Everyone. Welcome to our second talk in the series for the Hillary term on Iraq 20 years after the 2003 invasion. I am really delighted and honoured to introduce our Speaker tonight, Dr. Emerson, on Summary. It's wonderful to have someone who's done my very fresh recent research on Iraq. Has lived there a lot. Has like a lot of like firsthand experience. Really immersed is not the right word from there and like directly in touch through all these years.
So we couldn't have been in better hands to learn more about Iraq close to 2000 feet. Mark Zandi is a research fellow at the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School. She is also a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institute Institution in Washington, D.C. and she is an incoming assistant professor of political science at Boston College. I should add that she she has also a Ph.D. from MIT in political science as well.
And her research examines the intersection of religion and politics in the Middle East, looking particularly at how the Shia religious establishment in Iraq has intervened in formal politics, in protests and in peacebuilding. So please join me in welcoming her and listening to her talk. Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for being here today and thank you so much for inviting me. Mariam, what a nice introduction and I know that you are from Boston.
So Solar Leaders Era Newton, thank you so much for the invitation. I am not only delighted to be here because I love talking about my research, but I also love any excuse to visit a beautiful campus. And this is definitely top five in the world. So for the definitive rankings, I will probably post on Twitter in maybe five years.
So I wanted to say I have a script that I am notorious for going off script, and I think it's okay for this presentation because I am going to be pulling a lot from my own experience, having lived in Iraq in the last two years to give me to this topic, which I think is very important but is also part of my larger book project. So my book is about the role of clerics in protest in Iraq from 1910 to 2020.
So it covers a very long period of time. But I wanted to focus today on the most recent instance of protest, which is a 2019 protest movement, also called the Shooting in Iraq and the Role of Clerics and the Role of Civil Society in that, because I think there's a very fascinating intersection that you don't really get to see until you're on the ground in Iraq.
And one of the things that I've been very grateful for during my time in Iraq is that a lot of my preconceived notions about how religion intersects with everyday life are very much challenged. And I think if I want you to come away with one thing during this presentation is that oftentimes when you hear about a revolution or a protest movement or any kind of contentious political event, you often hear the narrative of very elite people who are representing this protest movement.
And it makes sense because the people who have access to media and have access to convey a message in English are the upper middle class activists, and in Iraq's case, the medical doctors and engineers. Now, the political scientist. The economist or the sociologist? The anthropologist.
And for me, having received a lot of information when I was in the U.S. about Iraq, despite doing a lot of fieldwork, and it actually changed a lot when I moved out of the country and interacted with the reality of everyday life and how religion and activism and protest touched everyday life in ways that were not present to me when I was in the United States.
And so one of these contradictions that's so important to discuss is that there seems to be the sense that protest movements happen in this very black and white ideology, or they're anti-religion or secular, or they're in Arabic. They use the word civil, not only because they don't want to say secular, to not offend people who who are conservative. But in reality, large segments of the population still identify with religion and very profound ways.
And you can find the very same activists who say, we want the separation of religion and the state. We want the secular state to be the very same people who on a Friday will listen to the sermon of a cleric talking about the protest movement. And to me, that was so puzzling and contradictory and I really wanted to delve into why that was happening. And so today's talk, I will try to provide some sort of answer to this and to elaborate a bit more on this very compelling relationship.
So I have on this screen here just some various titles from both academic or policy work on the protest movement in 2019, as well as some journalism on the protest movement 2019. And you can say this like you can see this rhetoric emerging, like secular Shia Islam is on the rise. And the Shia crescent, you know, I'm sure in Iran with the protest right now, we're hearing a lot about this two very, very one sided narrative.
And it's not it's just not one sided as much as it's also conveying the superficial elements of a very, very deep movement. And in Iraq's case, there was a lot of this rhetoric without enough analysis of it. And I was really interested in uncovering this because I didn't think it really told the whole story, because while we got this kind of coverage, we also got something like this image I have from Al Jazeera which says Arab protesters look to society ahead of Friday sermon.
And for those familiar with the Grand Ayatollah, Sistani is the most important religious Shia religious cleric in Iraq. He has millions of followers within the country, followers within Iran, within the region and across the globe. And you can see what is very striking about this image and I don't know how well you can see it is that his photo is right there on the building, which is called the Turkish restaurant, which is really the focal point of the protest movement in Baghdad.
This is where the protests were, where they were born and where they maintained their power and where all the slogans emerged and where all the demands were raised. And you have. This photo of a cleric right there. And I really wanted to understand why you could have these two different rhetoric, rhetorics at the same time.
And I founded that during my time in Iraq by speaking both to clerics, but also, more importantly, to activists themselves and to the civil society leaders, as well as everyday protesters. Before. I didn't want to make this an overly academic lecture at all. So I'm just very, very easy to just talk about the different methods that I use to collect information.
But I won't bore you the details, mainly with a lot of interviews on the field with different people, but also some archival work that I've done over the years that I think is important to understand the full relationship between religion and the state and some discourse analysis. And in the Q&A, we can talk in more details about anything that's interesting to you, but just a very brief overview of that.
