The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  By the end of the ’90s, Sadr began to challenge the regime that had made him a leader. He disparaged Sistani and the politically quietist, “silent” Hawza (the school of Shiite theology) in Najaf, and identified himself with the “speaking” Hawza, who believed, with Iran’s Khomeini, in the clergy’s central role in politics. In a series of Friday sermons at the shrine in Kufa, a few miles outside Najaf, Sadr used metaphors and double meanings to deliver attacks on the Baathist tyranny. These speeches, which were secretly recorded and distributed, greatly enhanced his reputation, and they also led to his martyrdom, which in many ways must have been the desired end, as it had been for so many figures in Shiite history. Sadr and two of his sons were ambushed and shot on the road between Najaf and Karbala. His youngest son, Moqtada, a seminary student, remained alive to claim his father’s mantle and his following.

  A round sticker affixed to the wooden front door of the Shaker house bore an image of the white-bearded Sadr, along with a quotation from one of his sermons, insisting that women be veiled. The living room was decorated with pictures of Sadr, Moqtada, and Imam Hussein crossing a river on horseback by moonlight, like one of the Christian saints. Compact discs containing forty-five sermons by Ayatollah Sadr were stacked inside the family’s TV cabinet, alongside a pile of back issues of al-Hawza, the fiercely anti-American newspaper published by Moqtada al-Sadr’s movement. Shaker told me that he got his television news from al-Jazeera and Iranian broadcasts—he never watched Iraq’s American-run state network. His main source of information from the non-Islamic world, I realized, was old Hollywood movies. That wouldn’t offer him much help in parsing the truth of a story I noticed in al-Hawza. The newspaper had reprinted side-by-side photographs of President Bush and President Clinton holding up their index and pinkie fingers; the accompanying article offered the images as evidence of a Zionist-Masonic conspiracy.

  Shaker’s younger brothers, Ali and Samir, joined us in the living room. Ali was a secondary school math teacher; Samir, an unemployed telecom repairman. Unlike their dirty-blond, fair-skinned older brother, they were dark and bearded—respectful, serious, slightly wary.

  “Samir is closer to God than me,” Shaker said. “Ali is like me—flexible.” Ali and Samir were devoted followers of Moqtada; they shared his hostility toward the occupation. From time to time, someone knocked on the inner door, and one of the brothers would get up to receive a tray of Pepsis from the hands of an unseen woman.

  Ali brought up the Ashura bombings. “Ninety-five percent of Iraqis knew the main purpose of this was to start a religious war between Shia and Sunnis,” he said. He was skeptical of the Americans’ assertion that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist with ties to al-Qaeda, who had recently written a long letter to Osama bin Laden advocating a strategy of fomenting civil war in Iraq, was responsible for the attacks. “This Zarqawi—it’s only a game that the Americans use,” Ali declared. “Before the election of Bush, they’ll show Zarqawi on TV. Just like Saddam—they captured him months before they showed him.”

  The brothers told me a joke about the occupation. An American soldier is about to kill a Shiite, who cries, “Please, no, in the name of Imam Hussein!” The American asks who Imam Hussein was and then decides to spare the man’s life. A few weeks later, this same soldier is sent to Falluja, where he’s cornered by a Sunni insurgent. The soldier thinks fast and cries, “Please, no, in the name of Imam Hussein!” The insurgent says, “What? You’re an American and a Shiite?” and blows him away.

  There was a moment of laughter in the living room.

  I had been collecting Iraqi jokes, and I weighed telling the Shaker brothers one. There was the joke about the newlyweds in Falluja (Falluja jokes abounded in Iraq). The man asks his new bride to suck his dick. “No, no,” she says, “it’s haram.” “We’re married now,” he says, “please, please do it.” “I can’t, it’s haram.” “Please.” “Okay, if you cover it in honey, I’ll do it.” “Are you kidding? If I cover it in honey, I’m sucking it.” A glance at the faces of somber Ali and devout Samir made me file the Falluja joke away. Then there was the joke I’d recently heard, from an Iraqi Shiite, about Ayatollah Mohamed Baqr al-Hakim, the spiritual leader of the Tehran-based Shiite political party, who had been killed by a car bomb in Najaf in August 2003. In the joke, he is blown into so many pieces that his body can’t be identified. Finally investigators bring a severed penis to his widow and apologetically ask her whether she can make a positive identification. The widow glances at the object and says, “That’s not my husband. That’s his driver.” This joke was so haram that I felt a quiver of fear just thinking about it. Finally I remembered a repeatable joke. Ten Kurds locked up in a mental hospital spend six months fighting one another to look through the tiny hole in the wall of their cell. A doctor, curious, enters the cell and asks to have a look. He puts his eye to the hole for ten minutes: nothing. “There’s nothing there,” he says. One of the patients answers, “We haven’t seen anything in six months—you expect to see something in ten minutes?” But by the time I remembered the Kurdish joke, the moment had passed.

