1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:13,260 Everyone. Welcome to our second talk in the series for the Hillary term on Iraq 20 years after the 2003 invasion. 2 00:00:14,310 --> 00:00:20,880 I am really delighted and honoured to introduce our Speaker tonight, Dr. Emerson, on Summary. 3 00:00:22,320 --> 00:00:29,250 It's wonderful to have someone who's done my very fresh recent research on Iraq. 4 00:00:29,790 --> 00:00:34,469 Has lived there a lot. Has like a lot of like firsthand experience. 5 00:00:34,470 --> 00:00:43,860 Really immersed is not the right word from there and like directly in touch through all these years. 6 00:00:44,250 --> 00:00:52,530 So we couldn't have been in better hands to learn more about Iraq close to 2000 feet. 7 00:00:53,250 --> 00:01:01,260 Mark Zandi is a research fellow at the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School. 8 00:01:02,220 --> 00:01:06,930 She is also a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institute Institution in Washington, 9 00:01:06,930 --> 00:01:12,810 D.C. and she is an incoming assistant professor of political science at Boston College. 10 00:01:14,140 --> 00:01:21,030 I should add that she she has also a Ph.D. from MIT in political science as well. 11 00:01:21,840 --> 00:01:26,460 And her research examines the intersection of religion and politics in the Middle East, 12 00:01:26,760 --> 00:01:35,970 looking particularly at how the Shia religious establishment in Iraq has intervened in formal politics, in protests and in peacebuilding. 13 00:01:37,350 --> 00:01:43,020 So please join me in welcoming her and listening to her talk. 14 00:01:49,700 --> 00:01:53,980 Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for being here today and thank you so much for inviting me. 15 00:01:53,990 --> 00:01:57,830 Mariam, what a nice introduction and I know that you are from Boston. 16 00:01:57,830 --> 00:02:01,100 So Solar Leaders Era Newton, thank you so much for the invitation. 17 00:02:01,610 --> 00:02:07,879 I am not only delighted to be here because I love talking about my research, but I also love any excuse to visit a beautiful campus. 18 00:02:07,880 --> 00:02:14,870 And this is definitely top five in the world. So for the definitive rankings, I will probably post on Twitter in maybe five years. 19 00:02:17,690 --> 00:02:23,089 So I wanted to say I have a script that I am notorious for going off script, 20 00:02:23,090 --> 00:02:29,239 and I think it's okay for this presentation because I am going to be pulling a lot from my own experience, 21 00:02:29,240 --> 00:02:37,130 having lived in Iraq in the last two years to give me to this topic, which I think is very important but is also part of my larger book project. 22 00:02:37,820 --> 00:02:44,150 So my book is about the role of clerics in protest in Iraq from 1910 to 2020. 23 00:02:44,660 --> 00:02:54,739 So it covers a very long period of time. But I wanted to focus today on the most recent instance of protest, which is a 2019 protest movement, 24 00:02:54,740 --> 00:02:59,479 also called the Shooting in Iraq and the Role of Clerics and the Role of Civil Society in that, 25 00:02:59,480 --> 00:03:05,240 because I think there's a very fascinating intersection that you don't really get to see until you're on the ground in Iraq. 26 00:03:06,320 --> 00:03:11,240 And one of the things that I've been very grateful for during my time in Iraq is that a lot of my 27 00:03:11,240 --> 00:03:16,370 preconceived notions about how religion intersects with everyday life are very much challenged. 28 00:03:16,730 --> 00:03:23,600 And I think if I want you to come away with one thing during this presentation is that oftentimes 29 00:03:23,600 --> 00:03:29,450 when you hear about a revolution or a protest movement or any kind of contentious political event, 30 00:03:29,750 --> 00:03:35,150 you often hear the narrative of very elite people who are representing this protest movement. 31 00:03:36,200 --> 00:03:43,910 And it makes sense because the people who have access to media and have access to convey a message in English are the upper middle class activists, 32 00:03:44,180 --> 00:03:48,889 and in Iraq's case, the medical doctors and engineers. Now, the political scientist. 33 00:03:48,890 --> 00:03:51,830 The economist or the sociologist? The anthropologist. 34 00:03:52,790 --> 00:03:58,939 And for me, having received a lot of information when I was in the U.S. about Iraq, despite doing a lot of fieldwork, 35 00:03:58,940 --> 00:04:06,319 and it actually changed a lot when I moved out of the country and interacted with the reality of everyday life and how 36 00:04:06,320 --> 00:04:14,990 religion and activism and protest touched everyday life in ways that were not present to me when I was in the United States. 37 00:04:14,990 --> 00:04:20,690 And so one of these contradictions that's so important to discuss is that there seems 38 00:04:20,690 --> 00:04:25,250 to be the sense that protest movements happen in this very black and white ideology, 39 00:04:25,490 --> 00:04:29,450 or they're anti-religion or secular, or they're in Arabic. 40 00:04:29,450 --> 00:04:35,269 They use the word civil, not only because they don't want to say secular, to not offend people who who are conservative. 41 00:04:35,270 --> 00:04:42,110 But in reality, large segments of the population still identify with religion and very profound ways. 42 00:04:42,320 --> 00:04:47,299 And you can find the very same activists who say, we want the separation of religion and the state. 43 00:04:47,300 --> 00:04:54,650 We want the secular state to be the very same people who on a Friday will listen to the sermon of a cleric talking about the protest movement. 44 00:04:54,950 --> 00:04:59,600 And to me, that was so puzzling and contradictory and I really wanted to delve into why that was happening. 45 00:05:01,100 --> 00:05:09,230 And so today's talk, I will try to provide some sort of answer to this and to elaborate a bit more on this very compelling relationship. 46 00:05:09,500 --> 00:05:19,820 So I have on this screen here just some various titles from both academic or policy work on the protest movement in 2019, 47 00:05:20,150 --> 00:05:23,719 as well as some journalism on the protest movement 2019. 48 00:05:23,720 --> 00:05:29,510 And you can say this like you can see this rhetoric emerging, like secular Shia Islam is on the rise. 49 00:05:29,510 --> 00:05:38,299 And the Shia crescent, you know, I'm sure in Iran with the protest right now, we're hearing a lot about this two very, very one sided narrative. 50 00:05:38,300 --> 00:05:48,740 And it's not it's just not one sided as much as it's also conveying the superficial elements of a very, very deep movement. 51 00:05:49,790 --> 00:05:54,710 And in Iraq's case, there was a lot of this rhetoric without enough analysis of it. 52 00:05:55,070 --> 00:06:04,549 And I was really interested in uncovering this because I didn't think it really told the whole story, because while we got this kind of coverage, 53 00:06:04,550 --> 00:06:12,320 we also got something like this image I have from Al Jazeera which says Arab protesters look to society ahead of Friday sermon. 54 00:06:12,710 --> 00:06:19,640 And for those familiar with the Grand Ayatollah, Sistani is the most important religious Shia religious cleric in Iraq. 55 00:06:19,940 --> 00:06:25,159 He has millions of followers within the country, followers within Iran, within the region and across the globe. 56 00:06:25,160 --> 00:06:32,989 And you can see what is very striking about this image and I don't know how well you can see it is that his photo is right there on the building, 57 00:06:32,990 --> 00:06:37,910 which is called the Turkish restaurant, which is really the focal point of the protest movement in Baghdad. 58 00:06:38,210 --> 00:06:40,160 This is where the protests were, 59 00:06:41,420 --> 00:06:47,240 where they were born and where they maintained their power and where all the slogans emerged and where all the demands were raised. 60 00:06:47,540 --> 00:06:50,060 And you have. This photo of a cleric right there. 61 00:06:51,230 --> 00:06:57,710 And I really wanted to understand why you could have these two different rhetoric, rhetorics at the same time. 62 00:06:58,190 --> 00:07:05,269 And I founded that during my time in Iraq by speaking both to clerics, but also, more importantly, 63 00:07:05,270 --> 00:07:11,150 to activists themselves and to the civil society leaders, as well as everyday protesters. 64 00:07:13,860 --> 00:07:17,759 Before. I didn't want to make this an overly academic lecture at all. 65 00:07:17,760 --> 00:07:24,930 So I'm just very, very easy to just talk about the different methods that I use to collect information. 66 00:07:24,960 --> 00:07:29,220 But I won't bore you the details, mainly with a lot of interviews on the field with different people, 67 00:07:29,490 --> 00:07:33,450 but also some archival work that I've done over the years that I think is important to 68 00:07:33,450 --> 00:07:39,479 understand the full relationship between religion and the state and some discourse analysis. 