Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr
Middle East Study Group
Grand Lake Neighborhood Center
Oakland, California
May 2008
The Sadrist Legacy
Photos of Sadr City often show posters of any or all of three faces, known to Iraqis as "Sadr I," "Sadr II" and Muqtada al Sadr. By now, each one of them should be familiar to us. Ubiquitously, there is Muqtada al Sadr-- about whom much has been written, although far too little of it is from an Iraqi Shiite perspective. Often, there is also a portrait of his father, Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al Sadr, or "Sadr II," always recognizable by his bushy white beard. He organized Sadr City as a refuge for the Shiite urban poor of East Baghdad in the 1990s. Juan Cole's 2003 article on Shiite religious factions (an earlier handout) contains what is still the most useful brief account of Sadiq al Sadr's political and religious career, including his turn toward a Shiite form of Sufism after he had been arrested and tortured by the Iraqi government in the late 1970s. And often, to one side of either or both of the father-son Sadr portraits, a gaunt face appears, an intense, knife-like presence that is instantly recognizable to Iraqis. This is "Sadr I," the legendary Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al Sadr, who was Sadiq's cousin and Muqtada's father-in-law. Sadr I founded the Shiite political movement in Iraq in the late 1950s, became a major Islamic theorist, and was executed by Saddam's regime in 1980. Saddam had Sadr II killed in 1999, along with Muqtada's two brothers. Muqtada's career cannot be understood apart from this activist legacy, where the decision to stay and fight to the death rather than escape to an Iranian haven symbolized an uncompromising Iraqi nationalist commitment. Here I want to draw together some of the points raised in our handouts about Baqir al Sadr and the emergence of the Dawa Party (see the reference list). Crucially, Shiite mujtahidun have considerable interpretive freedom, and as I explain below, it derives from the triumph of the "Usuli" or rationalist school in Twelver Shiism over two centuries ago. That freedom can have revolutionary consequences, like Khomeini's theory of one-man rule over the Islamic state. With Baqir al Sadr, as Talib Aziz demonstrates in several excellent articles, it led to a liberalizing reformist vision that shatters the current stereotypes of Islamism.
The Career of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr
On the opening page of his 1993 article on the achievements and struggles of Muhammad Baqir al Sadr, Talib Aziz describes Sadr as an Islamist, calling him the "mastermind" of a movement for Islamic revolution in Iraq that parallels Islamist movements in "almost all Middle East countries" in the 20th century (p. 207). Aziz provides a useful historical account of Baqir al-Sadr's career and of the Dawa movement he organized. He also profiles Sadr's political emergence on three fronts-- as a writer, thinker and organizer. Sadr took control of a newly formed political group at Najaf sometime after the July 1958 revolution, when General Abdel Karim Qasim came to power. Qasim's main support base was the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP). According to Aziz, a group of senior clerics at Najaf, led by Grand Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim, asked Sadr to use his polemical skills to combat the secularizing influence of leftist movements, especially the ICP, among young Shiites. Sadr not only attacked Communism as Western colonialism in a dangerously atheistic form, he also strongly affirmed the quranic message of social justice. In so doing, he promoted the "vocal" or political side of Islam that had been silenced at Najaf after the failed 1920 uprising against the British. Between 1959 and 1961, Sadr organized the Dawa Party as an underground revolutionary movement, published two important books (Our Philosophy and Our Economics) that challenged both Marxism and capitalism, and he founded a monthly journal for progressive Shiite thinking, called al-Adwa ("The Lights"). In 1960, Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim began pressuring Sadr to drop his political work and concentrate on his clerical career, since his activism was troubling the traditionalist clerics. By then, Sadr's accomplishment in traditional Shiite jurisprudence had established him as a "future grand marja of the Shi'i." Gradually, Sadr shifted his focus to the reform of the educational system at Najaf. He wrote innovative, pedagogically oriented texts for the study of fiqh, or legal reasoning. However, it was not Sadr but the traditionalist Ayatollah al-Khoei who succeeded al-Hakim as supreme marja in 1970. (Note: for a mujtahid, who is a cleric licensed to do independent interpretation of the Quran and Sunna, becoming a marja, or "Object of Emulation," has everything to do with reputation. It requires general recognition of one's superior knowledge, interpretive skills, and personal piety within the hawza, as well as external support from politically and/or economically powerful groups.)
