The Gertrude Bell Jar

Longish Thoughts On the Iraqi Constitution

[I started this awhile ago and just got around to finishing it today. I haven't checked to see if we have a count yet from the voting yesterday. It would be pretty funny if it turned out I spilt this much verbiage on a non-Constitution, wouldn't it? Although as I understand it, the parts I'm writing about aren't really the main issues for those who oppose passage so might not change much in the event of a revision.]

Bearing the cautionary tale of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906 firmly in mind, (wherein A. Iranians created a secular constitutional monarchy; B. Conservative clerics managed to insert the implementation of Shari’a canon law anyway; C. The Shari’a provision was ignored in practice; D. Iranian women were screwed anyway, since members of parliament were still the same sexist bastards the day after the Revolution as they were the day before), here are my thoughts about what the draft Iraqi Constitution might mean for women. In other words, I am assuming for the purposes of this discussion that the draft Constitution both accurately reflects the collective intent of Iraqis and will actually be enforced more or less in good faith (as opposed to ignored by whatever group manages to seize power in the event, for example, that national security under rule of law deteriorates utterly or is never secured).

The full text of the proposed Constitution is here.

Article (1): The Republic of Iraq is an independent, sovereign nation, and the system of rule in it is a democratic, federal, representative (parliamentary) republic.

Article (2):

1st -- Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation:

(a) No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam.

(b) No law can be passed that contradicts the principles of democracy.

(c) No law can be passed that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms outlined in this constitution.

2nd -- This constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people and the full religious rights for all individuals and the freedom of creed and religious practices.

The Constitution follows the preferred form as outlined in the Rand document (outlining a method for acknowledging the cultural and legal historical influence of Islam while preventing theocracy in a democratizing Muslim state--written in reference to the Afghan constitution, see link in side bar), identifying Islam as "a" rather than "the" basic source of legislation.

So what does "undisputed rules of Islam" mean? Taken literally according to the meaning in English, it would seem to authorize review of legislation only on the most broadly agreed-upon principles of Islam. There are 4 major orthodox schools of jurisprudence in Sunni Islam, and 2 major and many other minor schools of Shia jurisprudence. Very few specific legal issues in shari’a law are "undiputed" between these various legal traditions. In earlier translations of the draft, the locution "essential verities of Islamic law" appeared instead of "undisputed rules." Does this reflect a change in the language in the original, or the vagaries of translation? "Essential verities" could be interpreted as closer to what role democratic reformers want Islam to play in the state, a sort of general legal and cultural background recognizing Islamic beliefs about justice and morality rather than the adoption of some literalist version of Islamic law based inflexibly on one school or the other. Both locutions, in other words, appear to be intended to limit the influence of specific historical legal iterations of shari’a and subject secular legisation to review only against the broadest principles enshrined in shari’a. However, without knowing anything at all about what the original Arabic actually is and might mean in Iraqi or Islamic legal history, I find it difficult to know for sure what the precise wording of Article 2 1a means. It may simply be a formulaic reference to Islamic canon law for example. I had hoped that someone with the appropriate linguistic and legal expertise would have elaborated on this in some public forum or other by now, but unfortunately I haven't come across any such so far.

I'm even more at sea with Article (2) 2nd: I have no idea what it means in practice to "guarantee the Islamic identity of the majority" while also guaranteeing free exercise of religion for non-Muslims. My best guess is that this is meant as a kind of reassurance or substitute for the habitual requirement in most Muslim states that the head of state be a Muslim, which is not stipulated in this constitution. The notion of Muslim headship as a basic requirement for the legitimacy of any person or body seeking to rule over Muslims dates from the earliest years of Islamic civilization (see my brief summary here). It is striking that it is omitted here, and this omission can I think be interpreted as a very positive move towards realizing the kind of nonsectarianism and tolerance for diversity that is spoken of so forcefully in the preamble. Perhaps guaranteeing the Islamic identity of the people is meant as a gesture towards swapping out the Islamic character of the people for that of ruler as the basis of legitimacy? This would be consonant with the articulation of the people (as opposed to God) as the source of authority in the state:

Article (5): The law is sovereign, the people are the source of authority and its legitimacy, which they exercise through direct, secret ballot and its constitutional institutions.

