BlogIraqi

Fuck.

I am feeling so much anger boiling, I tried to cry but I couldn't.

New Blog

A newly-discovered blog by Baghdad Kassakhon [Storyteller], who is a journalist in Baghdad, has a post about the suffering of the Iraqi staff of the Associated Press.

Crisis Group, Muqtada's Greatest Hits DVD

International Crisis Group publishes two new articles about Iraq: The New Sunni Landscape, which explores the al-Qaeda's fall from grace in the Sunni community and the emergence of Sahwa, and the Need for a New Political Strategy. I've only read the first one so far and it's as informative and detailed as the previous Crisis Group reports, describing how did al-Qaeda fail and the motives of the Sahwa Tribal militas and their interaction with the US, the government and rival Sunni parties.
****
al-Rafedain.net, a Shi'i website with a strong anti-Sadrist bent has been uploading vidoes defaming Muqtada and the Mahdi Army for a long time, their latest is "Shathaat Muqtad'iyya" (Muqtaadi Fumbles), which collects the funny, crude and embarassing things Muqtada has said and done in a three-part YouTube series. Particularly interesting is Muqtada meeting his henchmen in the 2nd video, the similarity to you-know-who is uncanny, minus the crying Ya Booooya guy.

Arabs First Created...

COMMERCIAL JINGLES!!!!!

قل للمليحة في الخمار الأسود ماذا فعلت بناسك متعبد؟
قد كان شمر للصلاة ثيابه حتى وقفت له بباب المسجد
ردى عليه صلاته وصيامه لا تقتليه بحق دين محمد

the hero of this story is a poet called Miskin al-Darmi, who is an Umayyad-era Poet, who died in 90 AH.

SCENE: Medina.
al-Darmi in his house, with an Iraqi friend named Sulayman al-Baghdadi.

Darmi: Good going, dude, we managed to stay the whole night worshiping in the mosque.
Baghdadi: You know man, I wasn't worshiping in sincerity, but I had nothing else to do.
Darmi: What, you sold all your stock?
Baghdadi: Well, yes, except for the black burqaas, which constitute 4/5 of my goods.
Darmi: Why did you buy so much of these?
Baghdadi: Well because women in Iraq have taken it in fashion these days, so I thought it would be fashionable for the women of Medina.
Darmi: So what are you going to do now?
Baghdadi: Man, I'm in such a bad streak, ever since I stopped getting drunk at parties I've never seen anything good come to me. I've put all my money in these veils and now all I got to do is go back to Iraq and declare bankruptcy.
Darmi: Wait, I've got just the thing for you.

The next day al-Darmi sheds down his worshiping robes and dons partying clothes. his wife Jaleela is dumbfounded.

Jaleela: What the fudge are you doing? What do you think people are going to say?
Darmi: They'll say: al-Darmi reverted back to his old indecent ways and abandoned the path of worship.
Jaleela: and you like that?
Darmi: Whatever, I've decided to go back to what I was, it's more like me.
Jaleela: Woe to you!
Darmi: Don't worry, I'll be back poring over the Qur'an in no time.
Jaleela: Yeah right, you're going to spend your days writing indecent love poems and odes to those sultry concubines and then you come to me late at night, drunk and haggled, no sir, I'm going to my parents' house.

A party in the house of Abu Ayman, his concubines are led by the Singer Lamyaa, who sings some verses of al-Darmi's

Abu Ayman: Hit them with the new tune, Lamyaa.
Crowd: Yes, please, we want the new hit tune.
Lamyaa: I'm not going to sing it until I get the black burqaa.
Abu Ayman: I've had the boy go pick it up since early morning, and I don't know why it took him so long.
Ibn Suraij The Oud player: Here he comes at last!
Boy: Here's the black Burqaa, sir.
Abu Ayman: God curse your black face, what took you so long?
Boy: My good sir, look at my clothes, they're torn from the severe crowding and fights I've had to get into in order to get this burqaa. Everybody in town is buying those burqaas from the Iraqi merchant.
Ibn Surayji: So now you have your burqa, Lamyaa.
Lamyaa (dons it): How do I look in this?
Abu Ayman: By God! I never thought a black Burqa would look this good on anyone.
Crowd: So hit us with the tune now.
Lamyaa sings and Ibn Surayj plays:

Ask that beauty in the black burqa
What has she done to this obedient saint?
He was getting ready to pray, yet
her sight by the mosque door, made him faint
Leave him to his fasting and his prayers
By Mohammed's religion! leave him to his restraint

Abu Ayman: Dance to it Lamyaa, it's made for dancing!
Lamyaa re-sings the verses while dancing, getting everybody visibly excited.

