Viva Muqtada...

Baghdad Burning

... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...

It’s fascinating to watch the world beyond Iraq prepare for the World Cup. I get pictures by email of people hanging flags and banners, in support of this team or that one. Oh we have flags and banners too- the hole-ridden black banners all over Baghdad, announcing deaths and wakes. The flags are all of one color, usually- black, green, red, or yellow- representing a certain religious party or political group.

A friend who owns a shop in Karrada had a little problem with a certain flag last week. Karrada was one of the best mercantile areas in Baghdad prior to the war. It was the area you went to when you had a list of unrelated necessities- like shoes, a potato peeler, pink nail polish and a dozen blank CDs. You were sure to find everything you needed in under an hour.

After the war, SCIRI, Da’awa and other religious parties instantly opened up bureaus in the area. Shops that once displayed colorful clothes, and posters of women wearing makeup, began looking more subdued. Soon, instead of pictures of the charming women advertising Dior perfume, shops began putting up pictures of Sistani, looking half-alive, shrouded in black. Or pictures of Sadr, grim and dark, and almost certainly not smelling like Dior.

This friend owns a small cosmetics shop where he sells everything from lipstick to head scarves. His apartment is located right over the shop so that when he looks down from the living room window, he can see whoever is standing at the shop door. G. inherited the shop from his father, who sold sewing materials instead of cosmetics. The shop has been in his family for nearly 20 years. Prior to the war, his wife and sister ran the shop, making the most persuasive sales duo in the history of cosmetics probably (the proof of this being a garishly colored neck scarf I bought 4 years ago and never took out of the closet since). After the war, and various threats in the form of letters and broken windows, G. began running the shop personally and in addition to cosmetics, he introduced an appropriately dark line of flowing abbayas and headscarves.

The last time I visited G. in his shop was two weeks ago. Since January, G.’s shop has been the center of some football (soccer) activity. His obsession with football has gotten to the point where the shop closes up two hours early so that E., the cousin and various other friends can gather for PlayStation FIFA tournaments. These tournaments are basically a group of grown men sitting around, maneuvering little digital men running around after a digital ball, screaming encouragement and insults at each other. If you walk into the shop looking to buy something during those hours, you risk being thrown out or simply told to “Just take it, take it- whatever it is. Take it and GO!”. Every World Cup year, G. and his wife only half-jokingly quarrel about changing his only sons name to that of the footballer of the year. (As a sort of compromise, family and friends have all agreed to call his 14-year-old son “Ronaldino” until the games are over.)

G.’s cousin, who has lived in Canada for nearly 15 years, recently sent G. a large, colorful Brazilian flag- perfect for hanging on a shop window. He told us how he was planning to hang it right in the center and paint under it in big bold letters “VIVA BRASILIA!!”. E. looked dubious as G. excitedly described how he’d be changing the colors of the display- green and yellow to match the flag.

It was up for nearly two whole days before the problems began. The first hint of a problem came through G.’s neighbor. He stopped by the shop and told G. that a black-turbaned young cleric had been walking past the shop window, when the flag attracted his attention. According to the neighbor Abu Rossul, the young cleric stopped, gazed at the flag, took note of the shops name and location and went on his way. G. shrugged it off with the words, “Well maybe he’s a fan of Brazil too…” Abu Rossul wasn’t so sure, “He looked more like the ‘Viva Sadr!’ type to me…”.

A day later, G. had a visit at noon. A young black-clad cleric walked into the shop, and had a brief look around. G. tried to interest him in some lovely headscarves and abbayas, but he was not to be deterred from his apparent mission. He claimed to be a ‘representative’ from the Sadr press bureau which was a few streets away and he had a message for G.: the people at the abovementioned bureau were not happy with G.’s display. Where was his sense of national pride? Where was his sense of religion? Instead of the face of a heathen player, there were pictures of the first Sadr, or better yet, Muqtada! Why did he have a foreign flag plastered obscenely on his display window? Should he feel the need for a flag, there was the Iraqi flag to put up. Should he feel the necessity for a green flag, like the one in the display, there was the green flag of “Al il Bayt”… Democracy, after all, is all about having options.

G. wasn’t happy at all. He told the young cleric he would find a ‘solution’ and made a peace offering of some inexpensive men’s slippers and some cotton undershirts he sometimes sold. That evening, he conferred with various relatives and friends and although nearly everyone advised him to take down the flag, he insisted it should remain on display as a matter of principle. His wife even offered to turn it into a curtain or bed sheets for him to enjoy until the games were over. He was adamant about keeping it up.

Two days later, he found a rather dramatic warning letter slipped under the large aluminum outer door. In a nutshell, it declared G. and people like him ‘heathens’ and demanded he take down the flag or he would be exposing himself to danger. It takes quite a bit to shake up a guy like G., but the same day he had the flag down and the display was back to normal.

As it turns out, Muqtada has a fatwa against football (soccer). I downloaded it and this is a translation of what he says when someone asks him for a fatwa on football and the World Cup:

“In reality, my father's position on this topic isn't deficient... Not only my father but Sharia also prohibits such activities which keep the followers too occupied for worshiping, keep people from remembering [to worship]. Habeebi, the West created things that keep us from completing ourselves (perfection). What did they make us do? Run after a ball, habeebi… What does that mean? A man, this large and this tall, Muslim- running after a ball? Habeebi, this ‘goal’ as it is called… if you want to run, run for a noble goal. Follow the noble goals which complete you and not the ones that demean you. Run after a goal, put it in your mind and everyone follows their own path to the goal to satisfy God. That is one thing. The second thing, which is more important, we find that the West and especially Israel, habeebi the Jews, did you see them playing soccer? Did you see them playing games like Arabs play? They let us keep busy with soccer and other things and they've left it. Have you heard that the Israeli team, curse them, got the World Cup? Or even America? Only other games... They've kept us occuppied with them- singing, and soccer, and smoking, stuff like that, satellites used for things which are blasphemous while they occuppy themselves with science etc. Why habeebi? Are they better than us- no we're better than them.”

Important note: Islamic Sharia does not prohibit soccer/football or sports- it’s only prohibited by the version of Sharia in Muqtada’s dark little head. I wonder what he thinks of tennis, swimming and yoga…

I listened to the fatwa, with him getting emotional about playing football, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Foreign occupation and being a part of a puppet government- those things are ok. Football, however, will be the end of civilization as we know it, according to Muqtada. It’s amusing- they look nothing alike- yet he reminds me so much of Bush. He can barely string two sentences together properly and yet, millions of people consider his word law. So when Bush raves about the new ‘fledgling Iraqi government’ ‘freely elected’ into power, you can take a look at Muqtada and see one of the fledglings. He is currently one of the most powerful men in the country for his followers.

So this is democracy. This is one of the great minds of Bush’s democratic Iraq.

Sadr’s militia control parts of Iraq now. Just a couple of days ago, his militia, with the help of Badr, were keeping women from visiting the market in the southern city of Karbala. Women weren’t allowed in the marketplace and shop owners were complaining that their businesses were suffering. Welcome to the new Iraq.

It’s darkly funny to see what we’ve turned into, and it is also anguishing. Muqtada Al-Sadr is a measure of how much we’ve regressed these last three years. Even during the Iran-Iraq war and the sanctions, people turned to sports to keep their mind off of day-to-day living. After the occupation, we won a football match against someone or another and we’d console ourselves with “Well we lose wars- but we win football!” From a country that once celebrated sports- football (soccer) especially- to a country that worries if the male football players are wearing long enough shorts or whether all sports fans will face eternal damnation… That’s what we’ve become.

***River Bend***