So I wanted to start by first just discussing the key actors in this presentation, the first one being the Shia religious establishment in Iraq. I'll start by saying that Iraq is a very diverse country with a lot of religious actors. And so I very purposefully chose to study the Shia religious establishment because the greatest, largest group in Iraq are the Shia of Iraq. And so the Charlotte establishment has very interesting level of authority over a large segment of the population.
And what is more important to me is that until very recently, they've been largely absent in academic discourse and there hasn't been any books about them. What you haven't said is a lot of focus when it comes to the role of religion in the state.
On as her in Egypt understandably it's a of the most important religious institutions of Islam and from the Shia side, everyone is of course preoccupied with Khomeini because he kind of upended everything we know about clerics and their role in politics.
But he also inadvertently led to this belief that Iraqi clerics are quiet and they don't participate in politics, they don't participate in protest or quiet under authoritarianism in their client under everything else, while you have this different school of thought is much more involved in will create a theocratic state and that's a very you know, it's knocking both black and white ideas in the beginning of this presentation.
But that's another very black and white idea of what clerics do, and they operate on a much wider spectrum. So one of the reasons I focus on those institutions, because I'm trying to fill in this gap of knowledge about about the Hausa, which is the set of seminaries that operate in Iraq. There are seminaries, libraries, mosques. There are places where clerics teach.
And you can see a photo up here of, you know, clerics in Najaf by a bunch of books is this kind of environment that I that I focus on. But to give you a bit of a firmer grasp on it, there's two concepts I'd like you to keep in mind. The first one is the Nigeria, which is really the upper echelons of religious leadership in Iraq. And by that I mean the system of religious training. The seminary that occurs within the houses is a very hierarchical one, but it's also very often institutionalised.
It's not very bureaucratised at all. It looks nothing like looks nothing like Oxford in the sense of although here Oxford also isn't very institutionalised sometimes, but it's definitely less institutionalised in Oxford, I would say. But there isn't really like you don't come in and there is a professor who will guide you through and tell you, you know, this is of course, you should take and I by this point, did you take this exam?
I hear the exams here are very institutionalised. So there's nothing like that. And it's just a system in which you have to drive yourself to different classes, to different clerics.
You have to build relationships with mentors, and you have to reach this level of knowledge where elite scholars are willing to say that you are well versed enough, that you are knowledgeable enough that you can infer laws, Islamic laws on your own, and then you become what they call them, which that someone who is able to and for Islamic knowledge on their own.
And this process takes a very long time, I'd say, you know, 20 years to get through the the very basic training at the three levels before you become in a position where you actually become an ayatollah, a grand jury or a grand ayatollah. And the key thing is that you really need followers to establish who you are. And within Shiism, clerics, followers who are required to emulate them on religious matters. So it does give them a bit of authority, particularly on family issues and social issues.
And they also are required, which is very important, to give a certain percentage of their disposable income as a religious tax of sorts. So clerics, when they reach very high levels in this institution, are able to finance a lot of their own endeavours, and most importantly, they're able to be very independent of the state. And this is what really makes this religious institution very unique, I would say.
And this is what makes them admire the religious leaders of the top echelons of this institution, very powerful. It's because they have their own resources and they have their own followers. So they have the ability to mobilise people through to certain actions, to certain beliefs, and they have the ability to mobilise resources around different causes. And this is the reason that this institution. Was so preyed upon by former Iraqi regimes.
So the Baathist era of Iraq, which I think everyone is very familiar with, is notorious for being a totalitarian state and an authoritarian state at other times preying on large segments of the population.
But one of the one of the segments of the population that are preyed on most strongly was clerics, because it really did fear, particularly after the Iranian revolution, that they would launch a movement similar to that in Iran and that they would take over the state because of their ability to control a large part of the population and their independence from the state. So in retaliation to that, the state decided to be very cautious of them and to control them to the extent possible.
So one of the places I visited during my research was about the archives and the Hoover Institute and Stanford. And for those of us familiar with that story, it's basically all the documents of Saddam Hussein's government that were taken out of Iraq in 2003 and moved to staff first in Washington and then to Stanford University in California for American academics to see, but for Iraqis to not see until 2019 or 2020 again.
So there's a lot of ethical issues around these documents and their existence and where they are. But when you actually go and see them, you can actually see the inner workings of an entire regime. And one of the things that becomes very clear very quickly is that this regime was obsessed with clerics, particularly Shiite clerics. But to not discriminate, it was obsessive clerics across the board. It tried to keep the Sunni clerics, for example, using the same sermons and the same language.
It kept an eye on how clerics talked about Saddam Hussein in their sermons. I mean, it reached a level of pettiness where I could see that in some of the documents. They would check whether or not a cleric had prayed and prayed for the president before they started their sermon. So it's a very tight level of regulation. The actual is that the religious establishment itself had its numbers dwindling from the thousands to the hundreds during this period from, I would say, 1980 to 2003.
Very few international students came to this institution at this time, and the entire environment was very, very, very fearful of the state. And so in light of this, you can see that for a cleric and I have this quotation on on the screen, when 2003 came, it was an entire reversal of fortune that I can't I can't emphasise enough for them.
