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Religious leaders to dominate Iraq's election By Charles Clover in Baghdad Financial Times Published: October 22 2004
The effort to build political coalitions to compete in Iraq's January parliamentary elections has focused attention on the paramount role that religious leaders will play in picking the winners and losers in the poll.
While senior Shia and Sunni religious leaders have said they will not run, they appear to have the most influence on who represents their respective communities or whether they will be represented at all.
Mainstream Shia religious leaders, led by the highest ranking cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, have been pushing hard for an election since the end of the war 18 months ago.
They say an election would offer the best opportunity for the Shia to take advantage of their numerical supremacy, estimated at 60 per cent of Iraq's population.
However, the main opposition they face is also from Islamic groups, an indicator of the dominant position religion now plays on all sides in the politics of Iraq.
Opponents of the mainstream Shia parties include the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the Association of Muslim Scholars, a loose grouping of Sunni clerics who have links to insurgent groups operating in Sunni Arab regions of Iraq. The association said on Friday that seven of its members had been arrested in recent days.
While there is no apparent alliance between Mr Sadr and the association, the two sides have taken similar positions on various issues and formed a considerable counterweight to the influence of the Shia clerical establishment.
“I am against any form of sectarianism. I am ready to vote for Sunnis and I hope Sunnis are ready to vote for Shia,” said Mr Sadr on October 4, singling out the association for praise: “May God bless them,” he said.
Mainstream Shia parties hoped that Mr Sadr, who has a wide following, would ultimately join them in a unified list. But their efforts were dealt a blow on Friday when a representative of Mr Sadr told tens of thousands of worshippers at Friday prayers that the Shia religious establishment was split in two.
It was a particularly sharply worded criticism of the “Marjai'ya”, which usually refers to the four senior clerics, led by Mr Sistani, who reside in the holy city of Najaf.
“We are caught between a Marjai'ya of tradition, and a Marjai'ya of leadership,” Sheikh Abdul Zahra al-Suweidi, a Sadr representative, told the assembled worshippers in the Sadr City neighbourhood of Baghdad, implying that Mr Sadr represented the latter. “We need a Marjai'ya of leadership.”
This statement was among the Sadr group's strongest public challenge yet to the leadership of Mr Sistani, whose representatives have been helping behind the scenes to create a unified Shia candidate list.
Mr Sadr himself had urged the top clerics not to get involved in the election. “We are one body, provided the religious authority is not taken advantage of to win elections. The religious authority is not an election card. I belong to the religious authority, but I do not use it as a card to win elections,” he said earlier this month. Mr Sistani's office issued a public statement on Thursday night, saying the elderly cleric would not support any specific candidates in the election. This appeared to be an effort to distance himself from any hint of interference in the political process.
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