The Baathist coup of 1968 introduced a sustained period of government repression of Shiite activism in Iraq. After the 1978-79 revolution in Iran, the Baathist regime saw the Dawa Party as a major threat to its survival. Dawa members fled to Iran or were arrested, tortured and (often) killed. In Iran, the exiles established the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (now ISCI), led by Baqir al-Hakim, Ayatollah Muhsin's son. In April of 1980 Sadr and his sister were arrested and executed by the Baathist regime. Five months later Saddam invaded Iran. In his 1988 article, Chibli Mallat argues that the reason Ayatollah Khomeini was determined to continue the war until he ousted Saddam Hussein was the opportunity that would provide for the Iraqi clerics who had formed a government-in-exile in Iran. Which leads directly to Iran's support of the Supreme Council (now ISCI) in Iraqi politics today. Aziz argues that Baqir al Sadr was drawn into his final political struggle by the Iranians, who expected Iraqi Shiites to rise up just as they had, as well as by young activists in Iraq who overestimated the revolutionary potential of the moment. Sadr, Aziz claims, "did not believe the time was ripe." But he was committed to support those who called for his leadership in the struggle. He went ahead with full knowledge that he would be killed by the regime. Aziz describes Sadr's refusal to be co-opted when offered several easy ways out (pp. 216-217).
As always, it is essential to be aware of the historical context. Baqir al Sadr's liberalism emerged within a specific social milieu of young Shiite intellectuals at a revolutionary moment in Iraq's history. Their thinking was shaped by the need to develop an Islamic response to challenges from the left, when communist and socialist movements were flourishing and vying for power. This contextual reality goes far to explain the differences between the radicalism of the Dawa Party's program as an emerging Islamist vanguard in 1960 and the mass-based conservatism of Muqtada al Sadr's militia movement in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Nothing better clarifies the differences between these two moments of Sadrist Islamism than the advocacy of women's rights from 1960 on by the activists who produced al-Adwa. Clearly, most Islamists today would regard their efforts to promote liberalizing reforms within Islam as betrayals. But when political conflict is framed as a "clash of civilizations," to cite Samuel Huntington's famous theme, cultural issues get militarized.
Shiite Activists in a Leftist Political Context
In 1959, Sadr's sister Amina became known as Bint al Huda (Daughter of the Righteous Path) after writing a treatise that earned her the unofficial title of mujahida at Najaf, where women could not be officially recognized as scholar-clerics. Joyce Wiley's article, "Alma Bint al-Huda, Women's Advocate," profiles her multi-dimensional efforts to promote women's rights within Islam. Through her didactic fiction, her campaigns for women's education and employment, and her regular editorials in al-Adwa, she challenged the traditional clerics in Najaf on a range of social issues. Another key figure, Muhammad Husain Fadlallah (now a Grand Ayatollah in Lebanon) was the number two writer (after Sadr) in al-Adwa. Throughout his career, as Talib Aziz shows in his 2001 article on Fadlallah, he has aggressively defended women's rights (partly because he worked with Bint al Huda through the five years al-Adwa was published). Later, Fadlallah developed his own activist version of Shiism in Lebanon, where he became the leader of the embattled Shiite community following the disappearance of Musa al Sadr in 1978. In Islam and the Logic of Power (1976), written under fire in the Shiite quarter of Beirut, Fadlallah defends Islam as both "religion and state," arguing their inseparability in now familiar Islamist terms. And yet, as Talib Aziz emphasizes in his article on Fadlallah's thinking, he has always insisted that jurists must question tradition and arrive at contemporary understandings of human rights that are unimpeded by "cultural influences and popular consensus" (Aziz 2001, p. 212). Pragmatically, Fadlallah decided that the Shiite goal in multicultural Lebanon must not be an Islamic state but a representative governmental presence. As it turned out, the Dawa scholar-activists had their faith tested in some of the most horrific moments of recent Middle East history, in Iraq and in Lebanon. Yet it is their interpretive work that will probably matter most in the long run. Both together and singly, their careers illustrate the importance of what is known as the "Usuli" tradition of ijtihad (the task of interpretation) within Shiism. Since the triumph of Usulism is actually a major historical event within Shiism, it is worth summarizing.