And now is as good a time as any to begin addressing the frequent claim that this Constitution authorizes an "Islamist state." The Islamist position is that God is the only source of legitimacy in a state or its law. Current and former Islamist states have therefore put clergy in charge of all three branches of the state, the judicial, legislative, and executive. (The Islamic Republic of Iran accomplished this end through the creation of the Revolutionary Council, a clerical body which of course has no equivalent in the proposed Iraqi Constitution, and which was given oversight and control of every function of government; I'm not sure that the Taleban ever bothered to commit the details of its rule to paper, but my impression is the structure of government, such as it was, was pretty much akin to rule by military junta). This Constitution includes clergy only in the judicial branch, and even there perhaps not to the exclusion of secular judges. Even if the worst happens, and the judiciary ends up populated exclusively with Sadr clones who willfully ignore all the international human rights norms written into this Constitution in favor of their extremist minority interpretation of Islam, they still would not be able to somehow create from the bench a free-ranging religious police, such as that which exists in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim states, to harass and terrify people in the streets and take up supposed wrongdoers for punishment, nor could they legislate new restrictions, such as not permitting women to leave their homes unaccompanied by a male guardian, as was the case in Afghanistan. A Sadrist judiciary may, in other words, very much want to create all kinds of new "crimes" and execute "apostate" women and religious minorities daily in the public square, but will be powerless to do so without a state apparatus set up to deliver victims to them. It is possible that Iraqis will one day fly in the face of all available public opinion polls about extremist Islam and vote for a legislature and executive that promises to play this bloody role, but in that case something will have gone very badly awry in the whole society. Talebanization cannot somehow arise from "loopholes" in this Constitution, there simply isn't one that would allow clergy under its own power to take over the whole government from the bench.

All of which is not to say that conservative Islamic judges alone can't do women significant harm if they choose; they certainly can. The conservative end of traditional Islam does not deserve to be tarred with the brush of the near-psychotic Taliban, but it disadvantages women plenty nonetheless. The unequal practices of polygamy, in which one man may marry up to four woman, and of divorce (in which a man may divorce his wife unilaterally through a simple oral formulation, whereas a woman must sue in court to divorce her husband, and only then on a few very narrowly defined bases) are comparatively rare but hang like the sword of Damocles over the heads of wives in traditional Muslim societies, and give men tremendous leverage in any marriage, the more so because Islamic law also automatically awards him sole custody of any children (once they reach a certain age, 7 and 9 respectively for boys and girls IIRC) following a divorce, and does not require alimony or any sort of post-divorce support for women of any kind, a significant economic threat in a part of world that does not have many jobs of any kind but particularly not for women, and in which a woman's family may refuse to take her in if her ex-husband is willing to allege that she was unfaithful to him or some such. From this position of power a husband may of course impose any number of restrictions on women in his household regardless of what any civil law says about where they may go and what they may do. There are other ways in which women are disadvantaged in Islamic law, such as a woman being entitled to inherit only a half-share of her parents' property as compared to her brothers, or counting as only half a witness in court, but the hard center of women's oppression in Muslim societies is family law. And some tribal customs regarding marriage, women, and family are even worse, which is why there was such a dispute about whether tribal courts would be formalized in this Constitution. I don't think that it does (reading it over now I'm not positive, see Article 43 2nd quoted below), but in any event, as I noted previously, the Constitution does promise to subject tribal customs to review for conformity with Constitutional principals regarding human rights.

And what are those principles that most affect women?

Article (14): Iraqis are equal before the law without discrimination because of sex, ethnicity, nationality, origin, colour, religion, sect, belief, opinion or social or economic status.

