IRAQ: Saddam Hussein is No Icon for Asian Muslims

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Apr 1 2003 (IPS) - The rage boiling over on the streets of Asia’s Muslim countries has helped clarify how Iraqi President Saddam Hussien is regarded in this corner of the Islamic world. He is no poster boy around which the faithful will flock.

That despite Saddam’s efforts, in the days leading up to the U.S.-led invasion on Iraq and since, to portray himself as a Muslim leader with sound religious credentials.

Not only has the Iraqi president turned to using religious phrases such as verses from the Koran when he speaks, but he has also called upon Allah to help him and his country stand up to the might of the invading U.S. and British forces that have been fighting Iraqi forces for two weeks now.

A week into the war that began Mar. 20, for instance, Saddam said, ”O Iraqis, fight as God ordered you to do,” during an address to the nation.

Then, with an eye towards the over one billion Muslims across the world, he added, ”O Arabs, O believers across the world, O enemies of evil, God is on your side.”

Yet, as is becoming more apparent during the demonstrations across Asia- including the over 100,000 people who turned up on Sunday in the Indonesian capital Jakarta – Muslims in Asia have not fallen for the ”Islamic card” that Saddam has been playing.

”Muslim solidarity (in Indonesia) has been addressed to the Iraqi people,” says Moeflich Hasbullah, a senior lecturer at the State University of Islamic Science based in Bandung, Indonesia. ”So it is not Saddam Hussein that counts but the plight of the Muslim Iraqis.”

”But Saddam knows well that the U.S.(-led) attacks will (produce) religious emotion and solidarity among Muslim people,” he adds.

Likewise in Pakistan, the emotions on the streets are directed more against the United States than in support of the Iraqi leader, says Abdul Aziz Hanif, general secretary of Jamiat Ahle-Hadith, a leading religious party.

”Most of the feelings are due to anti-American (sentiments) and not as a support for Saddam,” he adds, despite the crowds that religious parties have been able to draw in cities like Peshawar and Quetta in recent days.

As in Indonesia and in Malaysia, Pakistani protests, too, have been unequivocal about where their sympathies lie – with the besieged Iraqi people.

In fact, the focus on the plight of the Iraqi people has resulted in those from across the religious spectrum joining the marches. In Malaysia, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Hindus have been in the vanguard of protests, says an organiser for the Stop the War Coalition.

The suspicion that is greeting Saddam – unlike Washington’s other nemesis, Osama bin Laden, who has been given iconic status in some Muslim quarters and whose picture adorned placards during the protests over the Afghan war – is that this invasion remains largely his own doing.

Muslim leaders like Hanif, for instance, make note of Saddam’s efforts to crush the presence of Islam in Iraq in an effort to promote Arab nationalism based on the ideas of the Baath party, whose pillars espouse socialism and secularism.

Among the worst hit in this suppression were Iraq’s Shiite Muslim community, who make up close to 60 percent of the country’s 25 million people. Saddam belongs to the minority Sunni Muslims, who have politically subjugated the Shiite majority for decades.

Also crushed were the Kurds, another Muslim community, to Iraq’s north.

What is more, Asian Muslims also find themselves at odds with Iraq’s Baath Socialist Party, which first took over power in 1963, given its strong emphasis on Arab nationalism.

Since assuming the presidency in 1979, Saddam Hussein has not lost sight of this vision, consequently feeding an aspiration to be regarded as a great Arab leader of contemporary times.

While that may have an appeal to Arab world, in the Muslim countries east of Iraq they are more familiar with moments in Saddam’s life – just as now – when he cloaks himself in the garb of Islam to rally Muslims across the world to his side.

During the Iraq-Iran war, for instance, Saddam Hussein went on a well-publicised pilgrimage to Mecca to perform the ‘haj’. Later, during the first Gulf War, he shed aside all his party’s claims to secularism and added the words ”Allahu Akbar” (God is great) on the Iraqi flag.

According to Hanif, Saddam made Muslims more suspicious of him during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. ”During 1991, the opposition against him became acute because he occupied another Muslim country, Kuwait.”

And no Muslim country in Asia measures up to Iran when it comes to views about the Iraqi leader. Iran, a predominantly Shiite country, has long been seething at Saddam for the bloody Iran-Iraq war and his treatment of the Shiites in Iraq.

In the growing number of anti-war demonstrations across Asia, it is only in Iran, as happened last week, that protesters held up banners with these two messages – ”Death to America・and ”Death to Saddam”.

Even the defeated Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, still the subject of manhunts by U.S. forces on the Pakistan-Afghan border, did not have it as bad.