***
Darmi: Come back to me Jaleela, I've abandoned my marauding ways.
Jaleela: Look at this hypocrite, now that he's made a mockery out of himself he wants me back!
Her mother: Yes, everybody is talking about him these days.
Her father: Why did you do this to yourself?
Darmi: I'll tell you why.
Somebody outside sings: Ask the beauty in the black burqaa/what has she done....
Jaleela: Listen to this mother! Look, why don't you go back to your black burqaa beauty and leave me alone.
Darmi: There is no such girl, don't you people know the Iraqi merchant Sulayman? Haven't you seen that every woman in town has bought his Iraqi black burqas until there's none left?
Jaleela's father: Yes, even your wife begged me to buy one for her.
Darmi: Really? you wanted to be the Black Burqa Beauty yourself?
Jaleela: No, but I saw everybody do it so I did it myself.
Darmi: You see? I did what I did only so that I can help my Iraqi friend sell his undesirable black burqas! He's even sent for his dealer in Iraq to bring him more of them, they're selling like hot cakes.

Translated from the play by Ahmed Ali Bakthir, which is based on a true story.
The verses are famous, and they're still sung until today, most recently by an Egyptian fusion? band with some western influences called Wust il Balad.

This is the first installment of my Arabs First Created series.

Batatu: Chapter 3 : Geographic Distribution of the Principal Racial-Religious Groups

[this chapter was especially illumantive to me regarding the question of Sunni-Shi'i distribution in old Iraq (before the 1800s) and what did "Iraq" exactly mean at the time]

Iraq may be said to have been, in the time of the monarchy, divided into three religious zones.

One of these zones, the most populous, was and remains the home of Shiism. it covers all the provinces to the south of Baghdad. In its ethnic composition it is Arab except for concentrations of Iranians in Basrah and the Holy Cities of Najaf and Karbala. Its Shiism is not unbroken. Here and there it is interspersed with islands of Sunnism, which are urban in character and, in their size, inconsiderable, except in Basrah and Nasiriyyah, where there are strong Sunni minorities, and in the town of Zubair, southwest of Basrah, which is entirely Sunni.

A second religious zone, embracing Arab-inhabited valleys of the Euphrates above Baghdad and of the Tigris between Baghdad and Mosul, is the domain of Sunnism. Here only small Shii minorities at Dujail, Balad, Samarra, and a string of Turkmen settlements, some of which are Shi'i as in Tal Afar and Toz Khomatu, breach the Sunni continuity.

The third religious zone conincides with the Kurdish rain-fed mountain crescent in the north and northeast of Iraq. This zone is also Sunni, but unlike the Sunni Arab region, it was in the period of monarchy permeated by mysticism and by its practitioners, the Sufis. This is not to say that there were no traces of Arab Sufism, however, in monarchic days had none ouf the outward vigor of Kurd mysticism.

EXPLANATIONS FOR THIS RELIGIOUS CONFIGURATION
Nearly at thousand years ago, Abu Bakr al-Khawarizmi (d 993) envied the people of Iraq because, as he put it, "in their midst are the tomb-sanctuaries of [Ali]...and of Hussein, and because Shiism is Iraqi." At the time the name Iraq referred not to the territory of present day Iraq, but only to that part which lay south of a line connecting Anbar (or according to another view, Haditha) on the Euphrates and Tikrit on the Tigris, that is, it coincided, except for Baghdad and areas north of Baghdad, with the abode of the Shi'is.the heart of the sect was then, as now, the Middle Euphrates, the role of the Buwayhids in Baghdad (from 945 t o1055) and al-Mazyad of Bani Asad from Hilla to Basra (1012 to 1150) helped or consolidated the advance of Shi'i principles. So did also the power that the Shii Arab dynasty of the Musha'sh' Saadah wielded from the outskirts of Baghdad to the Gulf in the middle of the fifteenth century. But before and after that time the country passed through a succession of conquests: the Euphrates and Tigris changed their main beds ; medieval towns, like Wasit and Madai'n disappeared, new towns, like Amara and Nasiriyah came into life, old tribes were scattered or subdued, and new tribes from Arabia moved into the river valleys, Yet in the midst of all the vicissitude and instability one feature persisted: the overwhelmingly Shi'i character of this zone. How can one account for this Shii continuity, particularly in the face of long centuries of apparent Sunni dominance, the dominance of the Ottoman Turks (1534-1622, 1638-1917) and their nominal vassals, the Georgian Mamluks (1749 - 1831)??