In a straightforward reading, this provision would seem to pre-empt the "half-a-witness" rule for women. It also would seem to be intended to identify women as fully included in all of the following rights as articulated, which include:

Article (15): Every individual has the right to life and security and freedom and cannot be deprived of these rights or have them restricted except in accordance to the law and based on a ruling by the appropriate judicial body. [My note: The inclusion of the words "male and female" should not be taken to mean that women are not included in any statements that do not include these words. The locution is very similar to that in the Koran, when Muhammad repetitively says: "O believers, men and women …" and then lists their duties and so forth. Muhammad adopted this formulation after a group of women asked him whether everything he addressed to believers was meant to apply to them, and Muhammad said that indeed it was, and used the "male and female" formulation thereafter for emphasis. It is included here probably for emphasis as well; and of course Article (14) explicitly underlines women's equal status under the law.]

Article (16): Equal opportunity is a right guaranteed to all Iraqis, and the state shall take the necessary steps to achieve this.

Article (17): 1st. Each person has the right to personal privacy as long as it does not violate the rights of others or general morality.

Article (20): Citizens, male and female, have the right to participate in public matters and enjoy political rights, including the right to vote and run as candidates.

Article (22): 1st. Work is a right for all Iraqis in a way that guarantees them a good life.

Article (29): 4th. Violence and abuse in the family, school and society shall be forbidden.

Article (30): 1st. The state guarantees social and health insurance, the basics for a free and honorable life for the individual and the family--especially children and women--and works to protect them from illiteracy, fear and poverty and provides them with housing and the means to rehabilitate and take care of them. This shall be regulated by law.

Article (34): 1st. Education is a main factor for the progress of society and it is a right guaranteed by the state. It is mandatory in the primary school and the state guarantees fighting illiteracy.
2nd. Free education is a right for Iraqis in all its stages.

Article (35): 3rd. Forced labour, slavery and the commerce in slaves is forbidden, as is the trading in women or children or the sex trade.

Article (43): 2nd. The state is keen to advance Iraqi tribes and clans and it cares about their affairs in accordance with religion, law and honourable human values in a way that contributes to a developing society and it forbids tribal customs that run contrary to human rights.

Article (44): All individuals have the right to enjoy the rights stated in international human rights agreements and treaties endorsed by Iraq that don't run contrary to the principles and rules of this constitution.

Article (45): Restricting or limiting any of the freedoms and liberties stated in this constitution may only happen by, or according to, law and as long as this restriction or limitation does not undermine the essence of the right or freedom.

As you can see, no position is taken in the Constitution on the crucial matter of family law, save the one provision which seems designed to explicitly invalidate the Islamic justification for wife-beating, (Article 29th, 4th, quoted above). And the guarantees about rights to education and work seem to address the assertions made by some that the inclusion of Islamic law in any capacity in the Constitution will prevent women from working without the permission of their husbands or girls going to school and so forth. We may derive some comfort from the references to international human rights treaties, since Iraq is a signatory to both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and CEDAW, the latter especially since the rights of women within the family are articulated in some detail (though see my earlier caveat).

Many Muslims, including some clergy and Islamic law scholars, have sought and found amelioration for the unequal status of women in traditional Islam from within Islamic law and tradition (and indeed women's rights within marriage are better in some existing orthodox Islamic schools than others), and are working towards an understanding of Islam that will bring it into conformity with international human rights standards including those touching on the status of women. And some quite powerful clerics such as Sistani seem at least willing to bend Islamic practices to meet secular requirements, and to acknowledge the force of secular law and particularly international human rights standards in deliberating about how Muslims should live in "modernity."

The crucial question is, who will end up on the court? Because obviously an ultra-conservative like Sadr would be willing to overturn all human rights guarantees articulated in this Constitution and by reference to international rights treaties by finding them in violation of Article 2 a (despite the clear intention of Article 2 c, that the rights and freedoms outlined in the Constitution, should limit the authority of Islamic law) without batting an eye. (And apparently conservative clerics regard the rights for women implied in Article 44 threatening enough to their agenda to have attempted, unsuccessfully I am pleased to note, to have it excised). Even less radical clerics might jib at apparently privileging those treaties over Islamic law when it comes down to cases.