They went from being individuals that were hunted down by the state, who were tortured and exiled, who were deported, whose family members were killed, to suddenly being in a very friendly relationship with the state. And not only that, sometimes the state would actually seek advice and seek legitimation from them. So one of the clerics I spoke to told me when I was you know, I speak to him in 2018.
So it's, you know, years since 2003, Iraq had seen the ISIS war, a lot of other difficulties, and there had seen several waves of protests. And the cleric said to me, we should be grateful for Iraq. Now, it's so much better than before, better than Saddam's era. The Baathists were criminals. And I think this is something that gets lost a lot.
When people look at Iraq today, they forget that for many of these clerics who tend to be a lot older than the average Iraqi citizen, their formative years really were under baptism. And they were so frightened by what happened under Saddam that anything in comparison was better for them than that. Despite the corruption of the current state, despite all these other grievances that the public expresses on a regular basis, they still have that point of contact.
But at the same time, it wasn't something that happened without there was a price for the clerics to pay after 2010, after this strong relationship of the state and their alliance, whether intended or whether it was accidental, what the state actually ended up depleting a lot of their the good populations goodwill with the clerics in Iraq. And I actually remember a story of I was in Iraq in 2003. I was just visiting. And at the time there was this big rhetoric going around about how.
So I used to visit the city of Karbala, which would get a lot of pilgrims from Iran and about how a lot of the Iranian pilgrims were warning the Iraqis this was that the popular narrative in Karbala of just wait a few years and you'll hate these clerics like we hate them, too. And so it was a sense of like once they become politicised, you won't like these people anymore. They're no longer oppressed. You want, you want, you know, they won't resonate with you anymore.
And so clerics in Iraq actually experienced a bit of this despite being much less involved in politics than their Iranian counterparts. And it was largely because a lot of the Shia Islamist parties that did quite well in subsequent elections after 2003 and even 2005 and so on, they found they trace their roots to the clerical establishment. They would say, you know, our founders from the clerical establishment, we we are Islamist parties.
They would take photos with elite clerics and they would try to market themselves as such. But because they performed so poorly when it came to public services, because the population saw them as being complicit in corruption, this reputation started to rub off on the clerical establishment as well, and they started suffering reputational costs. And so I have another quote here from a cleric whose name I didn't put up there because I don't think he wanted others to know that he had said this.
But he he said to me, when some religious organisations entered political activity, meaning Islamist parties, this reflected badly on religion and the street started to reject the and started to dislike the religious establishment. Why? Because they saw it as an authority that is responsible for 15 years of destruction and devastation that has befallen the country. This is how the street perceives the situation.
So there's this presumption of a reversal of fortune, of strong ties to the state that they've never had before. At the same time, that came at the expense of losing the will of the public.
What made matters worse, in a way, was in 2014, when there was the ISIS incursion in Iraq, and there was this very well-known photo by Grand Ayatollah Sistani encouraging Iraqis to participate and to join security forces, which later led to the creation of the Popular Mobilisation Forces, which were very popular in Iraq during that war. And, you know, I have very distinct memory of being in Iraq in 2014 and 2015. And at that time, they were considered absolute heroes of this cause and essential.
But over time, they became disliked by the population. They were seen as predatory, as non-state actors. And this also reflected badly on the religious establishment, because whether, you know, whether this photo actually led to the creation of paramilitary groups or whether it didn't, it's still it still was attributed to the religious establishment's role in this war. And so I have this photo of a billboard of the various clerics who had died.
And this from the religious establishment and this other. This you know, this kind of imagery is throughout Iraq, but the population's reaction to it has changed dramatically since the end of the war with ISIS. And this change in public opinion is something that you can see in a wide array of public opinion polls in Iraq. Some of them, I trust, more than others, though there's been enough public opinion work in Iraq that I that I do believe the findings reflect reality in this case.
So this particular one is from the Arab world that are saying that in 2013. So before the war with ISIS, 19.5% of Iraqis surveyed preferred a non-religious party over a religious party. And by 2018, 40.6% preferred a non-religious party. So you see the population wanting non-religious parties more at this time. And this is also from the Arab barometer showing trust in judgement or the areas of Iraq, Bahrain, Baghdad. Most of these provinces are almost predominantly Shia.
So you can see how the levels of trust in religious leaders have plummeted over the years. Of course, there's different definitions of which religious religious leaders are talking about. There's also the question that I'll come back to in a second that I started this presentation with of, you know, we know, you know, this to be true. We know that this is a trend in Iraq. Know that there's a turn against religious rule and in politics.
But at the same time is still a highly conservative society who at the end of the day was listening to the protest, to the sermons during the protest movement. So there is still a big question mark about what exactly is happening in Iraq. There is a lot more public opinion, dead on or off, that pretty much says the same thing. But in my interviews as well and in my time in Iraq, you can sense that this has happened and that opinions have plateaued more or less now.
