Iraq at Risk Of Turning Into An Islamic State
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
WASHINGTON – As lawmakers in Baghdad struggle to meet their extended deadline to produce a constitution by Monday, an envoy from Iraq’s largest Islamist party said yesterday that he expected the document to include a clause requiring that legislation “not contradict with Islamic law.” The inclusion of such a clause has been an ongoing source of debate for drafters, and has raised concerns that Iraq could become an Islamic Republic, like neighboring Iran.
In a briefing here yesterday for reporters and analysts, Amar al-Hakim, son of the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, said that that Iraq’s new constitution would have built-in provisions to ensure that the government respect Islam – the religion, Mr. al-Hakim stressed, of 95% of Iraqis. While he was careful to also say that the rights of minorities and women would be protected, allowing both religious and civil family courts, he fell short when trying to detail how an adherence to Islamic law could coexist with individual rights.
In Iran, which has a similar prohibition on laws contradicting the tenets of Islam, a powerful and unelected guardian council has vetoed most political reforms. In other Middle Eastern theocracies, such as Saudi Arabia, voting and basic institutions essential to democracy do not exist because they are seen as un-Islamic.
Iraqi representatives have for months been drafting a constitution amid an increasingly bloody war. Yesterday, the Middle East Media Research Institute reported that Web sites affiliated with Al Qaeda have posted death threats against members of the panel responsible for drawing up the document. Four American soldiers were killed yesterday by a roadside bomb, just one of the methods terrorists have employed to slay both Americans and Iraqis since the liberation.
“We are now talking about the principle,” Mr. al-Hakim said yesterday in his briefing at Freedom House’s headquarters here. “When it comes to the details, that might require Islamic scholarly discussion.” When pressed, Mr. al-Hakim said he envisioned that Iraq’s supreme court would be the final arbiter of whether or not a law was consistent with Islam. He insisted that these jurists would be “legal scholars,” as opposed to clerics.
Nonetheless, some observers expressed concern yesterday about the recent direction of debate over the new constitution. “The underlying problem is the infusion of religious principles, mainly Sharia law, without any definition of what standards or blueprint for Iraq’s international human rights obligations,” a lawyer from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Robert Blitt, said. Mr. al-Hakim’s “message was that Iraq is going to reconcile Islam and individual rights. … But he did not get very specific.”
The fate of individual rights for minorities and women is a source of serious unease in Iraq.
When an Iranian author, Azar Nafisi, asked Mr. al-Hakim whether the new constitution would protect the rights of wives to divorce their husbands in civil courts, he hedged. Mr. al-Hakim pointed out that the constitution would in fact allow for both Sharia and civil family courts, but did not say whether women could choose which court would hear their case.
In response to a question about the rights of religious minorities, Mr. Hakim said they would be protected. But in his example he referred to Yazidi tribesmen as “devil worshipers,” a slur Yazidis have long denied: “The constitution will even protect the people who defend the devil,” Mr. al-Hakim said.
In Baghdad yesterday, the Associated Press reported that members of the constitution committee were close to reaching a compromise on the issues that prevented the committee this week from meeting the August 15 deadline for releasing a draft. The wire quoted a spokesman for the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Haitham al-Husseini, as predicting a breakthrough in talks within the next 48 hours. “The work is being done in an inclusive way to overcome the points of disagreements,” Mr. al-Husseini is quoted as saying.
When the constitution is finished, Iraqis will vote on the document in a referendum. Three provinces can effectively veto the draft giving both Sunni and Kurdish minorities a potential veto.
[According to the Associated Press, the top American commander in the Middle East, General John Abizaid, discussed the security situation yesterday with President Talabani and afterward said American and Iraqi forces would “continue the fight against these people that are killing innocent Iraqis day after day after day for no reason other than to try to grab the headlines.”
The senior American commander in Iraq, General George Casey, identified “foreign fighters and the Iraqis that support them” as the greatest threat to Iraq over the next six months to a year.]