The constitution stipulates that members of the Iraqi version of the Supreme Court shall be experts in "Islamic law and law," but it leaves the matter of how they shall be chosen to enabling legislation. It would be a rare individual who could combine true expertise in both fields of law; will there be both secular and Islamic judges on this court? Will there be a certain number of seats allotted for each type, and which gets a majority? Or will each seat be filled separately so that you could possibly end up with a heavy clerical majority? Will judges be selected by the legislature, or the president, or what? Will there be a separate council appointed just for this purpose, which would leave the door open to a self-perpetuating aristocracy far removed from the society's beliefs about Islam (as is the case in Iran for example). And indeed any method of selection which does not somehow guarantee that the court will more or less reflect popular rather than extremist interpretations of Islam by allowing the electorate a pretty good amount of influence over selection will be vulnerable to producing an out-of-step court, possibly in a very conservative direction.

And in all truth while most ordinary Muslims do not believe that their religion does or should contradict human rights principles, the majority in the Arab world at least do not actually want full equality for women and so do not seem to interpret personal and family status in terms of human rights at all (see some pretty typical stats here), and to the extent that this Constitution creates a truly democratic body, this hesitation about women's rights will most likely be reflected in its institutions and law one way or another. Articles 17 and 43 2nd go a little way towards articulating an understanding of private, customary practices as public issues subject to process of law, but the existing cultural understanding of what is a public issue and what is a family issue may prevent them from being interpreted to women's advantage. It may be that many improvements in the status of women will have to be articulated explicitly in legislation rather than left for the courts to find in the Constitution.

Which leads us to the greatest weakness of the Constitution in my view (with respect to women at least): the provision which requires that any new piece of legislation be reviewed first by the judiciary before coming into force. This is in fact one of the methods that guarantees clerical domination via the Revolutionary Council of the legislature in Iran (the other is that body's ability to basically pick Parliamentary candidates) and could become a tremendous bar to all kinds of reform if it is allowed to be dominated by conservative clerics.

So in my view, the door is open both to oppression and to freedom for women in this Constitution; a little wider to the latter if it is taken at face value and in good faith by those who are tasked with enforcing it. But with so little information about how the courts will be constituted it is impossible to predict whether it will be interpreted so.

Hrm, I meant to talk about the relationship of honor killing to all of this too, but it's very complicated, and this is long enough already, and I'm tired … Soon, maybe.

Update: I came back to put in a missing link and correct some typos, so I might as well also point out since I forgot to mention it before that the provision guaranteeing 25% of Parliamentary seats to women is still in place in the proposed Constitution--there had been rumors that this would be eliminated.

Correction: Actually, Article 44 (“All individuals have the right to enjoy the rights stated in international human rights agreements and treaties endorsed by Iraq that don't run contrary to the principles and rules of this constitution”) was eliminated in the final draft after all. For some reason I had thought that the only major change to the proposed Constitution was in the rule about how it could be amended, so I was working from my printout of the draft published in August in composing this entry. The full text of the draft that was actually voted on October 15th is here (What now appears as Article 44 is just the provision that was previously Article 45.) Looking over the updated draft, I don’t think anything else I highlighted has been changed Amnesty International’s statement deploring the change is here. (Actually, this is how the change came to my attention; I was looking something else up on their site). Their assessment is basically correct, I think. It wasn’t strongly worded enough in the original in my opinion, but obviously it was strong enough to be threatening to fundies; the deletion is a real loss.

Another Country Heard From

Iraqi bloggers weigh in on the U.S. election: Alaa for Bush, and Riverbend for Kerry. Interestingly, from their opposite perspectives, they seem to agree that a Bush loss will be interpreted in their part of the world as a repudiation of the Iraq war and the U.S. approach thus far to the WOT in general (i.e., Afghanistan, though Alaa doesn’t spell that out as much).

Omar at Iraq the Model translates comments from Iraqis and other Arabs from the BBC Arabic forum.

(Links swiped from Dean's World.)

G. said: I'm surprised that Riverbend sees a potential Kerry victory as a condemnation of the war in Afghanistan (I haven't read her site in months, so regulars might not be). Iraq, sure, he's taken various positions in the last year, but has Kerry ever been critical of the notion of going to war in Afghanistan?

