NEWS STORY: Sunni Clerics Ramp Up Calls for Armed Opposition

c. 2004 Religion News Service BAGHDAD, Iraq _ For Sheik Mohammad Ali Mohammad al-Ghereri, a Sunni Muslim cleric, the question is no longer whether to tell his followers to fight the Americans, but how to assure they wage war properly. “The holy warriors should have a clerical leader with them to advise them on all […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

BAGHDAD, Iraq _ For Sheik Mohammad Ali Mohammad al-Ghereri, a Sunni Muslim cleric, the question is no longer whether to tell his followers to fight the Americans, but how to assure they wage war properly.

“The holy warriors should have a clerical leader with them to advise them on all points, such as how to properly treat the Americans they capture,” he said in his austere mosque in the capital’s Zafarenieh district.


For fellow Sunni cleric Abdul Sattar Abdul-Jabbar, the issue is no longer whether his followers should kidnap foreigners, but which ones.

“Isn’t the trucker who brings supplies for the Americans and helps the occupation also part of the occupation?” said Abdul-Jabbar, a member of the Association of Muslim Scholars, the country’s largest Sunni religious grouping. “I think so.”

For Mohammad Amin Bashar, a Sunni cleric and professor at Baghdad’s Islamic University, the limits of classroom debate are likewise clear: “When two students come to us and have a disagreement, we tell them it’s all right to disagree,” he said. “The important thing is that we have a unified position in resisting the occupation.”

If Sunni clerics are a window into the soul of the violent resistance to the United States’ aims in Iraq, the landscape they reveal couldn’t be bleaker for U.S.-led forces trying to quell an insurgency that shows no signs of abating.

Among Iraq’s Shi’a Muslim majority, the United States can at least count on a few high-ranking clerics to counter junior preacher Muqtada al-Sadr’s incendiary calls for holy war. But among the Sunni “ulema,” or clerical leadership, who guide the Sunni masses, the calls for armed opposition to the United States, no matter the cost, have become increasingly strident.

“There is no discussion,” said Imam Mahdi al-Sumaydai, a high-ranking Sunni cleric who recently was jailed for six months by the Americans for his inflammatory teachings. “Jihad (holy war) is a must in the religion to defend your property, your honor or your religion. How can anyone deny our right to jihad?”

An estimated 60 percent of Iraq’s 24 million people are Shi’as. Roughly 35 percent are Sunnis, including both Muslims and Kurds.


Publicly, the U.S. military and the Bush administration, as well as interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, continue to describe those who battle the U.S.-led coalition as “dead enders,” criminals, gangsters and losers of the former regime making a last desperate stand in the face of the interim government’s successes.

“The insurgents see a successful Iraqi interim government taking control of the country,” explained the commander of the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division, Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, when asked why the insurgency seems to have intensified in recent weeks. “They see improvement of basic services. They see their power base slipping away. They see elections on the horizon. If you’re a terrorist, that must be your worst nightmare.”

But on the streets, the calls by clerics for jihad are spreading into the mainstream, seeping into a popular culture ironically liberated by the same occupation they’re opposing. Unencumbered by Saddam Hussein’s strict censorship laws, videos of armed mujahedeen (holy warriors) battling Americans _ often set to rhythmic religious music _ sell briskly at CD shops and in bazaars.

“People are trying to be more religious right now because they think it’s opposition to the Americans,” said an Iraqi translator working for Westerners who asked that his name not be published. “They tell me, `It’s halal (holy) to kill you because you’re a translator working for the Americans.”’

Among Sunni clergy, those who oppose violent resistance are rare, even when the clerics themselves are victims. Two clerics who belonged to the Association of Muslim Scholars, which had been involved in seeking the release of two French journalists, were killed in separate attacks in Baghdad this week. Abdul-Jabbar said he doubted their deaths had anything to do with the group’s work on hostages and blamed the murders on “occupation forces and some (Iraqi) sectarianists.”

Taking exception to the aggressive stance by clerics is Sheikh Adel Khalid Dawoud, a loyal follower of Islamic Salafi tradition, which spawned the Wahabbi sect that influences Osama bin Laden. Dawoud originally heeded senior clerics and urged his followers to wage holy war against the occupation. But as the level of human suffering rose, and the numbers of dead, widowed and orphaned soared in resistance strongholds like Fallujah, Dawoud became one of the few clerical doubters of violent resistance.


“What we can hear from the people of Fallujah coming to visit us is that most of the houses have been partially destroyed and many, many families have left Fallujah,” Dawoud said. “The people have been unemployed for a very long time.”

Unlike scholarly clerics immersed in books, Dawoud says he ministers to those suffering the consequences of the insurgency from his tiny mosque in Baghdad’s Karada district.

“The jihad itself is meant to remove injustice and harm from the back of the people,” he said. “If the jihad brings more harm to the people, then it is not justifiable.”

But most Sunni religious authorities dismiss such talk as nonsense, not in line with Islamic teachings in the Koran or the Sunna, the body of work produced by Muslim scholars after the religion’s founding.

“The jihad is a necessity for each Muslim,” said Ziad Farhan, a master’s degree candidate at Islamic University. “The Prophet (Mohammed) gave up everything for elevating the religion. In Islam there is either death or jihad. There is no other way.”

Under the administration of former occupation chief L. Paul Bremer, U.S. officials closely monitored the religious leaders, seeking out allies, asking some to tone down their rhetoric and occasionally arresting firebrand clerics such as Sumaydai. But since Allawi took over, U.S. officials have done little to engage or communicate with Sunnis outside the confines of the interim government. However, some U.S. military officials in far-flung locales continue to attempt to build friendships and identify enemies among religious and tribal leaders in their areas of operation.


Muslim clerics rarely speak directly, often looping vague religious references and poetic verses from sacred texts into their often repetitive talks. But in their support of jihad, they mince no words.

They cite a litany of perceived American missteps, from the stalled reconstruction effort, the killing of innocent Iraqis and the abuse of prisoners, to soldiers entering mosques without taking off their boots, entering women’s quarters during house raids and patting down female detainees.

And they believe that force is the only language the United States understands, that Americans refuse to listen to Iraqis’ peaceful demands. Were it not for the resistance throughout the Sunni Triangle following the 2003 war, they say, the now-dissolved Iraqi Governing Council would not have been conceived; if not for the April uprisings in Fallujah and the Shi’a south, Allawi’s interim government would not have been established; and without the ongoing violence in Baghdad and the rest of the country, elections would not be set in January.

“Those who called for political solutions have been repeatedly embarrassed and outdone by those wanting military solutions,” said professor Bashar.

MO/PH END DARAGAHI

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