Not long ago, a law professor from Basra was in my office and saw something i had copied months ago from a lengthy treatise (known as a risala 'amaliyya) that each Shi'i high jurist writes to inform the lay community how to live their lives in accordance with shari'a. This one belonged to Shi'i Islam's chief Quietist of the last couple of decades, Grand Ayatollah Abul Qasim al Khu'i. He puzzled over it and asked me where it was from, and I told him.  He then asked me what I thought it meant.  I looked closer at the passage, and it read:

Thus, for example, if one's nation was Najaf, and he was travelling to Kufa, where he worked every day, then we would not in customary parlance call this person a traveler . . . . similarly, if one's nation was Baghdad, and he traveled daily to Kadhmiyya.  (Omitted part is the actual rule, having to do with the required shortening of prayer in travel, not relevant here). 



I had to pull out the book and all became clear. His definition of nation was that central place where one's house is permanently, no a country, not even a place where a person was born or where he happens to live, even for years, but the place he plans on spending his life.  The confusion really lay in the word "nation" (watan), which I understand from Bernard Lewis at some point just referred to a patch of earth but which now most assuredly means the nation state to most Arabs.  God, the nation and the king, for example, is the common refrain in the Arab monarchies.  Saddam is the crown of the nation, and the source of its good reputation, went one ridiculous song, out of the thousands written for the guy.  So then when he used this word, watan, to mean people from Najaf who go to Kufa every day, it would be like someone saying if your nation is Manhattan and you go to Brooklyn every day, do this.  It doesn't make sense to a modern person.  What Manhattan nation?

But of course as a Quietist Khu'i recognizes no nation-state, it doesn't exist for him, his use is therefore more medieval, watan is just a place you call home, based on largely medieval historical understandings of what that is.  The problem is, this is not language that modern Iraqis can really understand, or access, living as they do.

Nor are the rules really drafted for our times.  What is the place I plan to live in permanently?  I'm here in Pittsburgh, I'm happy here, I have no current plans to move, am I here permanently?  I would have said the same when in Suleymania Iraq.  Or before that Baghdad.  Or before that Hong Kong.  Or before that Surabaya, Indonesia.  Or before that New York City.  Or before that Boston.  I guess all that moving puts the odds firmly against my retiring here in 30 years but then if this isn't my home what is?  What's the rule for the Palestinian in the refugee camp in Lebanon, since he's been there 40 years and it's not looking good for him to vacate any time soon?  How about immigrants who sort of think they are temporary workers or think they'll eventually go back to their home countries, in retirement ?  The Iraqi refugee in Iran who will not return unless Saddam falls?  None of it is really addressed.  It's not that you can't ask to fill in gaps, you can, it's that the rules themselves force these questions because they are literally, literally three hundred years old and nobody has really thought to update them.  They're basically compilations, using medieval language that is often inaccessible and terribly obscure.

Finally, who cares about all these details about when to shorten prayer?  Why are such extensive details so terribly important?  What does Islam have to say about economic order?  How about the dictatorship of Saddam?  Who do we vote for, what political system do we agitate in favor of, how can we, the dispossessed Shi'a, get our fair share of the national pie?  This is what the Shi'a masses want to know, but clearly aren't going to get from a fellow who won't even acknowledge the nation-state and uses the word for it in a medieval sense.

It was this that led to the Activism discussed in the last post. People like Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr looked around in the middle of the twentieth century and saw the lay Shi'a of the south dispossessed, disenfranchised and angry, eager for some sort of change in their unfortunate lot.  The most popular appeal was that of the Marxists, contrary to much of the Arab world, where Marxism did not make much of an impression.  Revolution, elimination of social classes, fair distributions of national wealth and resources, these proved enormously popular to the Shi'a in the south, and the similarly situated Kurds in the North.  What the clergy offered in contrast was, here is when to shorten prayer, assuming you are in the nation of Najaf going to the nation of Kufa (literally, by distance, Brooklyn to Manhattan).  This terrified Sadr, who saw his beloved clergy becoming largely irrelevant to the lives of the Shi'a, and he sought to change it.  

He had no patience for the risala 'amaliyya and its arcane rules, he could barely agree to draft one, and even then it was a half hearted effort at the end of his life,designed largely to burnish his reputation.  His works instead are on philosophy, political order, economics, written in a way that is modern, easy to understand and accessible.  He urged his fellow scholars to follow course, to write on such topics, to address the needs of the masses, or to fade forever into the background.  The Quietists provided the greatest resistance.

And in this comes the pitfalls of Quietism.  When one ignores the state, then effectively one ignores public life, and then it becomes very hard to be relevant to people who actually have to live in the real world and do the things actual people do.  Quietism isn't secularism, it isn't the state has a place and religion has a place, it's disassociation--the profane world leads to a lot of ugliness, and it's best to avoid it where possible and just not discuss it.  Umm, but they are drafting me in the army.  I have taxes I have to pay.  There is political unrest and threats of Shi'a repression. I'm just supposed to ignore it? If you say that, something will come in to fill that vaccuum.

While this position worked for a while, particularly given the severe repression of Saddam Hussein, eventually, after the American invasion, it became almost as bankrupt as Activism.  When Saddam fell, the Shi'a faithful began pouring in, the Activist political parties that had been in exile began to return, the Americans were setting up a constitutional system with their own handpicked "experts", it couldn't seriously be maintained that the center of Shi'i learning would be busy worrrying about prayer schedules.  And indeed it was not, Sistani became more prominent, more willing to intervene in public affairs, and has continued that role to today, as some of my Opinio Juris blogs make clear. 

But just as Quietism has faded due to irrelevancy, so Activism has not risen given its own problems with excessive juristic entanglement with state institutions.  There is therefore a blend of the two, some from this and some from that, a desire to be robust and relevant to public order, and yet a reticence to be too heavily involved in corrupting and corruptible public institutions.  Sistani might slip into Khu'i's medieval vocabulary at times but he certainly knows what a nation is, and does not hesitate to engage it. 

They are still working it out, this is a process largely in its infancy.  Yet this much is obvious--in Iraq, the wings have collapsed, and the clergy are all Quiestists, and Activists, now.

HAH