Religious Extremism and Ecumenical Tendencies in Modern Iraqi Shi‘ism

Abstract

After the British army completed the occupation of Iraq in November 1918, and throughout the existence of the modern Iraqi state, grass-root cooperation, coexistence, and even intermarriage between Sunni and Shi‘i Arabs became commonplace in the large cities — theological differences notwithstanding. And yet, the political, let alone ecumenical, cooperation between Sunni and Shi‘i religious establishments remained limited. From the early 1930s, senior Shi‘i clergy spearheaded the political struggle of their community for equality, while their Sunni counterparts remained on the sidelines. Although both religious establishments became deeply wary of the rise of the Communist Party and secularism (let alone atheism) in Iraqi society in the late 1940s, they confronted this threat to their interests and beliefs almost entirely single-handedly. Over the last ninety years, from the end of Ottoman rule in Iraq after World War I until the present, government policies at times encouraged clerics to promote Sunni-Shi‘i cooperation, but there were only three meaningful and clear-cut cases of clerical-initiated Sunni-Shi‘i cooperation, bordering on ecumenism. All these initiatives, however, came from the most radically anti-secular and anti-Western flanks of the Shi‘i religious establishment. The hallmark of each and every instance of meaningful clerical Sunni-Shi‘i cooperation in Iraq has, without exception, been radicalism and extremist political activism. This chapter focuses on these three cases.