Apart from the power of persistence natural to religions and in particular to aggrieved sects, one obvious factor making for the perpetuation of Shi'i influence was :

[1] the presence of the Shii sanctuaries of Najaf and Karbala, and Shii schools at Najaf and Hillah.
[2] The commercial and religious intercourse that the Shias of Iraq maintained, if interruptedly, with Shi'i Persia.
[3] The contagion of the environment, Bedouin tribes who moved into the Shi'i zone - and Islam sat lightly on the Bedouins - tended in time, ti wold appear, to adapt themselves to its beliefs and practices.
[4] The missionary zeal of the mumans, who were itinerant men of religion.

It may be wondered how Shii conversions took place seemingly under the very nose of the Sunni government, the explanation is simple. During the greater part of the Ottoman period the write of the authorities ran precariously outside the main towns.

[5] The conversions may have even come about on account of the government: the tribes' intolerance of government - any government. and their association of government with oppression, plus the fact that the government was Sunni, may have eased the task of the mumans and the transition to Shiism.

The government accorded the Shi'is full liberty to make their devotions in their own manner in all the places that they considered sacred, apparently because it stood to gain from the flow of pilgrims to Iraq. But in all other places, as in Basrah or in Baghdad proper, they were denied the free exercise of their religion. This rule must have been relaxed in the course of the later part of the nineteenth century, under the monarchy the religious freedom of the Shiis became complete.

In turning to the Sunni Arab zone, the thing that catches attention is that Shiism never penetrated it in strength, while a Shii dynasty, the Hamdanis wielded authority in Mosul between 905 and 979, but it hardly made a dent in the Sunni loyalty of its inhabitants. An attempt to encourage Shiism by Badr-ud-Din Lulu, a slave who ruled Mosul for about forty years in the first half of the 19th century, failed to evoke any response. with minor exceptions, the whole region remained steadfast in its attachment to Sunnism down to our own time. Perhaps the most crucial explanation for this is the fact that, in their economic relationships, the regions of Mosul and the upper Euphrates were oriented toward Sunni Syria and, in a lesser degree, toward Sunni Turkey. Indeed, it would not be going too far to say that in the days of the monarchy the people of Mosul were closer in outlook and temperament to the Arabs of Syria, specficially of Aleppo, than to the Arabs of central and southern Iraq. (True, even the Mosuli accent, which I speak since I'm half-Mosuli, has more similarity with the softer Levantine dialects of Arabic than the harsher, more tribal accent of Iraq proper and the Gulf.)

Hanna Batatu, Iraq : Social classes.

I have finally resigned and began the exhausting task of reading the mammoth "phonebook" of Hanna Batatu about Iraq, (apx. 1300 pages, with fine letters), I shall jot down some notable paragraphs on my blog as I progress through it:

P. 17, DIVERSITY OF IRAQIS:

Of course, the more conscious of the townsmen thought themselves as part of the realm of Islam, and Islam's ideals, though denuded of much of their old vigor, tended to rescue them to some extent from their localism and associate them with their brother Muslims within and beyond the confines of the Ottoman Empire. But Islam in Iraq was more a force of division rather than of integration. It split deeply Sunni and Shi'i Arabs, socially they seldom mixed, and as a rule they did not intermarry. To the strict Shi'is, the government of the day - the government of the Ottoman Sultan that led Sunni Islam - was, in essence, a usurpation. In their eyes, it had not the qualification to even execute the laws of Islam. They were, therefore, estranged from it, few caring to serve it or attend its schools.

Of course, today things are much different, mostly thanks to the pseudo-secular period of modern-day ideologies such as Pan-Arabism and Communism, there is social intermingling and intermarriage, although today, with the full-force resurgence of old Islamic models and the hostilities along it, it seems the problems are largely the same, except they got perhaps a little uglier with all that sly decades-long maneuvering, marriages are being broken apart and friends are re-examining their relationships. Let's hope for the next episode.

