Informed Comment Homepage

Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion

Header Right

Donate

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google+
  • Email
  • RSS
  • Featured
  • US politics
  • Middle East
  • Environment
  • US Foreign Policy
  • Energy
  • Economy
  • Politics
  • About
  • Archives
  • Submissions

© 2023 Informed Comment

  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Uncategorized

Mahatma Sistani From European Peace

Juan Cole 01/27/2004

Tweet
Share
Reddit
Email
0 Shares

Mahatma Sistani?

From a European peace worker in Iraq, a week or so ago:

“I have heard that Sistani has promoted among his followers the Gandhian method of disobedience against the occupation power, if the situation seems to go out of hand [i.e. if the US rejects direct elections].”

If this report is correct, it would make sense of Sistani’s intransigence on the need for open elections, and his resort for the first time recently to calling mass urban demonstrations.

My wife, Shahin Cole, says that figures such as Sistani who decide to seek to influence society, are like stage magicians. They do not pull out all the stops and perform their most complex and dazzling trick first. They start small, showing only the tip of their wand. Then they wave around the whole wand. Then they reach deeper into their bag of tricks for ever bigger props and effects. Sistani’s fatwa or ruling of June 28 on the need for delegates to a constitutional convention to be popularly elected was the first, small demonstration of his powers. The 100,000 in the streets of Baghdad on January 19 was a further such demonstration. But if he does mount a campaign of civil disobedience to force free and fair elections, that will be the time for him to make the elephant disappear.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

Primary Sidebar

STAY INFORMED

Join our newsletter and have sharp analysis delivered to your inbox every day.

Twitter

Follow Juan Cole @jricole or Informed Comment @infcomment on Twitter

Facebook



Sign up for our newsletter

Informed Comment © 2023 All Rights Reserved

Posting....