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Adel Abdul Mahdi, one of the leading candidates to become the new
Iraqi prime minister, recalled the day last year when he and other Iraqi
leaders were summoned to the holy city of Najaf by the country’s senior Shiite clerics.
The topic was the role of Islam in the new Iraqi state. Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, the country’s most powerful
Shiite leader, questioned whether Mr. Mahdi and the
others, members of the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, had the
legitimacy to draft an interim constitution.
"You were not elected," Ayatollah Sistani
told the group.
Mr. Mahdi says he did not hesitate to answer.
"You were not elected," he told the ayatollah.
With that, Mr. Mahdi and the others returned to the
capital and drafted an interim constitution intended to govern Iraqi for the
next year, naming Islam as a source, but not the only source, of legislation.
The language bridged one of the most divisive issues in forming the new
government, whether it should be secular or religious.
Mr. Mahdi, one of the leaders of the United Iraqi
Alliance, the Shiite coalition on the verge of capturing a majority of seats
in the national assembly, recalled the moment to illustrate the limitations
of the Shiite clerics in political affairs here.
"Victory is the most dangerous moment," Mr. Mahdi,
63, said in an interview at his home in Baghdad this week. "There will be some people trying to
push for extreme measures. If we start with such behavior, we will lose the
country."
Mr. Mahdi, a witty, affable, French-trained
economist who serves as the finance minister in the current government,
personifies a strong secular current that runs through the alliance. That
strand is likely to resist demands for an Iranian-style Islamic state, where
ultimate power resides with clerics, political
rights are limited and women face harsh restrictions.
The question for Iraqis, as well as the Bush administration, is whether Mr. Mahdi’s secular vision extends to the rest of the
Shiite alliance, or whether it is being used as cover for a more ambitious
religious agenda.
The leaders of the Shiite alliance have said the new Iraqi government, if
they end up with enough votes to form it, will be headed by a secular figure.
Fewer than a half dozen of the alliance’s 228
candidates are clerics. And a likely alliance with the Kurdish parties, which
are secular, could blunt the Islamists.
Still, many Iraqis say Mr. Mahdi, secular-minded
though he is, would be under fierce pressure from Iraq’s clerical establishment to accord Islam an
expansive role in the permanent Iraqi constitution the national assembly is
to write this year.
He is thought to be an attractive candidate to the Americans. He has worked
closely with the Bush administration, and helped renegotiate Iraq’s foreign debt. Like many Iraqi leaders, including
even many of the clerics themselves, he takes a cold-eyed view of the need
for American troops to stay in the country until Iraqi security forces are
strong enough to defeat the guerrilla insurgency on their own.
Mr. Mahdi’s conversion from young Baath Party member to Maoist cadre to pro-American
Islamic moderate is emblematic of the journey taken by many intellectuals who
came of age in the 1960’s, swept up in the left-wing currents of the
time, only turn back to the faith into which they were born.
Yet in all of his transformations, there is, to his rivals, the whiff of the
opportunist. Far from being devoutly religious himself, they say, Mr. Mahdi is a secular man who attached himself to a largely Islamist group to get closer to power, and by so doing
made that group more acceptable to the outside word.
Within the wider world of Iraqi Shiites, a struggle for influence in the new
government has already begun. Earlier this week, Ayatollah Muhammad Eshaq al-Faeath, one of five
ayatollahs who make up the senior Shiite religious leadership here, publicly
demanded that Islam be named as the "only" source of legislation, a
feature that would probably render Iraq an Islamic state. Others are demanding that family and
personal relations be regulated by Koranic law.
"He will be under pressure on the power of religion in the state,"
said Adnan Pachachi, a
secular Sunni leader, referring to Mr. Mahdi.
"But if he gets the job, it will actually help him resist the
pressure."
Even those Iraqis, like Mr. Pachachi, who are
convinced of Mr. Mahdi’s relatively secular mind-set say they are concerned that he could end up
becoming a pawn of Abdul Aziz Hakim,
the leader of his party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known as Sciri.
The steely-eyed Mr. Hakim, the former leader of the
party’s military wing who is believed to have close connections to
Iranian intelligence agencies, is the scion of one of the most prominent
Shiite religious families in Iraq. He is said to favor a broader role for Islam in the new
constitution.