I really don't think she knows what she's doing if she mentions it in the context of an endorsement. Does she think any but the most isolationist Americans would refuse to "condone" that war? If I suspected Kerry was opposed to the invasion of Afghanistan and yet I was somehow a Kerry supporter, sharing that suspicion would be the last thing I'd do. The mere suggestion would damn him.

I replied: I haven't read her in a while either; she lost me with the "Sadaam era was a time of peace and dignity" thing. I'm assuming she's just looking at it from the general Arab perspective (well, not that there is such a thing really--I mean the prevailing worldview in Arab countries); my sense is that they don't see nearly as much distinction between the two wars as we do; it's all just an attack, for oil, or for Israel, or against Islam, etc. (I've been meaning to look up actual numbers on that though, if there are any).

FWIW, the Not in My Name people were running full-page ads just before the Iraq War denouncing our imperial aggression in Afghanistan along with their arguments against invading Iraq. I thought it was a bad strategy, but whatever, they didn't ask me :-).

Campaign Fact Check

John Kerry, or rather his campaign, has favored us at last with his "plan" for the WOT and foreign policy in the Middle East in an extensive press release/interview with Spencer Ackerman.

I may or may not get around to a full critique, but for now, this paragraph caught my eye:

After Kerry gave an interview in August warning that Bush's policies were "actually encouraging the recruitment of terrorists," Bush fumed that Kerry's "logic is upside down … We don't create the terrorists by fighting back. We defeat the terrorists by fighting back." But, if Bush looked at what his policies have meant at Cairo's Al Azhar mosque, the closest thing Sunni Islam has to a Vatican, he would notice a disturbing trend. Days after September 11, 2001, Al Azhar's university rector, Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, issued a Koranic condemnation of the attacks: "Attacking innocent people is not courageous, it is stupid and will be punished on the Day of Judgment." Yet fury over the invasion of Iraq turned Al Azhar's denouncement of bin Laden into approval of his ideology. On the eve of the war, the mosque's scholars wrote, "According to Islamic law, if the enemy steps on Muslims' land, jihad becomes a duty on every male and female Muslim.

As it happens, Al Azhar was taken over entirely by Islamists in the 1990s. So I was startled to learn of a lone holdout, in such a prominent position no less, still on staff as late as September 2001. Who can this hero be? Why have none of the progressive Muslims I've read singled him out for his courage and integrity? To Google! And pages and pages of fascinating quotes from Sheik Tantawi came right up.

May 2, 2001:

Sheik of Al-Azhar, Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, the leading religious authority in the Sunni Muslim establishment in Egypt, joined in the debate, saying that "the suicide operations are of self-defense and a kind of martyrdom, as long as the intention behind them is to kill the enemy's soldiers, and not women or children."[8] It is interesting to note, that Sheik Tantawi had in the past published a stronger version of his stance on this issue, in which he stated: "Any explosion that leads to the death of innocent women and children is a criminal act, carried out only by people who are base, cowards and traitors, because a rational man with just a bit of respect and manliness, refrains from such operations altogether." It is noteworthy that this declaration by Sheik Tantawi referred to the attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and it does not seem to apply to Palestinian attacks against Israelis.[9]

However, an Egyptian law professor, Tawfiq Al-Shawi, recalled that Tantawi had issued in the past an opposite religious ruling, namely, that the suicide attacks are acceptable in the Shari'a: "On August 4, 1998, in an interview in the Al-Hayat daily, Sheik Tantawi described suicide operations as a legitimate defense against the enemy who attacks the Palestinian people, and who has no mercy on the elderly, women or children... On a previous occasion, on May 27, 1998, Sheik Tantawi stated: 'It is every Muslim, Palestinian and Arab's right to blow himself up in the heart of Israel, an honorable death is better than a life of humiliation. All religious laws have demanded the use of force against the enemy and fighting against those who stand by Israel; there is no escape from fighting, from Jihad, and from [self-]defense, and whoever refrains from such things is not a believer.'"

