Middle East History Professor Juan Cole

DATE April 13, 2004 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Juan Cole discusses Moqtada al-Sadr's influence in
Iraq
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

The American-led coalition in Iraq expected resistance from Sunni Muslims.
After all, Saddam Hussein is Sunni and so are most of the people in his
political party, the Baath Party. But now the coalition is facing a Shiite
insurrection as well as a Sunni one. The Shiite leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, and
his militia seized control of several Iraqi cities last week. The American
Occupation Authority shut down Moqtada's newspaper and said it would try to
arrest him in connection with the murder of a grand ayatollah last April.
General Abizaid, the head of the Central Command, said the mission of US
forces is to kill or capture Moqtada al-Sadr, but he also said there would
probably end up being a uniquely Iraqi solution.

Yesterday Moqtada began negotiations with several Shiite clerics, including
the son of Iraq's leading Shiite cleric, the grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, who
wants the Americans out of Iraq but advocates settling differences peacefully
with the help of a new constitution.

My guest, Juan Cole, is a professor of modern Middle East and South Asian
history at the University of Michigan and is the author of the book "Sacred
Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi`ite Islam." I
asked him first about Moqtada al-Sadr.

Let's start with a brief profile of Moqtada al-Sadr. What is his role in this
insurgency?

Professor JUAN COLE (University of Michigan): Well, Moqtada appears to have
believed that the Americans had decided to come for him. It should be
remembered that he lived his life under the Baath government, which was a
repressive police state. I think he still reads the cues of the Occupation
Authority of the United States through that lens, so when 28 arrest warrants
were issued for his close aides, Saturday, a week ago, I believe that he felt
that his life was in danger, that he would be arrested and executed. And so
he called upon his people to launch an insurrection against the Americans I
think as a way of signaling that he wasn't going to go quietly.

GROSS: And what is he officially wanted for? What are the charges against
him now?

Prof. COLE: The Coalition Provisional Authority accuses Moqtada of having
played a role in the murder on April 10th of 2003 of Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a
prominent cleric who had been in exile in London, came back to Iraq, seems to
have had American backing in doing so. A crowd gathered in the streets of
Najaf and stabbed him to death. The allegations are that the crowd was
Moqtada's supporters. And, further, there are allegations that Moqtada
instigated them to act in this way, although he denies it and there aren't
good eyewitness accounts that prove that he ordered a hit.

GROSS: And he's implicated in another murder, too, isn't he?

Prof. COLE: Well, the Moqtada al-Sadr movement has an element of thuggishness
about it, and there have been a number of incidents in which his followers
have armed themselves and have engaged in violence. They are accused of
having firebombed cinemas and video stores, liquor stores; of harassing women
who didn't veil; indeed, of attacking an entire gypsy village south of
Diwaniyah that was a hotbed of prostitution. And so the problem is, of
course, that these actions may have been local, may have been spontaneous.
There's not, to my knowledge, good evidence that Moqtada sat down in a room
and ordered such things to happen. But there are potentially large numbers of
such charges that could be laid at the door of his organization at least.

GROSS: Who are Moqtada's followers?

Prof. COLE: Moqtada's followers appear to be largely young and poor
ghetto-dwellers. Iraq, in the past decade, has been economically devastated
by the United Nations' sanctions and by the way that Saddam Hussein
manipulated those sanctions to the benefit of the Baath Party, depriving the
majority of Iraqis of gainful employment and medicine and social services and
so forth. And particularly the Shiites were out of favor with the Baath
Party, and so the resources tended to go to what is now called the Sunni
triangle, the Sunni-Arab community. So there were large, festering slums.
East Baghdad, now called Sadr City, then called Saddam City, may have two
million residents. There's not much in the way of work there, and many of the
people have come in the past two decades from rural backgrounds to settle in
the city to look for work. And so it's a very bad situation. It's like the
worst of the inner-city problems that the United States has seen in the past
half-century. And it is those ghetto-dwellers that, in particular, have
flocked to the standard of Moqtada and who, indeed, supported his father's
movement back in the 1990s.

GROSS: Well, what do young, poor men hear in his message?

