarani said, “There is no party that organized the demonstration.
The people organized themselves, since they want their right to an elec-
tion.” Another young cleric, Muhammad Saªid, who was urging the crowd
to stick to the route and not to spill onto side streets, said, “We are all Mus-
lims and all of us are participating. What we want is free elections, noth-
ing else.” Observers could distinguish thick concentrations in the crowd
of supporters of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and
of Muqtada al-Sadr. The crowd mingled slogans demanding elections and
stressing the right of the Iraqi people to choose their leaders with religious
chants, such as “Yes, yes, to Islam!” and “There is no deity but God and
Muhammad is his Prophet!” They held aloft placards in Arabic and English
urging elections, with phrases such as “Yes, yes to the religious leadership,
and yes, yes to elections” and “The Surest Guarantee of True and Just Rep-
resentation is Elections” and “Citizens, the Future will be Decided in the
Coming Months! Be Zealous in Excercising your Rights in Determining the
Course of Events!” The 5,000 out by the bridge called on the United Nations
to exert pressure for elections, and carried placards with slogans such as,
“We Ask the United Nations to Intervene in the Method of the Elections.”
A representative of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq,
Sabah al-Musawi, told Agence France Presse, “We support the position of
Sistani, since democracy accords with his views. We desire wide partici-
pation through free elections, not imposed appointment.” He added, “We
cannot in the future defend Iraqi representatives elected by small groups.”
One of Sistani’s representatives, who helped organize the demonstrations,
said, “We Iraqis are a civilized people and are capable of deciding our fate.”
He said that no appointed government could be depended on to give Iraqis
their rights. He stressed, “The government would have no legitimacy, and
the Iraqi people would neither cooperate nor interact with it, save if it is the
Iraqi people who elect it.” The Bush administration immediately backed off,
faced with these massive rallies, and cooperated with the sending of a UN

envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, to determine when and how (rather than whether)
open elections would be held.25
Meanwhile, members of the Interim Governing Council who earlier had
favored the US approach to carefully controlled elections, based on the Coali-
tion-appointed provincial councils, defected to Sistani. Ahmad Chalabi told a
skeptical audience at the arch-conservative American Enterprise Institute in
Washington, DC, that he now favored open elections and believed they could
be held. And ªAbd al-ªAziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic
Revolution in Iraq with its 15,000-strong Badr Corps paramilitary, told Reu-
ters the same thing in late January: “It can be done, if we want it and make
the effort. I believe they can be run.” Az-Zaman reported that al-Hakim admit-
ted, “Ideally elections would depend on the existence of a census, an electoral
law, and a law governing parties … There are problems … But I believe that
[elections] will express the opinion and the will of the people … will give a
voice to all, and holding them is feasible.”26
In a February 2004 interview with the German magazine, Der Spiegel, Sis-
tani said that he felt that the only way forward out of the quagmire was
democratic elections.27 When the German interviewer inquired as to whether
they might not produce a tyranny of the Shiite majority, Sistani demurred.
“Not at all. Even if a certain community holds a majority in numbers, this
will not lead to the creation of a political majority, because in every com-
munity there are different political orientations.” He felt it was important
that governments succeed one another peacefully, something that had been
rare during his lifetime in Iraq. He added, “Also, since the majority of the
Iraqi people are Muslims, they are sure to choose a system which will respect
the principles of the Islamic Sharia, and also protect the religious minori-
ties.” Sistani’s generousness of spirit blinded him to the need for constitu-
tional and institutional protections for minorities, and to the ways in which
implementation of Islamic law would disadvantage Chaldean and Assyrian
Christians, heterodox Yazidis, and secularists, including secular women. His
analysis of the fractured character of Shiite politics and the ability of minori-

25 Diamond, Squandered Victory, pp. 135-139.
26 Al-Zaman, January 26, 2004, via Informed Comment, January 26, 2004 at www.juancole.
com/2004/01/question-of-elections-in-iraq-in-past.html.
27 The interview is in Arabic at Sistani.org; the translations here are from “Newspaper
Interview with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani . . . translated from a German Interview by
Der Spiegel, Posted Feb 22, 2004,” Federal News Service, February 24, 2004, Lexis-Nexis.