April 7, 2002:

The great Imam of Al Azhar Sheik Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, demanded that the Palestinian people, of all factions, intensify the martyrdom operations [i.e. suicide attacks] against the Zionist enemy, and describe the martyrdom operations as the highest form of Jihad operations. He says that the young people executing them have sold Allah the most precious thing of all.

[Sheik Tantawi] emphasized that every martyrdom operation against Israel, including children, women, and teenagers, is a legitimate act according to [Islamic] religious law, and an Islamic commandment, until the people of Palestine regain their land and cause the cruel Israeli aggression to retreat …"

November 3, 2003:

The Grand Shaykh of Al-Azhar Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi
announced on Sunday [2 November] that suicide-bombers who are defending their land are seen as martyrs in Islamic shari'ah law.

Anybody blowing himself up in the face of an the occupiers of his land is a martyr, said Shaykh Tantawi in response to a question about the Islamic shari'ah stance over the Palestinians who blow up their bodies against the Israelis.

He stressed, however, that Islam did not allow the killing of innocent
civilians and children but only invaders and aggressors.

Yep, he's been an Islamist since at least 1998, though he seems a little wobbly on the killing women and children issue. His position on that issue probably depends on the audience he is addressing at the time. Tantawi's position is an appointed one, in the gift of the President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarek, who likes to maintain good relations with America. Why would Mubarek appoint an Islamist to such a post? Because he also likes to maintain a good relationship with the sort of people who assassinated his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, and will say things like this (scroll down) about what a good Muslim ruler he is at appropriate moments instead of trying to kill him, too. In return, as Tantawi mentions in the article, the Islamists get a nice fat budget every year to expand their "educational" programs.

However, the two quotes selected by the TNR reporter (or more likely the Kerry campaign; the entire article seems spoon-fed) do not necessarily contradict each other.

When the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa making the killing of Salman Rushdie the holy obligation of every Muslim in the world, the true theological significance of this declaration was lost on the Western media, which was distracted by Rushdie's status as a cultural rather than political figure, the question of whether The Satanic Verses were really all that heretical, etc. etc. But the fatwa was above all a legal ruling which thereby had the status of Shari'a for Shia Islamists, and one that set a very important precedent; for the very first time, a Muslim jurist had asserted jurisdiction over the entire world, not just within Muslim-ruled territories. Jihad is understood to be a defensive concept, and Islamists have always regarded the very existence of the state of Israel as an act of aggression against Muslims on Muslim land. Therefore the concept of jihad has always applied to terrorism as well as both offensive and defensive warfare against Israel, and would of course apply to any infidel armies invading Muslim lands, as in the recent U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But with the Rushdie ruling, jihad could be waged against any infidel who could be understood to be "attacking" Islam, anywhere in the world. However, since Sunni Muslims do not accept the authority of Shia clerics, the idea has not been universally adopted by Sunni Islamists. It is still nominally orthodox (if not ideal) to support jihad at home but not abroad. Thus, Tantawi can support suicide bombings against civilians in Israel and condemn suicide bombings against civilians in New York City without contradicting himself. That he is making such a distinction was not spelled out in any of the quotes I found, but his statement about the ban on headscarves in France seems to support this theory:

April 5, 2004

…if a woman lives in a non-Muslim country such as France, where officials want to ban the use of the veil, it is their right.

"As a Muslim," Sheikh Tantawi said, "I cannot object to this right, because they are non-Muslims. In such a case, a Muslim woman is subject to the laws of the non-Muslim state, and from the point of view of Shari'a [Islamic religious law] she is considered a person acting under compelling circumstances."

I leave contemplation of how damaging it might be to Muslims worldwide to uncritically characterize Al Azhar, now, as the "Vatican" of Sunni Islam, as an exercise for the reader.

Democracy Update

Some interesting reports on the Iraqi National Council elections (to form an interim National Council until general elections projected for January 2005) from Zeyad (who incidentally is pretty sanguine about both Sistani and stability in the Hawza) and Ali.