Prof. COLE: Moqtada stands up to the powers that be, and his father did
before him. Back in the 1990s, when Grand Ayatollah Ali Sisanti was more or
less keeping quiet, Moqtada's father was speaking out against Saddam, was
organizing people for Friday prayers and for various activities: soup
kitchens and informal law courts and so forth. And Moqtada's father was
killed at Saddam's orders in 1999 for those activities, after which Moqtada
took them up covertly; he went underground. So he speaks out soon after the
fall of the Saddam government. In April of 2003, Moqtada came out and said,
`Well, you know, we are grateful to the United States for removing Saddam, but
we now insist that the American military forces vacate our country.' And there
were a certain number of Iraqis who felt that way, who felt that the
occupation was a humiliation. Indeed, a recent poll showed that about half of
Iraqis feel that way. But no other major political or religious figure tended
to come out and say it in those bald terms. So Moqtada is someone who speaks
out, speaks his mind, speaks radically. And among the poor and dispossessed,
the more nationalistic Iraqis, his message seems fresh and welcomed.

GROSS: Is he taken seriously as a spiritual leader?

Prof. COLE: He is taken seriously as a spiritual leader, even though that
doesn't, on the surface, make much sense; that is to say the system prevalent
among Shiites in Iraq presumes that religious authority derives from a
lifetime of learning and writing, becoming well known. And so typically an
older man would emerge as a source of religious authority over time. It's
unusual for someone to be looked to for religious guidance who is Moqtada's
age, possibly 30 or less, and who hasn't, really, even finished his degree in
Islamic law at the seminary in Najaf. He's an all but dissertation, in
American terms.

But because his father built this organization that had enormous personal
loyalty to him, that is to Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, who was killed in 1999, and
because Baqir al-Sadr was killed and there was no real obvious successor to
him inside Iraq, people who followed him transferred their loyalty to Moqtada
in a sectarian way. I think this is outside that system of religious learning
and recognition that I was talking about before. Moqtada's followed in the
way that David Koresh was followed by the Branch Davidians. It's a sectarian,
millenarian kind of apocalyptic movement. And so it's quite irrelevant to his
fanatical followers that Moqtada does not have those credentials of high
education or of long study and teaching.

GROSS: In what sense is it an apocalyptic movement?

Prof. COLE: Well, Shiite Islam has been marked throughout its history by a
strong millenarian fervor, by a conviction that the Islamic promised one,
the Mahdi, will return shortly. The Shiite branch of Islam that is prevalent
in Iran and Iraq believes that after the prophet Muhammad's death, he should
have been succeeded as vicars by his descendants, by his son-in-law and cousin
Ali, who was married to the prophet's daughter. And then, of course, their
children afterwards were descendants of the prophet, and that line should have
provided the leaders of the Muslim community, according to the Shiites. But
the line ended with the 12th such leader called an imam. And the 12th imam
was said to have disappeared as a small child into a supernatural realm, from
which he would one day return, rather as Christians expect the supernatural
return of Christ. And so Shiites are awaiting the return of the 12th imam,
the Imam Mahdi, the guided one, who it is said that when he comes, he will
restore the world to justice, just as the passage of time had filled it with
injustice.

So Shiites are expecting the Imam Mahdi's return, and the more fervent of them
expect him to come very soon. And it appears to be the case that Moqtada's
movement is millenarian in this sense. They think the world is getting turned
upside down; that there are all kinds of signs and portents that the Imam
Mahdi is about to appear. Some of them may believe that Moqtada Sadr is
himself the Mahdi, and that is why they call their militia the Army of the
Mahdi. It means `the army of the coming promised one.'

GROSS: So if you look at the American presence in Iraq from the apocalyptic
Shiite point of view, does it have a different meaning than the Americans
might see it as having?

Prof. COLE: Absolutely. Well, the rhetoric of the Americans is that this is
a form of the militant spread of democracy. It's a kind of muscular
Wilsonianism spread of enlightenment, ideals and public discourse and
democratic procedures and rationalism. From the point of view of the slums of
Iraq among these young Shiite individuals, the sudden overturn of the Iraqi
government and having these foreigners from all these nations stomping around
their country in their army boots looks very much like the world being turned
upside down, like signs and portents of the coming of the promised one.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Juan Cole, and he's a professor
of Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. He's
the author of several books, including "Sacred Space and Holy War: The
Politics, Culture and History of Shi`ite Islam." Let's take a short break
here, and then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is historian Juan Cole, author of "Sacred Space and Holy War:
The Politics, Culture and History of Shi`ite Islam." When we left off, we
were talking about the Shiite insurrection in Iraq and its leader, Moqtada
al-Sadr.

