Inside Iraq, Al Dawa’s rank and file kept up the resistance. Meanwhile, in Tehran, the party’s exiled leadership joined sciri, which had been founded as an umbrella group for all the exiled Iraqi Shiite parties. When sciri declared its support of Iranian, Khomeini- style clerical rule, Al Dawa abruptly seceded in fealty to al-Sadr’s original, moderate approach to Islam and a pure, Iraqi national identity.
The break with sciri, combined with the inevitable toll of exile, prompted Ibrahim Jafari to transfer the party leadership to London, to protect it from further Iranian influence. A Khomeinist dissident branch stayed behind in Tehran. All the while, the cell network that had bravely remained in Iraq continued to be recognized as the main party. It was to those harried family men and women of the poor villages of the south, who had thousands of relatives murdered in the 1991 insurrection, that the Al Dawa leadership returned after the US invasion in 2003.
But many Iraqis, having suffered under the Baathists, still don’t trust political parties. To this day, according to Juan Cole, an expert on the Shiites who teaches at the University of Michigan, most of the Shiite groups are, like Al Dawa, still “cadre parties,” or parties supported by activists rather than by voters. In the ruins of the invasion, however, Al Dawa maintained a ghostly presence. In February 2003, an abc News poll found that while 61 percent of Iraqis preferred no political party, of those who did, Al Dawa consistently polled highest.
With a history of oppression and of splintering factions in exile, it’s not surprising that the party emphasizes strong leadership with centralized power in Iraq. This may, in fact, be the weakest plank of Al Dawa’s election platform in a nation of Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds who are already working out the painful calculus of decentralization.
Al Dawa’s strong suit is its relatively tolerant position on religion and state. While Westerners generalize from images of Shiite radicalism, the reality in Iraq is, as always, more complicated. Historically, Al Dawa has held that moderate Islam is best for Iraq. Yitzhak Nakash, a leading historian in English on the Iraqi Shiites, states explicitly that, in contrast to Iran, there has never been sufficient desire for clerical rule among Iraqi Shiites, let alone the means or the conditions to bring it about. Al Dawa has, according to the Middle East Review of International Affairs, kept its laity powerful by building up its political bureau, keeping clerical jurisprudence separate, and insisting on Islamic government being delivered through a popular vote.
By contrast, the clerical leader of sciri, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, has declared that democracy is but a means to Iranian-style clerical rule. sciri is considered to be the party closest to the religious head of Iraq’s Shiites, the Grand Ayatollah Sistani. But once again, Shiite appearances deceive. Juan Cole suggests that their connection is due mostly to sciri’s prominence in Najaf, the ancient capital of Iraqi Shiism, where Sistani is based; and because sciri’s powerful Badr Corps militia has supplied the cleric and the gold-domed Imam Ali Mosque with protection.
sciri and Al Dawa have bonded to form the heart of the Shiite electoral slate, and the Western press often presents Al Dawa and sciri as a pair. But sciri’s tendency toward Khomeinism is inimical to Sistani’s strong rejection of clerical rule, and Iraqis, not to mention Sistani, are likely to favour Al Dawa in any post-electoral contest for power.
Al Dawa’s views on Islam and society remain more or less identical to those of Sistani. The white-bearded, laconic cleric has remained Iraq’s most popular and effective figure in the two years of occupation. Twice he has blocked Washington’s electoral proposals as undemocratic; he has also succeeded at intimidating the U.S. during attempts to hammer out an interim constitution. And it was Sistani who finally brokered an end to Moqtada al-Sadr’s insurrections. Sistani and Al Dawa agree, by and large, on pluralism, and the Shiite party has long maintained a policy of reaching out to Sunnis.
Cole believes that Al Dawa’s president, Jafari, may well be elected Iraq’s new prime minister. During Moqtada al-Sadr’s uprising, Jafari managed to retain third place in a poll taken by Washington’s Coalition Provisional Authority, as Iraq’s most popular public figure after Sistani and al-Sadr. Another poll, taken last June, found him to be the most popular choice for prime minister of the transitional government. However, in the politicking preceding the appointment, the UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi apparently passed over Jafari, giving the job to Iyad Allawi because he feared that Jafari’s massive grassroots support might tempt him to hang on to power.
But Al Dawa’s strongest contribution to the Shiite ticket in the election is its consistent record of nationalism. It was surely in the spirit of nationalism that Jafari himself warned that foreign Jihadist fighters in Fallujah had hampered the ability of the Sunni resistance to negotiate, making the U.S. military assault last November inevitable. Meanwhile, the other main Shiite groups, sciri and the Sadr Group, have leaned too often toward Iran, allowing Al Dawa to point to its bloody sacrifice confronting Hussein, and its official rejection of Tehran. As the only Shiite Party to mount a significant resistance to the Baathist tyranny, Al Dawa launched numerous assassination attempts on Hussein throughout the 1980s, attempted to kill his right-hand man, Tariq Aziz, and went after Hussein’s son, Uday Hussein. Neither sciri nor the Sadr Group can make a similar claim.
