That invasion-language acronym being absurd, what shall we call this parcel of rogues? Perhaps Hakimites might do provisionally? Or else just keep on reiterating that SCIRI is scarey? The latter is probably what the Green Zone lounge lizards of the MSM will do. The Hakímiyya made the announcement that they were dropping "revolution" from their prospectus a number of months back, as a matter of fact, but if that development eluded the perspicacity of a M. ‘Amr Muhsin, who presumably thinks in Arabic, 'tis no wonder that Uncle Sam's hotel-lobby journalists never heard of it at all.
At the time, I recall wondering exactly what would be left in the vernacular after the Rev. decided to miss out his revo. It looks like Al-Majlis al-‘Ulá al-’Islámí al-‘Iráqí is it. Not very happy, I fear, in that form either: Mím ‘Ayn ’Alif ‘Ayn might do to portentously introduce a súra with, but that jumble can scarcely be a clever acronym like al-Hamás. M. Muhsin's reportage drags in James Madison quickly enough, but perhaps the Supreme Counselor himself should talk to somebody on Madison Avenue about the little details of packaging his product.
In English I should prefer to keep the grammatical structure of SCIRI, "The Supreme Council for Iraqi Islamism," but then, "Islamism" is jargon that begs to be mispronounced at Rio Limbaugh, and "Supreme Council for Islamic Politics in Iraq" would probably be open to ideology-based objections from the Hakímites themselves. Probably they rather like what they came up with because it fudges the question of whether their Iraquitas takes precedence over their Islamicitas or vice versa. However from a Madison Avenue point of view that little ploy will not get them very far either, for of course the TwentyPercenters and the Sunnintern and indeed, most street Arabs worldwide, do not much care for the Hakímites' Islamicity in the first place.
But I perceive that I have transgressed the border between words and things here and that therefore we must hear from M. Muhsin about the thing side of it all:
| Pan-Arab al-Hayat reported on a press conference that was held in Baghdad by the leadership of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC - formerly SCIRI) to announce and comment on the latest changes to the party’s platform. A statement read by SIIC’s leader, 'Abd al-'Azeez al-Hakeem, confirmed earlier reports claiming that the powerful Shi'a party has decided to change its name and, more importantly, proclaim Ayatollah Sistani as the party’s main spiritual authority. SIIC occupies 30 seats in the Iraqi parliament and is, along with the Sadr Current, the largest player in the ruling Shi'a coalition. Al-Hakeem reiterated the argument claiming that the removal of the term “revolution” from the party’s name is due to the ousting of Saddam Husain “which made ‘revolution’ an outdated term,” al-Hakeem said. |
Could M. ‘Amr Muhsin be out to guy the Rev. al-Hakím? – "Look, it has only taken His Worship four years to notice that Saddám is gone!" etc. etc.? An interesting question, but not an important one. It does matter, though, whether M. Muhsin seriously considers that between them the Sadriyya and the Hakímiyya dominate the quasigovernment of poor M. al-Málikí, who has not the honor to belong to either the one faction or the other. Furthermore, it matters that M. Muhsin seems to know about such questions only from reading the London papers. It would be nice to have BritSlogger too, no doubt, but that would be a different line of enterprise all the same. (Why on earth was M. ‘Amr Muhsin not present at the Rev. al-Hakím's press conference in person? Didn't they invite him? Did they perhaps not even inform him that it was happening? What's going on here? Would you buy a used slog from this guy? One must always bear in mind that the whole Slogger City web fandango is basically a come-on designed to lure potential mercenaries and/or investors to purchase inside information about the state of the colony from their corporation. M. ‘Amr Muhsin looks to be letting his team down just a little ….)
We are here to discuss native politics, though, not private-sectorian schemes of enrichment. To begin with what is perfectly clear, the Rev. al-Hakím is no revolutionary vis-à-vis the existing quasigovernment of poor M. al-Málikí. Beyond that, however, things become murky quick. Do the Hakímiyya support the GZ status quo in the same sense that the Sadriyya support it? Presumably not. After the mass resignation of their quasiministers, the Sadriyya must be accounted somewhat less supportive, or so it would be natural to suppose. But then again, maybe not. At the time the Sadrists took a rather implausibly lofty tone about that move, making out that they were doing poor M. al-Málikí and "national" "reconciliation" a favor by stepping out of the way and thus setting a good example for the others. That sounded a bit too good to be true, but it could be true all the same, and the Sadriyya may conceivably have made a secret deal with the President of the Council of Quasiministers that makes them really even farther inside than the Hakimites are.