Why was it important for the National Council elections not to fail? UN Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi had wanted to delay them until all groups (mostly Islamist groups and the Sadrists, although SCIRI is in), had agreed to participate instead of boycotting them, in order to enhance the perceived legitimacy of the interim National Council. And indeed it doesn't sound like anybody's happy with the number of Coalition-approved "list" members who made it onto the council. However it may have been better to have gone forward than not, if the outcome of Brahimi’s similar approach in Afghanistan is any guide. (Very long quote behind the cut since the Atlantic has suddenly gone entirely subscriber only, the chumpskies. I should point out that the author of this article, Laura Secor (writing probably in June), was arguing that Afghanistan had been an important learning experience for Brahimi and he would naturally be doing much better in Iraq):

Brahimi—whose official title is special adviser to the Secretary-General on the political situation in Iraq—is an odd match for the Bush Administration's Wilsonian project in Iraq. He does not see it as his business to engineer new democracies, or to impose outside visions on reluctant societies. On the contrary, he is a tough-minded realist who respects and understands power; his approach in similarly vexed situations has been to figure out which players are in charge on the ground and how to meet their minimum requirements. In Afghanistan, for instance, where he successfully negotiated a peace among competing armed factions after the U.S. invasion in 2001, Brahimi earned the enmity of human-rights advocates by allowing murderous warlords not merely to escape justice but to become officials of the new government. Assuring peace and stability, Brahimi explained, was a higher priority than realizing justice—and the surest way to restore peace quickly was to make the warlords stakeholders in the new government.

At the Afghan negotiations he chaired in Bonn, beginning in November of 2001, Brahimi worked out the following arrangement: an interim government would convene an emergency loya jirga seven months later, in order to select the government that would lead Afghanistan for two years after that. The loya jirga, organized by a commission of Afghans under UN supervision, has proved to be one of the most controversial undertakings of the seventy-year-old Brahimi's long career. Nader Nadery, an Afghan who worked as a human-rights activist during the Taliban era, served on the commission. He recalls that the Afghans drew up stringent guidelines excluding anyone who was known to be a human-rights violator from the loya jirga. "But Mr. Brahimi and the interim government were insisting that we invite the warlords," Nadery recalls. "He was pushing the commission to violate its own rules and procedures."

Whether the warlords were brought in on Brahimi's initiative or the Pentagon's is disputed. But Brahimi defended the idea in conversations at the time and in interviews afterward. He explained to the Afghans that if the warlords were not invited, they wouldn't accept the decisions of the loya jirga. He pointed out that the warlords, who had been armed and supported by the United States in the war against the Taliban, already controlled much of Afghanistan's territory; they could not be wished away. Four months later, in an interview conducted by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Brahimi said that although civil leaders claimed to be more representative of the Afghan people than the warlords were, they had no particular basis for asserting this. "Yeah, they are nice people; they want the good of their country; but to say that they are representative—how?" he asked. "You can't compare whether the others are more representative or not."

In the event, the warlords not only attended the loya jirga but occupied front-row seats and left the proceedings in possession of important government ministries. It was a turning point for the new Afghanistan and, Brahimi's critics say, a tantalizing opportunity wasted. Although few experts believe the warlords could have been excluded from the political process, most of those with whom I spoke thought that Brahimi, the United States, and the United Nations actually strengthened the warlords at a moment when they could have been weakened. Vikram Parekh, a Kabul-based researcher for the nonprofit International Crisis Group, faults Brahimi for taking too little input from his own more experienced staff members, who might have told him that some of the warlords were "paper tigers," far from invincible. Nader Nadery recalls attending the pre-loya jirga election in Mazar-e-Sharif, where a handful of regional delegates were to be elected by secret ballot from among caucuses of about sixty local notables. One of the warlords, the notoriously brutal and much feared General Abdul Rashid Dostum, stood as a candidate. For the first time his lock on power was not assured. "When they were counting votes, I saw that his hands were shaking," Nadery told me. "He was very disturbed. He was concerned if he failed, if he lost, what will happen." He didn't lose—a fact Nadery attributes to the conspicuous presence of Dostum's thugs; but even more disappointing to his opponents was the legitimacy conferred on people like Dostum by an international community that saw them not as fading figures from Afghanistan's ugly past but as crucial interlocutors in determining its future. "General Dostum left the loya jirga tent a different person," Nadery claims. "A few days ago his hands were shaking. Now he left the tent the same person he was in 1992. He'd been honored by the international community and the government."