Ijtihad and the Akhbari-Usuli Debate
The late eighteenth century saw the resolution of a decisive battle between traditionalist and rationalist schools of interpretation within Shiism. Traditionalists called themselves Akhbaris-- meaning defenders of the traditions or "reports." They insisted that the Quran and the canonically accepted hadiths had to be taken literally, as self-evident "reports" of God's will, without reference to reason (aql) or social consensus (ijma). They were opposed by the proponents of ijtihad, which means the effort of reasoning (it has the same root as jihad) applied to the task of interpretation. Akhbaris not only rejected any such mediation of the direct word of God, they opposed the quasi-professional hierarchy that went with training and certifying clerics for ijtihad. Historically, the dispute goes back to 1501, when the Safavid Empire was founded in Persia, and the new government brought in trained professionals from outside Persia to institutionalize Shiism. Persian ulama reacted against this imported clerical elite, and against any idea of a clerical hierarchy based on special training in interpretation. They appealed to the people to support them on the basis of their lineage, piety and devotion to tradition, arguing that spiritual continuity with the Twelve Imams mattered far more than than learning. However, the defenders of ijtihad eventually won the battle, as noted above. Significantly, it freed Shiite ulama to establish institutions with considerable independence from government control, due to the new system of requiring contributions from the followers of each mujtahid. Ever since, Shiism has developed through a the specialized training of clerical interpreters in the hawza, or seminary for the study of fiqh (law) and ijtihad. In effect, the triumph of Usulism insured that learning and power would be inseparable.
The challenge posed by Baqir al Sadr lay in his claim that Shiite mujtahidun had unduly restricted themselves by interpreting the Quran and Sunna in purely individualist terms. To avoid clashes with the government, they had ignored issues of social justice. However, Sadr argued, the destructive impact of colonialism upon Muslim culture had awakened the need for "a new spirit in the movement of ijtihad," to overcome "the malady of aloofness from the political field" (Sadr, p. 47). In Sadr's restatement of the aims of ijtihad, the Quran is seen as requiring "social freedom," meaning that "no group or class has the right to exploit another group or class, just as no individual can enslave another" (Sadr, p. 110). As Sadr put it, conveying this social message was the "other fifty percent" of interpretation, which he was committed to defending.
Balancing Populism and the Wilayat al-Faqih
The various articles Talib Aziz has produced on different facets of Muhammad Baqir al Sadr's career keep returning to the liberalizing, democratic thrust of his work. (They ought to be republished as a single volume, given the need for a wider appreciation of Sadr's achievements and significance.) In "The Political Theory of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr," Aziz describes Sadr's effort in the late 1970s to balance the concept of the wilayat al-faqih (the "guardianship of the jurisconsult" theory, which Khomeini would apply in authoritarian terms in Iran) with an electoral system that would actually give political power to the people. While Aziz classifies Khomeini as a "statist," promoting what amounts to a dictatorship, he calls Sadr a populist.
Aziz goes so far as to argue that Baqir al Sadr is "foremost among contemporary radical Islamic jurists in his vision of the people playing an active role in politics" (p. 240).
The obvious question that is left open here is how much, if anything, Ayatollah Khomeini got from Baqir al-Sadr in Najaf, where he gave his famous lectures in 1970 announcing the revolutionary theory of the wilayat al-faqih. For sixteen years Khomeini was part of a hawza that was dominated by Sadr's intellectual and political presence. During this time, the Dawa Party that Sadr established was strategizing and struggling for its survival, with the ultimate goal of establishing a Shiite-led Islamic state in Iraq. We know from Sadr's students that he sent them to hear Khomeini's 1970 lectures. However, as Mallat observes in The Renewal of Islamic Law (an in-depth study of Sadr's ideas of law, economics and banking), we will never know how much intercommunication occurred between Sadr and Khomeini during the years both were in residence at Najaf (Renewal, p. 50). Khomeini was under police surveillance as an Iranian political exile, and as Mallat notes, he was liable to immediate deportation by "a wary and unfriendly government" (Renewal, p. 51). Sadr too was doubtless under surveillance, as a self-declared political activist before he pulled back for strategic reasons. But it is impossible to imagine Khomeini not having drawn a great deal from the ideas and oppositional intensity of the Dawa milieu at Najaf while he was residing and (occasionally) teaching there.
Moreover, as Mallat observes, "the emergence of the Islamic movement in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon cannot be understood without the network which originated in the city of Najaf," where the key figures of the movement in the late 1970s and 1980s had either studied or resided (Mallat 1993, p. 51). In this sense the political movement at Najaf must be considered one of the contributing factors to the Iran revolution, and Sadr's role was probably a significant factor. Sadr's political writings of the late 1970s even include a famous "Legal Note on the Project of a Constitution for Iran," written at the request of the clerical leadership in Lebanon, "which corresponds to a large extent to the text adopted by the Iranian revolution a few months after their takeover" (Mallat 1988, p. 725; see also Renewal, p. 70). Mallat stresses Sadr's promotion of Shiite "particularism" towards the empowerment of the marjaiyya (clerical leadership), which the Iranian revolution concretized, while Azam stresses Sadr's populist liberalism, treating it as a reliable counter-balance to the authoritarian tendency of politicized Shiism.
