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| Volume X, Fall 2003, Number 3 |
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| EXCERPT: Pro-U.S. Fatwas |
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| Charles Kurzman |
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Dr. Kurzman teaches sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is editor of the anthologies Liberal Islam and Modernist Islam, 1840-1940 (Oxford University Press, 1998 and 2002) and author of The "Unthinkable" Revolution in Iran, 1977-1979 (Harvard University Press, forthcoming in 2004).
In testimony before the Senate Armed
Services Committee on April 10,
2003, Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz hailed a recent proclamation by Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf, Iraq, as "history's first pro-U.S. fatwa."1 This claim was apparently drawn from an op-ed by Amir Taheri that appeared three days earlier in The Wall Street Journal, calling Sistani's proclamation "the first pro-U.S. fatwa in modern political Islam."2
If true, this development would support the position of American foreign-policy hawks, who argue that the active projection of U.S. power around the world, and especially in the Middle East, will help to bring political order to the world. Sistani's fatwa, issued during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, suggests that "political Islam" will prudently retreat in the face of U.S. determination. The fatwa appears to confirm the old cliché that "they," be they Muslims or other groups, only understand force.
But Wolfowitz's claim is not true. Sistani's statement is not history's first pro-U.S. fatwa. In fact, important fatwas explicitly supportive of the U.S. military have been issued during each of Wolfowitz's two stints in the Department of Defense, one by senior Saudi Arabian religious scholars allowing U.S. troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia, and one by a variety of Middle Eastern religious scholars allowing Muslims in the U.S. armed forces to pursue the war on terrorism "against whoever their country decides has perpetrated terrorism against them." These instances represent two sorts of pro-U.S. fatwas: those which support the United States for strategic reasons, and those which do so out of sympathy for U.S. victims of terror. A third, partially overlapping category involves Islamic statements that are pro-U.S. in a deeper sense, that of promoting values that most in the United States hold dear, such as democracy. In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, Ayatollah Sistani issued just such a fatwa, urging the popular election of the body that is scheduled to draw up Iraq's new constitution. Wolfowitz's blanket statement discounts this longstanding liberal tradition within Islam, at precisely the time when the "war on terrorism" makes such ideological partners indispensable.
1 Paul Wolfowitz, "Prepared Statement for the Senate Armed Services Committee: The Future of NATO and Iraq," April 10, 2003, http://www.defense.gov/speeches/2003/sp20030410-depsecdef0142.html.
2 Amir Taheri, "Shiite Schism" (op-ed), The Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2003, p. A26.
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