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| Iraq-Jordan |
| Sufi Baathists among Fallujah insurgents |
| 2004-04-21 |
| An uninvited guest garbed in a golden tunic and towering white headdress strides into a wedding feast at the Sufi takiya, or lodge, of Hassan the Flying Man, a mystic famed for flying fromBaghdad to Turkey in the14th century. With a perfunctory nod at the groom, he shatters the jollity with an appeal for reinforcements for his hometown of Falluja. "American forces are turning Falluja into a mass grave," says Mohammed Eissawi, a Sufi master who escaped from America's siege of the city he calls Iraq's Stalingrad. "Why are you abandoning the city of 200 mosques and 100 Sufi lodges? Your rice sacks are not enough. You must give yourselves." For decades, Arab regimes have patronised Sufism, the mystical Islam born in 8th century Iraq, as a way to keep Islam out of politics. But now angered at the US's continued occupation of Iraq, Sufi masters are taking centre stage in a campaign to mobilise their hundreds of thousands of disciples and turn the resistance from a struggle led by small cells of militant puritans into a mainstream Sunni revolt. "Falluja is the place for men full of spirit and free from the blemish of colonialism," says Mr Eissawi of the Qadiriya, Iraq's oldest and most populous Sufi order. He is also the preacher at the neighbouring Gailani mosque and thus one of Baghdad's more powerful clerics. He is concerned, he says, that some at the wedding feast were playing truant from his prayers. Sheikh Mohammed Abu Khomra, hosting the feast and master of a smaller Sufi order, the Rifaiya, shuffles uneasily and calls on God to provide. "Now is the time for patience not emotion," he says after Mr Eissawi has left. "The only Jihad in Sufism is jihad al-nafs, the spiritual struggle against the ego." Who wins this theological battle for the Sufi lodges will largely determine the US's future in Iraq. From Nigeria, Sudan and Algeria in the 19th century and Chechnya in the 21st, Sufi murshids, or guides, have roused their disciples to revolt against non-Muslim rulers. In most parts of rural Iraq today, however, Sufism is simply a form of "folk Islam" that differs from mainstream religion only in that dead holy men are worshipped in the same way saints are in Christianity, and prayers are often used to induce mild trances. Twice a week, Sheikh Abu Khomra draws scores of working-class men and women to his takiya to rhythmically howl the name of god and rock themselves into states of rapture. Craftsmen, clerks and cleaners seek the touch of his staff to cure their marital problems, his herbs for their sexual ones, and his breath and spittle for their sick infants. Some bring empty plastic coke bottles to collect the waters which bubble up around the 14th shrine of the first Khomra. But after the seance his followers join the thousands who turn out to hear Mr Eissawi deliver a fiery Friday sermon expressing his understanding of the anger of hostage-takers. Flyers on the alley walls of Bab Sheikh, this rambling old quarter of Baghdad, hail the latest victories against Satan's forces at Falluja's gates: one tank, six helicopters, 120 juggernauts and many infidel prisoners. "Long live the Resistance" is scrawled in red beneath the few wooden lattice balconies that survive Saddam Hussein's brutal modernisation of the capital. In the markets, peddlers hawk DVDs of Salah Hashem al-Janabi, a popular singer from Falluja who uses Sufi drumbeats and chants to recount the epics of the city's fighters. "Sufism is again busy with jihad," says Sheikh Abdulwahab al-Toma, Arabic for Thomas, another influential Sufi imam with an office at the Gailani mosque. "All must participate if not with arms, then with alms." The resistance to the US-led occupation of Iraq has created an odd alliance between Sufis and their hated enemies: the other dominant non-mainstream trend in Islam: Salafi, or Wahabi, fundamentalism. Before the war, Human Rights Watch condemned Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish- led militant group sympathetic to Osama bin Laden, for destroying the shrines of Sufi saints in north-eastern Iraq. But now, says Sheikh Abdulwahab, the two movements have found common cause. The broadening of the resistance from small Salafi groups to mainstream Sufis is adding to the worries of Iraq's US administrators. Last week, US troops launched a pre-dawn raid on the Sheikh al-Qummer takiya (lodge) in northern Baghdad, and uncovered 35 men, women and children seeking safe haven after fleeing Falluja. They found no weapons but detained four men from Falluja, and two caretakers, including a 70-year-old