American Crescent A Muslim Leader on the American Frontier

Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 Husayn vs. Hussein The most excellent jihad is the uttering of truth in the presence of an unjust ruler.1 The Prophet Muhammad ONE NIGHT IN early 1971, my father came home at nine o'clock to find an urgent message from the governor of Iraq's Karbala province, Shabib al-Maliki. He returned the call, and their conversation was brief, which made it either more ominous or less, I'm not sure. Governor Maliki wanted to see him right away. Nine o'clock was late for Karbala; in the Middle East lunch, not dinner, is the main meal of the day, and the first call to prayer comes at dawn. My father's experiences over the previous ten years, and especially in the two and a half years since the Baath party had come to power, had taught us that a request for a late-night meeting could signal nothing positive. Two days earlier, a close friend of my father's, Ayatollah Mohammad Shirazi, had fled the country after learning of a plot to assassinate him. Ayatollah Shirazi was one of Iraq's most learned and trusted scholars of Islamic jurisprudence, a mujtahid, and he unflinchingly criticized the Baathists, a dangerous practice under an anti-Shia regime whose ideology and rule were based on consensus through fear. Baathist assaults frequently targeted the outspoken and the charismatic. The more influential the critic, the more savage the government's response. It might start with legal harassment and escalate to overt threats. Then anonymous agents of the Mukhabarat, the secret police known as the "visitors of the dawn," would knock on your door in the pre-waking hours when witnesses were few and the element of surprise high. If you were lucky, they administered a beating. If you were not, they took you to headquarters for interrogation, torture, or execution, depending on whether you told them what they wanted to hear. Detainees at Abu Ghraib, the British-built sixties-era facility where the Baathists held many of their political prisoners, experienced cruelty of the most imaginatively ghoulish varieties: scalding with boiling water in their most sensitive areas, branding, crucifixion, blinding with insecticides, feet-first insertion into an industrial grinder. They were dissolved in acid baths while their wives were forced to watch. Some simply vanished. Upon learning of his impending fate, Ayatollah Shirazi made the sensible decision to avoid torture or death and instead struck out for Kuwait under cover of darkness. He told no one of his plan. At the governor's office soon after receiving the message, my father joined a secretary and Governor Maliki himself, who didn't waste any time in revealing his agenda: Where is your friend Shirazi? Why did he leave? My father could take some comfort in the fact that Governor Maliki had seemingly called this meeting to discuss Ayatollah Shirazi and not his own criticisms of the regime, which were frequent. I don't know where he went, my father saidand it was true; he did notbut I can tell you that Ayatollah Shirazi left because he feared for his life. Two years earlier, Ayatollah Hassan Shirazi, Mohammad's brother, had written poems mocking the regime and openly denounced those in power as thugs and gangsters. He was arrested, tortured, and nearly executed. Only widespread public outrage at his treatment saved him. (He fled to Lebanon, where one of Saddam Hussein's agents assassinated him in 1980.) Governor Maliki pretended for my father's benefit that Ayatollah Mohammad Shirazi had overreacted. Shirazi was very safe in Karbala, he said. He had no reason to worry. You're right, my father said, and the best proof of what you say is the two sheikhs, Ayatollah Shirazi's associates, who were arrested at the doorstep of Imam Husayn's shrine yesterday.Qazwini, Hassan is the author of 'American Crescent A Muslim Leader on the American Frontier', published 2007 under ISBN 9781400064540 and ISBN 1400064546.