69 00:07:39,480 --> 00:07:46,470 And in the Q&A, we can talk in more details about anything that's interesting to you, but just a very brief overview of that. 70 00:07:47,640 --> 00:07:57,000 So I wanted to start by first just discussing the key actors in this presentation, the first one being the Shia religious establishment in Iraq. 71 00:07:57,420 --> 00:08:01,799 I'll start by saying that Iraq is a very diverse country with a lot of religious actors. 72 00:08:01,800 --> 00:08:10,350 And so I very purposefully chose to study the Shia religious establishment because the greatest, largest group in Iraq are the Shia of Iraq. 73 00:08:10,710 --> 00:08:16,230 And so the Charlotte establishment has very interesting level of authority over a large segment of the population. 74 00:08:16,710 --> 00:08:21,390 And what is more important to me is that until very recently, 75 00:08:21,390 --> 00:08:26,370 they've been largely absent in academic discourse and there hasn't been any books about them. 76 00:08:27,510 --> 00:08:31,620 What you haven't said is a lot of focus when it comes to the role of religion in the state. 77 00:08:31,650 --> 00:08:40,049 On as her in Egypt understandably it's a of the most important religious institutions of Islam and from the Shia side, 78 00:08:40,050 --> 00:08:47,340 everyone is of course preoccupied with Khomeini because he kind of upended everything we know about clerics and their role in politics. 79 00:08:47,670 --> 00:08:54,989 But he also inadvertently led to this belief that Iraqi clerics are quiet and they don't participate in politics, 80 00:08:54,990 --> 00:09:00,480 they don't participate in protest or quiet under authoritarianism in their client under everything else, 81 00:09:00,840 --> 00:09:08,990 while you have this different school of thought is much more involved in will create a theocratic state and that's a very you know, 82 00:09:09,000 --> 00:09:12,299 it's knocking both black and white ideas in the beginning of this presentation. 83 00:09:12,300 --> 00:09:17,640 But that's another very black and white idea of what clerics do, and they operate on a much wider spectrum. 84 00:09:19,140 --> 00:09:27,830 So one of the reasons I focus on those institutions, because I'm trying to fill in this gap of knowledge about about the Hausa, 85 00:09:27,840 --> 00:09:31,469 which is the set of seminaries that operate in Iraq. 86 00:09:31,470 --> 00:09:34,959 There are seminaries, libraries, mosques. 87 00:09:34,960 --> 00:09:36,570 There are places where clerics teach. 88 00:09:36,570 --> 00:09:45,330 And you can see a photo up here of, you know, clerics in Najaf by a bunch of books is this kind of environment that I that I focus on. 89 00:09:45,390 --> 00:09:50,580 But to give you a bit of a firmer grasp on it, there's two concepts I'd like you to keep in mind. 90 00:09:50,940 --> 00:09:56,820 The first one is the Nigeria, which is really the upper echelons of religious leadership in Iraq. 91 00:09:57,480 --> 00:10:01,260 And by that I mean the system of religious training. 92 00:10:01,680 --> 00:10:07,919 The seminary that occurs within the houses is a very hierarchical one, but it's also very often institutionalised. 93 00:10:07,920 --> 00:10:09,700 It's not very bureaucratised at all. 94 00:10:09,700 --> 00:10:17,429 It looks nothing like looks nothing like Oxford in the sense of although here Oxford also isn't very institutionalised sometimes, 95 00:10:17,430 --> 00:10:21,540 but it's definitely less institutionalised in Oxford, I would say. 96 00:10:21,900 --> 00:10:26,040 But there isn't really like you don't come in and there is a professor who will guide you through and tell you, 97 00:10:26,040 --> 00:10:29,670 you know, this is of course, you should take and I by this point, did you take this exam? 98 00:10:29,970 --> 00:10:33,210 I hear the exams here are very institutionalised. So there's nothing like that. 99 00:10:34,440 --> 00:10:41,330 And it's just a system in which you have to drive yourself to different classes, to different clerics. 100 00:10:41,340 --> 00:10:43,440 You have to build relationships with mentors, 101 00:10:43,770 --> 00:10:50,219 and you have to reach this level of knowledge where elite scholars are willing to say that you are well versed enough, 102 00:10:50,220 --> 00:10:56,549 that you are knowledgeable enough that you can infer laws, Islamic laws on your own, 103 00:10:56,550 --> 00:11:03,030 and then you become what they call them, which that someone who is able to and for Islamic knowledge on their own. 104 00:11:04,050 --> 00:11:07,650 And this process takes a very long time, I'd say, you know, 105 00:11:07,800 --> 00:11:16,290 20 years to get through the the very basic training at the three levels before you become in a position where you actually become an ayatollah, 106 00:11:16,290 --> 00:11:24,600 a grand jury or a grand ayatollah. And the key thing is that you really need followers to establish who you are. 107 00:11:25,080 --> 00:11:32,550 And within Shiism, clerics, followers who are required to emulate them on religious matters. 108 00:11:32,760 --> 00:11:37,110 So it does give them a bit of authority, particularly on family issues and social issues. 109 00:11:37,590 --> 00:11:46,080 And they also are required, which is very important, to give a certain percentage of their disposable income as a religious tax of sorts. 110 00:11:46,410 --> 00:11:52,710 So clerics, when they reach very high levels in this institution, are able to finance a lot of their own endeavours, 111 00:11:53,040 --> 00:11:56,520 and most importantly, they're able to be very independent of the state. 112 00:11:57,990 --> 00:12:02,640 And this is what really makes this religious institution very unique, I would say. 113 00:12:02,910 --> 00:12:09,510 And this is what makes them admire the religious leaders of the top echelons of this institution, very powerful. 114 00:12:09,510 --> 00:12:12,960 It's because they have their own resources and they have their own followers. 115 00:12:13,100 --> 00:12:19,129 So they have the ability to mobilise people through to certain actions, to certain beliefs, 116 00:12:19,130 --> 00:12:22,370 and they have the ability to mobilise resources around different causes. 117 00:12:22,940 --> 00:12:26,600 And this is the reason that this institution. 118 00:12:28,180 --> 00:12:32,230 Was so preyed upon by former Iraqi regimes. 119 00:12:32,980 --> 00:12:37,750 So the Baathist era of Iraq, which I think everyone is very familiar with, 120 00:12:37,750 --> 00:12:45,880 is notorious for being a totalitarian state and an authoritarian state at other times preying on large segments of the population. 121 00:12:46,360 --> 00:12:52,030 But one of the one of the segments of the population that are preyed on most strongly was clerics, 122 00:12:52,030 --> 00:12:55,510 because it really did fear, particularly after the Iranian revolution, 123 00:12:55,810 --> 00:13:01,600 that they would launch a movement similar to that in Iran and that they would take over the state because 124 00:13:01,600 --> 00:13:06,580 of their ability to control a large part of the population and their independence from the state. 125 00:13:06,790 --> 00:13:15,190 So in retaliation to that, the state decided to be very cautious of them and to control them to the extent possible. 126 00:13:16,210 --> 00:13:22,450 So one of the places I visited during my research was about the archives and the Hoover Institute and Stanford. 127 00:13:23,140 --> 00:13:26,950 And for those of us familiar with that story, 128 00:13:26,950 --> 00:13:33,729 it's basically all the documents of Saddam Hussein's government that were taken out of Iraq in 2003 and moved 129 00:13:33,730 --> 00:13:40,360 to staff first in Washington and then to Stanford University in California for American academics to see, 130 00:13:40,360 --> 00:13:44,440 but for Iraqis to not see until 2019 or 2020 again. 131 00:13:44,890 --> 00:13:49,570 So there's a lot of ethical issues around these documents and their existence and where they are. 132 00:13:49,570 --> 00:13:55,200 But when you actually go and see them, you can actually see the inner workings of an entire regime. 133 00:13:55,210 --> 00:14:02,470 And one of the things that becomes very clear very quickly is that this regime was obsessed with clerics, particularly Shiite clerics. 134 00:14:02,470 --> 00:14:05,800 But to not discriminate, it was obsessive clerics across the board. 135 00:14:06,130 --> 00:14:12,160 It tried to keep the Sunni clerics, for example, using the same sermons and the same language. 136 00:14:12,460 --> 00:14:16,330 It kept an eye on how clerics talked about Saddam Hussein in their sermons. 137 00:14:16,810 --> 00:14:20,920 I mean, it reached a level of pettiness where I could see that in some of the documents. 138 00:14:20,920 --> 00:14:27,760 They would check whether or not a cleric had prayed and prayed for the president before they started their sermon. 139 00:14:28,180 --> 00:14:30,320 So it's a very tight level of regulation. 140 00:14:30,340 --> 00:14:37,659 The actual is that the religious establishment itself had its numbers dwindling from the thousands to the hundreds during this period from, 141 00:14:37,660 --> 00:14:40,780 I would say, 1980 to 2003. 142 00:14:41,890 --> 00:14:50,710 Very few international students came to this institution at this time, and the entire environment was very, very, very fearful of the state. 