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The people's cleric

Revered leader has power to get Iraqis to rise up, stand down

BY MOHAMAD BAZZI | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

February 27, 2006

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Perhaps more than anyone else, a soft-spoken, bespectacled Shia cleric named Abdulaziz al-Hakim could determine whether Iraq plunges into full-scale civil war or pulls back from the brink after last week's destruction of a main Shia shrine.

Al-Hakim is leader of the Shia Muslim majority in the Iraqi parliament and of the country's largest political party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. He also is heir to one of the most revered dynasties in the Shia world. And most important, he controls a militia of up to 20,000 fighters, who have infiltrated many of Iraq's security forces.

After the bombing of the gold-domed Askariya mosque in Samarra on Wednesday, al-Hakim took a tough stance, urging Shias to protest its destruction. He also said Sunni militants had been emboldened to attack Shia targets by U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad's criticism of the behavior of Shia-dominated security forces.

"His statements gave a green light to terrorist groups," al-Hakim said. "Therefore, he shares in part of the responsibility."

But by Friday, the cleric had tempered his rhetoric and had begun calling on Shias not to retaliate against Sunnis.

"Like other Shia leaders, al-Hakim initially had an angry reaction, but then he began to call for self-restraint," said Zuheir Jazairy, a prominent Iraqi writer and political analyst. "He realized that it's in his political interest not to escalate the violence...Any appeal from al-Hakim carries significant weight on the ground."

Angry Shias responded to the shrine bombing by attacking Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad and other cities. By Friday, more than 150 Iraqis had been killed and dozens of mosques damaged. As the violence threatened to spiral out of control, the Iraqi government imposed a curfew in several cities, and al-Hakim was among several leaders to appeal for Shia-Sunni unity in statements broadcast on Iraqi state television.

The cleric said those who bombed the shrine "do not represent the Sunnis in Iraq." He blamed the attack on members of Saddam Hussein's ousted Baathist regime and Islamic militants loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

"This is what al-Zarqawi is working for: to ignite sectarian strife in the country," al-Hakim said. "We declare our rejection of any attack against a Sunni or Shia mosque, and we also condemn the killing of any Iraqi."

On Saturday, President George W. Bush called al-Hakim and six other Iraqi leaders, urging them to calm sectarian tensions. After Bush's call, al-Hakim met with Khalilzad and retracted his earlier criticism of the U.S. ambassador.

Dual roles

Al-Hakim, 52, is particularly influential in Iraq because he is both a cleric and a political leader. Since the fall of Hussein's regime in April 2003, Iraqis from both sects have looked to their religious leaders for guidance and relied less on their new politicians, many of whom are close to the United States.

"Iraqis are obeying their clerics, and not their politicians," said Hazem Amin, an expert on the Shia at the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat. "The clerics can bring people out into the streets, and they can send them home."

Of all the clerics vying for authority in Iraq, al-Hakim has a unique pedigree. He is the youngest of nine sons of Grand Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim, who was spiritual leader of the worldwide Shia community from the early 1950s until his death in 1970. After the Baath party came to power in 1968, the elder al-Hakim issued a religious ruling banning membership in the party.

That set off a confrontation between the cleric's family and the secular regime which continued until the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

At the start of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, al-Hakim and one of his older brothers, Muhammad Bakr, fled to Iran. As the brothers waged a guerrilla battle against Hussein's government, the regime retaliated by arresting more than 100 of their relatives in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf. Eventually, seven of their brothers and nearly 50 other relatives were executed.

Shortly after he returned to Iraq in May 2003, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim was killed in a massive suicide car bombing outside the holiest Shia shrine in Najaf. Iraqi security officials say the August 2003 attack, which killed more than 85 people, was carried out by al-Zarqawi's father-in-law.

Al-Zarqawi, a Sunni militant from Jordan, has specifically targeted leaders of Iraq's Shia majority in hopes of inflaming sectarian tensions. The Najaf bombing was particularly devastating in its scope and because it deprived the Shia community of the elder al-Hakim, a key cleric and political leader.

Relating to the past

The al-Hakim family saga resonates with the martyrdom tradition in Shiism, which makes Abdulaziz al-Hakim's influence in modern-day Iraq even greater. It echoes the life story of Imam Ali, the prophet Muhammad's son-in-law and Shiism's founding figure, who was assassinated in the year 661 as he prayed in a mosque near the Iraqi city of Kufa.

Nineteen years later, Ali's two sons, Hussein and Abbas, were killed in an ambush not far from where their father was felled. The killings of Ali and his sons became the defining factor in the split between the Shia and Sunni sects of Islam. Their battlefield deaths also made martyrdom one of Shiism's most important tenets.

"Abdulaziz al-Hakim is the sole surviving son," Amin said. "He is the bearer of his family's legacy of martyrdom."