  Ali, sitting cross-legged on a rug against the wall, looked directly at me. “Before this war, I was waiting for the Americans to come, and now I feel sort of cheated. All this talk about rebuilding Iraq, and all we see is a couple of light coats of paint. And they say they renovated Iraq.”

  Samir spoke in darker tones, with a faint smile. He had never had any illusions. “No enemy loves his enemy. We know very well that the Americans don’t intend us any good.”

  I pointed out that the Americans had at least gotten rid of Saddam.

  “That’s not enough,” Ali said. “Now things are worse. We can’t go outside at four in the morning, as before.”

  If within a year there were free elections in Iraq, I asked, would they be satisfied?

  “Yes,” Samir said.

  Ali disagreed. “I don’t think the people will be satisfied. What if we have a president? The mobile phones we have here don’t work. Why can’t it be like the Gulf countries? Maybe in generations after generations. But we won’t be here then. It pisses me off.”

  Shaker asked to borrow my satellite phone and disappeared up on the roof, to call his new wife in Amsterdam.

  * * *

  ON THE FRIDAY following the Ashura bombings, I went with Shaker to hear prayers in Kadhimiya. Along a broad pedestrian market street that ended in the square in front of the sixteenth-century mosque, cordons of grim-looking young men in black, carrying Kalashnikovs, searched the throngs of pilgrims for weapons. These were the local security force of the Mahdi Army, the armed followers of Moqtada al-Sadr, named for the twelfth Shiite imam, the hidden imam, who is expected to return as the messiah and usher in the Apocalypse. There were no Iraqi policemen or American soldiers on the streets. One militiaman, who was eighteen years old, told me that the Americans had prevented the Mahdi Army from carrying their weapons on Ashura. This was a foolish decision, he said: If the militia had been armed, it would have been able to hold back the surges of worshippers that day and catch the suicide bombers mingling in the crowd. After the explosions, Iraqis had greeted the soldiers who rushed in to evacuate the wounded with a storm of rocks and shoes.

  While Shaker went into a shop to wash himself before prayers, a local cleric named Sheikh Mohamed Kinani told me that the bombers were Wahhabi members of al-Qaeda, working in concert with an American soldier employed by the John Kerry campaign. “I believe John Kerry is behind this so Bush will lose his presidency and look bad in front of the world,” he said. “But it’s the Iraqis who pay for it.” The traffic in conspiracy theories had grown so heavy that an American intelligence unit began putting out The Baghdad Mosquito, a daily compendium of rumors currently in circulation, not unlike the records kept by the Baath Party. According to men I spoke with in Kadhimiya, Wahhabi had light-colored beards and were the enemies of true Muslims. A merchant on the pedestrian market street said, “We caught a Wahhabi from R
amadi an hour ago.” The captive was wearing a short dishdasha, in the Wahhabi style, and while his feet were dirty, his body was suspiciously clean. A search of the Wahhabi man turned up blank paper and a map. Local people took him to the police station, where he would be tortured until he confessed.

  Prayers began beneath a hot noon sun. The shrine itself, with its splendid golden dome and minarets, its tiled arches soaring over the wooden front doors, was closed because of bomb damage. Men filled the square; holding black signs and pictures of Shiite martyrs, they shook their fists and chanted, “Pray to Mohamed and the followers of Mohamed and hurry the damning of our enemies. Give victory to Moqtada! We follow Moq-ta-da!”

  The doctor knelt in the front row and prayed. He seemed alone in the crowd, the only worshipper who wasn’t chanting.

  One of Moqtada’s aides, Hazem al-Araji, delivered the sermon. He was a thirty-five-year-old sayyid, or descendant of the Prophet, with a salt-and-pepper beard, who had spent two years in exile in Vancouver before the war. Later, in conversation at his office, he proved to be a smooth, smiling politician who Googled himself several times a day to keep up with his press and who made a theocratic Islamic state sound not very different from a parliamentary democracy. But in front of the crowd of worshippers outside the shrine, Araji let loose an incendiary and conspiratorial analysis of the violence in Iraq. The attacks came from four sources, he declared, none of them Iraqi or Muslim: It was the Jews, the Americans, the British, and the Wahhabi. The Jews—who had been warned to stay away from the World Trade Center on September 11, so that not one Jew died—“want Iraqis to die.” America, the devil, allowed the violence in order to have an excuse to continue occupying Iraq. The British, America’s partners, were more directly responsible, since they invented Wahhabism and, therefore, al-Qaeda, which have “nothing to do with Islam.”

