Saddam's Fall Will Reignite the Revolutionary Debate

When Ayatollah Khomeini was arrested in the Iranian Shi'ite centre of Qom and packed off by the Shah to Ankara on a cargo aircraft, it was a transfer of a revolutionary personality arguably as important as that of Lenin on the famous sealed train. A year later, in 1965, Khomeini arrived in Iraq, at which point one cleric remarked to another: "This sayyid has caused havoc in Qom. We must be careful not to let him do the same in Najaf."

Nearly 40 years on, the divisions which Ruhollah Khomeini and his ideas provoked not only remain but, with the fall of Saddam Hussein, constitute a potentially volcanic fault in the world of Shi'ite Islam.

At issue is not only the future of Iraq and the failure or success of America's plans but also the future of Iran. What happens in one country will inevitably, and perhaps fundamentally, affect the other. Put briefly, the dispute about the proper political role of Islam, which has rumbled along in a subterranean way in Iran since the 1979 revolution, begins again, and openly, in a free Iraq.

How it is defined in whatever constitutional dispensation is agreed, and which figures emerge as the political and politico-religious leaders of Iraq's majority of Shi'ites will be of huge importance to both countries. The Iranian reformers and those Iranian clergy who oppose what they see as too great an involvement of the clerical class in government have been on their own for a quarter of a century. They have been able to survive, and the reformers have even been able to make gains within the democratic segment of Iranian institutions, but never to the point of threatening the ultimate hold of the clerical conservatives on power.

But help from abroad, and in particular religious help from abroad of the kind which, ironically, Khomeini was able to offer from Najaf to the Shah's opponents, has never been available. Independent although Iranian Shi'ism has always been, and for all the differences between Islam and a more hierarchical Christianity, it has been a little as if Rome was silent in some vital Catholic dispute.

Iraq contains the holiest Shi'ite shrines and cities. Najaf, in particular, has long been seen as a fount of religious leadership. The suppression of the Shi'ites of Iraq by Saddam Hussein began almost as soon as he took control of the Iraqi government in 1969. One of its effects was to crush Iraqi Shi'ite political and religious development in the years before the Iranian revolution burst on the world.

Later, when the two countries went to war, Shi'ite fought Shi'ite on the battlefields and government- controlled clergy in Iraq were drawn into the propaganda battle, but that was almost entirely the product of coercion. Now, for the first time in 30 years, both major theatres of Shi'ite politics will be active and a third, in Lebanon, smaller but strategically important, will be subject to more diverse influences.

Interference is too small a word to express what has already begun to happen. The picture of Iran attempting to create a sphere of influence in southern Iraq, or of the Iranian regime plotting, as some fear, to sabotage the American project, with the Americans responding, perhaps with military threats, is too simple. One has to ask which Iran will be interfering: the one represented by Khomeini's successor as supreme guide, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, who defines American control in Iraq as "a bigger dictatorship" than that of Saddam, or the Iran of President Mohammed Khatami, who recently told a closed meeting of members of parliament that "talking with the US is in the interests of Iran"? It is easy to imagine that Khatami and Khameini want different outcomes in Iraq.

Then, again, which Iraqis will take the lead in responding: those who survived under Saddam in Iraq, those who were in exile in Iran, or those who were in exile in the west ? One is presumed to be in the Iraqi tradition of keeping a distance from politics, another to be political in the Khomeini tradition and the third to be for a liberal separation of religion and state. But these assumptions may not long survive. For instance, some Iraqi exile clerics in Qom, asked during the war to issue statements condemning both Saddam and the US, refused to comply, according to a recent account by the Iranian journalist Amir Taheri. Two went on to issue statements condemning Saddam alone, which suggests that Iranian hardline control of Iraqi clerics who took refuge there may be far from complete.

A bdul Majid al-Khoei's assassination in Najaf and the boycotting of the first consultative meeting of Iraqi political representatives in Nassiriyah by Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which has been based in Iran, demonstrated that the theological and political arguments of the days when Ayatollah Khomeini was working out his ideas in Iraq are far from over. Now, as then, these arguments run from the study to the street, from verbal disputation to bloody murder.

The gentle and tolerant Mr Khoei, who "spent his life trying to reconcile Iraq's fragmented Shia community", in the words of a comment by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, has been widely mourned. With the prestige arising from his membership of one of the most prominent religious families, he could have played a kind of "third force" role between the Iranian exiles and the clerics who stayed in Iraq, and this may have been part of what he was trying to do when he was killed.

Khomeini was exiled from Iran because of his opposition to legislation giving Americans, mostly military advisers to the Shah's armed forces and aid officials, immunity from prosecution under Iranian law. In the speech which was the final straw for the Shah, he demanded of Iranians, in words his spiritual successors could use today to Iraqis: "What use to you are the American soldiers and advisers? If this country is occupied by America, then what is all this noise you make about progress?"

On the other hand, Khomeini's solution has been tried and found wanting by many Iranians, which cannot but affect the reception of his ideas on Islam and politics in Iraq. It was in Najaf that he first elaborated those ideas in their mature form. According to his biographer Baqer Moin, "he seems to have chosen his moment with care," offering his lectures just after Grand Ayatollah Mohsen Hakim of Najaf had been humiliated by the Ba'athist regime, so that they were a commentary on the weakness of both Iraqi and Iranian Shi'ism in face of secular encroachment. But Khomeini bemoaned the fact that "whatever I do, I face obstacles from the mullahs of Najaf".

Now the debate which Khomeini wanted to ignite more than 30 years ago, in Iraq as much as in Iran, is set to resume, with critical consequences for both countries.