Tell us something about the newspaper that Moqtada runs, which the Coalition
Provisional Authority shut down.

Prof. COLE: The newspaper is called al-Hawza. I have seem some exemplars
of it. It's a slight newspaper. I'm not sure it really can be called a
newspaper at all; it's more like a pamphlet. It came out only weekly and had
a circulation of only 10,000, mainly through Moqtada Sadr's network of mosques
and supporters. I think it's quite a minor affair and that it was almost
certainly much more trouble than it was worth to close it. It was making the
most outrageous allegations. For instance, in early March, before the big
bombs went off at Karbala and at Kazimiyah and Baghdad, a rocket-propelled
grenade hit a Shiite shrine in Kazimiyah. And this was almost certainly the
work of Sunni-Arab insurgents who were trying to make trouble between the
Shiites and the Americans.

And Moqtada's paper alleged that this rocket had hit the shrine from above,
and, in Iraqi terms, this can only mean that it was the doing of the Americans
because they are the only ones with aircraft that could fire from above. And
it's simply not true, and it is inflammatory. And, of course, if Shiites took
this sort of thing seriously, they might well attack American troops over it.
And that is the rationale that was given by Mr. Bremer for closing the
newspaper. However, to my knowledge, no Shiites actually did take this
allegation seriously, nor, to my knowledge, were any American troops actually
accosted on the basis of this report. And so it seems to me that probably it
would have been better just to ignore the thing.

GROSS: Now one more thing about Moqtada. Since his father, who was a
spiritual leader, was killed by Saddam Hussein, you might think that Moqtada
would have been more pleased about the Americans coming in and ousting Saddam
Hussein.

Prof. COLE: Well, I think Moqtada was very pleased that the Americans ousted
Saddam. Indeed, I think it's clear that during they year before the American
invasion, Moqtada was very well aware that it was coming and that he was
putting his people in place expecting an aftermath. And, indeed, although
Saddam is widely said to have fallen on April 9th, it seems to me clear that
already, on April 7th, there were no Baathists in East Baghdad. The
sudras(ph), the followers of Moqtada, had taken over.

But it should be remembered that Moqtada's movement derives from that of his
father, the Sadr II movement. And the Sadr II movement really is in the
mold of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. It harkens back to those themes of the
1980s. And in Khomeinist thought, the United States is the great Satan.
Americans have sometimes forgotten that phrase that Khomeini used for the US.
And Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, Moqtada's father, had his audiences chant against
the United States, chant against Israel. So there's a virulent
anti-Americanism and anti-Israel feeling in this movement. Like Khomeinism,
it desires an Islamic republic that is ruled by the clerics. And so it's
possible for Moqtada to be grateful that the United States has overthrown
Saddam and yet, nevertheless, to see the continued presence of the United
States as an obstacle to all of his main goals.

GROSS: We've been talking about Moqtada al-Sadr, who is a Shiite leading an
insurgency against the American-led coalition in Iraq. Let's talk about the
other Shiite leader, who's now well known to Americans, the Grand Ayatollah
al-Sisanti. Now these two men are of different generations: al-Sisanti is an
older man; Moqtada is, I think, around 30. What are some of the differences,
beyond the generational differences, between the two men?

Prof. COLE: Sistani is from Iran; he was born there around 1930 and came to
Najaf in Iraq in 1952. He is a representative of an older tradition of Shiite
clerical thought, which is often called quietist. That is to say that it
does not believe that clerics should get involved in day-to-day politics. It
is a tradition that was opposed by Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini wrought a kind
of reformations in Shiaism, arguing that the clerics should rule. So Moqtada
Sadr follows his father in having gone over to Khomeini's theories of clerical
rules, whereas Sistani never accepted them, nor did most of the leading
clerics of Najaf, which is one of the major theological and legal centers in
the Shiite world. It's a place of seminaries where clerics are trained, and
it has its own ideological caste. And so Najaf typically does not want to see
clerics in government. Sistani believes that clerics should make their views
known on important social issues, arguing from an Islamic point of view
through rulings, or fatwas.

