You can keep track of the blow-by-blow of the Iraq election on every other blog on the net it seems. The only thing I would like to add is this: the vast majority of Iraqi Kurds are Sunni, so instead of “low Sunni turnout” it should be “low Arab Sunni turnout.” No doubt most news junkies and bloggers simply assume that most readers are intelligent enough to do this “search & replace” implicitly. Don’t count on it! Iraq is complicated enough, no need to drop qualifiers.
Addendum: Let me first offer the caveat that I am a casual, at best, follower of foreign affairs, so I am sure that many (most?) readers of this weblog know more about the details of what is going on in Iraq than I. Nevertheless, a few observations….
I am worried that Americans are projecting their own conceptions of ethnicity, nationality and religious confession on to Iraq. I am not one who believes that ethnicity, nationality and religious confession do not have cross-cultural and cross-temporal universal meaning. But, I do believe that their explicit modern universality is a reflection of the fact that the outward institutions of the West have been extrapolated to the rest of humanity which does not share the historical and cultural background which makes them relevant in the same way.
Let me elaborate. Take the question of ethnicity. We know that ~75% of Iraqis are Arabs, ~20% of Iraqis are Kurds, with the balance made up of groups like the Turkomans, Assyrians and so on. The exact numbers are not really relevant, my point is that explicit circumscribing of ethnic identities in this fashion is most easily applicable to European nations circa 1900, after the period of nationalism and state-formation which resulted in a relative uniformity of, for example, “Italianness” and “Germanness,” which had not prior to that point existed.
Consider the “Arabs.” Up until the overthrow of the dictatorship Iraq had been under the sway of Baathism, Arab nationalism, for several decades. The backstory is that Baathism is very much an effort to unite Arab peoples under a 19th century European conception of nationality. The original Baathist intellectuals were often French educated, and, they were often members of religious minorities. The premier Baathist thinker, Michael Aflaq, was a Syrian Christian. Arab nationalism was obviously a way that Aflaq could emphasize his commonality with the majority of Arabs who were Muslim without discarding his Christian religious faith. It should perhaps be no surprise that Syrian Baathism is buttressed by the Alawite religious minority and has a reputation of religious tolerance toward Christians (Alawites celebrate some Christian festivals, like Christmas). Similarly, Iraqi Baathism was promulgated by the minority Sunni community. During the Iran-Iraq War Baathism was a way to rally Shia Arabs against their co-religionists in Iran (though there was a bizarre religious element in that the Baathist regime attempted to portray the Iranians as Zoroastrian fire worshippers).
My overarching point is that Arab nationalism is to a large extent an artificial construction of the 20th century, forwarded by European trained intellectuals who were often religiously heterodox and could not participate as full members of an Islamic civilization. The identity of Arabs with Islam is obviously very strong. I recall with interest that some Islamic historians term the Ummayyad Caliphal period the “Arab Kingdom.” This is because of its secular and ethnically chauvanistic tenor, in constrast with the more cosmopolitan and explicitly Muslim Abbassid dynasty. It is clear which identity won out among Arab Muslims for most of their history.
Add to this the fact that not only do Arabs have a transnational identity as the premier Muslim people that tends to absorb their ethnic identification, but they often identify more saliently at a more local level as members of a clan or tribe. With the decline of the idea of Christendom, as well as the American tendency toward mobility and alienness of the concept of extended families and clans, I think that Americans might be getting the wrong impression of what Iraqi Arabs conceive themselves of as (in other words, “Shia Arab” is a small fragment of their self-identification, in contrast with “American who goes to a Baptist church”).
Many of the same points can be made of Kurds. My understanding is that the “Kurdish language” is actually a loose coalition of barely intelligible Indo-Iranian dialects. It might be that “Kurdish” is an exclusionary identity, that is, when you subtract Arab speakers of the lowlands, Turkic speakers of Anatolia & Iran, Armenian speakers and finally Persian speakers who look toward standard Persian as typified by Ferdowsi, you are left with a hodge-podge of Indo-Iranian dialects in a mountainous area that no one wanted to really settle or administer. Add this to the fact that coterminous with the Iraqi region of Kurdistan there are groups like Assyrians, Chaldaeans and Yezidis, who might or might not speak a variety of languages but are defined by their religious heterodoxy, and you have a very confusing situation.
When Americans look to Iraq, I think we should think more of Germany in 1800 or Italy in 1850. Though there were rough rhymes and reasons to the makeup and self-identification of these geographic-cultural regions, the plethora of barely unintelligible dialects, confessional confusions in the case of Germany and the lack of historical statehood meant that nations had to be created from above (political consolidation) as well as from below (cultural hegemony of High German via Luther’s Bible as well as Florentine Italian from Dante). I am not sure that in this time and place that the exact dynamics are going to be recapitulated, and to some extent I think Arab nationalism several decades ago, or Kurdish nationalism today, is the outgrowth of a modern, nationalistic self-conscious elite grafted on to a pre-nationalistic population base.
So it’s confusing. Especially when you add to the fact that Americans are probably talking to the nationalist elites but have forged a democracy which gives voice to the pre-nationalistic masses.
Posted by razib at 01:38 AM