They're not on a decline, you know, until they plummet completely. But you can see that it is quite, quite a distinction over the years. So this is all the context in terms of public opinion and how the you know, how everyone in Iraq feels and where the clerics are in terms of their relationship with the state before the October protest movement or the party movement,
as it's called in Iraq. I mean, I don't even know how to begin to describe this movement because it's it's happened so recently that I I have an adviser who always recommends never studying a protest movement until you're moved 15 years faster so that you can reduce all the all the emotion and the energy around it. But this is quite reason to happened in the fall of 2019 and the winter of 2020 was cut short by the COVID pandemic.
It is the largest anti-government protest movement in Iraq's post-world three history. Destabilise the country for months on end. But it was limited to Baghdad and the Shia majority governorates in southern Iraq. There really weren't protests in Sunni areas or in Kurdish areas for various reasons that I'm happy to talk about.
But what's really interesting is that in addition to them being predominantly Shia protozoans of the shell population, they also had a very religious dynamic to them in the sense that anyone who's been to Iraq for pilgrimage, which I'm sure some of you have to know that there's this particular environment of almost the festival where people are cooking and providing free food and free housing. And there is these plays and these cultural productions on the street.
And this was something that was occurring during the protest movement. And I actually saw it again recently when Iraqis were hosting the Gulf Cup as well. It's, you know, every protest movement or every public event in Iraq takes on a religious character inadvertently, because this is how people know how to come together. It's how they how they operate in the public sphere.
And so I remember watching this and seeing, like, you know, green flags representing Imam Hussein and Shia Islam and just these productions that felt very strongly religious. At the same time, as you can see, the demands on the on the Turkish restaurant, the building over here, or various demands being held by protesters of wanting to separate religion from the state and wanting no more Islamist parties and just having these somewhat contradictory but not really contradictory demands,
because this could also be just a cultural production. But in addition to the way that they express themselves, there is also the issue of everyone watching and waiting for the Friday sermons of Grand Ayatollah Sistani, whose representatives? There are two representatives, and they took turns delivering sermons every Friday. And I can tell you that every single person in Iraq and every single Iraqi outside was waiting to hear what they were going to say.
We are waiting for them to shepherd Iraq in a way through what was happening. And protesters were mainly interested in will the clerics side with us or the side of the state. Now, the clerics that are sorry, the protestors themselves and the activists were very much divided on what they wanted. So you have an entire group of people that are very revolutionary minded.
So they would challenge the typical things you would have seen in the Arab Spring, like a shot during the 4th of July, which is, you know, entire engine change. And then you had very reformist people who had the inclination of having a new electoral law or who wanted to the prime minister to resign or something that worked within whatever institutions that Iraq already had.
In my own research on this, I can say that the reformists were outnumbered by the revolutionaries, but the reformists were also much, much more articulate and were able to take control of of creating these demands and writing them. And that's because a lot of the reformers came from Iraqi civil society and Iraqi civil society took on the leadership role. I mean, keep in mind, this is a very big protest movement. Not everyone in here is a civil society activist, is dedicated their entire life.
It's just a regular protest movement for different segments of society showed up, some politicised, some being, you know, from the soldiers movement, some being, you know, everyday students, people who felt compelled to join the mobilisation because of family or other or pressure or just simply out of a sense of it being a historic moment. And so its demands were articulated by a different set of people as well.
So when I spoke to the various protesters to tell them, you know, I'm very confused by your demands. On one hand, you say you want a secular state, you want you don't want any more Islamist parties, you don't want any more clerics involved in politics. And at the same time, why are you waiting for Grand Ayatollah Sistani to tell you what to do? And I was genuinely confused and I spoke to them. They also said, did you lasha, you know, did you actually care?
So I have I have so many calls. It's from the fact these two. One activist told me, even though I am secular and a liberal, I still believe there is common ground between me and the religious establishment.
And that speaks to a sort of pragmatism, a pragmatic relationship that developed between elite activists and between the clerical establishment, where the activists realise the clerics are very powerful and the clerics realise that their reputation needed rehabilitating and that these were good allies for them.
The other quote is from an activist in Basra, and she said, after October, it was very necessary that we follow the speeches of the religious establishment because it was the engine of movement for many people. Each speech was support which supported the revolution was a source of strength for us. The sermons are important to us so that we can gain an audience.
So they wanted the formation of the religious establishment to provide them with an audience and to provide them, in a way, also with a path forward. And what's really funny is some of the other activists I remember distinctly speaking to a woman from Kosovo at the end of the interview told me, by the way, I'm a Christian and you know, the way I'm not surprised knowing Iraqis, you know, there's different layers of leadership.
But we went through an entire interview and only in the end, she said, this idea of how we go about it makes it a lot more interesting to hear that you've been listening and waiting. So it's the role of the religious establishment at this time was I mean, it's really summarised by the side but says that the clerics called for calm. What they did was that they more or less suggested ways to resolve the situation, which was basically going through whatever constitutional means and mechanisms are.
Can they suggested the Prime Minister step down, which happened early elections, new opt after a law, existing mechanisms that were definitely more reformist and revolutionary. At the end of the day, I mean, we were talking earlier, various people about whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about Iraq. And this is what I go off script again. And, you know, it's been 20 years since the 2003 war. Iraq is rife with corruption, you know, still not very great services in the country.
