The American government expected Iraqi Shiites to rise against Saddam Hussein during the U.S.-led war last spring: why was there no rising? Fear of the Baath regime intermixed with a sense that the United States betrayed them in the wake of the Gulf War are important factors in explaining the hesitation of the Shiites. Analysts and reporters covering the war noted these factors, but they paid too little attention to the role of nationalism. We need to examine the historical struggle between Arab Shiites and Sunnis over the meaning of Iraqi and Arab nationalism if we are to understand the cautious attitude adopted by Shiites during the war as well as the challenges facing the United States as it attempts to win the peace in postwar Iraq.
Britain, the mandatory power, created Iraq in 1921 as a state ruled by a Sunni minority elite. The new British rulers viewed the Shiite religious leaders of Najaf and Karbala as extremists whose influence over the largely tribal Shia population had to be curtailed. So they bequeathed Iraq to the Sunni Sharifians led by King Faysal (son of the Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who declared the 1916 Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire) and to a group of ex-Ottoman Sunni officers who joined Faysal in Syria during World War I. "I feel convinced," wrote the British plenipotentiary Gertrude Bell from Baghdad, "that our best allies are the Mesopotamians who served with Faisal and have the true spirit of Arab nationalism in them. . . . They will be regarded with considerable jealousy here, but they are capable men and they are men with an ideal." The Sharifians and the ex-Ottoman officers ruled Iraq until 1958. A decade of instability followed the collapse of the monarchy in that year, leading to the seizure of power by the Baath and the subsequent rise of the Sunni Tikriti clan whose members, led by Saddam Hussein, ruled Iraq until April 2003.
This means that in modern Iraq a Sunni minority, constituting some 17 percent of the population and based in central Iraq, held sway over the Shiite majority of 60 percent spread over southern and central Iraq and over a Kurdish minority of 20 percent in the north. The Sunnis felt entitled to rule Iraq, considering themselves the heirs of the Ottoman Empire. Their claim to rule was strengthened by the preponderance of Sunnis over Shiites in the wider Arab world and by the support of Arab Sunni leaders, including the rulers of Saudi Arabia, who view Shiism as heresy and have felt more comfortable with Sunni rule next door. Western powers bolstered Sunni rule in Iraq; until 1991, the U.S. government considered the Baath regime as a bulwark against Shiite Iran. This view prevailed even in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War when the first Bush administration ruled out action to aid Iraqi Shiites who rebelled against Saddam.
Like the Sunnis, the Shiites are predominantly Arabs. Shiites became a majority in the country only in the nineteenth century as the bulk of Iraq's Arab nomadic tribes settled down and subsequently espoused Shiism. Although Sunnis and Shiites have had conflicting political aspirations, both groups have a stake in preserving the territorial integrity of Iraq. Whereas for the Sunni minority an intact Iraq is a matter of survival, for the Shiite majority the question is rather one of gains and losses. Were Iraq to splinter, Shiites in the south would lose the capital, Baghdad, despite the fact that Shiites are half its population. They would also lose the shrine cities of Kazimain and Samarra, situated in central Iraq, as well as substantial revenues from the northern oil fields. And finally, they would not be able to realize their dream of attaining power in a large and prosperous state. Shiites have nourished that dream ever since their failed revolt against the British in 1920, when the plan of Shiite clerics to dominate Iraq misfired.
In the months leading up to the revolt, the Shiite religious leaders in Iraq and the Sunni Sharifians, then based in Syria, forged an alliance aimed at creating an Arab Islamic state ruled by an Arab emir and a legislative assembly. Whereas the Sharifians considered this formula an opening for their rule of Iraq, Shiite clerics hoped that it would enable them to oversee the legislative process once British control was ended. The Shiite tribes rose, but they were crushed by superior British arms. And then, to the dismay of the Shiites, the British brought the Sharifians to power, even though their part in the rising was not less than that of the Shiites. In subsequent years, Shiites would claim that their uprising had enabled the Sunni minority to attain power and enjoy all the fruits of office. In a statement submitted to British and American diplomats in 1932, Shiite leaders lamented, "Our endowments have been taken away, our lands confiscated, our trade depressed, and even our cemeteries have come under their control." This feeling that Iraq was created in sin is still strong today, when the United States is seeking to refashion Iraq's political system.