143 00:14:51,070 --> 00:14:58,479 And so in light of this, you can see that for a cleric and I have this quotation on on the screen, 144 00:14:58,480 --> 00:15:05,740 when 2003 came, it was an entire reversal of fortune that I can't I can't emphasise enough for them. 145 00:15:06,160 --> 00:15:14,229 They went from being individuals that were hunted down by the state, who were tortured and exiled, who were deported, 146 00:15:14,230 --> 00:15:19,480 whose family members were killed, to suddenly being in a very friendly relationship with the state. 147 00:15:19,480 --> 00:15:25,060 And not only that, sometimes the state would actually seek advice and seek legitimation from them. 148 00:15:26,500 --> 00:15:31,690 So one of the clerics I spoke to told me when I was you know, I speak to him in 2018. 149 00:15:31,690 --> 00:15:40,210 So it's, you know, years since 2003, Iraq had seen the ISIS war, a lot of other difficulties, and there had seen several waves of protests. 150 00:15:40,540 --> 00:15:46,420 And the cleric said to me, we should be grateful for Iraq. Now, it's so much better than before, better than Saddam's era. 151 00:15:46,720 --> 00:15:51,459 The Baathists were criminals. And I think this is something that gets lost a lot. 152 00:15:51,460 --> 00:15:57,370 When people look at Iraq today, they forget that for many of these clerics who tend to be a lot older than the average Iraqi citizen, 153 00:15:57,820 --> 00:16:00,399 their formative years really were under baptism. 154 00:16:00,400 --> 00:16:05,830 And they were so frightened by what happened under Saddam that anything in comparison was better for them than that. 155 00:16:06,340 --> 00:16:08,319 Despite the corruption of the current state, 156 00:16:08,320 --> 00:16:15,000 despite all these other grievances that the public expresses on a regular basis, they still have that point of contact. 157 00:16:17,310 --> 00:16:26,730 But at the same time, it wasn't something that happened without there was a price for the clerics to pay after 2010, 158 00:16:26,730 --> 00:16:31,860 after this strong relationship of the state and their alliance, 159 00:16:31,860 --> 00:16:34,769 whether intended or whether it was accidental, 160 00:16:34,770 --> 00:16:42,680 what the state actually ended up depleting a lot of their the good populations goodwill with the clerics in Iraq. 161 00:16:42,690 --> 00:16:47,459 And I actually remember a story of I was in Iraq in 2003. 162 00:16:47,460 --> 00:16:52,890 I was just visiting. And at the time there was this big rhetoric going around about how. 163 00:16:52,890 --> 00:16:54,450 So I used to visit the city of Karbala, 164 00:16:54,450 --> 00:16:59,639 which would get a lot of pilgrims from Iran and about how a lot of the Iranian pilgrims were warning the Iraqis this 165 00:16:59,640 --> 00:17:05,160 was that the popular narrative in Karbala of just wait a few years and you'll hate these clerics like we hate them, 166 00:17:05,160 --> 00:17:10,560 too. And so it was a sense of like once they become politicised, you won't like these people anymore. 167 00:17:10,770 --> 00:17:15,270 They're no longer oppressed. You want, you want, you know, they won't resonate with you anymore. 168 00:17:15,540 --> 00:17:22,200 And so clerics in Iraq actually experienced a bit of this despite being much less involved in politics than their Iranian counterparts. 169 00:17:22,650 --> 00:17:33,000 And it was largely because a lot of the Shia Islamist parties that did quite well in subsequent elections after 2003 and even 2005 and so on, 170 00:17:33,480 --> 00:17:37,709 they found they trace their roots to the clerical establishment. 171 00:17:37,710 --> 00:17:42,330 They would say, you know, our founders from the clerical establishment, we we are Islamist parties. 172 00:17:42,330 --> 00:17:46,920 They would take photos with elite clerics and they would try to market themselves as such. 173 00:17:47,250 --> 00:17:54,660 But because they performed so poorly when it came to public services, because the population saw them as being complicit in corruption, 174 00:17:55,020 --> 00:18:03,120 this reputation started to rub off on the clerical establishment as well, and they started suffering reputational costs. 175 00:18:03,930 --> 00:18:11,999 And so I have another quote here from a cleric whose name I didn't put up there because I don't think he wanted others to know that he had said this. 176 00:18:12,000 --> 00:18:18,450 But he he said to me, when some religious organisations entered political activity, meaning Islamist parties, 177 00:18:18,450 --> 00:18:25,260 this reflected badly on religion and the street started to reject the and started to dislike the religious establishment. 178 00:18:25,680 --> 00:18:33,470 Why? Because they saw it as an authority that is responsible for 15 years of destruction and devastation that has befallen the country. 179 00:18:33,480 --> 00:18:35,610 This is how the street perceives the situation. 180 00:18:35,940 --> 00:18:42,050 So there's this presumption of a reversal of fortune, of strong ties to the state that they've never had before. 181 00:18:42,060 --> 00:18:47,010 At the same time, that came at the expense of losing the will of the public. 182 00:18:48,570 --> 00:18:57,479 What made matters worse, in a way, was in 2014, when there was the ISIS incursion in Iraq, 183 00:18:57,480 --> 00:19:05,310 and there was this very well-known photo by Grand Ayatollah Sistani encouraging Iraqis to participate and to join security forces, 184 00:19:06,180 --> 00:19:12,480 which later led to the creation of the Popular Mobilisation Forces, which were very popular in Iraq during that war. 185 00:19:12,840 --> 00:19:18,090 And, you know, I have very distinct memory of being in Iraq in 2014 and 2015. 186 00:19:18,420 --> 00:19:22,560 And at that time, they were considered absolute heroes of this cause and essential. 187 00:19:22,800 --> 00:19:26,250 But over time, they became disliked by the population. 188 00:19:26,250 --> 00:19:35,040 They were seen as predatory, as non-state actors. And this also reflected badly on the religious establishment, because whether, you know, 189 00:19:35,130 --> 00:19:40,560 whether this photo actually led to the creation of paramilitary groups or whether it didn't, 190 00:19:40,560 --> 00:19:46,050 it's still it still was attributed to the religious establishment's role in this war. 191 00:19:46,290 --> 00:19:50,790 And so I have this photo of a billboard of the various clerics who had died. 192 00:19:50,790 --> 00:19:54,330 And this from the religious establishment and this other. 193 00:19:56,170 --> 00:20:00,129 This you know, this kind of imagery is throughout Iraq, 194 00:20:00,130 --> 00:20:05,680 but the population's reaction to it has changed dramatically since the end of the war with ISIS. 195 00:20:06,730 --> 00:20:15,310 And this change in public opinion is something that you can see in a wide array of public opinion polls in Iraq. 196 00:20:15,340 --> 00:20:17,230 Some of them, I trust, more than others, 197 00:20:17,530 --> 00:20:25,960 though there's been enough public opinion work in Iraq that I that I do believe the findings reflect reality in this case. 198 00:20:26,560 --> 00:20:32,710 So this particular one is from the Arab world that are saying that in 2013. 199 00:20:33,190 --> 00:20:41,200 So before the war with ISIS, 19.5% of Iraqis surveyed preferred a non-religious party over a religious party. 200 00:20:41,260 --> 00:20:45,910 And by 2018, 40.6% preferred a non-religious party. 201 00:20:46,210 --> 00:20:51,490 So you see the population wanting non-religious parties more at this time. 202 00:20:53,230 --> 00:21:00,100 And this is also from the Arab barometer showing trust in judgement or the areas of Iraq, Bahrain, Baghdad. 203 00:21:00,190 --> 00:21:03,520 Most of these provinces are almost predominantly Shia. 204 00:21:04,060 --> 00:21:09,430 So you can see how the levels of trust in religious leaders have plummeted over the years. 205 00:21:10,600 --> 00:21:14,710 Of course, there's different definitions of which religious religious leaders are talking about. 206 00:21:15,070 --> 00:21:22,320 There's also the question that I'll come back to in a second that I started this presentation with of, you know, we know, you know, this to be true. 207 00:21:22,330 --> 00:21:28,450 We know that this is a trend in Iraq. Know that there's a turn against religious rule and in politics. 208 00:21:28,720 --> 00:21:34,720 But at the same time is still a highly conservative society who at the end of the day was listening to the protest, 209 00:21:34,720 --> 00:21:39,970 to the sermons during the protest movement. So there is still a big question mark about what exactly is happening in Iraq. 210 00:21:41,470 --> 00:21:45,490 There is a lot more public opinion, dead on or off, that pretty much says the same thing. 211 00:21:45,490 --> 00:21:55,000 But in my interviews as well and in my time in Iraq, you can sense that this has happened and that opinions have plateaued more or less now. 212 00:21:55,360 --> 00:22:00,280 They're not on a decline, you know, until they plummet completely. 213 00:22:00,700 --> 00:22:05,050 But you can see that it is quite, quite a distinction over the years. 