  Shaker knelt, slump shouldered, and gazed down at his clasped hands, muttering prayers. He looked puzzled, as if he were trying to figure something out. I wondered if the cleric’s ranting embarrassed him.

  “If you read the modern books of history,” Araji proclaimed, “Wahhabism started in 1870 by the good graces of the British government in order to go against Islam, to make Islam look bad, to make Muslims fight each other. Those who know—good. Those who don’t—know now.”

  Araji was referring to Confessions of a British Spy, an apocryphal memoir attributed to a British colonial officer of the early eighteenth century named Hempher (Araji was off by 150 years). Going undercover, Hempher befriends a gullible, hotheaded Iraqi in Basra named Mohamed ibn Abd al-Wahhab and tempts him into founding a heretical sect of Islam that will bring disrepute to other Muslims and turn them against one another: “We, the English people, have to make mischief and arouse schism in all our colonies in order that we may live in welfare and luxury.” But Hempher cannot conceal his admiration for the spiritual grandeur of Islam, which more than once nearly causes him to abandon his mission. Confessions of a British Spy reads like an Anglophobic variation on Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the labor of a Sunni Muslim author (probably Turkish) whose intent is to present Muslims as both too holy and too weak to organize anything as destructive as Wahhabism on their own (or, Araji’s listeners could deduce, to pull off a crime as appalling as the Ashura bombings, which took place two centuries after Wahhabis, on the same holiday, had sacked the Shiite shrine at Karbala, slaughtering two thousand citizens). With its subtext of powerlessness, the “memoir” is a confession of Muslim humiliation, a text that was bound to find an audience in occupied Iraq, where, in spite of a pronounced streak of anti-Shiism throughout the book, the name Hempher was beginning to circulate among militant Shia.

  “America, England, Israel, do whatever you have to do, build more missiles, more explosives, more terrorism all over the world,” Araji said. “But it’s not going to stop us.”

  The crowd chanted: “Yes, yes to Islam!”

  “Just a speech,” Shaker scoffed as we drove out of Kadhimiya. “If I knew this man is going to deliver the Friday prayers, I would not go.” He would have preferred to hear Moqtada himself. If Moqtada had come, he said, there would have been less talk and more action.

  * * *

  ON THE NIGHTS around Ashura, the Shia prepare large quantities of food, visit friends and neighbors, and stay up together until dawn watching for the spirit of Imam Hussein to pass by. I was invited to spend one night at the house of a theology student named Ali Talib. He lived just off a highway in eastern Baghdad, on a narrow street amid a warren of houses, all of them flying tattered little black, red, and green flags above their rooftops. Ali was outside when I arrived, stirring a cauldron of steaming porridge with a wooden paddle twice the length of a baseball bat. All along the street, his neighbors were doing the same. It was already late evening—the curfew would soon make it impossible for me to leave until early morning. I had never spent the night in an Iraqi home before, and Ali made a point of putting me at ease from the start by handing me the paddle and insisting that I stir. I was to help feed the passing spirit of Imam Hussein.

  Ali was in his early thirties, a fleshy man with a severe limp, nearly bald, a light growth of stubble on his cheeks—doctrinally correct, he insisted, since what mattered was having enough facial hair to be unmistakable for a woman, not having a full beard. Ali was warm, ebullient, constantly touching my shoulder for emphasis or laughing with startled delight at something I said. “I wish one day would be forty-eight hours instead of twenty-four!” he cried. “I can’t sleep quietly—this week I slept eight hours, because of the Internet.” The dial-up connection, a present from his family, allowed him to study night and day in the absence of expensive books. “I’d love to be in NASA and see this world from the sky,” he said apropos of nothing. “I want to live it second by second.”

  Ali’s family tried to make his life as easy and fulfilling as possible, because it wasn’t clear how long he would live. Since childhood he had suffered from a disease of the left leg. He lifted his dishdasha to show me: The leg was horribly swollen and discolored, with knots of bulges up and down the thigh and calf. An operation had been unsuccessful; the doctor had told him that unless he went abroad for treatment, the disease would eventually kill him.