man. With each raid, US forces are increasing their array of enemies, says Thahir al-Sheik Qummer, the sheikh of the takiya. When he went to inquire about the fate of the 70-year-old, his uncle, he said US troops shouted: "Get out." Mr Thahir contrasts insults from US rulers with that under British rule in the 1920s, when Sufis were courted and the head of the Qadiri order appointed Iraq's first prime minister. "Sufis were the link between the British and the Iraqis," he says. "But America has made us into rebels. It will backfire." Even so the British, who occupied Iraq in the 1920s, struggled to contain the Sufi brotherhoods. Falluja's Sufis still revere as a model Sheikh Dhari, who joined the Shia-led 1920 revolt against direct British rule. Fed up with Colonel Gerard Leachman, Britain's arrogant political officer in Falluja, the Sheikh shot him dead. The Sheikh's grandson now heads the Muslim scholars' council, which has mediated between the hostages and their abductors but is demanding the withdrawal of foreign troops. Sufi grievances dovetail with widespread resentment in the Sunni triangle at the toppling of Mr Hussein's Sunni-based regime, which financed as well as infiltrated their orders, says a newspaper editor under Mr Hussein now exiled in Jordan. According to the editor, who wishes to hide his identity, the ties have survived the regime's fall. He points to Ezzat al-Douri, Mr Hussein's deputy for whose capture the US-led coalition in Iraq is offering $10m. Under Hussein, Mr Douri handled Iraq's religious affairs and claimed to be a Sufi devotee. DVDs of Mr Douri chanting at their takiyas still sell on Baghdad's roadsides. Ahead of the war, Mr Douri lavishly restored Baghdad's shrines of Abdel Qadir al Gailani, the founder of the Qadiriya order and that of Sheikh Maarouf, an 8th century mystic revered by the Naqshbandiya order. Initially favouring Sheikh Abu Khomra's Rifaiya order, to which he had blood ties, in the 1990s he patronised the Kasnazaniya, a splinter group of the Qadiriya order, which claims 1m followers in Iraq and has been quick to reposition itself in occupied Iraq. The sheikh's son has set up a political party in Baghdad, the Coalition for Iraqi National Unity (CUNI), and publishes al-Mashriq, one of the capital's best endowed newspapers that sprung up after the war. His brother, who previously supplied Mr Douri's bodyguards, now runs the Iraq Establishment Protection Company, a Sufi militia providing guards for the Coalition Provisional Authority base in Kirkuk. "We take the morals of the Kasnazaniya and apply them to the security company," says the brother, Paishrow Abdel Kadir, whose dervishes reputedly walk barefoot over burning coals. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #5 several commentators e.g.,Stephen Swartz of the National Standard (who I think is a Sufi) and Winds of Change site, have given Sufi good PR for a couple of years. I always suspected that there was a dark evil side of Sufi ism. |
| Posted by: mhw 2004-04-21 4:32:19 PM |
| #4 Sufi jihadists in Fallujah is just Darwinism at work. Dervish meets Devil Dog = dead dervish. |
| Posted by: RWV 2004-04-21 2:46:53 PM |
| #3 Sufi Ba'athists? I thought the Sufis would have more sense. |
| Posted by: mojo 2004-04-21 2:15:02 PM |
| #2 Sufism is a fascinating subject, although my knowledge of it is only through reading the Sufi "pope" Idries Shah. From what I can tell, it is virtually a completely different religion than, say, Wahabism. It is a "spiritual", ie psychological interpretation of Islam, definitely not literalist. There is a long history of Sufis being persecuted by the more mainstream religion because they don't take the Quran literally. Some people have theorized that Sufism is a remnant of an older religion related to Hinduism and Buddhism, and there are a lot of resemblances. It is organized around spiritual masters and their students. This cell-like organization, which tends to be secretive anyway, lends itself to infiltration by poltical forces who then turn it toward subversive activities. For every genuine mystic or saintly master there are probably 10 or 100 false ones. |
| Posted by: virginian 2004-04-21 9:07:40 AM |
| #1 Before the war, Human Rights Watch condemned Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish- led militant group sympathetic to Osama bin Laden, for destroying the shrines of Sufi saints in north-eastern Iraq. But now, says Sheikh Abdulwahab, the two movements have found common cause. I against my brother; I and my brother against our cousin; my brother and our cousin against our neighbors; all of us against the foreigner. |
| Posted by: Paul Moloney 2004-04-21 1:54:19 AM |