ties such as the Kurds and Sunni Arabs to make their voices heard would be
shown to be inaccurate in 2005, when the religious Shiite bloc, the United
Iraqi Alliance, gained a majority in parliament. The subsequent elections of
December, 2005, however, would produce a deeply divided parliament more
closely resembling the one Sistani envisaged for Der Spiegel.
A United Nations envoy prepared to come to Iraq to make a determination
as to whether open elections were possible as early as that May, as Sistani
believed. On February 4, Shaikh Abd al-Mahdi al-Karbala’i, Sistani’s repre-
sentative in the holy city, “said that if the UN team ruled elections were not
feasible before the 30 June handover deadline, the Shia clergy would ‘insist
on a formula closer to elections than designations.’”28
The issue continued to resonate at the local level, just as it had at Hilla. The
next big struggle was in Nasiriyah. On January 28, a very large crowd, esti-
mated by the Iraqi press as in the thousands, demonstrated against the Coali-
tion-appointed governor of Dhi Qar province, Sabri Hamid Badr al-Rumayd.
On Wednesday, February 4, another big rally was held, according to the Bagh-
dad daily al-Zaman. The Virtue Party of Ayatollah Muhammad Yaªqubi, led
in Nasiriyah by Shaikh Asªad al-Nasiri, and the Sadr movement of Muqtada
al-Sadr, led locally by Shaikh Aws al-Khafaji, had repeatedly demanded that
the local provincial council be dissolved, since it had been appointed by the
Coalition Provisional Authority, and they viewed the governor elected by this
appointed body as illegitimate. Under popular pressure, several of the mem-
bers of the provincial council resigned.
The Iraqi police in Nasiriyah declined to intervene against the demonstra-
tion, and stood aside as spectators. The representative of Paul Bremer in the
city, John Bourne, went on local television to explain that direct elections
could not be held to select a new provincial council. He called on everyone to
remain calm. Despite having announced the resignation of some members
of the current provincial council “for private reasons,” he declined to ques-
tion its legitimacy, and merely promised to add other members to replace
the ones who had resigned. With the prospect of national elections sometime
later that year, popular dissatisfaction with the US- and British-appointed pro-
vincial councils was used by the Sadrists and the Virtue Party in an attempt
to force direct elections at the provincial level before national elections were
held. The distinction between “appointment” by a foreign power and popular

28 Ahmed Janabi , “US hints at Iraq election rethink,” Aljazeera.net, 05 February 2004.

sovereignty as expressed at the ballot box was key to these local demonstra-
tions in 2004.29
The issue remained hot at the national level as well. On February 8, a
political adviser to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Sayyid
Muhsin al-Hakim (a brother of Abd al-ªAziz) gave an interview on issues in
democracy and elections in the Persian newspaper Iran.30 He began by defin-
ing what the Iraqi Shiites wanted. “Democracy can be regarded as one of the
important parameters that create security and stability in a country. Democ-
racy means that each person in society enjoys the rights of a citizen, can play
a decisive role in determining his social and political fate, and can elect a
government of his own choice. This is the accepted definition of democracy
in political philosophy.” He condemned the apparent tendency among “all
the three higher levels” of Iraqi politics at that point (presumably Bremer, the
Interim Governing Council and the United Nations) to engage in “suspicious
moves that want to bypass the vote of the Iraqi nation on various pretexts.”
Sayyid Muhsin conceives of the intervention of Sistani as an operation
of civil society, the public sphere that is neither governmental nor private.
Western theorists of civil society, from Hegel to Habermas, had not empha-
sized the role of religious institutions, in part because in European countries
such as Germany the Protestant-Catholic divide was so significant as to make
religion an unlikely platform for truly public, neutral interchanges, and so
religion was increasingly conceived as part of the private sphere. The role
of the Catholic Church in overthrowing Polish communism and the global
religious resurgence of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,
however, have led many social theorists to look at religion as part of civil
society. Sayyid Muhsin positions the Najaf religious establishment in this
light, and defends its neutrality. He notes, “Analyses sometimes carried out
by some sources show that the true motive in this has not yet been clarified.”
This is a way of saying that these observers suspected that Sistani was act-
ing out of private or sectional motives, not out of truly public and national
ones. He denies this charge, however: “Actually, one can say that the only
objective that the religious reference point pursues is the institutionalization
of democracy in Iraq and stabilizing the rights of the citizens based on the