Much of the tension between Shiites and the ruling Sunni elite in prewar Iraq stemmed from the competition of the two groups over the right to rule the country and to define the meaning of nationalism. Whereas the Shiite majority preferred Iraqi nationalism, Sunni rulers adopted Pan-Arabism as their main ideology and took the preference of the Shiites as proof that they did not share the government's commitment to the ultimate goal of an Arab state extending far beyond the borders of Iraq. The struggle over Iraqi and Arab nationalism dates back to the early years of the monarchy. Iraqi Shiites rejected the government's attempt to develop a secular modern Arabism, which they viewed as an invention of Sharifian and ex-Ottoman officials. Instead, they emphasized their Iraqi identity and Arab tribal attributes. Ali al-Sharqi, for example, offered a vision of Iraqi nationalism built on the historical role of Iraq's tribes in preserving the "true" spirit of Arabism in the country. He advocated the development of an Iraqi national history, inspired by the effort of Egyptians to use their ancient past as a foundation myth.
Sharqi died in Iraq in 1964. He lived at a time when Iraqi governments still tolerated a degree of opposition and intellectual dissent. Later Shiite writers ended up in exile and had to publish their books outside Iraq. Writing from outside, they highlighted the Hijazi and Syrian origin of the officials who accompanied Faysal to Iraq as well as the Turkish origin of leading politicians under the monarchy. They charged that although Iraq's Sunni politicians claimed to rule in the name of Arabism, they had no familial links to Iraqi Arab tribes nor did they share the life of the Iraqi people. Iraqi governments both during and after the monarchy, Shiite writers argued, had emptied the word "Arab" of its old meaning (which connoted tribal origin and identity), and infused the word "Arabism" (uruba) with a new, Western, meaning. Iraqi Shiites had traditionally understood uruba as a quality derived from people's descent, but in the twentieth century the word became associated with "nation," and in modern Iraq it has been used interchangeably with qawmiyya, which connotes Arab nationalism.
In turn, as part of an effort to discredit the nationalist credentials of the Shiites, Iraqi rulers presented Shiism as a subversive heresy motivated primarily by Persian hatred for the Arabs. To underscore the magnitude of the Shiite threat to the Iraqi state and to Arab nationalism, they invoked the memory of the shuubiyya movement that appeared within Islam in the eighth century. The term shuubiyya derives from the Arabic word shuub, which means peoples and nations. The majority of those who joined the movement during the eighth and ninth centuries were Persians and Aramaeans who protested the privileged position of the Arabs within Islam and demanded equality for all Muslims. The appearance of the shuubiyya became an issue of major concern for Arab historians and literary figures, some of whom considered the movement a threat both to Islam and to the supreme position of the Arabs among the world's nations. The term shuubiyya fell out of use in the medieval period; its reappearance in modern times was connected to the rise of Arab nationalism.
The first explicit Iraqi government attempt to depict Shiites as a threat to Arabism may be traced to the early years of the monarchy. The Baath began using the word shuubi to attack its opponents long before coming to power. Between the mid-1940s and early 1970s, shuubi became a curse word directed mainly against Iraqi communists, the majority of whom were Shiites. Abd al-Karim Qasim, who ruled Iraq for five years after the monarchy was overthrown in 1958, was a prime target of the Baathists, who depicted him as a separatist and a shuubi despot. Qasim, the son of a Fayli Shiite mother and a Sunni Arab father, advocated Iraqi nationalism and made the unity of the country his main goal. In an interview with a Lebanese journalist, Qasim articulated his view of Arabism-a view shared by many Iraqi Shiites: "For us," he said, "Arabism is not a means for achieving political ends, but a quality derived from our noble social origin and standing." In opting for Iraqi identity, Qasim and the majority of Iraqi Shiites adopted a line similar to that advocated by the Egyptian nationalist Lutfi al-Sayyid, who maintained that Egyptians should insist on preserving their Egyptian identity and not seek affiliation with any other state. Qasim was executed by Baathi officers who led the 1963 coup on charges that he was an enemy of Arabism-which was evident, they said, from his refusal to join the United Arab Republic. He is remembered by Shiites as the single nationalist leader who attempted to break the mold of an Iraqi state built on sectarian divisions and ruled by a Sunni elite. <SNIP>
Yitzhak Nakash teaches Middle East history at Brandeis University. He is the author of The Shi'is of Iraq, reissued with a new introduction in 2003. An earlier piece on Iraq that he wrote for Dissent appeared in the Fall 1998 issue.