Government Aims for Muqtada's Balls

It seems that the guys really mean it this time around, they're really intent on nailing Shibil al-Hawza by his firebreathing firebrand nostrils, not only are they trying to forming Shahwa (Shi'i-Sahwa) councils inside the city that carries his father's name, but they're pulling all the guns : first a National Security Council that bans all militas [which really means just the Mahdi Army because Badr is the government now] and they're also wiping the dirt off the case of Muqtada's First Blood: Sayyid Abdul-Majid al-Khoei.

Two days ago, I watched an al-Khoei family member on al-Arabiya, he said that Muwaffaq al-Rubiaye came to talk to him about reopening the case, he seemed a little irritated at all involved, first he said that al-Khoei's case was never closed in the first place so that is shall be reopened, which directly contradicts what Rasim al-Marwani, a Sadrist cultural advisor, who repeatedly said that al-Khoei family themselves had "dropped the case which was setted in good will." and second he said that too many people have used al-Khoei's murder as political leverage, which is of course a direct jab at Ibrahim al-Jaffari's stint as PM in 2005 during which he ignored the murder due to the backing of the Sadrists which directly gave him the PM position, but he could have also been referring to this recent request by al-Rubaiye, especially as he didn't really seem to be supportive of it and seemed rather annoyed at all of them.

Another al-Khoei family member, Hayder al-Khoei, writes in his blog Eye Raki about this recent development, expecting an ominous showdown (of course, being a member of al-Khoei family it's understandable for Mr. Eye Raki not to be really objective about anything involving the man who killed his father, that is if he is indeed Hayder the son of Sayyid Majid, but re-reading Eye Raki's blog with this fact in mind the guy seems to be incredibly reasonable and objective about Iraq in general, and that is damn impressive considering his family is an extremely respected religious family which is expected to be subjective, to say the least, he is much better than other Iraqi Shi'i (and Sunni) blogs.)

Everybody in the government, including the Sunnis, and most recently, Iran, have supported the government against Muqtada, who has came back to Najaf ; recent news items talk about Basra breathing a little air after months of religious monkeybrains.

So why is this happening all of a sudden, I don't want to get my hopes up as the Badrists/Iraqi Government/and even the Amreekan have played forbidden detente football with Muqtada for years now, so what has suddenly prompted this sudden rush to crush him? (Amreekans still seem reluctant about it.)

Nobody knows for sure, maybe they were encouraged by Muqtada's declaration to disappear for a while and focus on his college education, but the obvious reason is the municipal council elections, which sits as a pragmatic selfish explanation that sits in line with what has been happening in Iraq until this point, however, even if that is indeed true, I do wish that the Sadrists are destroyed in the long run and are not as powerful as everyone expected them to be, first, having one militia around is better than two, and second, the Badrists, as evil as they are, seem to be more negotiable than Qrazy Qaddo and his boneheaded supernatural take of the world, the only people who expressed sympathy were either opportunists who calculated so as to slide with the more populist Sadrists to advance their own careers such as Ibrahim "Lazga" Jaffari and Ahmed "Slimesnake" Chalabi, or Ba'athis who really have no love for them but use them to prove that their resistance is pan-Iraqi, the Sadrists have completely destroyed their own nationalistic credentials in their post-2006 killing spree, before which only Badr, with its covert sneaky assassinations were being pointed at as the extremist Shi'i.

One could certainly look with sympathetic eye towards the poor downtrodden base of Muqtada al-Sadr, I remember in the old days when we used to make fun of them like hell, not because they were Shi'i but mostly because they were dirty and backward, something even the middle-class Shi'is used to do, calling them mi'dan and shroog. it's a classic urban vs tribal situation in a way.

Ismail al-Lami aka "Shi'i Zarqawi" Abu Deraa is back in town, supposedly he returned to Basra but this al-Arabiya article says his pictures are distributed around police checkpoints in Kerbala, we finally have a good picture of him, the person who took this picture said, and I quote: "lol my father was some weeks ago in iran. he meeted Abu dere3 there in qom (iran)
he was without bodyguards walking in a place where just iraqi live there, he is a friend of my uncle who also lives there, here are some pics of abu dere3 from some weeks ago with my father and uncle", Abu Deraa reminds me of a cross between a big teddy bear and a large rodent: