As the June deadline for the transfer of power to an Iraqi transition government approaches, expect a rising tempo of political posturing on all sides. Those who have failed to find a popular constituency are likely to paint a grim picture, with emphasis on lack of security, to seek a prolongation of direct rule by the US-led coalition.

Others, however, want the Americans and their allies to leave as fast as they can. These are individuals and parties that have been able to fill part of the gap left by the collapse of the Baathist regime. They are concerned that a longer American presence may result in the spread of ideas and the establishment of rules that would prevent them from imposing their brands of politics on the newly-liberated nation.

The noisiest of these are the so-called Islamists, some of whom have just had a verbal spat with Paul Bremer, the Coalition’s “Pasha” in Baghdad.

It all started with a couple of mullas demanding that Islam be the “foundation” of the future constitution. The demand was echoed by one or two members of the Governing Council, presumably for want of better things to do.

Bremer, a normally cool man who thinks twice before he makes a move, was provoked into a hasty reaction, asserting that he would not sign such a constitution.

The spat looks like a scene from the theater of the absurd. The mullas who made the initial noises represent no one except their own images in a mirror. Bremer, for his part, was unwise to brandish a veto that belongs to the people of Iraq.

Do the Iraqis want an Islamist regime?

The question is pertinent and must be debated. At least five major public opinion polls conducted since the liberation show that support for such a regime hovers around three to four percent. In one poll, the question whether an Iranian-style Islamic Republic would be suitable for Iraq drew a positive response from only one percent of the respondents.

None of Iraq’s dozen or so political parties — from the secularists to religious Shiites — demands the creation of an Islamic state. Nor can one find a single prominent Iraqi intellectual who would wish to establish a religious regime.

Even the Shiite mullas, starting with their primus inter pares, the Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani, are not making such a demand.

Anyone with some knowledge of Iraqi Shiism would know that the last thing that Iraq’s Shiites want is a regime like that of the Khomeinists in Iran which, after a quarter of a century of terror and war, is now in deep, possibly terminal, crisis.

Iraqi Shiites opposition to a religious state, however, is not solely doctrinal. It is also dictated by practical politics.

Though Shiites account for some 60 percent of the Iraqis, they cannot be regarded as a monolithic bloc even on issues of faith. Like other Shiites they are divided into dozens of ways (tariqats) and countless forms of allegiance (taqlid). As the Iranian experience has illustrated, it is impossible for Shiites to agree on a single political reading of Islam. But even if such a single reading were to be imposed by conjecture, as was the case in Iran in 1979, it would not be sustainable for long. The Iraqi situation is more complex still because 40 percent of the country’s population are not Shiites and have no reason to accept any Shiite political reading of Islam.

Any attempt at imposing an Iraqi version of Khomeinism would lead to civil war and the dismemberment of the country.

As the sole organizing principle of political life, religion is unworkable outside small, ethnically and culturally uniform, and isolated communities, which Iraq is not. All this does not mean that Islam should be scripted out of the future Iraqi constitution. Some 95 percent of Iraqis, including those who describe themselves as “humanists”, acknowledge Islam as a key element in their existential reality. Thus there is no harm in reflecting that<