Saturday, February 18, 2006
Interpreting social change in Iraq
Sabrina Tavernise of the NYT shows that Sunni-Shiite intermarriage in Baghdad has fallen from 3-5% in 2002 to virtually 0% today, as sectarian rancor has increased and broken up past such marriages.
This is certainly true, but it begs a question: why has sectarian rancor increased? The answer is that Sunnis no longer have an inside lock on the levers of power and have been displaced by Shiites, whom many Sunnis consider rubes on a good day and subhuman apostates after a rousing Friday sermon. Consider this bit:
For hard-line Sunnis, Shiite power is a bitter pill. A recent conversation in a Baghdad gas station line illustrates the attitude.
"Those Shiites were servants," one man told another, watching angrily as a third maneuvered in front, according to Ilham al-Jazaari, who was waiting nearby and overheard the exchange. "They wiped our shoes. Now they are going in front of us."
There are the extreme cases. Reports have surfaced of hard-line tribes, particularly in the heavily Sunni areas of central and western Iraq, refusing to allow tribal members to marry Shiites. One mixed couple even had a series of threatening telephone calls demanding that they divorce or be killed.
But most cases are subtler. Maisoon Muhammad, a counselor at the Center for Psychological Health in Iraq, said one of her patients, a Sunni woman, recently received a marriage proposal from a Shiite. One of the woman's aunts urged her to accept, but another forbade the union, saying she would refuse to greet a man she knew to be Shiite.
Looked at this way, the sectarian strains in Iraq are positive evidence that the country is becoming more just, at least in the sense that power and status are no longer allocated by force to the advantage of a small minority. It should not surprise us that displaced Sunnis are deeply resentful. Nor should we care, except perhaps on purely utilitarian grounds.
When was the last time this happened? In South Africa, at the end of aparthied, when the blacks of that country fully developed their political rights and established the basis on which they would progress economically. I don't recall the Western left losing a lot of sleep over the social circumstances of South African whites as the security situation declined and their economic, social and political power eroded.
Looking at Tavernise's article from that perspective, one might write an accurate one-sentence summary quite differently than Juan Cole: "Sabrina Tavernise of the NYT shows that Sunni resentment over the loss of power and status in newly democratic Iraq and the hostility of Shiites to the Sunni insurgency has all but eliminated Sunni-Shiite intermarriage in Baghdad and broken up some existing mixed marriages."
2 Comments:
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Sat Feb 18, 12:26:00 PM:
A relevant comparison may be the American South circa 1970.
By Papa Ray, at
Sun Feb 19, 08:24:00 PM:
Iran will be a big factor in determining if there is a civil war, after most of the US troops leave, and the aid from the US and other countries starts drying up.
At the moment they are content with subverting the southern part of Iraq (where most of the oil is)and making the Brits stay in garrison. They know the Brits have no staying power and will be gone soon.
It remains to be seen if the U.S. will send any troops to replace them.
Mr. Shochu is correct in his comparisons. There is a big difference in the two tribes not only in "religion" but in customs.
Papa Ray
West Texas
USA
