In an Old Mosque, The Blunt Rhetoric Of the New Iraq
Preacher Turned Politician Embodies Shiite Ambitions
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 28, 2005; Page A01
BAGHDAD -- The world according to Jalaledin Saghir, a preacher turned politician, is an uncomplicated place.
There is good and evil. There are martyrs and terrorists. The righteous (those who agree with him) are pitted against the iniquitous (those who don't). The past incarnated in Saddam Hussein is gone. In its place is a promising future in which Iraq's majority Shiite Muslims take their place as the country's deserving rulers.
"Qata'an," Saghir says often, urgent and clipped. Absolutely, it means.
Saghir, the 47-year-old scion of a clerical family, with a generous gray beard and piercing dark eyes under a white turban, is a new kind of politician in an unsure country, and his dramatic ascent illustrates the direction Iraqi politics are increasingly taking.
To his supporters, he is a symbol of Shiite empowerment, a message he delivers weekly in sermons to overflow crowds at the Baratha mosque, one of Baghdad's most revered. He is blunt and, just as important in Iraqi politics, apparently fearless. A defender of Shiite interests, he exercises his influence not only in the mosque but in Iraq's new parliament, as a representative of the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition that captured a majority of the body's 275 seats in the Jan. 30 elections.
To his critics, he is less a symbol of empowerment and more an emblem of rhetorical excess. Even some of his clerical colleagues describe him as overly ambitious and unrelentingly provocative. Some see demagoguery in his bluntness; and in his bravery they see incitement that is further fraying the already tattered relations between Iraq's Shiites and a disempowered Sunni Arab minority.
He is perhaps best described as a product of the tumult that has colored Iraq since the fall of Hussein in April 2003 and of the dramatic changes that have accompanied it. His success or failure in the months ahead could help delineate the still-ambiguous role of the Shiite clergy in the nation's political affairs.
In the quest for legitimacy in Iraqi politics, Saghir has much to draw on: his alliance with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's preeminent religious leader; the authority of his family's name; the resonant language of religion that can intertwine seamlessly with the agenda of a politician; and a grass-roots network provided by his mosque and the hundreds of loyal followers who propelled him into power.
"My concern is solely to be in the service of the people," Saghir said in an interview. His people, he meant.
A Mosque Transformed
The Baratha mosque that serves as Saghir's headquarters is perched behind rows of barbed wire, concrete barricades and white and yellow steel barriers. Its walls are draped in the iconography of religious activism: banners celebrating martyred Shiite saints, portraits of Sistani, slogans on black banners that serve as a Shiite version of agitprop.
In a land full of sacred shrines, Baratha is among the most venerated. By tradition, Imam Ali, a cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad, visited the site in the 7th century, digging a well that still delivers water today. Pilgrims from as far away as Afghanistan visit the fount, filling bottles with water believed to have curative powers.
With the consent of powerful allies, Saghir treats the mosque as his family's fiefdom.
For years, it was led by his father, Sheik Ali Saghir, a beloved cleric and lieutenant of one of the country's most prominent ayatollahs, Sayyid Muhsin Hakim. Saghir's father died in 1975, and the young activist cleric fled into exile in 1979, spending time in Syria, Iran and Lebanon. He returned to Baghdad -- and Baratha -- the week after Hussein was driven from power.
"We left when Baghdad was very beautiful," he said. "When we returned, it was destroyed."
Since his arrival, he has transformed the mosque into a nexus of an efficient political movement that works in the name of Sistani and under the loose umbrella of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the main Shiite political parties.
In a small shop near the worship hall, compact discs of Saghir's sermons line shelves along two walls. Each costs about 50 cents, and as many as 400 are sold each week. On any Friday, worshipers crowd the counter with money in one hand, the shoes they take off before prayer in the other. Minutes after his sermon ends, the CDs are available for sale.
Wooden scaffolding climbs up the mosque's wall, and workers lay brick for new additions that will cost $600,000. They will house, in part, committees organized over the past year for charity, women's issues, culture, information and education.
"There are those who are lazy, and there are those who like to work all the time, with both their mind and body," said Majid Saadi, dressed in a brown suit with no tie, his gray beard neatly trimmed.
Saadi is Saghir's point man in the information campaign at which his followers have become so adept. On religious occasions, the literature they produce celebrates Shiite ritual that was discouraged for decades; during this year's elections, it was avowedly political.
"We worked day and night," said Saadi. "The people were thirsty for information."
In the month before the vote, the mosque printed more than 1 million posters supporting the Shiite coalition, Saadi said. For a time, they seemed to grace every wall in Baghdad. More than 1,500 volunteers loyal to Saghir also helped produce 20,000 hand-written banners, he said. Twenty seminars were organized at the mosque during the campaign, recorded on CDs and distributed by the thousands. As many as 100,000 leaflets were printed.
"The biggest efforts to support [the Shiite coalition] came from the Baratha mosque," Saghir said.
