> He's got that characteristic of Islamist politicians which also accounted for
> the popularity of the Taliban in the early days and of the Islamic Courts Union
> in Somalia (and the JEM in Sudan) - he's honest. Personal integrity is a big
> thing with all the Islamist types. He has also been moving since day one from
> a purely Shia Islamist position to a more nationalist form of Islam; this is
> basically because he is not and never has been taken particularly seriously as
> a religious figure.
...
> He is, at the end of the day, an Islamist and a fundamentalist and I personally
> would certainly not vote for him if he stood for Holborn & St Pancras. He's
> not very fond of gays and he advocates an entirely illiberal penal code and few
> civil liberties. But both those things are also true of Fidel Castro and being
> a Fidelista isn't taboo on this list is it? I think that qualified support for
> al-Sadr as a genuinely popular figure and perhaps among the least worst
> feasible options in Iraq is a much more reasonable position than being
> enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad.
I agree with much of this - however, Moqtada al-Sadr is not an Islamist in the usual sense. I find it hard to see how he is an Islamist at all although I used: to be honest, I actually got into a bit of trouble for describing him in those terms to my Politics and the Middle East lecturer... He is certainly religious and as a religious figure in politics asserts all sorts of pieties. I don't know what his views on homosexuals are, and as far as I know he has never taken the time to extemporise on the matter (unlike Sistani). But he does not and never has embraced a polity exclusively based on the Quran and the Prophetic Tradition, and this is an important between his followers and the 'Iranians' of whom he is contemptuous (namely, the SCIRI, who actually do hope for and anticipate a pre-Mahdist Islamic Republic, which is why Hakim is now trying to resuscitate a sectarian carve-up of the country - otherwise they have no base).
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