* Small protests were held by peace activists throughout the US and the world on Saturday. Some 7,000 came out in Chicago, e.g. In London, AP estimates 15,000. (There have been bigger anti-war protests in London). NYT says 6,000 came out in San Francisco, but few of them were young people.
* The New York Times reveals that Rumsfeld's torture team, Task Force 6-26, was so notorious that even the CIA wanted nothing to do with it! Current Attorney General Albert Gonzales helped authorize this torture.
* Baghdad police announced Saturday that they had found another 18 bodies in the streets. There were some bombings, including an attack on pilgrims heading to Karbala. It turns out that the head of the Iraqi army was almost killed in Kirkuk on Thursday. It was announced on Saturday that on Thursday guerrillas north of Tikrit killed 2 US soldiers and wounded another. It grinds on.
* Al-Hayat reports [Ar.] that the (Sunni hardline) Association of Muslim Scholars said that it "deeply resents and takes offense" at the idea that the 'forces of Occupation' (the United States) and Iran would hold talks about Iraqi internal affairs. Its communique said, "Iranian intervention in Iraqi affairs is not new, and has reached an apex of harmfulness. But what is new is the attempt to legitimize this interference and to provide it with an international cover, while completely ignoring the sovereignty and the governmental administration of Iraq itself." Sunni Arab Iraqis have long been distrustful of Shiite Iran.
The US-Iran dialogue on Iraq comes after the Iraqi Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, called last Wednesday for Tehran to talk to Washington. Al-Hakim was a guest of Iran's ayatollahs for nearly a quarter century, but also has an alliance of convenience with the Bush administration.
The Iraqi Accord Front, a fundamentalist Sunni Arab list with 44 members in parliament, also expressed its "strong rejection" of the negotiations, which it called unwarranted interference in Iraqi affairs and unjustified by any conceivable result the negotiations might produce. Its statement added, "Who is responsible for the Iraq file is the people of Iraq . . . this is a legal and national responsibility, and no other party may intervene in it."
The National Iraqi list of former appointed PM Iyad Allawi also rejected the negotiations. When Allawi was in power briefly, he sought to increase tension with Iran, appointing a minister of defense who called Iran the number one enemy of Iraq. Allawi has strong CIA connections.
In contrast, al-Hayat says it was told by Arab diplomats in Washington that the negotiations between the US and Iran might lead to cooperation in containing the terrorist groups in Iraq and to the imposition of great isolation on the Syrian regime, which views continued troubles in Iraq as its guarantee that the US won't try to overthrow it.
The Sunni Iraqi Accord Front put forward a plan to constrain the prerogatives of the prime minister. Iyad al-Samarra'i told al-Hayat that it was proposing that big departures in strategy be confirmed by a two-thirds vote in parliament, and that internal security policy be confirmed by an absolute majority (i.e. counting abstentions and absentees), and ordinary policy by a simple majority (a majority of those MPs actually voting). These Sunnis are also suggesting that the government be divided into 3 portfolios, security, the economy, and services, and that these be handled by the 3 vice premiers on a consensus basis. (This system would allow the Kurdish and Sunni Arab vice premiers to outvote the one Shiite vice premier, thus undoing the results of the Dec. 15 elections, which gave the religiou Shiites a near-majority).
* The Turkish envoy to Baghdad says that Iraq has never been so close to civil war as it is today. He reports that the Iraqi political figures with whom he is in touch are extremely worried about the outcome.
** Sistani on Homosexuality
Readers have been asking me about the stance of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani regarding homosexuality. I take it they are inquiring about this entry at my colleagues' great Pandagon site.
Let me begin by saying that the charge leveled by some, and mentioned at Pandagon, that Sistani has called for the killing of Sunnis, is completely untrue. The implication given by exiled gay Iraqi, Ali Hili, of the London-based gay human rights group OutRage, that Sistani has called for vigilante killings of gays, is untrue, though it is accurate that Sistani advises that the state make homosexual activity a capital crime; it is also accurate to call this "sick."
In traditional Islam there was no conception of the "homosexual" as a permanent identity or social role. As in ancient Greece, the real distinction in sexuality (as Michel Foucault showed) was between the penetrator and the penetrated. Medieval and early modern Islamdom were like the Greece of Plato. Adult males were the penetrators. In premodern Muslim society, women could be penetrated if they were legally married to the man or if they were his slaves. Likewise, slave-boys (catamites) could be penetrated, although it was typically disapproved of by the Muslim clerics. Exclusive adult male-male sexual relationships are not recorded, and a taste for a slave-boy did not stop a wealthy man from being married or from having liasons with his female slaves, as well. About half the famous love-poems of the medieval Baghdad literary figure, Abu Nuwas, appear to have been addressed to boys.