  “The reason I’m patient is that I know Imam Hussein suffered much worse things,” he said. “The killing of Hussein led to a revolution. But this revolution was not one of blood—it was of the spirit.”

  The two-story house was built around a small inner court that was open to the night sky. A bird fluttered in a cage, a boom box played rhythmic chants of self-flagellation, and Ali, his uncle, and I sat talking in the court while neighbors came and went. Ali was an ardent student of Islamic philosophy. For years under Saddam, he had gone down to Najaf, not telling his parents, and pursued a course of study with the leading Shiite clerics of the Hawza. The government monitored the students, and two of Ali’s teachers were eventually executed, but he had always been plagued with hopelessness, and what he was learning in Najaf made life not just bearable but ecstatic. “The whole world is built on the love of God,” he said. “Not just human beings—everything you see in life, every living organism.” He became a follower of the seventeenth-century Persian mystic Mullah Sadra, an idealist philosopher in the spirit of Neoplatonism, who taught the unity of all existence. “He built this road, Mullah Sadra, and all the scholars after him built the same road, and I wanted to follow him, but Saddam and my uncle wouldn’t let me take that road.”

  Ali’s uncle, an old communist who was not particularly religious, said, “We didn’t want him to follow it, because at that time just listening to this music would have killed him, and the punishment would have been for the whole family.”

  Eventually, Ali’s health and the dangers forced him to stop attending classes in Najaf. He kept studying with a secret group of friends in Baghdad. The hardest part was finding and buying books. In his bedroom upstairs Ali had Machiavelli’s The Prince, a brand-new copy of Mull
ah Sadra’s Philosophy of the Principles and What Is Promised, and other texts, but it was never enough. The Internet had become his obsession—it was, he said, Bremer’s greatest gift to Iraqis. On his desk there was a picture of Grand Ayatollah Sistani.

  We talked on into the night: about Mill’s idea of liberty, Islam and democracy, the role of women in religion and tradition, the leading Iraqi politicians, the place of the clerics in the future government. Ali’s ideas were half formed; at times he came close to advocating Iranian-style wilayat al-faqih, at other times he wanted to keep religion and politics separate. He asked me a thousand questions. What did I think of The Passion of the Christ? Had I met anyone famous other than Bremer? How could I separate what was the government’s business from what was Allah’s? Would the Americans let Iraqis write their own constitution? It was a rare and bracing conversation, for Ali was open to every idea; nothing was out of bounds.

  The Shiite surge during the days of Muharram in Iraq had all the heat and fervor of a long-suppressed desire, but it was not a tolerant month. Students were threatening academic deans for taking down their religious banners, and Moqtada’s followers were conducting themselves more and more like a fascist militia. Mustafa al-Kadhimi, the exile I first met in London, who in his youth had been a member of the Islamist Dawa Party, once explained that this religious explosion was not just a reaction to the Baath Party’s repression but a version of the same dictatorial mentality, for the generation of younger Shia had grown up knowing nothing else. It would take two or three years to spend itself, and in the meantime a lot of mischief would be done. As for Ali Talib, he didn’t know exactly what he thought, but how he thought was self-critically, with a touch of metaphysical joy.

  We even talked about sex. The mutual friend who introduced us had told me that for six months Ali had been carrying on a semisecret affair with a widow. The Shia sanctioned a practice known as zawaj mutea, or pleasure marriage. It was based on a verse from the Qur’an and had all the trappings of conventional Islamic marriage: There was a contract, payment up front, consent of both parties, approval of the woman’s family, and clerical blessing (the woman couldn’t be a prostitute). The difference was that zawaj mutea was temporary: It could last anywhere from one hour to twenty years, and it was indefinitely renewable. I had heard that there were rooms in Kadhimiya rented out for just this purpose, and imams with albums full of pictures of good men and women for their flock to choose among. “But there’s a sensitive point,” Ali cautioned. If the woman was still a virgin, “You cannot have sex with her—you can only touch and kiss.” He explained, “It would be a disaster for that virgin because her brother would kill her. It isn’t Islamists who would kill her—she would be killed by tradition.” (In the case of widows and divorcées the restriction was lifted.) But if you clicked on www.sistani.org and looked up the grand ayatollah’s teachings on the subjects of oral and anal sex, you realized that thousands of young Shia were well advanced in the arts of love before they ever married in the traditional manner. Ali described the practice as a doctrinal act of kindness. “We Shia don’t want to have forbidden sex, so we have zawaj mutea. It’s like having mercy, so that he or she wouldn’t suffer inside, to make it easier for them.”