A Modernist Approach to Reading the Quran
Still another measure of Sadr's liberalism is his approach to Quranic interpretation. In a 1994 article on readings of the Quran by Sadr and John Wansbrough, Chibli Mallat provides us with a useful account of Baqir al Sadr's hermeneutic strategies. He bases his analysis on published student transcriptions of Sadr's last public lectures (he was put under house arrest in April 1979), which happened to be about reading the Quran. Above all, Mallat observes, Sadr insisted on reading and applying the Quran "as a whole," rather than using the traditional line-by-line "piecemeal" approach. (This is a crucial modernist principle, consonant with the influential hermeneutic approach of Fazlur Rahman.) Sadr describes it as a "constant renewal" of understanding, through a dialectical to-and-fro movement between a Quranic essence and contemporary life situations. The Quran is not meant to be a reading experience that begins and ends with itself, Sadr argues. It is "a spiritual energy directed towards man, which multiplies his potential and directs him on the correct path" (quoted in Mallat 1994, p. 162). The Quran is "a book both of guidance and change… bringing people out of darkness into light." By "change," Sadr is thinking, as throughout his writings, of social reform within historical circumstances of economic injustice and oppression, which requires Quranic guidance. According to the Quranic laws of history, "the prophets were always confronting the rich in their societies" (p. 165). Since the exploitation of man by man is "the root of evil," the religious message commands believers to challenge the idolatry of wealth and materialism. We return to Sadr's claim, defended at length in his studies of fiqh (Islamic law), that the Quran must be read for collective as well as individual guidance, as the divine summons to social justice that keeps getting renewed in different eras.
It is worth adding that Talib Aziz offers a more nuanced version of Baqir al Sadr's activist career than Patrick Cockburn presents in his recent book on Muqtada al Sadr. For Cockburn, Sadr I is simply a guerrilla fighter with brains. For Aziz, he was the leader of an intellectual and activist movement that redefined Shiism by responding to political challenges while promoting a liberal social vision. For Chibli Mallat, Baqir al Sadr was less significant as an activist than as a thinker. In theorizing a new constitutional and economic system for Islam, Sadr is here ranked with Jamal al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh as one of the great Islamic reformists.
Handouts:
Talib Aziz, "The Role of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr in Shi'i Political Activism in Iraq from 1958 to 1980," International Journal of Middle East Studies, 25 (1993), 207-222.
Talib Aziz, "Fadlallah and the Remaking of the Marja'iya," in Linda Walbridge, ed., The Most Learned of the Shi'a (2001), pp. 205-215.
Talib Aziz, "The Political Theory of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr," in Faleh Abdul-Jabar, ed., Ayatollahs, Sufis and Ideologues (2002).
Juan Cole, "The United States and Shi'ite Religious Factions in Post-Ba'athist Iraq," Middle East Journal, 57:4, Autumn 2003, pp.543-566.
Joyce Wiley, "Alima Bint al-Huda, Woman's Advocate," in Linda Walbridge, ed., The Most Learned of the Shi'a (2001), pp.149-160.
Other references:
Faleh Abdul-Jabar, "The Genesis and Development of Marja'ism versus the State," in Ayatollahs, Sufis and Ideologues: State, Religion and Social Movements in Iraq, ed. Faleh Abdul-Jabar (2002), pp. 61-89.
Talib Aziz, "Popular Sovereignty in Contemporary Shi'i Political Thought," Muslim World, 86:3-4, July-Oct. 1996, pp. 273-293.
Muhammad Baqir al Sadr, "The Development of Ijtihad," in Introduction to an Islamic Political System, transl. M. A. Ansari (Karachi, Islamic Seminary, 1982), pp.43-65.
Chibli Mallat, "Religious Militancy in Contemporary Iraq: Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr and the Sunni-Shia Paradigm," Third World Quarterly, 10:2, April 1988, pp. 699-729.
Chibli Mallat, The Renewal of Islamic Law: Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr, Najaf and the Shi'i International (1993).
Chibli Mallat, "Readings of the Qur'an in London and Najaf: John Wansbrough and Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 57, part 1 (pp. 1-253), 1994.
