DUBAI • Iraqi Shiite and Sunni religious leaders gather in the Muslim holy city of Makkah this week to try to find a way to halt sectarian violence that is threatening to escalate into all-out civil war.
The meeting – which officially opens tomorrow – comes towards the end of the holy month of Ramadan, which has seen a spike in communal bloodletting, and aims to set religious standards to remind Muslims of the peaceful tenets of their faith.
Key leaders of Iraq’s Shiite majority community gave their blessing to the meeting hosted by Saudi Arabia, but analysts voiced scepticism about its chances of influencing the sectarian death squads at work in Iraq.
Gathering under the auspices of the 57-member Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the summiteers will work from a 10-point text that draws on verses of the Quran and sayings of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) highlighting that “spilling Muslim blood is forbidden”.
The text also calls for safeguarding the two communities’ holy places, defending the unity and territorial integrity of Iraq and the release of “all innocent detainees.”
An OIC spokesman said the summit was “not a conference or a forum or a venue for negotiations.”
Rather, “it is a meeting of the marjaya (Shiite religious authorities) and Sunni ulema (clerics) to anoint the document, which will be distributed to Iraqis and publicised in the media.
“This initiative aims to quell religious conflict and does not profess to reconcile the protagonists,” he added.
The delegates are expected to include the heads of Iraq’s two religious endowments organisations and a number of leading clerics from both sides.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki said he hoped the talks would boost his Shiite-led government’s national reconcilation efforts.
“We pin hopes on every step made by people who care for the interest of Iraq and condemn the terror acts in Iraq,” he said.
“A conference like that in Makkah, whereby Shiite and Sunni clerics are to attend, is deemed to be a support to efforts at home to find common ground for dialogue.”
Shiite spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani said: “We support this conference and wish it success.”
And Shiite radical leader Moqtada Al Sadr, whose Mahdi Army militia US commanders accuse of carrying out much of the killing from the Shiite side, said: “I support all conferences that go in line with the interest of Iraq, though I would have preferred it to be held in Iraq.”
But Iraqi academic Dhargham Abdullah Al Dabbagh predicted the summit would fall flat.
“Of course, the Saudis’ intentions are good, but the meeting is bound to fail. It will have no impact on the ground,” said Dabbagh, a diplomat under the regime of Saddam Hussein who nonetheless spent 16 years in jail.
“The conflict between Shiites and Sunnis is a consequence of the occupation. The Americans have enshrined sectarianism in Iraq, which is now in the grip of a civil war which the Iraqi government does not want to recognise.”
Dabbagh, who teaches at Amsterdam’s Free University but travels to Iraq periodically, said the meeting’s impact was also likely to be lessened by the absence of some leading clerics from both sides.
Jamal Abdul Jawad of Cairo’s Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies agreed. “The Mecca meeting will not cool things down,” he said.
“Sectarian violence will persist as long as security forces and the Iraqi army are not strong enough” to fight the insurgency. But Abdul Jawad added that the interest of Saudi Arabia in hosting the meeting was obvious.
“If sectarian violence persists in Iraq, sedition will spread to other countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia,” where Shiites make up around 10 per cent of the population.