"Hakim has decided that he can realize his
ambitions through Adel Abdul Mahdi," said Adnan Ali, a senior leader in the Dawa
Party, a member of the Shiite alliance, which supports a different candidate
for prime minister.
Who will become prime minister is expected to be one of the most hard-fought
battles after election results are in, and with the vote-counting nearing
completion, the political deal making has already begun.
For Mr. Mahdi to arrive at the spot where he is now
is perhaps not as surprising as the path that he took to get there. He comes
from a family active in politics; his father, Abdul Mahdi
Shobar, was a guerrilla leader against the British
in 1920 and later became a minister of education during the monarchy of King
Faisal. He is a boyhood playmate of Ahmad Chalabi,
a rival for the job of prime minister, and Ayad Allawi, who now holds the post.
Mr. Mahdi said he joined the Baath
Party when it was largely a youth movement, and was even an acquaintance of
the future leader, Saddam Hussein, who at the time, he said, worked in the
party’s Peasant Division.
Mr. Mahdi said he had joined out of a romantic
attraction to the ideals of Arab nationalism and socialist economics, but
quit the party in the 1960’s, after it came to power and when, he said,
its leaders began killing and imprisoning political opponents.
"When we saw the experience of blood, torture, executions, killings, we
were shocked," he said, then turning to an Arab proverb to describe the
party: "The fish was rotten from the head."
After the ouster of the Baath Party from its first
stint in power in 1963, Mr. Mahdi was arrested,
jailed and tortured; his jailers, he said, used pliers to pull chunks of
flesh from his thighs. Five years later, as the Baath
Party prepared to return to power and begin its 34-year reign of terror, he fled the country, tipped off that he was a
target for execution.
Ending up in France, where he earned master’s degrees in political
science and economics, he said he embraced Marxism, and especially the brand
espoused by Mao, which Mr. Mahdi said he found
appealing for its emphasis on popular participation.
Yet even in his years as a follower of Mao, he said he never abandoned his
Islamic faith.
"We weren’t of those people who were trying to defy religion,
trying to defy their family," he said of his youthful philosophical
detours.
Like many Iraqis, Mr. Mahdi was inspired by the
Iranian revolution of 1979, which appeared as a model for Iraq’s long-suppressed Shiite majority and a real-life
example of an Islamic-guided government. He and many other Iraqi Shiites in
exile, including Mr. Hakim, began using Iran as a base to organize against Mr. Hussein’s
government. The two men were both founders of Sciri
in the 1980’s.
American officials say Sciri continues to receive
support from the Iranian government, and the party’s relationship to Iran has given rise to concerns, in the United States and in Iraq, about the movement’s independence.
As the Iranian revolution transformed into a theocracy, it alienated many
Iraqi Shiites, some of whom rejected it as a model for Iraq. Mr. Mahdi is tempered in his
criticism of the Iranian government
"They have to be more open," he said. But he professes a vision of
political Islam that is substantially more mild than
the Iranian variety.
To Mr. Mahdi, the Shiite religious hierarchy has an
important role in leading the country, but he says the religious leadership
has to make way for democratic politics, in contrast to the Iranian model.
"We accept the role of the religious leadership," he said.
"They are part of society. People respect them. They have a natural
part. But this natural part should not stop the nation from practicing its
rights. The nation should elect its representatives. Because the nation is
not just the religious people but all the citizens."
Mr. Mahdi said he believed that the dangers of a
full-blown Islamic theocracy coming to Iraq were minimal. Ayatollah Sistani,
he said, has ruled out the use of Koranic law in
governing family law.
But in saying so, Mr. Mahdi makes it clear that
moderates like himself need all the help they can
get.
"They have the right to be worried," he said of the Iraqi people.
"I hope they would stay worried. All the people should be cautious. They
should keep criticizing. I am not asking people to stop criticizing, to trust
blindly."
As to the charge that he is a political opportunist, Mr. Mahdi
confesses that he is a practical politician, but one who has stayed true to
his principles.
"Why are you married?" he asked. "If they need me and I need
them, then this is a very solid relationship."
Likewise, he makes no apologies for his intellectual evolution.
"It took 50 years to have such development," he said of his
political journey. "With major events in the region going on, countries
changed, their ideologies changed. It didn’t take two days."
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