Grand Lake Neighborhood Center
Oakland, California
May 2008
The Sadrist Legacy
Photos of Sadr City often show posters of any or all of three faces, known to Iraqis as "Sadr I," "Sadr II" and Muqtada al Sadr. By now, each one of them should be familiar to us. Ubiquitously, there is Muqtada al Sadr-- about whom much has been written, although far too little of it is from an Iraqi Shiite perspective. Often, there is also a portrait of his father, Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al Sadr, or "Sadr II," always recognizable by his bushy white beard. He organized Sadr City as a refuge for the Shiite urban poor of East Baghdad in the 1990s. Juan Cole's 2003 article on Shiite religious factions (an earlier handout) contains what is still the most useful brief account of Sadiq al Sadr's political and religious career, including his turn toward a Shiite form of Sufism after he had been arrested and tortured by the Iraqi government in the late 1970s. And often, to one side of either or both of the father-son Sadr portraits, a gaunt face appears, an intense, knife-like presence that is instantly recognizable to Iraqis. This is "Sadr I," the legendary Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al Sadr, who was Sadiq's cousin and Muqtada's father-in-law. Sadr I founded the Shiite political movement in Iraq in the late 1950s, became a major Islamic theorist, and was executed by Saddam's regime in 1980. Saddam had Sadr II killed in 1999, along with Muqtada's two brothers. Muqtada's career cannot be understood apart from this activist legacy, where the decision to stay and fight to the death rather than escape to an Iranian haven symbolized an uncompromising Iraqi nationalist commitment. Here I want to draw together some of the points raised in our handouts about Baqir al Sadr and the emergence of the Dawa Party (see the reference list). Crucially, Shiite mujtahidun have considerable interpretive freedom, and as I explain below, it derives from the triumph of the "Usuli" or rationalist school in Twelver Shiism over two centuries ago. That freedom can have revolutionary consequences, like Khomeini's theory of one-man rule over the Islamic state. With Baqir al Sadr, as Talib Aziz demonstrates in several excellent articles, it led to a liberalizing reformist vision that shatters the current stereotypes of Islamism.
The Career of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr
On the opening page of his 1993 article on the achievements and struggles of Muhammad Baqir al Sadr, Talib Aziz describes Sadr as an Islamist, calling him the "mastermind" of a movement for Islamic revolution in Iraq that parallels Islamist movements in "almost all Middle East countries" in the 20th century (p. 207). Aziz provides a useful historical account of Baqir al-Sadr's career and of the Dawa movement he organized. He also profiles Sadr's political emergence on three fronts-- as a writer, thinker and organizer. Sadr took control of a newly formed political group at Najaf sometime after the July 1958 revolution, when General Abdel Karim Qasim came to power. Qasim's main support base was the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP). According to Aziz, a group of senior clerics at Najaf, led by Grand Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim, asked Sadr to use his polemical skills to combat the secularizing influence of leftist movements, especially the ICP, among young Shiites. Sadr not only attacked Communism as Western colonialism in a dangerously atheistic form, he also strongly affirmed the quranic message of social justice. In so doing, he promoted the "vocal" or political side of Islam that had been silenced at Najaf after the failed 1920 uprising against the British. Between 1959 and 1961, Sadr organized the Dawa Party as an underground revolutionary movement, published two important books (Our Philosophy and Our Economics) that challenged both Marxism and capitalism, and he founded a monthly journal for progressive Shiite thinking, called al-Adwa ("The Lights"). In 1960, Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim began pressuring Sadr to drop his political work and concentrate on his clerical career, since his activism was troubling the traditionalist clerics. By then, Sadr's accomplishment in traditional Shiite jurisprudence had established him as a "future grand marja of the Shi'i." Gradually, Sadr shifted his focus to the reform of the educational system at Najaf. He wrote innovative, pedagogically oriented texts for the study of fiqh, or legal reasoning. However, it was not Sadr but the traditionalist Ayatollah al-Khoei who succeeded al-Hakim as supreme marja in 1970. (Note: for a mujtahid, who is a cleric licensed to do independent interpretation of the Quran and Sunna, becoming a marja, or "Object of Emulation," has everything to do with reputation. It requires general recognition of one's superior knowledge, interpretive skills, and personal piety within the hawza, as well as external support from politically and/or economically powerful groups.)
