Lunch with A Kurdish Mullah

There's a saying in Kurdish, apparently borrowed from Arabic, used to welcome guests: "This house is your home and the children are your pets." Last week, when I asked my friend, Ahmed Wahab, if I could attend prayers with his family, he welcomed me by using that phrase with a twist. "The cleric is your pet," he said.

Actually, Ahmed Wahab is himself a Sunni cleric, but he's no one's pet. Sayeed Ahmed ("Sayeed" is an honorific bestowed upon descendants of the prophet Mohammed) is one of Iraqi Kurdistan's most outspoken preachers, and a former member of the Iraqi parliament. I wandered into his mosque one lazy summer day about three years ago. Now Friday prayers and lunch with the Wahab family is a little ritual I try to perform whenever I am in Arbil.

Unfortunately, Sayeed Ahmed no longer preaches. The Kurdish religious authorities removed him from his pulpit in 2005, probably for political reasons. He is an official of the Kurdish Islamic Union, a moderate Muslim party and Kurdistan's largest opposition group.

Pointing out the democratic failings of the two ruling Kurdish political parties -- the Kurdish Demoratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) -- is a favorite pastime of Sayeed Ahmed. He was a source for my article on the subject last year. In the name of fighting terrorism, the KDP and PUK have used the their security services for political purposes, preventing demonstrations, arresting critics, and running a secret prison system off-limits to human rights groups. (The U.S. State Department substantiated this in its 2006 report on human rights in Iraq.) "In the Middle East, governments are like the sky and the people are like the earth," he once told me. "The two never touch."

However, in the year since my article, the KDP and PUK have made efforts to change their leadership styles. Though they once carved up Iraqi Kurdistan into two geographically seperate one-party fiefdoms, they have unified the Kurdish regional government and say they are trying to make it a model of transparency that will attract foreign investment and international support. The KDP and PUK also deserve respect for preserving Iraqi Kurdistan as an oasis of security and stability in a country that has descended into chaos and civil war.

Still over lunch last Friday, Sayeed Ahmed repeated one of his central themes: that America's willingness to collaborate with autocratic Middle Eastern regimes in the war on terror would backfire. "The US keeps dealing with a small group of elites and ignoring the majority of Muslims," he said. "The US trains their military and intelligence services, which they use to stay in power."

"The majority of Muslims are peaceful, so why doesn't America talk to us?" he said.
The failure of America in the Middle East would be a blow to all Muslims. "America is the center of progress and knowledge in the world," he said. "If the United States fails, humanity fails."

--Andrew Lee Butters