GROSS: Does al-Sistani see the United States as the great Satan in the same
way that Moqtada al-Sadr does?

Prof. COLE: No, I don't believe he does. I think that he genuinely is
grateful to the United States for having overthrown Saddam. And, indeed, I
think Grand Ayatollah Sistani's main critique of the United States is that it
hasn't been true enough to its own ideals and its own promises. Sistani wants
one-person, one-vote democracy in Iraq, and he wants it yesterday. And he
insists that without one-person, one-vote kinds of elections, nothing that is
done in Iraq is ultimately legitimate. And so if there's going to be a
constitution, it has to be written by people who were elected to a
constitutional convention by the Iraqi people. If there's going to be a
government, it must be elected by the Iraqi people in order to represent their
will. That is his Islamic legal ruling: that government must derive from the
will of the people.

And he doesn't believe that since the fall of Saddam anything the United
States has done in Iraq really has tended towards that results. Everything
has been done through appointments and through kind of influenced processes,
cronyism and so forth. And so he thinks this entire enterprise is
illegitimate because it does not derive from the will of the people.

GROSS: Juan Cole is a professor of Middle East and South Asian history at the
University of Michigan and author of "Sacred Space and Holy War." He'll be
back in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Coming up, the Shiite and Sunni responses to the American-led
occupation in Iraq. We continue our conversation with Juan Cole, professor of
history and an authority on modern Islamic movements.

Also, Ken Tucker reviews the debut album by singer-songwriter Nellie McKay.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Let's get back to our conversation about the insurgencies in Iraq. My guest
is Juan Cole. He's a professor of Middle East and South Asian history at the
University of Michigan, and author of the book "Sacred Space and Holy War:
The Politics, Culture and History of Shi`ite Islam."

What is the relationship between the Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani and Moqtada
al-Sadr, who have emerged as the two leaders of the Shiites?

Prof. COLE: Well, Sistani and Moqtada don't get along, as indeed Sistani did
not get along with Moqtada's father, Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, because of their
different views of the role of the Shiite clergy and the future of Iraq and
their different methods of politics: Sistani being a quietist and simply
speaking out sometimes calling for peaceful demonstrations; Moqtada organizing
a militia and agitating for an Islamic republic. So they don't get along, and
indeed soon after the fall of Saddam, Moqtada's followers surrounded Sistani's
house in Najaf and gave him 48 hours to get out of town or threatened to kill
him, and Sistani's supporters among the tribal chieftains came into town and
forestalled this development.

So I think there's very bad blood between the two, but it's a very complex
relationship because Sistani, I think, also would not like to see Moqtada
treated unjustly. I think he would not like to see Moqtada dragged away in
chains by the Americans, and I think all the Shiites in Iraq, even if they
deeply dislike Moqtada, would be very nervous about that kind of development
because it looks tyrannical to them. It looks as though an imperial power is
coming in and cracking down hard on one of their own, even if he is one of
their own black sheep.

GROSS: Now when the United States and the coalition it led invaded Iraq, I
think the official word was we were expecting resistance from the Sunni,
because Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Muslim, his party, the Baath Party, was
predominantly Sunni. But I think there was more supported expected from the
Shiites because the Shiites had been terribly oppressed under Saddam Hussein.
Even though they were the majority group, they were oppressed by the Sunni
minority. Were you surprised at the Shiite insurgency?

Prof. COLE: No, actually I'm--Terry, the people who made the American policy
towards Iraq, the invasion and the occupation afterwards, are not stupid
people. They're often quite bright. But I have to say that on the whole and
by and large, they're extremely ignorant people, and they really did not know
what Iraq was like. They had no idea. Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary
of Defense, gave an NPR interview last year this time before the war and said
that the Shiites of Iraq would be better friends for the United States than
the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia because they were secular. And then there isn't
in Iraq that problem of holy cities the way there is in Saudi Arabia. I mean,
he appears not to have known about Najaf and Karbala, and he seems to have
thought that the Shiites of Iraq were secularists. And it simply wasn't true,
and anyone who had been following Iraq knew that those statements, you know,
needed a great deal of nuance.