The Baathist coup of 1968 introduced a sustained period of government repression of Shiite activism in Iraq. After the 1978-79 revolution in Iran, the Baathist regime saw the Dawa Party as a major threat to its survival. Dawa members fled to Iran or were arrested, tortured and (often) killed. In Iran, the exiles established the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (now ISCI), led by Baqir al-Hakim, Ayatollah Muhsin's son. In April of 1980 Sadr and his sister were arrested and executed by the Baathist regime. Five months later Saddam invaded Iran. In his 1988 article, Chibli Mallat argues that the reason Ayatollah Khomeini was determined to continue the war until he ousted Saddam Hussein was the opportunity that would provide for the Iraqi clerics who had formed a government-in-exile in Iran. Which leads directly to Iran's support of the Supreme Council (now ISCI) in Iraqi politics today. Aziz argues that Baqir al Sadr was drawn into his final political struggle by the Iranians, who expected Iraqi Shiites to rise up just as they had, as well as by young activists in Iraq who overestimated the revolutionary potential of the moment. Sadr, Aziz claims, "did not believe the time was ripe." But he was committed to support those who called for his leadership in the struggle. He went ahead with full knowledge that he would be killed by the regime. Aziz describes Sadr's refusal to be co-opted when offered several easy ways out (pp. 216-217).
As always, it is essential to be aware of the historical context. Baqir al Sadr's liberalism emerged within a specific social milieu of young Shiite intellectuals at a revolutionary moment in Iraq's history. Their thinking was shaped by the need to develop an Islamic response to challenges from the left, when communist and socialist movements were flourishing and vying for power. This contextual reality goes far to explain the differences between the radicalism of the Dawa Party's program as an emerging Islamist vanguard in 1960 and the mass-based conservatism of Muqtada al Sadr's militia movement in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Nothing better clarifies the differences between these two moments of Sadrist Islamism than the advocacy of women's rights from 1960 on by the activists who produced al-Adwa. Clearly, most Islamists today would regard their efforts to promote liberalizing reforms within Islam as betrayals. But when political conflict is framed as a "clash of civilizations," to cite Samuel Huntington's famous theme, cultural issues get militarized.
Shiite Activists in a Leftist Political Context
In 1959, Sadr's sister Amina became known as Bint al Huda (Daughter of the Righteous Path) after writing a treatise that earned her the unofficial title of mujahida at Najaf, where women could not be officially recognized as scholar-clerics. Joyce Wiley's article, "Alma Bint al-Huda, Women's Advocate," profiles her multi-dimensional efforts to promote women's rights within Islam. Through her didactic fiction, her campaigns for women's education and employment, and her regular editorials in al-Adwa, she challenged the traditional clerics in Najaf on a range of social issues. Another key figure, Muhammad Husain Fadlallah (now a Grand Ayatollah in Lebanon) was the number two writer (after Sadr) in al-Adwa. Throughout his career, as Talib Aziz shows in his 2001 article on Fadlallah, he has aggressively defended women's rights (partly because he worked with Bint al Huda through the five years al-Adwa was published). Later, Fadlallah developed his own activist version of Shiism in Lebanon, where he became the leader of the embattled Shiite community following the disappearance of Musa al Sadr in 1978. In Islam and the Logic of Power (1976), written under fire in the Shiite quarter of Beirut, Fadlallah defends Islam as both "religion and state," arguing their inseparability in now familiar Islamist terms. And yet, as Talib Aziz emphasizes in his article on Fadlallah's thinking, he has always insisted that jurists must question tradition and arrive at contemporary understandings of human rights that are unimpeded by "cultural influences and popular consensus" (Aziz 2001, p. 212). Pragmatically, Fadlallah decided that the Shiite goal in multicultural Lebanon must not be an Islamic state but a representative governmental presence. As it turned out, the Dawa scholar-activists had their faith tested in some of the most horrific moments of recent Middle East history, in Iraq and in Lebanon. Yet it is their interpretive work that will probably matter most in the long run. Both together and singly, their careers illustrate the importance of what is known as the "Usuli" tradition of ijtihad (the task of interpretation) within Shiism. Since the triumph of Usulism is actually a major historical event within Shiism, it is worth summarizing.
