JOLLY DAYS

Understanding Iraq

For comprehensive understanding of the journey of the Muslim world you go to Bernard Lewis, but If there is an expert on Iraq itself, it is Fouad Ajami. If he is being interviewed I always stop and listen — I feel he knows the subject and is trying to honorably parse the terrain. It doesn't hurt that Ajami is a Lebanese Shiite and respected by all the players. In these times of ideological simplicity, nuanced understanding is practically revolutionary. This excellent, balanced NYT review of Ajami's book, as well as that of another by an equally thoughtful author — the son of John Kenneth Galbraith — who is an expert on the Kurdish predicament, is well worth a look.

[Ajami's] core argument is that the trouble we are seeing in Iraq results from the profound unwillingness of Sunni Arabs in Iraq and elsewhere to accept the rise to power of Shiites in what is, after all, their own country. Shiite Arabs have long been second-class citizens, repressed and kept from political power even where, as in Iraq, they are a numerical majority…Shiite leaders have begun fitfully to come to terms with what it means to exercise secular political power in the name of a group that is, after all, a religious denomination. [Ajami] describes a meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani — one of the first such accounts to appear in English — and is impressed by the leader’s light touch when it comes to politics.