I think that the American administration mainly depended upon what they were
told by expatriates like Ahmad Chalabi, who's from a Shiite family, but which
left Iraq in 1958 and simply didn't know what the situation was. Nobody knew
that Moqtada's father had this massive movement, even though there were books
about it in Arabic. They didn't realize that, you know, the slums had been
organized for homanish(ph) purposes under Saddam, and they thought of Saddam's
government as totalitarian, as controlling everything, whereas, in fact, we
know that there were substantial covert political movements among the Shia
that Saddam's people were never able to stamp out.

And so what really was happening was that Shiite Iraq, the 65 percent in the
south, was a cauldron of cells and conspiracies and militias and neighborhood
politics that Saddam tried to keep a lid on with brutal and massive violence,
and what the United States really did was to go in and take off that lid.

GROSS: Well, you know, I think there was this expectation that when after the
invasion, that the Shiites would support us, that the Sunni, at least
temporarily, would oppose us because we had deposed the Sunni leader, Saddam
Hussein, but certainly that the Shiites and the Sunni would be on different
sides of the fence. I mean, they have been opposed to each other for so long
in Iraq, but now it looks like there are Shiite and Sunni insurgencies against
the United States. Do you think that the Shiites and the Sunni are actually
working together now?

Prof. COLE: Well, there is evidence of them working together. In fact, when
the Americans were besieging Fallujah, the Shiites of Kazimiyah in Baghdad and
the Sunnis of Azimiyah in Baghdad, which are contiguous neighborhoods that
have a long history of mutual rivalry and turf wars, actually made common
cause and got together a big convoy of 60 relief trucks and went out to
Fallujah to try to get aid to the Sunni people of Fallujah. So that was an
example of Shiites donating blood, of donating goods, of putting themselves in
harm's way for the sake of the Sunnis.

And I think that Iraqi nationalism, as a phenomenon, tends to be disregarded
by Western observers, and I'm really puzzled by this. I mean, it is true that
Iraq is a new country, as many Third World countries were, grew out of a
colonial experience. The British carved it out of the Ottoman Empire and so
forth. But it has existed as an independent country since 1932, which is a
long time, and it's certainly long enough for education institutions and
political institutions to foster a sense of national identity, and Iraqis, in
my experience, have tended to be extremely nationalistic.

And just to give you an example, during the Iran-Iraq War, which Saddam
launched against Iran in 1980 and which lasted for eight years, from 1980 to
1988, there was relatively little defection from the ranks of the Shiite
Iraqis to Khomeini's side, and the army was very largely Shiite conscripts,
the Iraqi army. So you had hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shiites fighting to
the death for eight years against Iranian Shiites across the border who were
invading their country, side by side with the Republican Guards and the Sunni
Arabs of Iraq. So, I mean, there is a recent historical precedent for them
getting together to face an outside invader.

GROSS: My guest is Juan Cole, professor of Middle East and South Asian
history at the University of Michigan. We'll talk more after a break. This
is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is historian Juan Cole, author of "Sacred Space and Holy War:
The Politics, Culture and History of Shi`ite Islam."

One of the issues that's facing Iraq now is the majority vs. the minority. Is
there majority rule? How much power do the minorities have? Can you just
talk a little bit about the dilemmas that will face Iraq as it tries to come
up with a constitution?

Prof. COLE: Well, the Iraqis, in a way, it seems to me face a very similar
situation to that faced by the Founding Fathers of the United States, and I'm
a little bit puzzled by the decisions that have been made so far. For
instance, the interim constitution calls for just one house of parliament.
But you know, we have this system of a lower house to Congress and the upper
house, the Senate, precisely because the Senate overrepresents the small
states and it's kind of a protection for minorities that might otherwise face
the tyranny of the majority.

Since we know that the Iraqi Shiites are the majority of the country, 60, 65
percent, they're likely to dominate in parliament, and if it only has one
house, then there is a danger of a tyranny of the majority. So far that
danger has been addressed by giving, say, the Kurds veto over a future
constitution, or it has been addressed by trying to make sure that there are
three presidents representing each of the major religious communities. But
those kinds of measures don't seem, to me, to be ideal. I don't understand
why they just don't have two houses of parliament and have the upper house
overrepresent the Sunnis in such a way as to prevent a tyranny of the Shiite
majority.

GROSS: If President Bush called you up and asked you for advice about what we
should do next, what would you tell him?