214 00:22:09,010 --> 00:22:13,899 So this is all the context in terms of public opinion and how the you know, 215 00:22:13,900 --> 00:22:19,389 how everyone in Iraq feels and where the clerics are in terms of their relationship 216 00:22:19,390 --> 00:22:24,129 with the state before the October protest movement or the party movement, 217 00:22:24,130 --> 00:22:26,920 as it's called in Iraq. I mean, 218 00:22:26,920 --> 00:22:35,889 I don't even know how to begin to describe this movement because it's it's happened so recently that I I have an adviser who always recommends 219 00:22:35,890 --> 00:22:43,990 never studying a protest movement until you're moved 15 years faster so that you can reduce all the all the emotion and the energy around it. 220 00:22:44,740 --> 00:22:52,000 But this is quite reason to happened in the fall of 2019 and the winter of 2020 was cut short by the COVID pandemic. 221 00:22:52,570 --> 00:22:57,820 It is the largest anti-government protest movement in Iraq's post-world three history. 222 00:22:58,400 --> 00:23:06,970 Destabilise the country for months on end. But it was limited to Baghdad and the Shia majority governorates in southern Iraq. 223 00:23:07,570 --> 00:23:13,450 There really weren't protests in Sunni areas or in Kurdish areas for various reasons that I'm happy to talk about. 224 00:23:14,590 --> 00:23:20,710 But what's really interesting is that in addition to them being predominantly Shia protozoans of the shell population, 225 00:23:21,670 --> 00:23:28,240 they also had a very religious dynamic to them in the sense that anyone who's been to Iraq for pilgrimage, 226 00:23:28,870 --> 00:23:32,620 which I'm sure some of you have to know that there's this particular environment of 227 00:23:32,620 --> 00:23:36,549 almost the festival where people are cooking and providing free food and free housing. 228 00:23:36,550 --> 00:23:40,570 And there is these plays and these cultural productions on the street. 229 00:23:40,840 --> 00:23:43,480 And this was something that was occurring during the protest movement. 230 00:23:43,870 --> 00:23:48,610 And I actually saw it again recently when Iraqis were hosting the Gulf Cup as well. 231 00:23:48,880 --> 00:23:54,310 It's, you know, every protest movement or every public event in Iraq takes on a religious character inadvertently, 232 00:23:54,310 --> 00:24:00,490 because this is how people know how to come together. It's how they how they operate in the public sphere. 233 00:24:00,850 --> 00:24:03,879 And so I remember watching this and seeing, like, you know, 234 00:24:03,880 --> 00:24:10,780 green flags representing Imam Hussein and Shia Islam and just these productions that felt very strongly religious. 235 00:24:11,290 --> 00:24:18,159 At the same time, as you can see, the demands on the on the Turkish restaurant, the building over here, 236 00:24:18,160 --> 00:24:24,459 or various demands being held by protesters of wanting to separate religion from the state and wanting no 237 00:24:24,460 --> 00:24:32,110 more Islamist parties and just having these somewhat contradictory but not really contradictory demands, 238 00:24:32,110 --> 00:24:39,009 because this could also be just a cultural production. But in addition to the way that they express themselves, 239 00:24:39,010 --> 00:24:47,650 there is also the issue of everyone watching and waiting for the Friday sermons of Grand Ayatollah Sistani, whose representatives? 240 00:24:48,460 --> 00:24:52,330 There are two representatives, and they took turns delivering sermons every Friday. 241 00:24:52,600 --> 00:24:59,290 And I can tell you that every single person in Iraq and every single Iraqi outside was waiting to hear what they were going to say. 242 00:24:59,560 --> 00:25:03,640 We are waiting for them to shepherd Iraq in a way through what was happening. 243 00:25:04,060 --> 00:25:09,250 And protesters were mainly interested in will the clerics side with us or the side of the state. 244 00:25:10,000 --> 00:25:17,410 Now, the clerics that are sorry, the protestors themselves and the activists were very much divided on what they wanted. 245 00:25:17,770 --> 00:25:22,900 So you have an entire group of people that are very revolutionary minded. 246 00:25:23,260 --> 00:25:26,649 So they would challenge the typical things you would have seen in the Arab Spring, 247 00:25:26,650 --> 00:25:30,400 like a shot during the 4th of July, which is, you know, entire engine change. 248 00:25:31,420 --> 00:25:37,899 And then you had very reformist people who had the inclination of having a new electoral law or who wanted 249 00:25:37,900 --> 00:25:43,360 to the prime minister to resign or something that worked within whatever institutions that Iraq already had. 250 00:25:43,720 --> 00:25:49,780 In my own research on this, I can say that the reformists were outnumbered by the revolutionaries, 251 00:25:50,170 --> 00:25:59,620 but the reformists were also much, much more articulate and were able to take control of of creating these demands and writing them. 252 00:25:59,620 --> 00:26:05,410 And that's because a lot of the reformers came from Iraqi civil society and Iraqi civil society took on the leadership role. 253 00:26:06,160 --> 00:26:12,690 I mean, keep in mind, this is a very big protest movement. Not everyone in here is a civil society activist, is dedicated their entire life. 254 00:26:12,700 --> 00:26:16,900 It's just a regular protest movement for different segments of society showed up, 255 00:26:17,170 --> 00:26:21,910 some politicised, some being, you know, from the soldiers movement, some being, you know, 256 00:26:21,940 --> 00:26:23,230 everyday students, 257 00:26:24,010 --> 00:26:32,560 people who felt compelled to join the mobilisation because of family or other or pressure or just simply out of a sense of it being a historic moment. 258 00:26:32,860 --> 00:26:36,940 And so its demands were articulated by a different set of people as well. 259 00:26:38,410 --> 00:26:47,470 So when I spoke to the various protesters to tell them, you know, I'm very confused by your demands. 260 00:26:47,860 --> 00:26:52,569 On one hand, you say you want a secular state, you want you don't want any more Islamist parties, 261 00:26:52,570 --> 00:26:55,719 you don't want any more clerics involved in politics. 262 00:26:55,720 --> 00:27:00,880 And at the same time, why are you waiting for Grand Ayatollah Sistani to tell you what to do? 263 00:27:01,150 --> 00:27:06,520 And I was genuinely confused and I spoke to them. They also said, did you lasha, you know, did you actually care? 264 00:27:06,880 --> 00:27:10,060 So I have I have so many calls. It's from the fact these two. 265 00:27:11,470 --> 00:27:18,370 One activist told me, even though I am secular and a liberal, I still believe there is common ground between me and the religious establishment. 266 00:27:18,760 --> 00:27:26,350 And that speaks to a sort of pragmatism, a pragmatic relationship that developed between elite activists and between the clerical establishment, 267 00:27:26,800 --> 00:27:31,090 where the activists realise the clerics are very powerful and the clerics realise that 268 00:27:31,090 --> 00:27:35,380 their reputation needed rehabilitating and that these were good allies for them. 269 00:27:36,250 --> 00:27:42,700 The other quote is from an activist in Basra, and she said, after October, 270 00:27:42,700 --> 00:27:48,820 it was very necessary that we follow the speeches of the religious establishment because it was the engine of movement for many people. 271 00:27:49,330 --> 00:27:53,980 Each speech was support which supported the revolution was a source of strength for us. 272 00:27:54,010 --> 00:27:56,860 The sermons are important to us so that we can gain an audience. 273 00:27:57,310 --> 00:28:07,000 So they wanted the formation of the religious establishment to provide them with an audience and to provide them, in a way, also with a path forward. 274 00:28:07,240 --> 00:28:14,139 And what's really funny is some of the other activists I remember distinctly speaking to a woman from Kosovo at the end of the interview told me, 275 00:28:14,140 --> 00:28:23,860 by the way, I'm a Christian and you know, the way I'm not surprised knowing Iraqis, you know, there's different layers of leadership. 276 00:28:23,860 --> 00:28:28,269 But we went through an entire interview and only in the end, she said, 277 00:28:28,270 --> 00:28:33,640 this idea of how we go about it makes it a lot more interesting to hear that you've been listening and waiting. 278 00:28:37,860 --> 00:28:49,200 So it's the role of the religious establishment at this time was I mean, it's really summarised by the side but says that the clerics called for calm. 279 00:28:49,650 --> 00:28:55,260 What they did was that they more or less suggested ways to resolve the situation, 280 00:28:55,260 --> 00:28:59,270 which was basically going through whatever constitutional means and mechanisms are. 281 00:28:59,280 --> 00:29:04,559 Can they suggested the Prime Minister step down, which happened early elections, 282 00:29:04,560 --> 00:29:10,440 new opt after a law, existing mechanisms that were definitely more reformist and revolutionary. 283 00:29:11,670 --> 00:29:19,049 At the end of the day, I mean, we were talking earlier, various people about whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about Iraq. 284 00:29:19,050 --> 00:29:25,440 And this is what I go off script again. And, you know, it's been 20 years since the 2003 war. 285 00:29:26,310 --> 00:29:32,639 Iraq is rife with corruption, you know, still not very great services in the country. 