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| Islamic guidance is part of eight new, free primary and secondary schools funded by a Shiite foundation in Najaf. Sam Dagher |
Rising player with a vision for Shiite Iraq
Free schools and mass weddings create support for a Shiite-run south.
from the November 20, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
"This is our strategic project … we are grooming highly skilled mentors," says Hassan al-Hakim.
The foundation is also focused on children's education. At its Imam Ali schools where 2,000 are enrolled, students get English language, computer, and Islamic moral lessons starting in first grade. In Iraqi public schools, English is taught starting in fifth grade.
Good manners rule in the schools, where classrooms are spacious and smartly furnished. Boys and girls study separately, and girls older than 10 must be veiled. But some girls as young as 6 are covered.
Ammar al-Hakim denies that his foundation's activities are for the purpose of gaining popularity or promoting his party's agendas.
"We just want to set good examples for others.… if our party was solely after power, we would have grabbed it from the first day we returned to Iraq.… We are much more interested in the success of the Iraqi political project as a whole," he says.
"As for our insistence on the formation of regions in Iraq, we think it's the only means for security and stability."
Regarding the foundation's strong Islamic bent, Hakim says: "We are trying to promote and ingrain in people tolerant Islamic teachings … our goal is to serve humanity as a whole."
He says the foundation does not receive money from Iran and says it depends on donations and payments of khums, the sum of one-fifth of their income that pious Shiites hand over to their religious authorities to spend as they see fit. Other officials in ISCI say the party's position as a privileged interlocutor with Iran has turned it into a facilitator of Iranian-US dialogue "for the benefit of Iraq."
In a report issued last week, the International Crisis Group said that despite efforts to transform its image, ISCI continues to be at its core a sectarian religious party that, like other Shiite and non-Shiite players, receives funding from Iran.
"Its quest for power (political in Baghdad, religious in Najaf) has first and foremost taken the form of a quest for respectability," said the report.
"It has made strenuous efforts to distance itself from its Iranian patron, whitewash its embarrassing past, build political coalitions [and] profess the importance of Iraq's unity…."
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