'The Anger of the Gentle'
When Saghir returned to Baghdad in 2003, he preached to 2,000 people. Now he estimates there are three times that many. His ambition: 30,000 worshipers drawn to the mosque for Friday prayers and a sermon as political as it is religious.
In today's Iraq, Saghir is what passes for a showman.
At a podium draped in black and adorned in arabesque and calligraphy, Saghir starts slowly, as though weary. His low voice is almost a whisper. The blink of his half-closed eyes is exaggerated. Then he runs his hand slowly through his beard as he scans the crowd.
On this day, the topic was the members of Iraq's new parliament -- Saghir among them -- convening for the first time since the election. "When I entered the room," he said, "the word of God was on my tongue, my heart quivered, and my eyes were tearing."
At the words, the crowd erupted: "Victory for Islam! Death to Saddam!"
He went on, invoking the names of prominent Iraqi clerics killed under Hussein's rule: "I saw the blood of the two Sadrs and the Hakim family, the blood of Iraq, north and south, from its center, east and west. My heart quaked."
Saghir's sermon is like a banner in the wind. At times, it is limp before it begins to flap on a light breeze. It sags, then is blown by a gust. Many gifted preachers steadily build to a crescendo, but few seem as skillful as Saghir in gliding from one extreme to the other.
Saghir said he never rehearses his speech, never thinks ahead about what he will say. "I watch the people as I give my sermon," he said. "I can tell if I'm having an effect or not."
In contrast to the public statements of the Supreme Council, with their emphasis on reconciliation with and inclusion of disenchanted Sunnis, Saghir is brusque with his followers. He speaks as if delivering self-evident truths, in impeccable, eloquent Arabic.
Insurgents? They are dismissed as Hussein loyalists disguised as holy warriors -- "Baathists wearing beards and turbans," he calls them in one sermon.
He calls their leaders the "heroes of satellite television," mocking their penchant for issuing statements on video. He ridicules the doctrine of the Association of Muslim Scholars, the most influential Sunni Muslim group, as "Saddam Hussein's Islam." And purges lie ahead, he warns, for Iraq's outgoing interim government, which he calls tainted by "the dirty faces of the Baathists.".
"The killers of today," he says in another sermon, "are the same killers as yesterday."
National reconciliation? "With whom?" he has asked in more than one talk. "With those criminals who have shed the blood of our people in Hilla, Karbala, Najaf and every other place in Iraq?"
Time and again, he insists that patience is running out.
"We warn you about the anger of the gentle and the patient," he said. "When the anger begins, nothing can stop it."
A Race Against Time
A man with a rifle sits outside Saghir's office. It is an understandable precaution.
Since he returned to Iraq in April 2003, Saghir, a father of five, estimates he has faced 21 attempts to kill him or his followers -- mortars fired a half-dozen times at the mosque, five would-be suicide bombers prevented from getting inside, a fusillade of gunfire at a car he was thought to be riding in (he wasn't), and assorted other car bombings and attempted shootings.
Khalid Fatlawi, a bookseller at the mosque, said: "He doesn't care about death. He has no fear."
"Why should I be scared?" Saghir asked as he sat in his office, which has newly painted walls, six shelves of books and two telephones.
Imbued like many Shiites with a reverence for sacrifice and struggle, he and his followers view the attacks as giving them a certain street credibility. To instill confidence in his followers, he said, he must speak with confidence.
"I feel like I am in a race against time with the terrorists," he said, "and I think we're winning the battle."
"Absolutely," he added.
But some question his modesty -- including other Shiite clerics, who, like him, are expected to disavow ambition. They see him as an opportunistic politician, capitalizing on his ties with the main Shiite party, his platform at the Baratha mosque and his perceived relationship with Sistani, whose influence is unparalleled among devout Shiites in Iraq.
Some of Saghir's detractors view him as a product of the Iraqi opposition that spent much of Hussein's era in exile. In those years, groups such as the Supreme Council were organized along explicitly sectarian or religious lines.
"He's very ambitious," said Salah Ubaidi, a cleric who remained in Iraq during Hussein's rule. "This sometimes puts him in embarrassing positions. He does not have enough flexibility to fulfill these ambitions."
Many Sunni politicians recoil at Saghir's language -- to them, evidence that they can expect second-class status in a Shiite-dominated state.
"He's one of the guys pushing the situation toward the extreme," said Saleh Mutlak, who leads a small, largely Sunni Arab party. "He's very biased, very aggressive, and the way he speaks is only going to deteriorate things between Iraqis."
Saghir shakes his head at the thought. He casts his eyes down and speaks slowly, almost wearily.
"If they want to reconcile, they should send me a message of peace," he said. "They should not send me a car bomb."
His tone softens, becoming almost reassuring.
"As long as Shiites maintain their discipline, there will be no civil war," he says. "We have a great storehouse of patience."
But, in words that were part prediction, part threat, he added, "What is right in the end will triumph."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5513-2005Mar27.html
