The Turbulent Priest

Tuesday, 22 February, 2005

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IWPR staff

Muqtada al-Sadr is unlike Iraq’s other Shia religious leaders – he is young, tough-talking and only a junior cleric. He has not slotted neatly into the new Iraqi establishment and is regarded by some as a loose cannon.

But he has a large popular following which means he cannot be dismissed as a marginalised firebrand.

Muqtada wears neither the years nor the scholarly demeanour of the typical Shia leader, but he enjoys significant support, especially from the impoverished Shia area of Baghdad.

He expresses things the senior clergymen cannot or will not say – especially anger about the United States military presence – and he has been critical of the Shia spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Sistani, head of the Hawza, the clerical academy in the holy city of Najaf.

Jaafar El-Ahmar of the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper, who is a close observer of the Iraqi political scene, says Muqtada taps into a vein of Shia popular concerns.“He expresses quite well…the feelings of the Shia,” said El-Ahmar. “And he’s popular as well.”

According to El-Ahmar, many Shia Iraqis “want clergy to be more active and interfere more in politics”.

With his common touch, Muqtada fits the bill. “His voice is louder than the others. We can’t compare him with Sistani,” said El-Ahmar.

Muqtada fills a void left by the absence of senior clerics from the political scene. Ayatollah Sistani has refrained from entering into post-Saddam politics. Two others are dead – in April, the moderate Abd al-Majid al-Khoei was killed by an angry mob in Najaf. And in August, Muhammed Baqr al-Hakim, head of the former opposition Shia party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, died in a car bomb in Najaf.

The young cleric came to prominence with a ready-made reputation – his father Ayatollah Muhammed Sadiq al-Sadr was a respected cleric killed in 1999, probably by Saddam Hussein’s regime. The ayatollah had pulled together a loose Shia movement from elements as disparate as intellectuals and tribesmen. And unlike the main Shia opposition groups it operated inside the country rather than from abroad.

The younger Al-Sadr inherited this movement together with the credibility won by his father and an uncle who was also assassinated. Both men were perceived to be opposing Saddam openly at a time when others did not, says El-Ahmar.

Muqtada quickly became a controversial character when he arrived in Iraq. His supporters were accused of involvement in Al-Khoei’s death, the suspicion being that they wanted to eliminate the competition. Muqtada has denied any part in the killing.

A few days after the assassination, supporters of Muqtada surrounded Sistani’s house in Najaf and reportedly demanded that he leave the town. The stand-off was defused without incident. Some local observers said Muqtada engineered the crisis simply to flex his muscles.

He was left out of the interim Governing Council set up in July, and went on to condemn the body as a puppet of the US. Some analysts suggest that he should have been coopted onto the council, so that as an insider he would not have been in a position to attack it. The support he commands among Shia, says El-Ahmar, would easily have qualified him for what was designed to be a broadly representative body.

“For one reason or another he was excluded,” said El-Ahmar, who believes this was a missed opportunity. “Since then his statements have become sharper.”

At the end of July, Muqtada called on his followers to mobilise into a militia, the Al-Mahdi army. He has since claimed that thousands have joined the unarmed force. The army’s title has a messianic ring to it – it recalls the last of the 12 imams of Shia Islam, whose return from centuries of seclusion is awaited by believers.

The US position on Muqtada is unclear. Although the Americans have generally tried to ignore him, his high profile is clearly an irritant. Shortly after he announced he was setting up the Al-Mahdi force, US troops surrounded his home. Thousands of his supporters took to the streets after hearing rumours that he had been arrested, and the American soldiers withdrew a few hours later.

In the latest protest called by Muqtada, thousands of people took part in a demonstration in the Baghdad’s Kadhimiyah district on September 21. He used a Friday prayer sermon to summon his followers after US Secretary of State Colin Powell had met a leading moderate clergyman, Ayatollah Hussein al-Sadr. The ayatollah is Muqtada’s second cousin, though not aligned with him.

Because Muqtada has remained an enigmatic character despite the media coverage he has received, it is unclear what his long-term ambitions are, or even whether he will be able to sustain the momentum of his street-based movement.

His critics dismiss him as a player, saying he is far too young and inexperienced, and too low-ranking in the clerical hierarchy, to present any challenge to the established Shia leaders. But imagining that the best policy is to ignore him could be a miscalculation that discounts his undoubted appeal among at least part of the Shia community.