The trouble with Brahimi's approach was that stability and justice were never actually separable. Unsurprisingly, the warlords run their ministries as patronage rackets. Their political and economic entrenchment in power, along with their failure to disarm, has made it very hard for the central government to impose the rule of law more broadly on the country. Though overshadowed by the dramatic news of insurgency and prisoner abuse in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan has been steadily deteriorating.

Indeed, toward the end of his tenure as head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, Brahimi seems to have realized that he could not guarantee long-term security there if key ministers in the Afghan government were criminals beyond the reach of the law. "As time wore on in his last year," one diplomatic source told me, "he realized that the continued role of the warlords would bring disaster to Afghanistan. He began to care much more about human rights. It was an evolution in his thinking. He began to realize that unless one had some kind of constitution and disarmament and rule of law, the process would not end up well." Shortly before he left Afghanistan, in January of this year, Brahimi delivered a rousing speech to this effect at the constitutional loya jirga.

I honestly don’t know what the ideal approach would be, but it’s clear that Shia groups are extremely suspicious of the UN approach, perhaps because of, rather than in spite of, the support it seems to enjoy with the Sunni Arab establishment.

Two Faces of Islam/Stephen Schwartz

The Two Faces of Islam : the House of Sa'ud From Tradition to Terror by Stephen Schwartz.

This is an impassioned representation of the political conflict between radical Islamists and moderate traditionalists as a struggle for the soul of Islam. The author initially traveled to the Balkans to research the history of Jewish communities, and (I gather from other news sources) converted to Sufism as a result of his experiences with Bosnian Muslims there. Schwartz traces the history of a violent, repressive tendency in Islam from the Khawarij who threatened and were deafeated by the ummah (community of Muslims) in the early days of Islam, through the rise of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, and the ability of that sect today to write itself over traditional Islam through the vast cultural influence occasioned by its oil wealth and its control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Schwartz is not exactly an objective observer (in discussing the origins of the Saudi's double-edged policy toward the West, he writes "To arrive at an understanding with the British, with the goal of transforming the ummah into a community of Wahhabi fundamentalists, was a concept so daring in its perversity it would seem to have sprung from the brain of a demon, not a man") and the book suffers somewhat by his apparent conflation of the culturally European and spiritually Sufi Bosnian Muslims with the mainstream Muslim community in the Middle East, which is Arab and mostly Sunni and a good deal more conservative and less tolerant than he would like to admit. Wahhabism is nonetheless as fully perverse and destructive as he paints it, even as compared to the most conservative mainstream Islamic traditions, and his detailed account of the history of Wahhabist cultural imperialism, particularly with respect to Saudi interventions in trouble spots like Afghanistan and Kosovo, and American obtuseness regarding same, is an important and largely neglected story.

Price of Honor/Jan Goodwin

Price of Honor : Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World by Jan Goodwin.

A journalistic account of the status of women in a number of Islamic countries, highlighting changes that have occurred as Islamization advances, along with an interesting chapter on Wahhabist recruitment in the U.S. The opening chapters, giving an overview of Islam as a religion and the history of the Islamic world, are a disaster, apparently cobbled together from clip files and never checked for basic coherence or context, so that the story contradicts itself from one page to the next. Skip directly ahead to the country chapters, which contain many first-person and uncensored accounts by ordinary Muslim women which are more precious than gold in their rarity, interviews with various notables like Queen Noor, and female Islamist propagandists like Laili Zikria Helms, the late, unlamented Taliban regime's female publicist in America. This book makes things seem much worse for women in Islamic countries than some other accounts I've read, the chapter on Pakistan being particularly hair-raising.