Education is poor in the country, the longest government formation process in Iraq's history. At the same time, I think I drive a lot of optimism about Iraq's future from the fact that there are still democratic mechanisms that Iraqis tend to overlook and to not value despite them still occurring.
The fact that we had a protest movement, which at the end of it of Prime Minister stepped down, is a pretty big deal for a country that had a war in 2003, a sectarian war in 2006, another sectarian war in 2014. It's basically only had five years of actual stability. And the fact that a protest movement led to the resignation of a prime minister, early elections, a new electoral law, protest parties emerging from that from that movement drawn in politics, gaining seats in parliament.
And I can very easily tell you all the obstacles that these people face in the fight for inclusion and representation in Iraq. But at the same time, I tried to have a balanced approach, and I actually have to, because I am Iraqi. And if I don't believe that the state will will survive without the need for a hugely destabilising revolution, then I've just come to more war and more more instability.
And I just I don't want to see the country go through that. But I also think there's a lot of unfair analysis tainted by the 2003 war, which is the sense that whatever happened in Iraq in 2003 was imposed by a foreign occupier. And so it's not organic. And therefore, anything emerging from it is also impure and inorganic and doomed to fail. And I see this a lot from people with particular policy backgrounds, and I'll just maybe it wasn't from who exactly, but I hear this discourse a lot.
And as the 2003/20 anniversary comes up, I'm hearing it more and more. And this desire to really distance, distance oneself from there off whether as an academic or a policy writer, has grown stronger because of this implication that if you write anything about Iraq or you treat it as a normal country, then in a way, you're you're saying that what happened in 2003 was okay and you're an apologist for the war.
But I do think it's time we move on past this mentality because it's negatively impacting Iraqis. And Iraq hasn't I mean, it's been poisoned by the 2003 war in many ways, but it hasn't. It's still surviving. And I don't think this kind of mentality really serves the country. So the point of optimism for me was that this did happen. We did have an early election.
The early election did see new political parties going back to the story of the religious establishment and and the civil society activists.
They have a larger role to play in this, of course. And I think that of course, I think that the reason that they shepherded the country towards this calm situation and supported the protesters and their demands, but also regulated the kinds of demands that got a lot of got more attention than others is because on one hand, they wanted to capture the goodwill of the people once they lost it.
Clerics all recognised that the mood in Iraq has changed, that, you know, they were revered in 2003, but they're no longer revered because of this association with politics. But it seemed to them, and I think they use this as an opportunity to recapture some of that lost popularity. They still have to do a lot more, but I think it's one step.
But the other one is that what people tend to forget about the clerics in Iraq, because that's the most important thing to them, is preserving the religious establishment itself. So the actual institution that they work and there are academic institutions where they teach their offices, their seminaries, their students, it's a centuries old institution. It means a lot to them and they want to make sure it exists. In a stable and secure environment.
And for that reason, Iraq's stability is very important to them. And sometimes they make very tough decisions during times of authoritarianism and are willing to overlook state predation just to keep the religious establishment safe. So in light of this, they really don't want to avoid revolution. They wanted to avoid civil war because they didn't want an environment of instability.
And keep in mind, going to what I said earlier about them having lived under Saddam Hussein and that really being the formative years for them, that motivated them to pursue stability. And so I so they wanted to keep this very informal and non-academic, but I just wanted to bring up, I think, one interesting finding from my book project that I wanted to share. And I'll walk everyone through this.
I collected the sermons of the of the two representatives I told you about from 2017 up until the beginning of of the pandemic. And I also collected the protest dates for various protests that occurred in Iraq over that time. And I wanted to see how sermons differed during when they occurred on a Friday following a protest movement versus the one in which the protest movement didn't occur. So in other words, how much does their rhetoric change when there are protests?
And what I found interesting is that they tend to if you look at the far right, they tend to acknowledge. So that's a positive association of the protest times that we've been following on that side. So they tend to acknowledge the grievances of people. They'll have words like anger, ignorance, emptiness, unemployment. It's an acknowledgement of grievances. At the same time, they'll also employ the language of institutions like protester quota, peaceful government election.
These mechanisms of stability, more interestingly, than any of these is, you know, I'm sure everyone is aware that there is this rhetoric of oppression within Shias and that's so accessible. The entire story of Shiism is built around revolution. I mean, the label Khomeini and most other rallying people was through this language and it's so easy to use it. And it was not only absent, but it was negatively correlated with like they specifically chose not to use it or in protest.
So the language of Shiism revolts toppling and that is because they do, for lack of a better word, have a status quo bias. They want stability. And so they'll avoid the avoid instigating events that will harm their institution or bring instability to the country. I animated this, but then I forgot to keep the animation and they said them. So all my conclusions are other ones, but I'll go through them with you.
So I think, yeah, these are the takeaways, you know, you later on go on here trying to remember I was talking about this time I would say to always remember that 2003 was a shock to the system for both clerics and for the civil society. I talked about how it was a shock to the system for clerics, but for civil society in Iraq, which I spoke of last today, I'll give you a very quick background.
