He has very pale skin and blue eyes, and his presence — with his long grey beard, his black turban and grey robes — has a studied dignity. He receives me in the city of Najaf, a sacred site for Shias, for it is where Emir Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law, who was murdered in year 41 of the hegira and is considered to be the spiritual figure of the Shia, is buried. Imam Muhammad Bakr Al Hakim lives in spartan austerity, and the offices of his movement are also extremely simple. But the precautions that they take are very tight.
Clerics, bodyguards and assistants search us, take our shoes off and confiscate our cameras and tape recorders (which they return to us once they have checked that there are no arms or explosives hidden in them). There is not a single female presence in the house, and Morgana has to comply strictly with the dress code by wearing the Muslim veil so that she can come in with me and take photographs. When I tell Ayatollah Al Hakim that she is my daughter, he replies curtly, without looking at her: ‘I have six daughters.’ I do not commit the impertinence of asking him how many wives have borne these six children. (The Shia, apart from having four legitimate wives authorised by the Koran, can add a fifth — the so-called ‘pleasure marriage’ — if they are travelling without female company, so that they do not have to suffer the privations of abstinence. This fifth wedding can last solely for the duration of the journey).
The day before receiving me, the ayatollah had declared — in this country where attacks are increasing every day — that it is a mistake to kill US soldiers, and that whatever objectives the Iraqis seek to achieve by assassination can be reached by peaceful means, through dialogue. I thought that he would repeat to me the same diplomatic declaration, but I was wrong. Speaking slowly, and gesturing gently to illustrate his words, he delivered a severe diatribe against the ‘coalition forces’. He never speaks about the Americans or the British, just about the ‘coalition’, but we both know very well who he is talking about.
‘The liberation was a mere pretext. The coalition troops have become occupation forces. Bush and Blair made many promises that they have been incapable of fulfilling. There is no security at all in the country, and our sovereignty has been snatched away from us. As a pretext for the war, they argued that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but they have not been able to find them. Nor have they been able to capture the former dictator and his followers, despite the fact that they are people who eat and move around and leave tracks. If they had let us act, we would have found them by now.’
He speaks without raising his voice and without looking at me, his blue eyes are staring into the distance, with the quiet determination of one who knows that he is in possession of the truth. His halfdozen assistants listen to him with wrapt attention, indifferent to the horrendous heat that has turned this small, bare room, with a large bunch of plastic flowers as its one adornment, into a frying pan. Ayatollah Al Hakim is a man who rarely smiles and who pontificates and proclaims rather than speaks, like the prophets and the gods on Olympus. Crouching behind him is a man who never takes his eyes off me, ready to leap on me if I make any suspicious movement. Being so close to Ayatollah Al Hakim makes me feel deeply uneasy. Although, like all agnostics, I recognise that I secretly envy believers, when these believers are as absolute and categorical as the Iraqi imam in front of me, it makes me shiver.
‘The war has not ended,’ Ayatollah Al Hakim continues. ‘Discontent among the people is increasing every day, as are the acts of resistance against the occupying forces, which is very serious for the future of Iraq. There are different reasons for this resistance: promises made to us are not kept and our dignity is humiliated. I’m referring to the behaviour of the occupation forces. They kill innocent people and they are incapable of finding the real culprits for the crimes committed by the dictatorship. They steal quite brazenly from the private houses that they search, taking the family’s money. They take advantage of the fact that since there are no banks, people have to keep their money in their houses. As well as stealing they offend our women, they touch them and that hurts and upsets our people. Here, in Najaf, we have already organised five demonstrations to protest against these abuses. It is true that surviving groups attached to Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party also commit terrorist attacks and sabotage. But this, to a great extent, is the fault of the coalition troops, because, instead of hunting down the Ba’athists and the followers of Saddam, they disarm us, the popular forces. But that just increases the anger of the Iraqis against the occupiers.’
Indeed, adorning the earthen walls in the drab, run-down, poverty-stricken streets of Najaf, a two-hour drive to the south of Baghdad, where the dust from the surrounding desert swirls around, staining everything the colour of yellow ochre, alongside the death notices for the many people who are brought to this holy city to be buried, there are many anti-coalition inscriptions and graffiti praising the ‘Soldiers of Islam’ who are fighting against the infidels and Satan. But none of them mention the Americans by name; they all rail against ‘foreign hegemony’ as well as proclaiming ‘Death to Saddam and the Ba’athists’.
The hostility towards the coalition troops, and the anti-American feeling, is very tangible among the crowd of believers heading towards the mosque in a great procession, the women dressed in severe abayas, tunics and black veils, that cover them from head to foot. Many of them, in addition, wear black woollen stockings and some even gloves, in temperatures of forty-five degrees in the shade. The mass of the faithful grows even denser around and inside the imposing mosque that contains the tomb of Emir Ali. My translator, Professor Bassam Y. Rashid, who is the director of the Department of Spanish at the University of Baghdad, is constantly explaining to all and sundry that we are not ‘Americans’, but we are stared at and gestured at in a hostile manner as we make our way to the mosque. The people are even more belligerent inside the mosque.
This is very different to what happened to me in the main Shia mosque in Baghdad, the mosque of the Khadim Brothers (the grandsons of Emir Ali), where I was greeted most cordially by the people who ran the place. They even joked that they had to make a good impression on foreigners to dispel the rumours put about by their enemies, that Shia are fundamentalist. This accusation is doubtless quite unjust. Along with the Kurds, the Shia were the ones that suffered the worst excesses of Saddam Hussein, who was a Sunni and surrounded himself with Muslims of the same religious tendency. There are doubtless many moderate Shia just as there are fundamentalist Sunnis. In broad terms the division between the two main currents of Islam is that the Shia religion is rooted in the more primitive sectors, the rural and marginal groups, while the Sunnis come in the main from the urban sectors, are better educated and better connected socially. The Shia have always been excluded from power, which has been a Sunni monopoly.