Amir Taheri, Arab News Staff

PARIS, 27 February 2004 — As the June deadline for the transfer of power to an Iraqi transition government approaches, expect a rising tempo of political posturing on all sides. Those who have failed to find a popular constituency are likely to paint a grim picture, with emphasis on lack of security, to seek a prolongation of direct rule by the US-led coalition.

Others, however, want the Americans and their allies to leave as fast as they can. These are individuals and parties that have been able to fill part of the gap left by the collapse of the Baathist regime. They are concerned that a longer American presence may result in the spread of ideas and the establishment of rules that would prevent them from imposing their brands of politics on the newly-liberated nation.

The noisiest of these are the so-called Islamists, some of whom have just had a verbal spat with Paul Bremer, the Coalition’s “Pasha” in Baghdad.

It all started with a couple of mullas demanding that Islam be the “foundation” of the future constitution. The demand was echoed by one or two members of the Governing Council, presumably for want of better things to do.

Bremer, a normally cool man who thinks twice before he makes a move, was provoked into a hasty reaction, asserting that he would not sign such a constitution.

The spat looks like a scene from the theater of the absurd. The mullas who made the initial noises represent no one except their own images in a mirror. Bremer, for his part, was unwise to brandish a veto that belongs to the people of Iraq.

Do the Iraqis want an Islamist regime?

The question is pertinent and must be debated. At least five major public opinion polls conducted since the liberation show that support for such a regime hovers around three to four percent. In one poll, the question whether an Iranian-style Islamic Republic would be suitable for Iraq drew a positive response from only one percent of the respondents.

None of Iraq’s dozen or so political parties — from the secularists to religious Shiites — demands the creation of an Islamic state. Nor can one find a single prominent Iraqi intellectual who would wish to establish a religious regime.

Even the Shiite mullas, starting with their primus inter pares, the Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani, are not making such a demand.

Anyone with some knowledge of Iraqi Shiism would know that the last thing that Iraq’s Shiites want is a regime like that of the Khomeinists in Iran which, after a quarter of a century of terror and war, is now in deep, possibly terminal, crisis.

Iraqi Shiites opposition to a religious state, however, is not solely doctrinal. It is also dictated by practical politics.

Though Shiites account for some 60 percent of the Iraqis, they cannot be regarded as a monolithic bloc even on issues of faith. Like other Shiites they are divided into dozens of ways (tariqats) and countless forms of allegiance (taqlid). As the Iranian experience has illustrated, it is impossible for Shiites to agree on a single political reading of Islam. But even if such a single reading were to be imposed by conjecture, as was the case in Iran in 1979, it would not be sustainable for long. The Iraqi situation is more complex still because 40 percent of the country’s population are not Shiites and have no reason to accept any Shiite political reading of Islam.

Any attempt at imposing an Iraqi version of Khomeinism would lead to civil war and the dismemberment of the country.

As the sole organizing principle of political life, religion is unworkable outside small, ethnically and culturally uniform, and isolated communities, which Iraq is not. All this does not mean that Islam should be scripted out of the future Iraqi constitution. Some 95 percent of Iraqis, including those who describe themselves as “humanists”, acknowledge Islam as a key element in their existential reality. Thus there is no harm in reflecting that fact in the new constitution, much like what the Afghans have done in theirs.

Even the issue of the “Shariah” (religious law) need not cause frictions. No modern society can be run with religious law as its only legal framework. Indeed, all Muslim states are signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and hundreds of international treaties that are not of “Islamic” origin. (That most Muslim governments violate or ignore the declaration and the treaties in question is due to their political nature, not their love of Islamic jurisprudence.) There is no reason why the “Shariah” should not be mentioned as one of the sources of law in Iraq.

The only effective way to settle these matters is through free and fair elections.

Nowhere has an Islamist party come to power through the ballot box.

Even the most moderate Islamist parties, that, like the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, deny any religious identity, have never won a majority of votes anywhere in the Muslim world. (In Turkey’s 2002 general election the Justice and Development Party collected almost 35 percent of the votes and formed the government. But let us not forget that 65 percent of the electorate voted against it.)

In Malaysia the Islamists have polled between 11 and 13 percent in local and general elections in the past four decades. In Jordan and Kuwait, the only Arab countries where elections of acceptable standards are held, the Islamists’ share of the vote has varied between 15 and 22 percent.

Iraq needs free and fair elections to choose a transitional government that would write a draft constitution for submission to a referendum. It may be difficult to hold elections by the end of June, the deadline set by Washington.

But there is no reason why a new deadline for elections cannot be set.

The United States cannot simply hand over Iraq to just anybody and then leave. It must leave only when it can transfer power to a freely elected Iraqi Parliament as the true expression of the nation’s sovereignty. This is what the US did in many other countries, notably in postwar Western Europe and Japan. There is no reason why Iraq should receive a different treatment.