According to this BBC article, Muqtada Sadr is losing his thin veneer of religious legitimacy supplied by Ayatollah Haeri in Iran. Unlike Sistani, Haeri has been giving Muqtada support religiously for his activities. I’m not sure what to make of his about face, except perhaps to make it easier for him to be more active in Iraq, either directly or through other proxies. On the surface, this is an important development, because if every Ayatollah now denounces the attacks on US and UK troops, it theoretically becomes easier to isolate those Shi’ah, and to a certain extent Sunnis, who do carry out attacks. I’m hopeful that the attacks in Sadr city will settle down, and more importantly that the city itself will be less likely to serve as a launching ground for others in Iraq.
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Update: The original post has been recovered here. Comments on this post are now closed. This post was originally sent in by Ghostdog. However, TypePad managed to lose all our posts from yesterday, so I had to re-post, and it’s now tagged with me as the author. To be clear, I am not.
PAMF
Stands for Punk A$$ Mo Fo. I think a better term than hoodlums in this case. Martijn always has such interesting posts. However, on the issue of counter-identity, isn’t that essentially OBL’s point? He hates women, so he’s a man. He hates the “West,” so he’s an Arab. He hates Christians and Jews, so he’s a “Muslim.” A little more seriously, hasn’t he simply adopted Islam as an oppositional identity? Isn’t he more aligned with Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam than with the Hanbali school? For OBL, it seems Islam is what others are not, and his association with Taliban,…
Veteran’s Day
TPM says it best.