Ijtihad and the Akhbari-Usuli Debate
The late eighteenth century saw the resolution of a decisive battle between traditionalist and rationalist schools of interpretation within Shiism. Traditionalists called themselves Akhbaris-- meaning defenders of the traditions or "reports." They insisted that the Quran and the canonically accepted hadiths had to be taken literally, as self-evident "reports" of God's will, without reference to reason (aql) or social consensus (ijma). They were opposed by the proponents of ijtihad, which means the effort of reasoning (it has the same root as jihad) applied to the task of interpretation. Akhbaris not only rejected any such mediation of the direct word of God, they opposed the quasi-professional hierarchy that went with training and certifying clerics for ijtihad. Historically, the dispute goes back to 1501, when the Safavid Empire was founded in Persia, and the new government brought in trained professionals from outside Persia to institutionalize Shiism. Persian ulama reacted against this imported clerical elite, and against any idea of a clerical hierarchy based on special training in interpretation. They appealed to the people to support them on the basis of their lineage, piety and devotion to tradition, arguing that spiritual continuity with the Twelve Imams mattered far more than than learning. However, the defenders of ijtihad eventually won the battle, as noted above. Significantly, it freed Shiite ulama to establish institutions with considerable independence from government control, due to the new system of requiring contributions from the followers of each mujtahid. Ever since, Shiism has developed through a the specialized training of clerical interpreters in the hawza, or seminary for the study of fiqh (law) and ijtihad. In effect, the triumph of Usulism insured that learning and power would be inseparable.
The challenge posed by Baqir al Sadr lay in his claim that Shiite mujtahidun had unduly restricted themselves by interpreting the Quran and Sunna in purely individualist terms. To avoid clashes with the government, they had ignored issues of social justice. However, Sadr argued, the destructive impact of colonialism upon Muslim culture had awakened the need for "a new spirit in the movement of ijtihad," to overcome "the malady of aloofness from the political field" (Sadr, p. 47). In Sadr's restatement of the aims of ijtihad, the Quran is seen as requiring "social freedom," meaning that "no group or class has the right to exploit another group or class, just as no individual can enslave another" (Sadr, p. 110). As Sadr put it, conveying this social message was the "other fifty percent" of interpretation, which he was committed to defending.
Balancing Populism and the Wilayat al-Faqih
The various articles Talib Aziz has produced on different facets of Muhammad Baqir al Sadr's career keep returning to the liberalizing, democratic thrust of his work. (They ought to be republished as a single volume, given the need for a wider appreciation of Sadr's achievements and significance.) In "The Political Theory of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr," Aziz describes Sadr's effort in the late 1970s to balance the concept of the wilayat al-faqih (the "guardianship of the jurisconsult" theory, which Khomeini would apply in authoritarian terms in Iran) with an electoral system that would actually give political power to the people. While Aziz classifies Khomeini as a "statist," promoting what amounts to a dictatorship, he calls Sadr a populist.
Politically speaking, in Sadr's system the people should be put in charge of the executive and the legislative authority of the state. It is left to them to decide on any policy, and to take any course of action that does not violate the basic teachings of Islam (Aziz 2002, pp. 240-1).
Aziz goes so far as to argue that Baqir al Sadr is "foremost among contemporary radical Islamic jurists in his vision of the people playing an active role in politics" (p. 240).
The obvious question that is left open here is how much, if anything, Ayatollah Khomeini got from Baqir al-Sadr in Najaf, where he gave his famous lectures in 1970 announcing the revolutionary theory of the wilayat al-faqih. For sixteen years Khomeini was part of a hawza that was dominated by Sadr's intellectual and political presence. During this time, the Dawa Party that Sadr established was strategizing and struggling for its survival, with the ultimate goal of establishing a Shiite-led Islamic state in Iraq. We know from Sadr's students that he sent them to hear Khomeini's 1970 lectures. However, as Mallat observes in The Renewal of Islamic Law (an in-depth study of Sadr's ideas of law, economics and banking), we will never know how much intercommunication occurred between Sadr and Khomeini during the years both were in residence at Najaf (Renewal, p. 50). Khomeini was under police surveillance as an Iranian political exile, and as Mallat notes, he was liable to immediate deportation by "a wary and unfriendly government" (Renewal, p. 51). Sadr too was doubtless under surveillance, as a self-declared political activist before he pulled back for strategic reasons. But it is impossible to imagine Khomeini not having drawn a great deal from the ideas and oppositional intensity of the Dawa milieu at Najaf while he was residing and (occasionally) teaching there.
Moreover, as Mallat observes, "the emergence of the Islamic movement in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon cannot be understood without the network which originated in the city of Najaf," where the key figures of the movement in the late 1970s and 1980s had either studied or resided (Mallat 1993, p. 51). In this sense the political movement at Najaf must be considered one of the contributing factors to the Iran revolution, and Sadr's role was probably a significant factor. Sadr's political writings of the late 1970s even include a famous "Legal Note on the Project of a Constitution for Iran," written at the request of the clerical leadership in Lebanon, "which corresponds to a large extent to the text adopted by the Iranian revolution a few months after their takeover" (Mallat 1988, p. 725; see also Renewal, p. 70). Mallat stresses Sadr's promotion of Shiite "particularism" towards the empowerment of the marjaiyya (clerical leadership), which the Iranian revolution concretized, while Azam stresses Sadr's populist liberalism, treating it as a reliable counter-balance to the authoritarian tendency of politicized Shiism.