286 00:29:32,640 --> 00:29:37,650 Education is poor in the country, the longest government formation process in Iraq's history. 287 00:29:38,220 --> 00:29:48,810 At the same time, I think I drive a lot of optimism about Iraq's future from the fact that there are still 288 00:29:48,810 --> 00:29:55,800 democratic mechanisms that Iraqis tend to overlook and to not value despite them still occurring. 289 00:29:56,130 --> 00:30:00,420 The fact that we had a protest movement, which at the end of it of Prime Minister stepped down, 290 00:30:00,690 --> 00:30:09,360 is a pretty big deal for a country that had a war in 2003, a sectarian war in 2006, another sectarian war in 2014. 291 00:30:09,450 --> 00:30:12,240 It's basically only had five years of actual stability. 292 00:30:13,140 --> 00:30:19,050 And the fact that a protest movement led to the resignation of a prime minister, early elections, a new electoral law, 293 00:30:19,590 --> 00:30:25,530 protest parties emerging from that from that movement drawn in politics, gaining seats in parliament. 294 00:30:25,800 --> 00:30:32,810 And I can very easily tell you all the obstacles that these people face in the fight for inclusion and representation in Iraq. 295 00:30:32,820 --> 00:30:39,240 But at the same time, I tried to have a balanced approach, and I actually have to, because I am Iraqi. 296 00:30:39,240 --> 00:30:45,430 And if I don't believe that the state will will survive without the need for a hugely destabilising revolution, 297 00:30:45,430 --> 00:30:50,759 then I've just come to more war and more more instability. 298 00:30:50,760 --> 00:30:57,810 And I just I don't want to see the country go through that. But I also think there's a lot of unfair analysis tainted by the 2003 war, 299 00:30:58,110 --> 00:31:03,540 which is the sense that whatever happened in Iraq in 2003 was imposed by a foreign occupier. 300 00:31:03,540 --> 00:31:09,750 And so it's not organic. And therefore, anything emerging from it is also impure and inorganic and doomed to fail. 301 00:31:10,200 --> 00:31:24,750 And I see this a lot from people with particular policy backgrounds, and I'll just maybe it wasn't from who exactly, but I hear this discourse a lot. 302 00:31:25,080 --> 00:31:30,210 And as the 2003/20 anniversary comes up, I'm hearing it more and more. 303 00:31:30,510 --> 00:31:37,860 And this desire to really distance, distance oneself from there off whether as an academic or a policy writer, 304 00:31:38,400 --> 00:31:45,479 has grown stronger because of this implication that if you write anything about Iraq or you treat it as a normal country, 305 00:31:45,480 --> 00:31:53,340 then in a way, you're you're saying that what happened in 2003 was okay and you're an apologist for the war. 306 00:31:53,340 --> 00:31:59,459 But I do think it's time we move on past this mentality because it's negatively impacting Iraqis. 307 00:31:59,460 --> 00:32:04,680 And Iraq hasn't I mean, it's been poisoned by the 2003 war in many ways, but it hasn't. 308 00:32:05,910 --> 00:32:12,660 It's still surviving. And I don't think this kind of mentality really serves the country. 309 00:32:12,660 --> 00:32:17,309 So the point of optimism for me was that this did happen. 310 00:32:17,310 --> 00:32:18,960 We did have an early election. 311 00:32:19,200 --> 00:32:30,180 The early election did see new political parties going back to the story of the religious establishment and and the civil society activists. 312 00:32:30,810 --> 00:32:36,370 They have a larger role to play in this, of course. And I think that of course, 313 00:32:36,420 --> 00:32:44,399 I think that the reason that they shepherded the country towards this calm situation and supported the protesters and their demands, 314 00:32:44,400 --> 00:32:51,000 but also regulated the kinds of demands that got a lot of got more attention than others is because on one hand, 315 00:32:51,300 --> 00:32:54,690 they wanted to capture the goodwill of the people once they lost it. 316 00:32:55,380 --> 00:32:59,480 Clerics all recognised that the mood in Iraq has changed, that, you know, 317 00:32:59,490 --> 00:33:04,590 they were revered in 2003, but they're no longer revered because of this association with politics. 318 00:33:04,820 --> 00:33:10,740 But it seemed to them, and I think they use this as an opportunity to recapture some of that lost popularity. 319 00:33:11,470 --> 00:33:14,700 They still have to do a lot more, but I think it's one step. 320 00:33:14,730 --> 00:33:18,879 But the other one is that what people tend to forget about the clerics in Iraq, 321 00:33:18,880 --> 00:33:23,940 because that's the most important thing to them, is preserving the religious establishment itself. 322 00:33:23,940 --> 00:33:29,669 So the actual institution that they work and there are academic institutions where they teach their offices, 323 00:33:29,670 --> 00:33:33,950 their seminaries, their students, it's a centuries old institution. 324 00:33:33,960 --> 00:33:40,090 It means a lot to them and they want to make sure it exists. In a stable and secure environment. 325 00:33:40,510 --> 00:33:44,350 And for that reason, Iraq's stability is very important to them. 326 00:33:44,350 --> 00:33:48,969 And sometimes they make very tough decisions during times of authoritarianism and are 327 00:33:48,970 --> 00:33:53,710 willing to overlook state predation just to keep the religious establishment safe. 328 00:33:54,070 --> 00:33:57,250 So in light of this, they really don't want to avoid revolution. 329 00:33:57,250 --> 00:34:01,270 They wanted to avoid civil war because they didn't want an environment of instability. 330 00:34:01,510 --> 00:34:07,870 And keep in mind, going to what I said earlier about them having lived under Saddam Hussein and that really being the formative years for them, 331 00:34:08,200 --> 00:34:12,820 that motivated them to pursue stability. 332 00:34:13,150 --> 00:34:17,920 And so I so they wanted to keep this very informal and non-academic, but I just wanted to bring up, 333 00:34:19,570 --> 00:34:23,170 I think, one interesting finding from my book project that I wanted to share. 334 00:34:23,380 --> 00:34:25,270 And I'll walk everyone through this. 335 00:34:26,530 --> 00:34:36,640 I collected the sermons of the of the two representatives I told you about from 2017 up until the beginning of of the pandemic. 336 00:34:36,970 --> 00:34:44,080 And I also collected the protest dates for various protests that occurred in Iraq over that time. 337 00:34:44,410 --> 00:34:49,479 And I wanted to see how sermons differed during when they occurred on a Friday 338 00:34:49,480 --> 00:34:53,980 following a protest movement versus the one in which the protest movement didn't occur. 339 00:34:54,280 --> 00:34:58,420 So in other words, how much does their rhetoric change when there are protests? 340 00:34:59,020 --> 00:35:06,969 And what I found interesting is that they tend to if you look at the far right, they tend to acknowledge. 341 00:35:06,970 --> 00:35:11,950 So that's a positive association of the protest times that we've been following on that side. 342 00:35:12,340 --> 00:35:19,270 So they tend to acknowledge the grievances of people. They'll have words like anger, ignorance, emptiness, unemployment. 343 00:35:19,330 --> 00:35:21,070 It's an acknowledgement of grievances. 344 00:35:22,240 --> 00:35:29,050 At the same time, they'll also employ the language of institutions like protester quota, peaceful government election. 345 00:35:29,980 --> 00:35:35,200 These mechanisms of stability, more interestingly, than any of these is, you know, 346 00:35:35,200 --> 00:35:40,120 I'm sure everyone is aware that there is this rhetoric of oppression within Shias and that's so accessible. 347 00:35:40,390 --> 00:35:43,390 The entire story of Shiism is built around revolution. 348 00:35:43,810 --> 00:35:50,770 I mean, the label Khomeini and most other rallying people was through this language and it's so easy to use it. 349 00:35:51,400 --> 00:35:58,840 And it was not only absent, but it was negatively correlated with like they specifically chose not to use it or in protest. 350 00:35:59,110 --> 00:36:07,990 So the language of Shiism revolts toppling and that is because they do, for lack of a better word, have a status quo bias. 351 00:36:08,020 --> 00:36:17,710 They want stability. And so they'll avoid the avoid instigating events that will harm their institution or bring instability to the country. 352 00:36:21,220 --> 00:36:24,740 I animated this, but then I forgot to keep the animation and they said them. 353 00:36:24,760 --> 00:36:30,450 So all my conclusions are other ones, but I'll go through them with you. 354 00:36:30,460 --> 00:36:34,900 So I think, yeah, these are the takeaways, you know, 355 00:36:35,060 --> 00:36:40,660 you later on go on here trying to remember I was talking about this time I would say to always 356 00:36:40,660 --> 00:36:45,880 remember that 2003 was a shock to the system for both clerics and for the civil society. 357 00:36:46,210 --> 00:36:50,710 I talked about how it was a shock to the system for clerics, but for civil society in Iraq, 358 00:36:50,710 --> 00:36:54,370 which I spoke of last today, I'll give you a very quick background. 