Between the Ideal and the Real: Shia Purism and the Dilemma of Modernity in Iraq

Between the Ideal and the Real describes why Iraq state-building and democratic transformation failed by offering a very new, and unusual, perspective, away from the usual blame assigned to the US that has become part of the ＂conventional wisdom＂ about Iraq and the Middle East. Although the book acknowledges US failings in Iraq, the main argument it presents is that the main causes of failure lie in a problematic alliance between Iraqi Shiite Islamist parties and the clerical establishment in Najaf, led by Ayatollah Sistani. To appreciate this new perspective, the book takes you into the history of Iraqi Shiism both as a set of doctrinal understanding of the world and a lived experience by ordinary Iraqi Shias. The book argues that this understanding hindered Shias from embracing many products of modernity such as nationalism, individualism, humanism, and democratic rule, by consolidating a primordial group identity that tie people to the past, a particular kind of past based on doctrinal supremacy and historical victimhood. Combined, the two have the negative effect of depriving ordinary Iraqi Shias of personal sense of agency and a general spirit skeptical of difference. The book also documents people’s push back against this restrictive approach to reality in a variety of contexts. Based on extensive historical and doctrinal research into the distant past of Shiism, the book links the past to the present by examining the unfortunate consequences that grow out of the insistence to allow pre-modern values determine the modern experience of life.

Akeel Abbas, PhD, a DC-based Middle East specialist, taught for years in several American universities inside and outside the US. His research interests include national and religious identities and modernity and democratization in the Middle East. Abbas regularly writes journalistic pieces in Arabic and English about the Middle East and Iraq.