As slavery was forbidden in the Ottoman Empire in the course of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, obviously the keeping of slave-boys by wealthy men ceased. As society modernized, notions of sexuality moved away from the penetrator/penetrated model similar to that of the ancient Greeks, and toward a modern male-female binary. Many Muslim societies in the course of the twentieth century also moved away from polygamy toward a model of one man, one woman as the family unit.
Modern homosexual identity has only slowly emerged in the Middle East, and has sometimes faced great hostility. I say sometimes because real-life Muslim societies are not as puritanical as outsiders or local elites imagine. It is obvious that American writer Paul Bowles liked living in Tangiers precisely because anything went as long as it stayed fairly private. In cosmopolitan Muslim cultures like Egypt, at best the modern gay subculture is winked at, but sometimes there are crackdowns. The situation resembles the US in, say, the 1930s and 1940s, when the police would arrest gays. In a radical Muslim regime like Taliban Afghanistan, gays were executed. This was in part an attempt to keep discipline in the Taliban military ranks, which were notorious for gay liaisons. So there is a spectrum. It should be underlined that Taliban Afghanistan was weird and not like most of the Muslim world.
So on to Sistani, who upholds a slightly modernized version of medieval Muslim canon law. The first two fatwas he gave on the subject have to do with adult men penetrating boys. That is, Sistani appears to take as the connotation of lawat that it is an adult man penetrating an under-age boy. Unsurprisingly, he deeply disapproves. The first two fatwas, however, come in response to questions about what this sexual relationship means for later marital relations between the two families. Say a 21-year-old man from Khazraj had relations with a 17-year-old boy from Ruba'i? Then, say the first man's family wanted to marry him off to a girl from the Ruba'i family. Can they? And to what degree of relatedness? Can he be the husband of his former lover's sister? The answer is "no." In contrast, Sistani would allow a man who had an affair with a girl to later on marry her sister. Personally, I think the gay guy is getting the better advice here; having a brother-in-law or sister-in-law who is your former lover would be awkward at family reunions. Sistani does say that if a man has an affair with a married woman, and fathers her child, and she later gets divorced, he cannot in good conscience marry her, as a punishment for the earlier sin.
The first two fatwas assume that the gay affair had been discovered and punished, but also assumes that the two men were not only at liberty but that their families were in the sort of social relationship where intermarriage was still a possibility.
A later fatwa insists that homosexual relations should be punished with the utmost severity, and urges the death penalty. Again, his assumption appears to be that the penetrated partner would likely be under-age, which may help explain his severity. His first two fatwas, however, assume that the punishment will actually be much less severe, even when one of the partners was under-age!
It should be noted that Sistani does not have or even claim the right to impose a death penalty on individuals for their activities. In contemporary Iraq, the legality of homosexuality would be determined by statute passed by parliament (or by provincial assemblies), and if it were illegal, sentencing would be carried out by civil judges. Sistani is here acting as a jurisconsult, saying what he thinks Islamic canon law requires. But Iraq is not governed, or not solely governed, by shariah or Islamic canon law.
The Iraqi constitution adopted on October 15 contains a provision that no law be passed directly contradicting the established laws of Islam, but another article says that no law may be passed that is contrary to human rights standards. Given that homosexuality has never been such a big an issue in the Middle East (and for long stretches some sort of homosociality was accepted elite practice) that its prohibition would rise to the level of an "established" Islamic law (thawabit ahkam al-Islam), one wonders if Iraqi law will really take this direction. Certainly, it would not be in accord with the other provision, concerning basic human rights.
But there isn't any doubt that Sistani does advocate making gay relations a capital crime. If Iraq took a strong turn toward implementation of religious law, which is entirely possible given that the December 15 election mainly put religious fundamentalist parties in parliament, then such severe penalties for homosexual relations could be imposed, despite the human rights language in the constitution.
I personally condemn Sistani's stance here, of course. He is a conservative Shiite cleric, however, so I don't know what people were expecting to happen if the secular Baath was overthrown and replaced by primordial ethnic identities.
http://www.juancole.com -- Jim Devine / "There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity." -- Chester Bowles