359 00:36:54,910 --> 00:37:05,350 So Iraq had, you know, a very typical flourishing civil society prior to the Baathist era, doing pretty well in the region. 360 00:37:06,010 --> 00:37:14,379 And then when both of them occurred and when Saddam Hussein particularly rose to power, it was all civil society was subsumed under the state. 361 00:37:14,380 --> 00:37:19,300 So organisations either became state and party organisations or they stopped existing. 362 00:37:19,600 --> 00:37:28,630 Some of them went underground, some of them went to Kurdistan after 1991 when it became autonomous from 363 00:37:28,720 --> 00:37:32,110 semi-autonomous from the rest of or autonomous at that time from the rest of Iraq. 364 00:37:32,830 --> 00:37:41,719 And for the most part, though, it really was decimated in the Baathist era and 2003 was a huge shock in the sense that there was 365 00:37:41,720 --> 00:37:47,790 the sudden influx of money from the US led coalition to try to rebuild civil society in Iraq. 366 00:37:47,800 --> 00:37:51,430 And the thinking behind this was that civil society leads to democratisation. 367 00:37:51,760 --> 00:37:56,739 So let's put money towards groups that work on human rights and democracy and like women's rights. 368 00:37:56,740 --> 00:38:01,930 And the huge influx of money led to a lot of corruption. 369 00:38:01,930 --> 00:38:07,660 Unsurprisingly, people created organisations just to get grants and then they disappeared and they became ghost organisations. 370 00:38:08,020 --> 00:38:16,389 So if you look at Iraq's NGO directorate, which registers every civil society organisation, your first glimpse are you'll say, 371 00:38:16,390 --> 00:38:21,670 wow, 4000 organisations registered in Iraq must be the most vibrant civil society scene in the region. 372 00:38:22,720 --> 00:38:28,060 When you go and you call them up or tried to call them up, as I did, so many disconnected lines, 373 00:38:28,060 --> 00:38:32,410 so many ghost organisations, I don't think they'd be more than 500 in the whole country. 374 00:38:33,100 --> 00:38:36,399 That being said, I do think the civil society scene is vibrant. 375 00:38:36,400 --> 00:38:41,350 I just think it's faces an uphill struggle in many ways. 376 00:38:41,350 --> 00:38:48,190 And it is there's it's really difficult to work with them because of this path of both organisations 377 00:38:48,190 --> 00:38:54,010 and this past issue with corruption and how it was dealt with in the media aftermath of 2003. 378 00:38:54,970 --> 00:38:55,180 You know, 379 00:38:55,210 --> 00:39:04,120 one of the legacies of the war in that sense is that it was too fast in the sense that it didn't really let them emerge in in a more organic way. 380 00:39:04,150 --> 00:39:09,580 But we still have a great civil society in Iraq. A handful of organisations are doing very important work. 381 00:39:10,780 --> 00:39:14,890 But like like the clerics, this is all new for them. 382 00:39:15,430 --> 00:39:22,570 And you can see civil society is quite divided between the old generation of civil society that had gone underground or had gone to Iraqi Kurdistan. 383 00:39:22,900 --> 00:39:25,870 And the new generation, which is very much you know, 384 00:39:26,580 --> 00:39:36,010 it grew up in the mid 2000s and had their four foundational years under various sectarian war as an occupation and have different, 385 00:39:36,250 --> 00:39:40,120 you know, to them the worst possible thing is having corruption. 386 00:39:40,120 --> 00:39:49,269 The worst possible thing is politicisation of religion, whereas this older generation, it's mainly they're communists, so different mindsets. 387 00:39:49,270 --> 00:39:52,570 But I think that's always an important thing to keep in mind. 388 00:39:52,930 --> 00:39:56,530 The religious establishment itself is very much in a period of adjustment. 389 00:39:57,010 --> 00:40:02,020 20 years is a long time for an individual. It's a very short time for a centuries old institution. 390 00:40:02,320 --> 00:40:05,380 This is the first thing that they can really do interfaith outreach. 391 00:40:05,620 --> 00:40:09,069 And, you know, now various U.N. organisations are looking for them. 392 00:40:09,070 --> 00:40:14,350 And in terms particularly after what happened to minorities, after ISIS, 393 00:40:15,070 --> 00:40:21,310 you're looking to them to have a more of a leadership role in creating peacebuilding in the country and engaging in interfaith work. 394 00:40:21,550 --> 00:40:24,280 This is all really new to them and they're learning how to do it. 395 00:40:24,280 --> 00:40:29,920 And, you know, in very short time span, I've seen more and more clerics emerge that take on these responsibilities. 396 00:40:30,310 --> 00:40:32,170 But this wasn't something they had done before. 397 00:40:32,170 --> 00:40:38,950 And I think if you're thinking about what the future of religion looks like in Iraq, it's going to be a lot more of that public facing cleric. 398 00:40:40,520 --> 00:40:44,080 And then clerics and activists have this online formative years. 399 00:40:45,160 --> 00:40:49,870 So I told you, clerics are always very, very much older than the Iraqi population. 400 00:40:49,870 --> 00:40:51,399 This has always been the case in Iraq, 401 00:40:51,400 --> 00:40:57,610 because it takes 20 years to even reach a level where you become someone who can possibly be an emulated cleric. 402 00:40:57,610 --> 00:41:04,810 So you're already I mean, I always compare it to doing a Ph.D. and being in academia, but it's even longer than that. 403 00:41:05,320 --> 00:41:08,920 So there's always going to be a disparity between you and the population. 404 00:41:08,920 --> 00:41:14,290 And keep in mind, Iraqis are so young. I think most are born after 2003. 405 00:41:15,490 --> 00:41:19,030 So you're looking at an average age in the institution. 406 00:41:19,420 --> 00:41:24,719 Of being in their fifties and sixties and on the street being like in your early twenties. 407 00:41:24,720 --> 00:41:30,270 There's completely different mindsets here. And these are the activists and these are the clerics. 408 00:41:30,360 --> 00:41:33,630 So naturally there's going to be a misalignment there. 409 00:41:34,080 --> 00:41:42,420 But I think this disconnect doesn't even matter as much as the fact that as Iraqis grow more 410 00:41:43,620 --> 00:41:48,420 anxious about the state of their country and as they protest more and they seek reform more, 411 00:41:48,660 --> 00:41:53,910 there's going to be a natural they might be pitted against clerics in the sense that clerics will 412 00:41:53,910 --> 00:41:58,709 always want to preserve stability and activists might want to challenge the system a bit more. 413 00:41:58,710 --> 00:42:01,290 And so this might be a source of contention in the future. 414 00:42:01,860 --> 00:42:08,399 But what we have right now is a very strategic relationship that's based on the realisation that they both want 415 00:42:08,400 --> 00:42:13,979 to manage their relationship with the state better and that they find allies in each other and Shia clerics. 416 00:42:13,980 --> 00:42:18,450 At the end of the day, I started this presentation by telling you there are independent of this, 417 00:42:18,450 --> 00:42:22,470 they consider themselves independent of the state because they have their own resources. 418 00:42:22,890 --> 00:42:29,010 There's an asterisk on this right now because they do get a lot of money from the endowments now and they get a lot of tax breaks. 419 00:42:29,760 --> 00:42:35,819 But the way they define themselves as a democratic institution, they always say, you know, people vote with their feet with us. 420 00:42:35,820 --> 00:42:43,380 They give us money or their representatives. So public opinion does matter to them and they will try to appeal to the protesters. 421 00:42:43,710 --> 00:42:50,220 And at the same time, a lot of this upper middle class civil society activists recognise that the average Iraqi is actually pretty 422 00:42:50,220 --> 00:42:59,820 conservative and doesn't want to immediately jump into this very modern Iraq that has these values that are, 423 00:42:59,940 --> 00:43:09,030 you know, talking about at to impose values, those that want to really impose something on a community unless it forms organically. 424 00:43:09,030 --> 00:43:15,780 And they need to have these kinds of partnerships and alliances with powerful actors who have reached with the government in order to do this. 425 00:43:15,780 --> 00:43:19,169 And so I find this relationship between the two quite fascinating. 426 00:43:19,170 --> 00:43:24,420 But I didn't realise that these ties are being formed until I spoke to both sides 427 00:43:24,420 --> 00:43:28,690 and finally told them I really don't understand what secular state your after 428 00:43:28,690 --> 00:43:33,120 one year on your so yeah when you willing to interact with clerics but it's actually 429 00:43:33,120 --> 00:43:37,320 what civil society does best when we build bridges and partnerships across. 430 00:43:38,490 --> 00:43:44,250 So I hope this presented a view of so many actors in Iraq. 431 00:43:44,970 --> 00:43:49,740 I'm sorry if I missed anything by way of like explaining an institution or a subject. 432 00:43:50,100 --> 00:43:56,430 I'm much more eager for the Q&A than I ever am for the actual presentation, so I'm happy to answer any and all questions. 