Prof. COLE: Well, first of all, we have to get back to where we were before
the blow-up last week, and so I would say that a negotiated settlement with
Moqtada Sadr that did not commit the United States to trying to arrest or kill
him would be highly desirable. His followers are going to make no end of
trouble if we continue to go after him in that way, and they're not that big a
danger if they're left alone, but I think they are a big danger if they're
pursued.

Then I think that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is perfectly right, that the
only hope for a legitimate government in Iraq, one that can attract the
allegiance of the Iraqi people, is to go to elections as soon as possible, and
if anything, the current deadline for elections of January 2005 should be
moved up to this fall. I think that the sooner the elections can be held, the
sooner you'll have a government in Iraq that the Iraqis feel represents them.

GROSS: If there were an election very soon, as al-Sistani would like to see,
what would the outcome likely be?

Prof. COLE: Well, if Iraqis vote on a one-person, one-vote basis, it seems
likely that 15 percent or so of the seats will be held by Kurdish Sunnis,
another 15 or 16 percent of the seats will be held by Arab Sunnis, and then
some 65 percent of the seats will be held by Shiites, with the Christians, the
Turkmen and other small minorities having a few seats each. Since the Shiites
are themselves divided, it would be possible in such a situation for the
30-some percent of the members of parliament who are Sunni to put together a
coalition, say, with middle-class, more secular-minded Shiites, and perhaps
emerge with a secular majority in the parliament, even though the religious
parties certainly are going to do well and would have a prominent role. It's
not clear that they could, however, impose a Shiite theocracy on a country
that has, after all, a substantial Sunni minority of that sort.

Elections are a risk. Obviously they didn't work out very well when they were
held in Bosnia after the conflict there. But I think we're not at a situation
in Iraq where the risk of not having them is much greater than the risk of
having them, and I think--and actually Grand Ayatollah Sistani has said this
as well--that because Iraq is a relatively diverse place, it's likely that any
parliament that is elected now will be sufficiently diverse as to prevent any
kind of tyranny of the Shiite majority.

GROSS: You know, you've described the Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani as being,
you know, a kind of force for democracy in Iraq. Would he smile on women
running for office or women's rights in Iraq?

Prof. COLE: Sistani is a conservative man, and his tradition is, frankly,
patriarchal. But, you know, his followers at least seem to have an open mind
on some of these issues. It seems clear that he supports the vote for women,
and when some of Moqtada's followers were harassing women and insisting that
they veil, Sistani gave a ruling, a fatwa, that it is illegitimate to force
women to veil. Also, one of his key aides said that although in Islamic law
drinking is forbidden, whether to drink or not should be up to the individual.
So Sistani is in a tradition where, you know, individual conscience is very
important, and there are laws and one ought to follow them, but coercion and
using the levers of the state to deprive people of their rights is not
allowed. And so I think that Sistani's position on women would be compatible
with a certain amount of freedom for them in the new Iraq.

GROSS: A certain amount.

Prof. COLE: Yes. Well, I mean, I think they have to face the facts that
Sistani would want certain laws to be enacted in accordance with Islamic law
that would restrain women in certain ways. You know, in Islamic law, there's
no alimony, so if you had a strict version of Islamic law as the law of the
land in Iraq, women could be divorced with impunity and men would not have
responsibility for them after three months. And this actually was implemented
even in secular India for Muslim women because of a legal case there. So
there are many elements of sort of the more medieval interpretation of Islamic
law, and Islamic law itself is not set in stone, of course, but the more
conservative interpretations of it, which I think are characteristic of
Sistani, which would detract from women's rights.

GROSS: After the Israel military assassinated Sheikh Yassin, who was the
spiritual leader of Hamas, Moqtada al-Sadr said that he wanted to open Iraqi
chapters of Hamas and Hezbollah. How do you interpret that?

Prof. COLE: Well, I think it has to be recognized by American audiences that
the majority of Iraqis support the Palestinian cause, and very large numbers
of Iraqis were deeply upset by the Israeli assassination of Sheikh Yassin. In
the United States and Israel, Sheikh Yassin is seen as a terrorist, and many
deaths of innocent people are laid to his door. But in Iraq, he's seen as
somebody who's standing against an occupation, as a freedom fighter, and so
there's a sense in which both the uprising in Fallujah, which explicitly was
done in the name of Sheikh Yassin, and the crackdown on Moqtada, which came
after he made this declaration of solidarity with Hamas, came out of the
Sharon government's decision to take out Yassin with a helicopter gunship.

