YUSUFAN, Iraq -- In the tribal meeting hall known as a diwan, on the edge of a forest of irrigated date palms in southern Iraq, Sheik Adnan Aidani grasped a stack of leaflets touting his underdog campaign. He had printed 2,000 of them. On any day, he extols the virtues of voting for him to dozens of skeptical followers, as they sip tea under portraits of his ancestors who led the tribe. His six sons said they corral anyone they meet. Their plea: Choose our father's list.
Soon after, his mobile phone rang, a call from one of his 12,000 tribesmen.
Kifah Mahmoud in his grocery with pictures of Shiite figures Ali Sistani, Ruhollah Khomeini and Mohammed Sadr.
(Anthony Shadid -- The Washington Post)
|
|
"God salute you," Aidani bellowed. More banter followed, then the sheik got to the point.
"I'm on the list that's numbered 234. Don't forget it. The number is very simple -- 2, 3, 4."
"I'm counting on you and our friends," he added, an order that sounded more like an entreaty.
Afterward, Aidani looked up, a bit discouraged, and shrugged his shoulders.
"I can't guarantee everyone in the tribe will vote for me," the sheik said.
Aidani is a minority within Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority, running on a small campaign list opposed by the United Iraqi Alliance, a coalition that has the tacit endorsement of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country's most prominent religious leader.
In a region famed for its dates and poets, along the Shatt al Arab waterway that flows to the Persian Gulf, he confronts a constellation of forces that hold sway in Iraq's fiercely traditional countryside and that may prove decisive in Sunday's election for parliament.
Uphill might be too simple a word to describe Aidani's struggle; it is more like climbing a steep mountain. In this village, politics are reflected through a religious prism, and many people see the vote as a turning point in a centuries-long Shiite narrative of oppression and disinheritance.
More often than not, Sistani speaks for them, and the posters of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, the communists and the constitutional monarchists dwindle as the road stretches from Iraq's second-largest city of Basra to a countryside stitched by a lattice of canals and still scarred by memories of a Shiite uprising after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
While sentiments are by no means universal in this village, and Allawi enjoys a degree of admiration even in Yusufan, voters still mention the past before the present, the sacred before the worldly -- and the sheik is left on the outside looking in.
"Some people stick with the list of the sayyid," Aidani said, using an honorific for Sistani, as he sat under World War I-vintage rifles hanging on the wall and a family tree tracing his genealogy back 33 generations. "They won't listen to anything else."
"To them," he said, shaking his head, "it's only the sayyid."