433 00:43:56,880 --> 00:44:10,959 Thank you so much. This was fascinating. 434 00:44:10,960 --> 00:44:18,850 Some of you might know I have a tiny bit of interest in and I found it very interesting. 435 00:44:20,380 --> 00:44:31,750 And I really appreciate the way you break out of like the influence of religion in politics as either being ideological, 436 00:44:31,750 --> 00:44:40,920 like someone like some religious leaders get involved because they believe this is the right way to go or like out of self-interest, 437 00:44:42,130 --> 00:44:45,910 they do this because they're allied with this or that political faction. 438 00:44:46,180 --> 00:44:49,030 So you bring the institutional aspect into it. 439 00:44:49,030 --> 00:44:55,269 There is an establishment that they're embedded in, and for any reason it might not be in their financial interest, 440 00:44:55,270 --> 00:45:01,330 but they they are inclined just naturally to preserve that institution. 441 00:45:01,600 --> 00:45:14,720 So I. They like focusing on that variable, if I may add, for recalling the scientific theory is actually very crucial. 442 00:45:15,020 --> 00:45:20,390 But at the same time, and like rightly so, it introduces a lot of. 443 00:45:21,410 --> 00:45:28,910 Confusion, so to speak, in the analysis, because it all of a sudden opens up a lot of other possibilities that we might see on the ground. 444 00:45:29,570 --> 00:45:37,770 For instance. What kind of harm are we talking about? 445 00:45:37,790 --> 00:45:44,299 When when when you were, for example, speaking about the religious leadership, 446 00:45:44,300 --> 00:45:49,820 is wary of the harm that the protest or a revolution might cause the institution. 447 00:45:51,050 --> 00:45:58,190 They're not in like formal politics technically, so they're not like technically fully supported by the state. 448 00:45:58,190 --> 00:46:01,070 As you were saying, they see themselves as an independent institution. 449 00:46:01,400 --> 00:46:10,670 So what is the harm in not seeing the state at the very at the worst case scenario, toppled and changed? 450 00:46:12,200 --> 00:46:16,880 So at that institutional level, what are they wary of? 451 00:46:17,630 --> 00:46:23,090 Could couldn't could it not be the opposite case as it was and to evolutionary Iran that the religious 452 00:46:23,090 --> 00:46:30,330 establishment actually gained a lot of support because they joined or met the opposition against the Shah? 453 00:46:30,370 --> 00:46:40,520 So what is what is that kind of like advantage, disadvantage by cost benefit when we're talking at an institutional level? 454 00:46:44,010 --> 00:46:50,430 And but another sort of alleyway that this opens, this approach is. 455 00:46:54,160 --> 00:47:05,739 Aren't they wary of the opposite outcome of becoming too engaged in formal politics and then having what happens to Iranian, 456 00:47:05,740 --> 00:47:07,990 how that happened to them, 457 00:47:08,230 --> 00:47:17,680 which is like complete state control monitoring, just like bureaucratisation at top down and basically losing their control. 458 00:47:17,710 --> 00:47:26,950 Why they are like they have it like a very safe cushion financially and politically, but losing their independence that they're so proud of. 459 00:47:27,400 --> 00:47:35,139 So, yeah, just to kick off the discussion. Oh, no, they're really amazing clusters. 460 00:47:35,140 --> 00:47:40,000 And as Maryam was asking them, I got really excited because they're all questions that I like, I love to grapple with. 461 00:47:40,000 --> 00:47:48,520 So I'll go through them before I forget anything, please ask. So when it comes to institutions as, you know, as acting as one unit versus, 462 00:47:48,520 --> 00:47:54,579 you know, how ideology motivates or how how strategic incentives motivate. 463 00:47:54,580 --> 00:47:59,020 And a lot of the political science literature and a lot of it focuses on like the Catholic Church, 464 00:47:59,770 --> 00:48:09,399 where we get a lot of theorising about how clerics behave. There is a big sense of view of incentives like monetary incentives or preservation of self 465 00:48:09,400 --> 00:48:14,980 rather than institution as an incentive and motivating clerics to participate in different ways. 466 00:48:15,760 --> 00:48:19,540 You know, there's a book about how the Catholic Church in Argentina was. 467 00:48:20,580 --> 00:48:26,370 Against the protesters and turned against the revolution because they had such strong relations with the state, 468 00:48:27,090 --> 00:48:32,069 they wanted to protect their interests and that they weren't worried about people converting out of their faith group, 469 00:48:32,070 --> 00:48:39,510 which is different in other countries in Latin America. So I thought a lot about the ideological and the strategic incentives of individual clerics, 470 00:48:39,510 --> 00:48:43,560 and particularly as I worked on the larger book, which dealt with a lot of case studies. 471 00:48:44,070 --> 00:48:48,450 I mean, this is this is the very end of of where my book is. 472 00:48:48,720 --> 00:48:54,780 And I recently started engaging with it because I didn't want to write a book about protests and revolution in Iraq without looking at, 473 00:48:54,840 --> 00:48:58,740 you know, the case that everyone is thinking about when they're looking at the country today. 474 00:48:58,950 --> 00:49:01,170 But if you look at the cases historically, 475 00:49:01,650 --> 00:49:08,190 what's really interesting is that you can find clerics who are on completely different sides of the ideological spectrum when it 476 00:49:08,190 --> 00:49:15,179 comes to how they perceive their relationship with the state and who will still be motivated to protect the religious establishment. 477 00:49:15,180 --> 00:49:22,620 Because to them, that is the most important thing of all. And I you know, I started thinking about how people interact within their own institutions. 478 00:49:22,620 --> 00:49:25,950 And there is the sense of, I call it institutional responsibility, 479 00:49:26,310 --> 00:49:33,540 where it's not something that we study a lot or talk about when we talk about individual incentives for behaving in certain ways. 480 00:49:33,870 --> 00:49:40,140 But a lot of clerics with different ideologies, with different strategies, some of them at the expense of their own well-being, 481 00:49:40,860 --> 00:49:47,160 want to make sure that the religious establishment is preserved and perseveres and and lives on. 482 00:49:47,370 --> 00:49:53,129 And I actually don't find this very surprising, because I actually think I'm not an economist, clearly, 483 00:49:53,130 --> 00:50:01,170 because I don't think humans are purely rational in a very, you know, a very directional way. 484 00:50:01,170 --> 00:50:06,240 But I do think that I can see different institutions, not just religious ones, for example, 485 00:50:06,600 --> 00:50:12,210 where their members care about the institution overall and work to preserve it. 486 00:50:12,540 --> 00:50:20,699 And I didn't see this across the years, across you know, you have times in which there are allies of the state, like during this time period. 487 00:50:20,700 --> 00:50:24,839 And then you have times of like not terribly predatory, but, you know, okay, 488 00:50:24,840 --> 00:50:31,500 relationship with the state and in times of completely predatory relationships or predatory predatory behaviour from the state. 489 00:50:32,010 --> 00:50:39,629 And despite these completely different incentives for self-preservation, a lot of elite clerics. 490 00:50:39,630 --> 00:50:44,580 So it really depends on their position in the system, care about the preservation of the religious establishment. 491 00:50:44,910 --> 00:50:51,030 Which leads to your next question about, you know, why would they think that the protesters, 492 00:50:51,030 --> 00:50:56,460 if they became revolutionaries and created this new Iraq, why would it be bad for the religious establishment? 493 00:50:56,760 --> 00:50:59,140 It's nothing about the protesters themselves. 494 00:50:59,190 --> 00:51:05,670 They could you know, they could be shaking hands and having dinner with these protesters every day before this revolution takes off. 495 00:51:06,030 --> 00:51:10,290 And they still would not believe in revolution being quick and easy. 496 00:51:10,590 --> 00:51:12,659 I think they're just very pragmatic, 497 00:51:12,660 --> 00:51:20,400 and I think that has a large part to do with them having lived under authoritarianism and seen unsuccessful revolutions in the past. 498 00:51:20,730 --> 00:51:29,730 So they have I mean, in many ways, they have a very strong political science like view of what a revolution looks like and the cost of a revolution. 499 00:51:30,090 --> 00:51:35,820 So they don't have they don't have the belief that it will actually be a smooth process. 500 00:51:36,090 --> 00:51:41,579 So it's less about the ideals of a revolution and less about the people leading it and whether they believe in them or not. 501 00:51:41,580 --> 00:51:51,450 As much as they know that in Iraq, a country that's seen two civil wars in the last two decades and various other wars before that revolution, 502 00:51:51,450 --> 00:51:55,410 is it going to be quick and painless? And I think really that's what motivates them. 503 00:51:55,860 --> 00:52:01,520 And I think I missed the third question, though. I don't think it had like a number of questions. 