A Modernist Approach to Reading the Quran
Still another measure of Sadr's liberalism is his approach to Quranic interpretation. In a 1994 article on readings of the Quran by Sadr and John Wansbrough, Chibli Mallat provides us with a useful account of Baqir al Sadr's hermeneutic strategies. He bases his analysis on published student transcriptions of Sadr's last public lectures (he was put under house arrest in April 1979), which happened to be about reading the Quran. Above all, Mallat observes, Sadr insisted on reading and applying the Quran "as a whole," rather than using the traditional line-by-line "piecemeal" approach. (This is a crucial modernist principle, consonant with the influential hermeneutic approach of Fazlur Rahman.) Sadr describes it as a "constant renewal" of understanding, through a dialectical to-and-fro movement between a Quranic essence and contemporary life situations. The Quran is not meant to be a reading experience that begins and ends with itself, Sadr argues. It is "a spiritual energy directed towards man, which multiplies his potential and directs him on the correct path" (quoted in Mallat 1994, p. 162). The Quran is "a book both of guidance and change… bringing people out of darkness into light." By "change," Sadr is thinking, as throughout his writings, of social reform within historical circumstances of economic injustice and oppression, which requires Quranic guidance. According to the Quranic laws of history, "the prophets were always confronting the rich in their societies" (p. 165). Since the exploitation of man by man is "the root of evil," the religious message commands believers to challenge the idolatry of wealth and materialism. We return to Sadr's claim, defended at length in his studies of fiqh (Islamic law), that the Quran must be read for collective as well as individual guidance, as the divine summons to social justice that keeps getting renewed in different eras.
It is worth adding that Talib Aziz offers a more nuanced version of Baqir al Sadr's activist career than Patrick Cockburn presents in his recent book on Muqtada al Sadr. For Cockburn, Sadr I is simply a guerrilla fighter with brains. For Aziz, he was the leader of an intellectual and activist movement that redefined Shiism by responding to political challenges while promoting a liberal social vision. For Chibli Mallat, Baqir al Sadr was less significant as an activist than as a thinker. In theorizing a new constitutional and economic system for Islam, Sadr is here ranked with Jamal al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh as one of the great Islamic reformists.
Handouts:
Talib Aziz, "The Role of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr in Shi'i Political Activism in Iraq from 1958 to 1980," International Journal of Middle East Studies, 25 (1993), 207-222.
Talib Aziz, "Fadlallah and the Remaking of the Marja'iya," in Linda Walbridge, ed., The Most Learned of the Shi'a (2001), pp. 205-215.
Talib Aziz, "The Political Theory of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr," in Faleh Abdul-Jabar, ed., Ayatollahs, Sufis and Ideologues (2002).
Juan Cole, "The United States and Shi'ite Religious Factions in Post-Ba'athist Iraq," Middle East Journal, 57:4, Autumn 2003, pp.543-566.
Joyce Wiley, "Alima Bint al-Huda, Woman's Advocate," in Linda Walbridge, ed., The Most Learned of the Shi'a (2001), pp.149-160.
Other references:
Faleh Abdul-Jabar, "The Genesis and Development of Marja'ism versus the State," in Ayatollahs, Sufis and Ideologues: State, Religion and Social Movements in Iraq, ed. Faleh Abdul-Jabar (2002), pp. 61-89.
Talib Aziz, "Popular Sovereignty in Contemporary Shi'i Political Thought," Muslim World, 86:3-4, July-Oct. 1996, pp. 273-293.
Muhammad Baqir al Sadr, "The Development of Ijtihad," in Introduction to an Islamic Political System, transl. M. A. Ansari (Karachi, Islamic Seminary, 1982), pp.43-65.
Chibli Mallat, "Religious Militancy in Contemporary Iraq: Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr and the Sunni-Shia Paradigm," Third World Quarterly, 10:2, April 1988, pp. 699-729.
Chibli Mallat, The Renewal of Islamic Law: Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr, Najaf and the Shi'i International (1993).
Chibli Mallat, "Readings of the Qur'an in London and Najaf: John Wansbrough and Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 57, part 1 (pp. 1-253), 1994.