So Iraq had, you know, a very typical flourishing civil society prior to the Baathist era, doing pretty well in the region. And then when both of them occurred and when Saddam Hussein particularly rose to power, it was all civil society was subsumed under the state. So organisations either became state and party organisations or they stopped existing.
Some of them went underground, some of them went to Kurdistan after 1991 when it became autonomous from semi-autonomous from the rest of or autonomous at that time from the rest of Iraq. And for the most part, though, it really was decimated in the Baathist era and 2003 was a huge shock in the sense that there was the sudden influx of money from the US led coalition to try to rebuild civil society in Iraq. And the thinking behind this was that civil society leads to democratisation.
So let's put money towards groups that work on human rights and democracy and like women's rights. And the huge influx of money led to a lot of corruption. Unsurprisingly, people created organisations just to get grants and then they disappeared and they became ghost organisations.
So if you look at Iraq's NGO directorate, which registers every civil society organisation, your first glimpse are you'll say, wow, 4000 organisations registered in Iraq must be the most vibrant civil society scene in the region. When you go and you call them up or tried to call them up, as I did, so many disconnected lines, so many ghost organisations, I don't think they'd be more than 500 in the whole country. That being said, I do think the civil society scene is vibrant.
I just think it's faces an uphill struggle in many ways. And it is there's it's really difficult to work with them because of this path of both organisations and this past issue with corruption and how it was dealt with in the media aftermath of 2003. You know, one of the legacies of the war in that sense is that it was too fast in the sense that it didn't really let them emerge in in a more organic way.
But we still have a great civil society in Iraq. A handful of organisations are doing very important work. But like like the clerics, this is all new for them. And you can see civil society is quite divided between the old generation of civil society that had gone underground or had gone to Iraqi Kurdistan.
And the new generation, which is very much you know, it grew up in the mid 2000s and had their four foundational years under various sectarian war as an occupation and have different, you know, to them the worst possible thing is having corruption. The worst possible thing is politicisation of religion, whereas this older generation, it's mainly they're communists, so different mindsets. But I think that's always an important thing to keep in mind.
The religious establishment itself is very much in a period of adjustment. 20 years is a long time for an individual. It's a very short time for a centuries old institution. This is the first thing that they can really do interfaith outreach. And, you know, now various U.N. organisations are looking for them.
And in terms particularly after what happened to minorities, after ISIS, you're looking to them to have a more of a leadership role in creating peacebuilding in the country and engaging in interfaith work. This is all really new to them and they're learning how to do it. And, you know, in very short time span, I've seen more and more clerics emerge that take on these responsibilities. But this wasn't something they had done before.
And I think if you're thinking about what the future of religion looks like in Iraq, it's going to be a lot more of that public facing cleric. And then clerics and activists have this online formative years. So I told you, clerics are always very, very much older than the Iraqi population. This has always been the case in Iraq, because it takes 20 years to even reach a level where you become someone who can possibly be an emulated cleric.
So you're already I mean, I always compare it to doing a Ph.D. and being in academia, but it's even longer than that. So there's always going to be a disparity between you and the population. And keep in mind, Iraqis are so young. I think most are born after 2003. So you're looking at an average age in the institution. Of being in their fifties and sixties and on the street being like in your early twenties.
There's completely different mindsets here. And these are the activists and these are the clerics. So naturally there's going to be a misalignment there.
But I think this disconnect doesn't even matter as much as the fact that as Iraqis grow more anxious about the state of their country and as they protest more and they seek reform more, there's going to be a natural they might be pitted against clerics in the sense that clerics will always want to preserve stability and activists might want to challenge the system a bit more. And so this might be a source of contention in the future.
But what we have right now is a very strategic relationship that's based on the realisation that they both want to manage their relationship with the state better and that they find allies in each other and Shia clerics. At the end of the day, I started this presentation by telling you there are independent of this, they consider themselves independent of the state because they have their own resources.
There's an asterisk on this right now because they do get a lot of money from the endowments now and they get a lot of tax breaks. But the way they define themselves as a democratic institution, they always say, you know, people vote with their feet with us. They give us money or their representatives. So public opinion does matter to them and they will try to appeal to the protesters.
And at the same time, a lot of this upper middle class civil society activists recognise that the average Iraqi is actually pretty conservative and doesn't want to immediately jump into this very modern Iraq that has these values that are, you know, talking about at to impose values, those that want to really impose something on a community unless it forms organically.
And they need to have these kinds of partnerships and alliances with powerful actors who have reached with the government in order to do this. And so I find this relationship between the two quite fascinating.
But I didn't realise that these ties are being formed until I spoke to both sides and finally told them I really don't understand what secular state your after one year on your so yeah when you willing to interact with clerics but it's actually what civil society does best when we build bridges and partnerships across. So I hope this presented a view of so many actors in Iraq. I'm sorry if I missed anything by way of like explaining an institution or a subject.
I'm much more eager for the Q&A than I ever am for the actual presentation, so I'm happy to answer any and all questions. Thank you so much. This was fascinating. Some of you might know I have a tiny bit of interest in and I found it very interesting.