504 00:52:01,530 --> 00:52:07,500 That was just a general thing about the British over. But how are they not worried about the state of state control? 505 00:52:07,870 --> 00:52:11,699 Okay. So this is it's funny that you bring up Iran because I always ask clerics, like, 506 00:52:11,700 --> 00:52:17,069 are you you know, your students complain that they can't get a job teaching at a university, 507 00:52:17,070 --> 00:52:24,809 even though they've spent 30 years studying because you don't have a certificate to give them because no one recognises like the you know, 508 00:52:24,810 --> 00:52:30,480 no one recognises that a grand ayatollah says this guy is, you know, very informed and has this knowledge of Islam. 509 00:52:30,480 --> 00:52:35,160 So why aren't you thinking about having an alternate institution that can provide certificates? 510 00:52:35,520 --> 00:52:40,110 And they told me plainly, you know, our worst fear is to be like Al-Azhar or to be like home, 511 00:52:40,560 --> 00:52:48,510 where it becomes so institutionalised that the states can actually come in and make decisions for us. 512 00:52:48,520 --> 00:52:55,829 So they would rather be selective about, you know, self-selection is what happens if you self-select into the system. 513 00:52:55,830 --> 00:52:57,750 You know, you're not getting a certificate out of it. 514 00:52:58,080 --> 00:53:06,389 You know that you can be as educated as a PhD holder in Iraq, but or more, and you won't be recognised officially as this. 515 00:53:06,390 --> 00:53:12,490 And it's I think they're keeping this this they want to keep this because it's part of what keeps the state away. 516 00:53:12,510 --> 00:53:17,070 So they're very, very wary of that. But then, like. 517 00:53:19,880 --> 00:53:27,160 You need to be affiliated with an Islamic or Islamist party would not amount to that level of they've never considered. 518 00:53:27,470 --> 00:53:34,100 That's the thing they always push against that. It's Islamist parties who are like, oh, we trace our roots to the religious establishment. 519 00:53:34,180 --> 00:53:37,220 Oh, there is a photo of me sitting next to a cleric. We're doing this and that. 520 00:53:37,400 --> 00:53:38,960 We never officially give it. 521 00:53:39,230 --> 00:53:45,770 They I mean, I think there was a brief moment in the mid 2000 where it seemed like they were pushing for a particular party. 522 00:53:46,040 --> 00:53:52,580 But I think the lesson has been learned that it's the cost of thought is not is is not worth a 523 00:53:52,590 --> 00:53:57,680 needless essentially because they they do enjoy a very good position when it comes to the state. 524 00:53:57,680 --> 00:54:04,790 I mean, Grand Ayatollah Sistani actually gets to appoint to the head of the Shia religious endowment, so he gets to appoint someone within the state. 525 00:54:06,650 --> 00:54:10,910 It's a very strong position, if I might use, 526 00:54:10,910 --> 00:54:20,629 of my privileges moderating this for just two more minutes and then open it to the audience and thank you for all this. 527 00:54:20,630 --> 00:54:27,360 This and this makes it so much more interesting to learn, I think. 528 00:54:28,970 --> 00:54:33,080 And elephants in the presentation was the influence of Iran. 529 00:54:33,090 --> 00:54:47,270 You did mention it, but. How much is the behaviour of the clerical Shia establishment in Iraq affected by Iranian support or disagreements with Iran? 530 00:54:47,290 --> 00:54:59,599 Like the we said, like faction was and but was it during the movement as well that people were chanting against Iran's influence? 531 00:54:59,600 --> 00:55:02,840 Right. Yes. So. Yeah. What is Iran? 532 00:55:03,140 --> 00:55:10,220 Such a tough question. I joke that I have an Iraq bingo sheet for every presentation I do and I and Iran. 533 00:55:10,410 --> 00:55:13,670 Iranian influence is always the one of the cause. 534 00:55:13,820 --> 00:55:18,920 And I think you very smartly noticed that I kept out of the presentation. 535 00:55:19,190 --> 00:55:23,090 It's because it's a conversation that truly never ends. There are so many layers to it. 536 00:55:24,620 --> 00:55:28,490 I think one of the one of the layers, I mean. 537 00:55:28,520 --> 00:55:32,690 Yes. So during the protest movement, there was a very strong anti Iranian sentiment. 538 00:55:32,710 --> 00:55:40,280 There were not just shouts against Iran, but there was also the burning of Iranian consulates in Karbala and in Najaf, 539 00:55:40,280 --> 00:55:50,269 which is astounding because these are the centres of Shiism. And so from a public sense there is a very strong anti-Iranian sentiment. 540 00:55:50,270 --> 00:55:54,200 And to me genuinely I and we saw this again and by the way, 541 00:55:54,200 --> 00:56:02,009 during the Gulf Cup because Iran made a big fuss about how dare the Arabs call it the Arabian Gulf Cup when it should be called the Persian Gulf, 542 00:56:02,010 --> 00:56:09,280 because it made everyone in Iraq very angry, including some people who actually, you know, were quite friendly towards Iran. 543 00:56:09,290 --> 00:56:13,489 So it was very bad PR for Iran in Iraq. 544 00:56:13,490 --> 00:56:16,310 But it made me realise that, you know, in Iraq, on the street, 545 00:56:16,730 --> 00:56:25,040 how very easily this the same racism that Saddam Hussein used to deport people in the eighties, 546 00:56:25,390 --> 00:56:36,670 the same racism that he built an entire war around can be so easily activated by any enterprising, you know, political elite and obviously don't. 547 00:56:36,680 --> 00:56:42,680 Average citizens separates an entire country from separates it into, you know, 548 00:56:42,740 --> 00:56:47,930 its leadership and its population and all these things that people tend to generalise 549 00:56:47,930 --> 00:56:52,070 and stereotype in the heights of passion and particularly nationalist passion. 550 00:56:52,280 --> 00:56:55,730 But I think one thing that we never talk about and when it comes to Iraq is that 551 00:56:56,060 --> 00:57:02,570 this is actually something that this anti Iranian intervention sentiment goes 552 00:57:02,570 --> 00:57:07,490 so easily with this anti Iranian racism that you can see in Iraq that can actually 553 00:57:07,670 --> 00:57:11,420 it really does remind me of the Baathist era and very in very terrible ways. 554 00:57:12,350 --> 00:57:17,209 I mean, and the reason I bring this up is because when I was working on Najaf and working 555 00:57:17,210 --> 00:57:20,150 on the religious establishment in Najaf and I told the story of earlier, 556 00:57:20,150 --> 00:57:27,770 one of the things I did is I went through this biographical dictionary of clerics from like 1900 till like very recently to see like, 557 00:57:27,770 --> 00:57:31,370 what does Najaf look like? Who are the people who live here and study here? 558 00:57:31,820 --> 00:57:40,850 And, you know, I tried to divide them by my nationality, like how many Iraqis are are in Najaf because there is this big sentiment. 559 00:57:40,850 --> 00:57:49,760 And it's true that Najaf actually was had a lot more Iranian clerics or clerics of Iranian origin up until 1960s with. 560 00:57:51,300 --> 00:57:55,710 With muscle hacking being very insistent on making more Iraqi clerics present. 561 00:57:56,040 --> 00:57:59,910 And so, like more sorry, Arab Iraqi clerics present. 562 00:58:00,240 --> 00:58:08,370 And at some point, it's like that sense of national identity and ethnic identity became so muddled on that city, I honestly couldn't code anymore. 563 00:58:08,670 --> 00:58:11,249 Who is who is Iranian and who is Iraqi? 564 00:58:11,250 --> 00:58:19,379 Because if someone is born in Najaf and lived in Najaf their entire life, but their family had emigrated from, you know, from somewhere, 565 00:58:19,380 --> 00:58:23,820 something like what do you call this person as versus a like an Arab who like studied in 566 00:58:23,820 --> 00:58:27,030 Najaf and then went and studied in Iran and then stayed the rest of their life there. 567 00:58:27,300 --> 00:58:30,810 And it's something about that city. It's not like any other city in Iraq. 568 00:58:31,440 --> 00:58:35,790 The identity is so fluid in that I mean, 569 00:58:35,790 --> 00:58:41,880 I think get it then racism getting out of hand and that city could be something that's very terrible for for Iraq. 570 00:58:42,210 --> 00:58:49,140 And that's really where the sense of, you know, these things happened during the protest movement were one thing in Baghdad. 571 00:58:49,140 --> 00:58:53,280 And like Basra and all these places that had you didn't have the edge of identity. 572 00:58:53,280 --> 00:58:58,200 But when it came to Najaf, I think it was completely different. And I think this fluid identity still exists today. 573 00:58:58,500 --> 00:59:07,319 If you if you go to Najaf, there isn't like guns. I mean, Sistani himself is, as they say, Iranian and doesn't even have an Iraqi passport. 574 00:59:07,320 --> 00:59:13,500 So and yet he is like the most powerful person in Iraq and he's not a source of Iranian political intervention in Iraq. 575 00:59:14,130 --> 00:59:18,000 So it really defies easy description, I would say. 576 00:59:18,900 --> 00:59:19,770 Thank you so much.