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To: GST who wrote (157349)	5/19/2003 11:16:07 AM
From: Oeconomicus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

COMMENTARY Mosque and State By ZACHARY KARABELL There's a growing apprehension that fundamentalist Islam is on the rise in postwar Iraq. It seems that not a day goes by without some publication featuring a photo, meant to be ominous, of Shiite Muslims celebrating a pilgrimage to the shrines of Najaf or Karbala, or of Sunni Muslims praying fervently at mosques in Baghdad or Mosul. As law and order continue to deteriorate, it's also been easy enough to find a mullah here or an imam there angrily denouncing the United States in the name of Allah. But while these stories make good copy, they distort what is going on, and add one more level to the layer cake of misunderstanding that most Americans, and yes, Europeans, have about the role of Islam not just in Iraq but in the Middle East as a whole. In the political vacuum of Iraq, Islamist groups are among the most organized and cohesive forces. One area of civil society that Saddam Hussein did not completely obliterate was the mosque, though his hand there was not exactly light (he did execute a number of leading Shiite clerics and drove a number more into exile). In other parts of the Arab world -- including Morocco, which has now witnessed a rash of suicide bombings -- the mosque or the Sufi lodge is the only place where some form of dissent can be safely voiced, and, as in the U.S., religious groups often tend to local needs such as feeding and housing the poor. That said, the notion that Islamic government is the preferred path for people in Iraq, or that it has been the common path for people in the Middle East historically is simply wrong. In fact, Islam as a force in political life is a recent and still marginal phenomenon. There may be no explicit church-state divide in Islam, but that's mostly because, outside of Iran, there is no church. Typically, religious authorities have been answerable to the state and to rulers, and those rulers, with very few exceptions, have been uninterested in religious government. ... ...Governed by a British-installed monarchy until 1958, Iraq was rent by ethnic divisions that coincided with the split between Sunni in the middle of the country and Shiite in the South, but not by doctrinal disputes. And when the monarchy was overthrown by a coup in 1958, and when the Baath Party came to power in 1963, Islam as a political force was nowhere to be found. Nor was it a force in the one other Arab country that shared the ethnic and sectarian potpourri of Iraq: Lebanon. In 1958, the tenuous balance in Lebanon between Sunni, Shiite, Druze, and Maronite Christian began to disintegrate in the face of changing demographics and the appeal of pan-Arab nationalism emanating from Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser... Yet the divisions in Lebanon, like Iraq, while nominally defined by religious sects, never became doctrinal, and no one in Lebanon at the time sought religious government. In fact, Lebanon was and has remained (the assiduous efforts of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah notwithstanding) a ruggedly secular society, and so has Iraq. ... Source: WSJ, May 19, 2003 More at: online.wsj.com