Moqtada and his father before him are strong supporters of the Palestinian
cause. The idea that Shiite Iraqis would be anything but sympathetic to
Hezbollah, which is a Lebanese Shiite group in south Lebanon that has fought
Israeli occupation of Lebanon, seems to me to have always been a non-starter.
It's natural that the Iraqi Shiites would be sympathetic to Hezbollah, and
overthrowing Saddam was always going to be a net plus for Hezbollah in
Lebanon. So I don't find anything particularly surprising about Moqtada's
announcement of solidarity with Hamas and Hezbollah and, indeed, Grand
Ayatollah Sistani, a much more cautious and venerable figure, has also
condemned the death of Yassin and has called for solidarity with Palestinians.

GROSS: You said that deposing Saddam was always going to be a net gain for
Hezbollah and Hamas, but that was certainly not what the Bush administration
had in mind. I mean, they saw overthrowing Saddam Hussein as paving the way
for peaceful settlement in the Middle East.

Prof. COLE: Yes. In 1996, Richard Perle, one of the advocates of the Iraq
war, and Douglas Feith, who's now the number-three man in the Pentagon, the
undersecretary of Defense for planning, issued a position paper for Benjamin
Netanyahu of the Likud Party in Israel in which they advocated an Iraq war
precisely for the purpose of moderating Hezbollah and removing support for the
Palestinians. So this outcome of possibly strengthening the Palestinian cause
and Hezbollah in Lebanon was not foreseen by the neoconservative intellectuals
who advocated the Iraq war, and this is simply because they, on the whole and
by and large, knew nothing about Iraq, and their 1996 proposal is full of
implausible assertions and, frankly, science fiction.

GROSS: Juan Cole is a professor of Middle East and South Asian history at the
University of Michigan, and author of "Sacred Space and Holy War: The
Politics, Culture and History of Shi`ite Islam."

Coming up, rock critic Ken Tucker reviews the debut release of Nellie McKay,
who has been praised for writing songs that reflect her love of older forms of
pop music. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Nellie McKay's debut CD "Get Away From Me"
TERRY GROSS, host:

Nellie McKay is a 19-year-old New York singer-songwriter whose debut release
is a double CD called "Get Away From Me." Although she incorporates hip-hop
and timely references into her music, initial press coverage of McKay has
focused on her fondness for the vocals of Doris Day as well as Eminem, for
older pop music forms and word play that's been compared to both Cole Porter
and Randy Newman. Rock critic Ken Tucker gave McKay a close listen.

(Soundbite of music)

Ms. NELLIE McKAY (Singer/Songwriter): (Singing) If you would sit oh so close
to me, that would be nice, like it's supposed to be. If you don't, I'll slit
your throat, so won't you please be nice? If you would...

KEN TUCKER reporting:

The first time I heard Nellie McKay's music, I hated it. Working on piano
like a female version of that enduringly annoying blusterer Billy Joel,
writing in throwback rhythms and genres, the cocktail ballad, the sort of
white jazz-pop stylings of '70s acts I always detested, like Manhattan
Transfer--well, let's just say it took me a little while to warm up to Nellie
McKay. Then I noticed that her album title, "Get Away From Me," was a sly,
open-handed slap at Norah Jones' "Come Away With Me," and read interviews
where McKay had the admirable gall to say that the narcotic Norah bored her.

I noticed that in the midst of her prettiest melodies, she was apt to swear
like a sailor about injustices perceived and deplored. And I noticed that she
frequently wrote in the character of various people she wanted to satirize or
attack, such as the selfish folks in this song.

(Soundbite of "Inner Peace")

Ms. McKAY: (Singing) In high school it was cool to say you look funny,
you're a retard dummy, a retarded dummy. Yeah, you (censored), out of luck,
you're no Playboy bunny. Hee hee. So you laugh, it's a gas, they're right on
the money. They're just being funny, hysterically funny. Yeah, I'm stupid,
it's true. Now can we be chummy? Maybe. But then it hits you, then it kicks
you, then you realize you're not unique, and you ignore it, you implore it,
just to let you turn the other cheek. Don't want to think about the schools
in Bosnia. Don't want to sing about food in Somalia. I don't need this. I
don't see this. All I want is inner peace. Graduate but...