29 Al-Zaman, February 7, 2004, via www.juancole.com/2004/02/sadrists-occupy-provincial-hq-
in.html.
30 “Iran: SAIRI Official Says Badr Organization Can Provide Security for Elections,” Iran in
Persian 09 Feb 04, FBIS, February 9, 2004.

formula of one person, one vote.” Sayyid Muhsin uses the universal refer-
ence-points of “the citizens,” of the individual voter, of stabilized rights and
democratic institutions, to characterize Sistani’s program, eliding its sectar-
ian and sectional context.
He adds, “A look at Iraq of the past shows that destabilization efforts were
carried out on three major levels: dictatorship on all levels, the religious sup-
pression of Shiites; and racial apartheid against the Kurds, the Turkmen, and
the Assyrians.” Here, he posits a parallel between the “religious suppression”
of his own community and the “racial” repression against the ethno-linguis-
tic groups. Both kinds of Iraqi ethnicity suffered under the Saddamist dicta-
torship. He continues, “Thus, the only alternative is elections and democracy,
which takes into mind the Islamic identity of the Iraqi nation and includes
all the elements that form the Iraqi nation’s social fabric.” The uneasy co-
existence here of particularistic Shiite demands (majority rule and Islamic
law) with national claims to rights for all citizens is mediated by “elections
and democracy.” This mechanism is envisaged as ending the threat of dicta-
torship, ending religious discrimination, and ending racial or linguistically-
based discrimination, all at once. He challenges the idea that the Shiites
want elections only because they are the majority and will inevitably come
to power that way. He insists that “the Iraqi Shiites and their sagacious reli-
gious point of reference [highest spiritual authority] have always wanted the
vindication of the rights of the other nationalities in Iraq and the recognition
of their basic rights and freedoms.” In acting for their rights, the Shiite cler-
ics insisted, they are securing the legitimate rights of all Iraqis. He goes on
to threaten that if the Shiite community is thwarted in its demand for open
elections, it would turn obstructionist and boycott the political process.
Other SCIRI leaders, such as Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, wove the new discourse
of national liberty through parliamentary elections into particularistic tradi-
tions of Shiite piety. In early March of 2004, he gave a sermon on the ninth
of Ashura, commemorating the martyrdom of Husayn, the grandson of the
Prophet Muhammad, the central ritual commemoration of Shiite Islam. It
was carried in the newspaper al-Adalah (Justice) on March 4. In the Shiite
narrative, Husayn had stood with the masses in what is now Iraq against
the oppression of the Umayyad Empire, then was cut down at Karbala by the
armies sent out by the Caliph Yazid on October 10, 680. Al-Hakim addressed
the crowd, saying, “We … pledge to our Imam al-Husayn to walk along his
path, which calls for adherence to right, justice, and freedom, and rejects
injustice, arbitrariness, and tyranny.” In this litany, “freedom” is perhaps the

only truly modern element, added by al-Hakim to the more traditional values
of justice and right. Al-Hakim tied the passion of Husayn to the Iraqi Shiites’
yearning for an end to occupation and the advent of an elected, democratic
government:

The land of Iraq is the land of the holy places and the cradle of freedom, and our
Imam Al-Husayn may peace be on him, is the leader of the martyred and father
of the free peoples. In order to close the road to all kinds of dictatorships and to
prevent a repetition of the bitter experience of Saddam’s tyranny, our demand for
this dangerous and sensitive stage of our struggling people’s life is to insist on
the holding of free and fair elections to enable our peoples to have their say and
express their opinion about whom they may choose to represent them.31