On the basis of the London press, M. ‘Amr Muhsin speaks of "more importantly, [to] proclaim Ayatollah Sistani as the party’s main spiritual authority." As regards that point, I'd guess that rank-and-file Sadrites and Hakimites are on a par, it being news to both of them that His Eminence of Najaf has not been their guru-in-chief all along. Certain factional insiders and operatives may have made mental or ideological reservations on behalf of Cardinal Khamenei at Tehran or Cardinal al-Há’irí at Qom, but they do not seem to have gone public with that sort of potentially divisive argumentation. To bring in some additional players, the traditional position of poor M. al-Málikí's faction, the mainstream Da‘wa, has been not to want any political guruship at all. And then there is the Islamic Virtue Party, which, as a cynic would expect from such a name, seems to be entirely out for power and plunder, despite the nominal guruship of Cardinal al-Ya‘qúbí. Finally it can be speculated with a high degree of confidence that such neo-Iraqi Twelvers as belong for political purposes to the rootless cosmopolitan or "secularist" community are muqallidún of the Rev. al-Sístání, but do not propose to take political advice from him or anybody else who wears a turban.
That is five factions, to each of which one might apply the further ecclesiastical-political ruminations of M. ‘Amr Muhsin:
| SIIC’s move away from Khamena'i’s umbrella may have surprised observers (formerly, SCIRI’s constitution noted that the party follows the leadership of the institution of Wilayat al-Faqeeh, currently headed by Ayatollah 'Ali al-Khamena'i) especially that many of the core activists of SIIC consider themselves loyal followers to Ayatollah Khamena'i, but there are several facets to the issue. On the one hand, only a fraction of Iraqi Shi'a follows Khamena'i and adopts his theory of Wilayat al-Faqeeh. No accurate statistics exist to confirm this opinion, but many observers consider Ayatollah Sistani to be the most widely followed religious authority in Iraq. At the same time, SCIRI was founded in Iran, and hosted by the institution of the Iranian Revolution. SCIRI’s early membership mainly consisted of Iraqis who fled to Iran, in the hundreds of thousands; many of whom sympathized with and supported the revolution and, as a result, followed the institution of Wilayat al-Faqeeh. After the fall of Saddam’s regime and the return of many Iraqi exiles from Iran, a clear gulf was noticeable in the party’s ranks between those who returned from Iran propagating a Khomeinist version of activism, and SCIRI’s local supporters who felt alienated by the unfamiliar loyalties of their peers. The same applies to the larger Shi'a public, Sadrist and Fadhila supporters also tend to follow Sistani; and Sunnis often critiqued the “Iranian” iconography of SCIRI and frequently accused the party of being a tool for the Iranian clerical establishment. In that sense, SIIC’s decision to distance itself from Khamena'i may be a well-calculated stratagem to promote the party among the Shi'a populace. |
Again, M. ‘Amr Muhsin is sound enough on what scarcely anybody denies, that the vast majority of the GOP's Shí‘í subjects in neo-Iraq follow al-Sístání on the strictly ecclesiastical front. Beyond that, he gets himself into trouble at once: Cardinal Khamenei's current wiláyat al-faqíh is not the same as Cardinal Khomeini's first draft of it, and then the former SCIRI's official ideology is distinguishable from both of the above. Even if all three of these were exactly the same, as they are not, wiláyat al-faqíh would remain the name of what M. Muhsin himself refers to as "an institution," which means that doctrinaires who agreed on everything else in detail could still diverge about the name of their walí.
This pudding becomes really interesting when one reflects that His Eminence of Najaf does not believe in the WaF institution at all, which seems prima facie rather like the RC's somehow finding themselves stuck with an anti-papistical Bishop of Rome. The analogy cannot be pressed, of course, because unless one gets it straight that the whole WaF business is a recent innovation, though perhaps a development adumbrated to some extent before the Rev. Khomeini came along, one does not know enough about the matter to begin to be dangerous. M. ‘Amr Muhsin does not point this out, an omission which must signify either that he is not aware of it himself or else that he does not consider it particularly significant. Either way, he and his corporation are most likely not the best place to look to for a book called Inside Neo-Iraq. Or even Neo-Iraq for Dummies.
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