And I really appreciate the way you break out of like the influence of religion in politics as either being ideological, like someone like some religious leaders get involved because they believe this is the right way to go or like out of self-interest, they do this because they're allied with this or that political faction. So you bring the institutional aspect into it.
There is an establishment that they're embedded in, and for any reason it might not be in their financial interest, but they they are inclined just naturally to preserve that institution. So I. They like focusing on that variable, if I may add, for recalling the scientific theory is actually very crucial. But at the same time, and like rightly so, it introduces a lot of.
Confusion, so to speak, in the analysis, because it all of a sudden opens up a lot of other possibilities that we might see on the ground. For instance. What kind of harm are we talking about? When when when you were, for example, speaking about the religious leadership, is wary of the harm that the protest or a revolution might cause the institution. They're not in like formal politics technically, so they're not like technically fully supported by the state.
As you were saying, they see themselves as an independent institution. So what is the harm in not seeing the state at the very at the worst case scenario, toppled and changed? So at that institutional level, what are they wary of? Could couldn't could it not be the opposite case as it was and to evolutionary Iran that the religious establishment actually gained a lot of support because they joined or met the opposition against the Shah?
So what is what is that kind of like advantage, disadvantage by cost benefit when we're talking at an institutional level? And but another sort of alleyway that this opens, this approach is. Aren't they wary of the opposite outcome of becoming too engaged in formal politics and then having what happens to Iranian, how that happened to them, which is like complete state control monitoring, just like bureaucratisation at top down and basically losing their control.
Why they are like they have it like a very safe cushion financially and politically, but losing their independence that they're so proud of. So, yeah, just to kick off the discussion. Oh, no, they're really amazing clusters. And as Maryam was asking them, I got really excited because they're all questions that I like, I love to grapple with.
So I'll go through them before I forget anything, please ask. So when it comes to institutions as, you know, as acting as one unit versus, you know, how ideology motivates or how how strategic incentives motivate. And a lot of the political science literature and a lot of it focuses on like the Catholic Church,
where we get a lot of theorising about how clerics behave. There is a big sense of view of incentives like monetary incentives or preservation of self rather than institution as an incentive and motivating clerics to participate in different ways. You know, there's a book about how the Catholic Church in Argentina was.
Against the protesters and turned against the revolution because they had such strong relations with the state, they wanted to protect their interests and that they weren't worried about people converting out of their faith group, which is different in other countries in Latin America. So I thought a lot about the ideological and the strategic incentives of individual clerics, and particularly as I worked on the larger book, which dealt with a lot of case studies.
I mean, this is this is the very end of of where my book is. And I recently started engaging with it because I didn't want to write a book about protests and revolution in Iraq without looking at, you know, the case that everyone is thinking about when they're looking at the country today.
But if you look at the cases historically, what's really interesting is that you can find clerics who are on completely different sides of the ideological spectrum when it comes to how they perceive their relationship with the state and who will still be motivated to protect the religious establishment. Because to them, that is the most important thing of all. And I you know, I started thinking about how people interact within their own institutions.
And there is the sense of, I call it institutional responsibility, where it's not something that we study a lot or talk about when we talk about individual incentives for behaving in certain ways. But a lot of clerics with different ideologies, with different strategies, some of them at the expense of their own well-being, want to make sure that the religious establishment is preserved and perseveres and and lives on.
And I actually don't find this very surprising, because I actually think I'm not an economist, clearly, because I don't think humans are purely rational in a very, you know, a very directional way. But I do think that I can see different institutions, not just religious ones, for example, where their members care about the institution overall and work to preserve it.
And I didn't see this across the years, across you know, you have times in which there are allies of the state, like during this time period. And then you have times of like not terribly predatory, but, you know, okay, relationship with the state and in times of completely predatory relationships or predatory predatory behaviour from the state. And despite these completely different incentives for self-preservation, a lot of elite clerics.
So it really depends on their position in the system, care about the preservation of the religious establishment. Which leads to your next question about, you know, why would they think that the protesters, if they became revolutionaries and created this new Iraq, why would it be bad for the religious establishment? It's nothing about the protesters themselves. They could you know, they could be shaking hands and having dinner with these protesters every day before this revolution takes off.
And they still would not believe in revolution being quick and easy. I think they're just very pragmatic, and I think that has a large part to do with them having lived under authoritarianism and seen unsuccessful revolutions in the past. So they have I mean, in many ways, they have a very strong political science like view of what a revolution looks like and the cost of a revolution. So they don't have they don't have the belief that it will actually be a smooth process.
So it's less about the ideals of a revolution and less about the people leading it and whether they believe in them or not. As much as they know that in Iraq, a country that's seen two civil wars in the last two decades and various other wars before that revolution, is it going to be quick and painless? And I think really that's what motivates them. And I think I missed the third question, though. I don't think it had like a number of questions.
That was just a general thing about the British over. But how are they not worried about the state of state control?