He here suggests a cycle of descent into tyranny and ascent into liberation.
The identification of Saddam Hussein with Yazid, the Umayyad persecutor
of Imam Husayn, was by then a hackneyed trope in Iraqi Shiism. But in the
context of March, 2004, al-Hakim’s reference to preventing further dictator-
ship is an oblique reference to Bremer’s one-man rule of Iraq. In folk Shiism,
it had been said that whoever weeps a tear for the slain Husayn was guaran-
teed entry to paradise. That is, he is a salvific figure. Likewise, here, al-Hakim
ties the symbology of the martyr’s sacrifice for spiritual salvation to a rheto-
ric of the people’s sacrifice for national liberation. Al-Hakim thus sets up a
neat parallel between the martyrdom of Husayn in the seventh century and
the rise of democracy in the early twenty-first century. Iraq was the scene
of both epiphanies. In both cases a long period of tyranny led the people
to rise up. Inspired by the sacrifice of the Prophet’s scion, the Iraqi people
now had the opportunity to institutionalize the values inherent in Ashura’
of refusal to countenance oppression. Not only free and fair elections but
also the rule of law are key to this new, continuous liberty. “The conferring
peoples confirm the need to issue a permanent constitution in the country.
The constitution should ensure the free and effective participation of all
sectors of society in the administration of their country in legitimate and
decentralized ways.” In this passage, we hear an early echo of al-Hakim’s
largest disagreement with Sistani, over whether Iraqi governance was best

31 “SCIRI’s Al-Hakim Demands Elections, Denounces Sectarianism,” Baghdad, Al-Adalah in
Arabic 04 Mar 04, FBIS, Thursday, March 4, 2004.

pursued through a strong central government or through a decentralized,
loose federalism.
In the end, the plan Lakhdar Brahimi worked out with his American and
Iraqi interlocutors gave Sistani most of what he wanted, though he did not
get his May elections. Open elections were planned for late January 2005,
after an initial transition from a purely American administration of the coun-
try to an American-backed interim government. Sistani also got a United
Nations resolution midwifing the new Iraq, internationalizing the process
far beyond what the Bush administration had wanted.
In the build-up to elections in January 2005, other high Shiite religious
authorities also weighed in on democracy and popular sovereignty. The Bagh-
dad newspaper al-Furat reported on October 10, 2004, that Grand Ayatollah
Muhammad Ishaq Fayyad, a colleague in Najaf of Sistani who originally hailed
from Afghanistan, also supported the electoral process. He demanded that the
elections be held on schedule (i.e. no later than January 30, 2005) and “added
that the elections represent the first step in the right direction toward build-
ing a free Iraq and achieving justice and stability for the Iraqis.” He elaborated
on the security issue, saying “that the security situation is connected to the
holding of the elections, which would lead to a free and democratic govern-
ment.” Implicit in the ayatollahs’ statements was a conviction that only an
elected government would have the authority and legitimacy to begin work-
ing on ending the foreign occupation of the country. Another Najaf grand aya-
tollah, Muhammad Saªid al-Hakim, was asked if the religious establishment
had a plan for the elections. He replied, “Its plan is to hold real and national
elections that lead to the composition of a truly sovereign and independent
government.” He stressed that the objective of the religious establishment is
to unify the national ranks and underscore efficiency and national will. The
Rousseauan language of the national or general will recurs here, and it shows
that Sistani was not alone in his interest in Enlightenment ideals about popu-
lar sovereignty. Sistani cobbled the Daªwah Party, the Supreme Council for
Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and other Shiite religious parties into a single list,
the United Iraqi Alliance. He advised Shiites to vote for it, and on January 30,
2005, it won a simple majority in the new parliament.

In conclusion, one can trace from April 2003 through January of 2005 a
remarkable development in Shiite religious and legal thinking about democ-
racy in Iraq. The ideals of elections, representation of the people, the expres-
sion of the national will, and a rule of law are invoked over and over again

by the most prominent religious leaders. Unlike Khomeini in 1979, they are
completely unafraid of the phrase term “democracy,” and generally see no
contradiction between it and Islam. These democratic convictions, of course,
have an immediate context. They give the religious establishment a means to
ensure that the Shiite majority in Iraq gains its political voice after decades
of severe repression. They also pave the way to an independent, sovereign
Iraq that may finally escape foreign domination. This instrumental utility of
democracy, however, cannot entirely explain the ayatollahs’ infatuation with
it. Rather, they survived the dictatorships of Saddam and Khomeini alike,
becoming disillusioned both with secularism and with authoritarian theoc-
racy.
The Shiite clerics were both helped and hindered by the Americans. The
Bush administration, having proved unable to discover the weapons of mass
destruction on which it had premised the war, increasingly turned to democ-
ratization as the justification for the continued occupation of Iraq. This rheto-
ric of democracy could thus be appropriated and used against the US by Iraqi
actors. The “one-man rule” of Paul Bremer became an easy target of criticism
when the Shiite clerics expressed their new commitment to popular rule.
The Americans also provoked a backlash. The Coalition Provisional Authority
under Paul Bremer stopped local elections and sought through the agree-
ment of November 15, 2003 to forestall open, one-person, one-vote elections
in Iraq for years to come. The Americans sought reliable local elites as allies,
and feared the unpredictability of open elections. The Shiite clerics were able
to enlist the Iraqi masses in their quest to pressure the Occupation Powers
into permitting open elections, both at the local and the national level. Local
protests at Hilla, Nasiriyah, Amara, Kut and elsewhere were important in
putting pressure on the CPA, and reflected discontents with lack of fuel and
services as well as a feeling of being blocked politically by foreign appoint-
ees. But most dramatic of all were the massive demonstrations in Basra and
Baghdad called in mid-January 2004 by Sistani.
The Shiite clerics were convinced of the compatibility of popular sover-
eignty with Islamic law at that point in Iraqi history, because they were sure
that the Shiite masses in the South – constituting some 60 percent of the
population – would vote for the Islamic parties and so ensure the triumph of
sharia. Their vision of democracy therefore involved a conception of dual sov-
ereignty, wherein clerical authority provided a bulwark against the possible
irresponsibility of the enfranchised masses. Despite adoption of the language
of “pluralism” (taªaddudiyyah) and expressing confidence that the rights of

minorities would be protected, the clerics seemed remarkably unafraid of
the consequences of a tyranny of the Shiite majority. They therefore seldom
supported any practical checks or balances to protect minority rights. The
language they favored was that of the general will of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
a democratic tradition notable for its lack of checks on majority power. Nev-
ertheless, the clerics did speak clearly of minority rights and the need for
pluralism, in a way that Khomeini never would have bothered to do. Some-
thing new is clearly being born in Iraq that does not in the least resemble
the theocratic systems of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr or Ayatollah Khomeini. It
is being born of Iraqi history and thought, and as much in reaction against
the US as in cooperation with it. Constitutionalism, open elections, and par-
liamentary bargaining are key to this new thinking among the Shiite clerics.
In the phrase of sociologist Asef Bayat, their democratic thinking is a mani-
festation of “post-Islamism,” and very possibly the beginning of the Islamic
Enlightenment.
Juan R.I. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History at
the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on modern Islamic
movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His current research
focuses on Shiite Islam in Iraq and Iran and on the “jihadi” or “sacred-war”
strain of Muslim radicalism, including al-Qaeda and the Taliban. His publi-
cations include Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural
Origins of Egypt’s Urabi Movement (Princeton, 1993), and Modernity and the Millen-
nium: The Genesis of the Baha’i Faith in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East (Colum-
bia, 1998). His most recent book is Sacred Space and Holy War (IB Tauris, 2002),
a collection of some of his papers on the history of the Shiite branch of Islam
in modern Iraq, Iran, and the Gulf. He has given numerous media and press
interviews on the “War on Terrorism” since 11 September 2001, as well as on
the 2003 Iraq War.
International Institute
for the Study of Isl am
i n t h e M o d e r n Wo r l d ( I S I M )

Visiting address:
Rapenburg 59
2311 gj Leiden
The Netherlands

Postal address:
P.O. Box 11089
2301 eb Leiden
The Netherlands

Telephone:
+31-(0)71-527 79 05

Fax:
+31-(0)71-527 79 06

E-mail:
info@isim.nl

Website:
www.isim.nl
-- The Ayatollahs and Democracy in Iraq (Used by permission of the curator)