TUCKER: That song is called "Inner Peace," but the invigorating thing about
Nellie McKay is that she revels in her inner turmoil. More explicitly
political than Eminem, she's delightfully awkward when she raps, in the grand
tradition of the Beastie Boys. But she's got a lot to say and she says it, in
the grand tradition of the rock music history she's so ambivalent about,
without regard to whether she sounds cool or not. She just lets it all out.

(Soundbite of "Sari")

Ms. McKAY: (Singing) Well, now I don't mean to offend, much. Just comprehend
when you're female and you're fenced in and phen-phened to no end and no zen
guide to men will help you fend off the brethren and then the pen appears and
better than the Oxygen Network or the sword or spear or fork or the bored
pork-fed horde. It's a mooring post, the whore you'll miss the most when
you're away. When you're in Snowshoe, PA, doing some play from backstage that
deals with AIDS and race and gays and relationships and ballet. And then
you're like, `Hey, yay, what'd you say? I can just sing my troubles away?'
But then you're (censored) and you gotta make buck and the whole world
(censored) and you're like a lame duck that's lyin' dyin' tryin' to sell out
but there's no one buyin'. There's all this doubt. You preen and dream and
scream and shout but your life's affliction is the fiction of Faust. I never
know when it comes and it goes, all the highs and the lows and there's
(unintelligible) straight away ...(unintelligible) cry every working day. I
don't know what else to say. I'm sorry for the time, the stupid way I rhyme.
I knew I shoulda chose a life of crime. I'm sorry for my blues. I guess it's
old news and you should know that really I'm sorry for you. I'm sorry...

TUCKER: In fact, it was a comment in one of her songs and one of her
interviews, saying how much she hated the concept of being cool, that turned
me around and on to McKay's music. That and touches like name-checking Ethel
Merman in the same verse as `civil disobedience' and neither in a gratuitous
way, in a song called "Change the World." Pretty soon, I was finding her
little genre parodies pretty funny and really enjoying her pointed,
impressively unironic attack on men in "It's a Pose."

(Soundbite of "It's a Pose")

Ms. McKAY: (Singing) Jimmy, you know my love is true. Oh, Davy, oh, you know
I love only you. And, Mitchie, oh, you give meaning to every day. Nathan,
oh, hold on, I got something to say. Menfolk, they need their women, but
women don't need their men. Ladies can walk away grinning, but guys act
surprised. `I thought I was your man. Why'd you leave me, baby?' Well, sir,
here's a maybe. Maybe it's because we can. Oh.

Unidentified Man: What the hell do you mean?

Ms. McKAY: (Singing) Well, for instance...

TUCKER: With this debut, Nellie McKay has already sidestepped the arty traps
that have ensnared other talented piano-playing sincerity-mongers like Rufus
Wainwright and the aforementioned Jones. There's something unsettling about
Nellie McKay. Her maturity contrasted with her youth, the hint in many of her
songs that she's an obsessive character who might be pretty high maintenance
or unbearable off stage. But working with The Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick
as producer to pare down what's apparently a trunkload of songs, flashing an
unnervingly manic red lipstick grin in TV appearances, McKay is going against
the grain of pop music in a way that makes many hard-core rappers and rockers
and soft-core Starbucks balladeers seem suddenly like they're trying too hard
to be cool fools she delights in tweaking.

I've gone from hate to, well, not exactly love, but bedazzled admiration
pretty fast. She's the kind of accessible eccentric who's sure to attract a
fervent cult, and maybe something even better, a broad, diverse audience for
her broad, diverse music.

GROSS: Ken Tucker is critic at large for Entertainment Weekly. He reviewed
Nellie McKay's debut CD "Get Away From Me."

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

(Soundbite of music)

Ms. McKAY: (Singing) Am I sad? Not sad enough really. Am I mad? Not mad
enough clearly. Am I complacent, completely lacking in sincerity? Yes,
indeed I am. Am I tough? Not tough enough really. Am I rough? Not rough
enough...
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