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Samarra's tragedy: the past and the future

Saeed Naqvi

The cameras are on the fallen dome of a great shrine in Samarra and waiting to see if Shias and Sunnis will be at each other's throats.

THE KAABA, in Mecca, was destroyed and rebuilt several times in history. Mirza Rafi Sauda, the great 18th century Urdu poet, described the destruction of the Kaaba as a sad event but not one that should bring everyday life to a stop. "Yeh qasr-e-dil nahin ki banaya na jaayega"! ("It isn't the castle of the heart, which once shattered cannot be put back together again.")

The destruction of one of Islam's holiest shrines at Samarra, central Iraq, on the Tigris is, likewise, part of history's ebb and flow. It is the site of a prehistoric settlement of the 5th millennium BC. For Muslims it acquired great resonance because it is the resting place of the tenth and eleventh Imams. The system of Imamate comes to an end with the mysterious disappearance of the 12th Imam Mohammad Mehdi Alahisalam, who will reappear on the Day of Judgment to restore justice to humanity. So goes the faith.

To understand how the destruction of the shrine in Sammara will resonate in the Muslim, more specifically in the Shia, world, it is useful to bring into one's ken the complex of shrines of the 12 Imams spread across Medina, Iraq, and Iran. The Prophet, in station way above all Imams, lies buried in the precincts of old Medina, which is now covered by the grand mosque of Medina, the contract for which was given to the Bin Laden family (yes, the family of which Osama is a part).

Since Saudi Wahabism does not permit preservation of graves and shrines, the resting place of Fatima, the Prophet's daughter, her eldest son and the second Imam, Hasan, his son, the fourth Imam Zainul Abedin, the fifth Imam, Mohammad Baqar, and the sixth Imam, Jafar-e-Sadiq (author of Shia jurisprudence), are buried in Medina's traditional graveyard called Jannat-ul-Baqih, which now lies in ruins.

The Shia world led by Iran would like Jannat-ul-Baqih restored to its deserved glory, a demand that runs into Wahabi austerity. It reflects on the practical good sense that is beginning to guide Teheran-Riyadh relations that speculation has been encouraged that repairs of Jannat-ul-Baqih might be undertaken.

Tribal and political conflicts within Islam caused Ali, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law and the first Imam, to travel to Kufa in Iraq where he was martyred and buried in nearby Najaf, which has since emerged as the centre of Shia learning. It is in Najaf that the grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani resides, his junior Ayatollahs supervising numerous schools and seminaries.

Not far from Najaf, is Karbala where Ali's (and Fatima's), younger son Hussain and his 72 family members, relatives, and companions were martyred on the banks of the Euphrates in a landmark battle. It is Hussain's martyrdom, the epic tragedy of Karbala, which is observed during the month of Moharram. We are only half way through that month this year.

No event in history has inspired such a bulk of poetry, dirges, epics and sombre songs set to Indian ragas as the tragedy of Karbala has. Hussain ranks as the third Imam and his shrine in Karbala is visited by millions of Shias from all parts of the world, even overcoming dangers since the U.S. occupation.

The shrines of the seventh and the ninth Imams, Moosa Kazmi and Mohammad Taqi, are in Kademain on the outskirts of Baghdad, but the resting place of the eigth Imam, Raza, is in Mashad, Iran.

Samarra's sacredness

Samarra derives its incomparable sacredness for Shias because three of the last Imams rest here. The Shrine of Imam Hussain in Karbala was excessively damaged in 1992 when Saddam Hussain ruthlessly quelled a West inspired Shia uprising. Almost all the other shrines in Iraq have been damaged during the occupation in crossfire. Each occasion was provocation to the Shias.

The western electronic media was quick to predict a civil war, an all out Shia-Sunni battle. Fears were ill founded. As early as September 2003, six months after the U.S. invasion, the Indian Embassy in Baghdad advised the Ministry of External Affairs to shut it down because "civil war is breaking out." Saner counsel at South Block prevailed. The Embassy was not closed but the Ambassador was put out of his nightmare of having to sleep in his Baghdad mansion with fingers on two automatic weapons, like the hero in a high tension cowboy movie.

But did the civil war break out? It is not for nothing that Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, who changes his opinion on Iraq every week, at one stage recommended a Nobel Prize for Ayatullah Sistani. Mr. Friedman's hyperbole apart, Ayatullah Sistani's role in keeping Iraq's 65 per cent Shias from the brink throughout these three years of the U.S. occupation has been an astonishing study in political control.

Since I was in Iraq before, during, and after the occupation, I can state with some certainty that even in late 2003, the Sunni tribal leaders had been invited to Najaf — these interactions were kept up frequently — and were given one message: You fight your battles in your own way; we have chosen the constitutional path. But never should we walk into the trap of the occupiers by fighting each other. "Never must an Iraqi fight another; the occupiers dream of a civil war must never be realised."

Of course there have been a hundred attacks on Shias and Sunnis in the market place, in homes and mosques. These have been sporadic incidents, never akin to civil war. It is common knowledge among the people, seething with rage at the daily humiliations (Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are mere refrains in the minute to minute horrors in which they live), that agents from Syria, Jordan, Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and mercenaries on CIA payrolls, are all stoking the embers to create their slice of advantage whose contours become more elusive each day.

Zalmay Khalilzad, appointed U.S. Ambassador in the Green Zone on the basis of the presumed good work he had done in Afghanistan, was credited with the ability to enlist Iranian cooperation on the Iraqi project, which looks messier each day in the absence of a coherent script.

At one stage, Gulf newspapers were writing laudatory editorials that Mr. Khalilzad was establishing direct contact with the Iranian leadership. The project was scuttled because of the Iranian nuclear issue, creating different uncertainties in the region. For Mr. Khalilzad the anxieties were of another order. After all, Iran has long borders with Iraq, Afghanistan, Balochistan, each an area where the U.S. is involved. Not to speak of Lebanon where the Hizbullah remains a major force, the much advertised cedar revolution or no cedar revolution.

The issue of democracy

What were billed as landmark elections in Iraq were completed on December 15. To this day, the contours of the new government are not clear because, having embarked on democracy (under occupation, of course), the U.S. is unable to handle the consequences of the electoral verdict. In fact, Hamas in Palestine, the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt, the Islamists in the Saudi municipal elections, the clerics in Iraq and Iran, are all causing second thoughts among democracy enthusiasts in Washington.

Whither democracy? Already TV cameras are being switched off the regime change project in Syria. Instead, they have been switched on the agitations following the Prophet's cartoons. The freedom of expression issue, which the cartoon controversy had brought into bold relief, has been confused by British historian David Irving's Holocaust denial conviction in Vienna.

So, quickly switch the cameras on the fallen dome of a great shrine in Samarra and wait to see if Shias and Sunnis will be at each other's throats. As Sauda said, monuments can be rebuilt, it is the "castle of the heart" that proves irreparable unless, of course, Ayatollah Sistani gives out yet another call for Sabr or "patience" so that the gains the Shias have made totally independent of American intentions are not spilt. This is something American academics have also begun to see as the only feasible way out.

The only way to salvage some thing from the mess the Americans have created in Iraq is to ensure a viable Sunni entity in the middle yoked with the south and north in a loose federation.

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