I have known that brother Ibrahim al-Ashaiqir al-Jaafari is a doctor, and that he is one of the main leaders of the Islamic Dawa Party, that he is a former vice president and prime minister of Iraq, and that he is now heading the National Reform movement which will run in the upcoming parliamentary elections. I have also been following his work both in the opposition and in power, before having shared the same flight with him from London to Beirut, where I discovered him to be, before this and that, a political theorist par excellence.

In the plane, al-Jaafari gave me a new book about his life and his work as a gift. Written by Mr. Ali Al-Saadi, the book is entitled: “Ring of Fire: Jaafari and the new Iraq, the vocabulary of confrontation and the features of peace”. The book represents 28 hours and a half of voice recordings between the two men. I read the author’s introduction and discovered that he, in turn, is a political theorist of the highest calibre, as he talks about the charisma of leadership and Iraq’s lack of such leaders throughout a history “that was full of leaders in power who pursued matters for their own sake, and goals for which they took every path and went to all means to maintain in, including the destruction of the temple [Iraq] on top of everyone”.

I then moved on to a preface by Mr. Al-Jaafari, in which he said that he started with an Islamist ideology before joining the Dawa Party, and that the consideration that the Party is an intellectual affiliation supersedes it as an organizational affiliation. In other words, he belonged to the theory before joining the party, and perhaps these two factors have influenced the affirmation of the theoretical and intellectual framework of his actions prior to delving into the details of his organizational relationships.

Jaafari as a theorist then prevails over his identity as a politician when one reads the dedication he wrote as he presented me with his book, since he said: “This is a dialogue of experience, and not an experience in dialogue, and one that has stepped forward from history and that has been soaked with historical factors, thus unveiling a present, with the hope that it will step up to the future.

What comes from the future is what steps forward from history, which then transforms from its past tense to a present knowledge and a course for the future. It is a gift of love, a bell that tolls with memory, and a display of words.

I have just finished reading your column “Ayoon Wa Azan”, which revealed your awareness and boldness. I appreciated this in you, and I hope that you will continue your journey, rising from an intellectual to a thinker, to a theorist, in service of truth and happiness in a world where some are trying to turn facts upside down. We are all students, and others are our teachers...”

I did not tell the former Prime Minister of Iraq that we, in Beirut, shun the word “theorist” because of the negative connotation it carries with it since we had tasted the bitterness of the “theorists” of Lebanese politics and those of the Palestinian factions, to the extent that a theorist may sit in his favourite coffee shop then orders the waiter: one black coffee, and one to debate me.

Ibrahim al-Jaafari is a devout Muslim, and when we were in the plane he was inquiring about each meal and whether it was halal. I told him that the food was prepared in London, and that God is merciful. However, he only ate a little, and then went to the end of the plane to do the afternoon prayer, and he probably was the only one who prayed on board that plane.

When he talks about the Dawa Party and its roots, he says that his objective behind his activism is to take society into a state of morality as stipulated by the Islamic Shari’a; as such, he says that the Dawa has gone through four stages: that of cultural change, then that of political change, followed by change through governance and then through monitoring the state and holding it accountable in the parliament.

When asked about nations, identity and citizenship, and whether these mean that the Iraqi Christians are closer to him than, for instance, the Iranian or Egyptian Muslims, he says: “I must deal with the Iraqi Christians as though they were a responsibility I am entrusted with...I am responsible for the Iraqi Christians if I am in position of power, and if they were in power, then I will deal with them in their official quality of being in power. For example if there is a Christian minister in an Islamic state, I see nothing wrong with that.”

In any case, I cannot give the book “The Ring of Fire” its fair share of analysis in such haste, especially when it is a 650-page book. But the reader who is interested will find along with the theorizing a wealth of information about the ousting of Saddam, and about Iraq before the latter and after it, and about the Christians and Sabians in Iraq and the Jews and others, in addition to the recent elections and the upcoming ones.

Mr. Jaafari says that the National Reform Movement is not a party, and is not a dissident faction of a party or a front for a party, but rather, it is a general notion in the sense of current that involves both centralized elites, and a diffused phenomenon that involves many social strata.

The differences between the party and the movement are many, according to Mr. Al-Jaafari, who points out that the aim of reform is not to eliminate the corrupt, but to remove them from that corrupt state. He mentions that one of the movement’s candidates in Basra is a Sabian woman. Nonetheless, the movement does not want escape into the future, but rather wants to build this future in the time the due preparations and requirements are accomplished.

It is a book worth reading.

khazen@alhayat.com