The Shiite Surge - They don't want secular Westernized Iraq.

NYT MAGAZINE

The clerics in Najaf say they don't want a secular, Westernized Iraq. So what do they want?

..snip..

...It is a truism that the past is far more alive in the Arab world than it is in the United States or in Western Europe. This is surely the case in the Shiite areas of Iraq, where the dead sometimes seem to have a greater presence, and certainly more authority, than the living. Talk to Iraqi Shiites, and you can get the disconcerting sense that the conversation -- self-evidently to them, incomprehensibly to you -- is constantly shifting backward or forward in time. I can't count the number of times, during the weeks I recently spent in the Shiite cities, towns and neighborhoods of Iraq, that I was told the story of Saddam Hussein murdering Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr -- only to find that in the telling, Sadr's killing became conflated with the murder of Imam Ali more than a millennium earlier.

Iraqi Shiite clerics are quick to acknowledge -- some would say exploit -- this sense of Shiite victimization, which has existed for much of the modern history of Iraq. The Ottomans, who ruled Iraq before it was Iraq, were Sunnis, and they discriminated against the Shiites almost as a matter of course. When the British arrived in 1915, matters did not change. Six years later, they installed a member of the Sunni Hashemite family brought from outside Iraq as the country's king. When the Baath Party seized power definitively in 1968, it had heavy Shiite support. But once again, Shiite hopes were soon dashed, as Saddam Hussein proved to be even more partisan toward the Sunni, and more violently repressive of the Shiites, than any of his predecessors.

As a result, the Iraqi Shiite political culture is a mixture of grievance and thwarted patriotism. The son of and spokesman for the current ayatollah Hakim summarized the Shiite plaint for me when we spoke in Najaf: ''The Iraqi Shiites are the majority here. But they were suffering in previous periods of Iraqi history -- since the foundation of the new Iraqi state, in fact. Their rights were never respected. When the Baath Party came to power in 1968, their suffering became a tragedy. We Shiites faced torture, killing and exclusion from the real life of Iraq. Even religion was repressed.''

...cont'd

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/01/magazine/01SHIITE.html