Okay. So this is it's funny that you bring up Iran because I always ask clerics, like, are you you know, your students complain that they can't get a job teaching at a university, even though they've spent 30 years studying because you don't have a certificate to give them because no one recognises like the you know, no one recognises that a grand ayatollah says this guy is, you know, very informed and has this knowledge of Islam.
So why aren't you thinking about having an alternate institution that can provide certificates? And they told me plainly, you know, our worst fear is to be like Al-Azhar or to be like home, where it becomes so institutionalised that the states can actually come in and make decisions for us. So they would rather be selective about, you know, self-selection is what happens if you self-select into the system. You know, you're not getting a certificate out of it.
You know that you can be as educated as a PhD holder in Iraq, but or more, and you won't be recognised officially as this. And it's I think they're keeping this this they want to keep this because it's part of what keeps the state away. So they're very, very wary of that. But then, like. You need to be affiliated with an Islamic or Islamist party would not amount to that level of they've never considered.
That's the thing they always push against that. It's Islamist parties who are like, oh, we trace our roots to the religious establishment. Oh, there is a photo of me sitting next to a cleric. We're doing this and that. We never officially give it. They I mean, I think there was a brief moment in the mid 2000 where it seemed like they were pushing for a particular party.
But I think the lesson has been learned that it's the cost of thought is not is is not worth a needless essentially because they they do enjoy a very good position when it comes to the state. I mean, Grand Ayatollah Sistani actually gets to appoint to the head of the Shia religious endowment, so he gets to appoint someone within the state.
It's a very strong position, if I might use, of my privileges moderating this for just two more minutes and then open it to the audience and thank you for all this. This and this makes it so much more interesting to learn, I think. And elephants in the presentation was the influence of Iran. You did mention it, but. How much is the behaviour of the clerical Shia establishment in Iraq affected by Iranian support or disagreements with Iran?
Like the we said, like faction was and but was it during the movement as well that people were chanting against Iran's influence? Right. Yes. So. Yeah. What is Iran? Such a tough question. I joke that I have an Iraq bingo sheet for every presentation I do and I and Iran. Iranian influence is always the one of the cause. And I think you very smartly noticed that I kept out of the presentation. It's because it's a conversation that truly never ends. There are so many layers to it.
I think one of the one of the layers, I mean. Yes. So during the protest movement, there was a very strong anti Iranian sentiment. There were not just shouts against Iran, but there was also the burning of Iranian consulates in Karbala and in Najaf, which is astounding because these are the centres of Shiism. And so from a public sense there is a very strong anti-Iranian sentiment.
And to me genuinely I and we saw this again and by the way, during the Gulf Cup because Iran made a big fuss about how dare the Arabs call it the Arabian Gulf Cup when it should be called the Persian Gulf, because it made everyone in Iraq very angry, including some people who actually, you know, were quite friendly towards Iran. So it was very bad PR for Iran in Iraq.
But it made me realise that, you know, in Iraq, on the street, how very easily this the same racism that Saddam Hussein used to deport people in the eighties, the same racism that he built an entire war around can be so easily activated by any enterprising, you know, political elite and obviously don't.
Average citizens separates an entire country from separates it into, you know, its leadership and its population and all these things that people tend to generalise and stereotype in the heights of passion and particularly nationalist passion.
But I think one thing that we never talk about and when it comes to Iraq is that this is actually something that this anti Iranian intervention sentiment goes so easily with this anti Iranian racism that you can see in Iraq that can actually it really does remind me of the Baathist era and very in very terrible ways.
I mean, and the reason I bring this up is because when I was working on Najaf and working on the religious establishment in Najaf and I told the story of earlier, one of the things I did is I went through this biographical dictionary of clerics from like 1900 till like very recently to see like, what does Najaf look like? Who are the people who live here and study here?
And, you know, I tried to divide them by my nationality, like how many Iraqis are are in Najaf because there is this big sentiment. And it's true that Najaf actually was had a lot more Iranian clerics or clerics of Iranian origin up until 1960s with. With muscle hacking being very insistent on making more Iraqi clerics present. And so, like more sorry, Arab Iraqi clerics present.
And at some point, it's like that sense of national identity and ethnic identity became so muddled on that city, I honestly couldn't code anymore. Who is who is Iranian and who is Iraqi? Because if someone is born in Najaf and lived in Najaf their entire life, but their family had emigrated from, you know, from somewhere, something like what do you call this person as versus a like an Arab who like studied in Najaf and then went and studied in Iran and then stayed the rest of their life there.
And it's something about that city. It's not like any other city in Iraq. The identity is so fluid in that I mean, I think get it then racism getting out of hand and that city could be something that's very terrible for for Iraq. And that's really where the sense of, you know, these things happened during the protest movement were one thing in Baghdad. And like Basra and all these places that had you didn't have the edge of identity.
But when it came to Najaf, I think it was completely different. And I think this fluid identity still exists today. If you if you go to Najaf, there isn't like guns. I mean, Sistani himself is, as they say, Iranian and doesn't even have an Iraqi passport. So and yet he is like the most powerful person in Iraq and he's not a source of Iranian political intervention in Iraq. So it really defies easy description, I would say. Thank you so much.