Islamic Democratic Current Party
Established in March 2003 and led by Muhammad Abd al-Jabbar Shabbut, who is from Al-Kut. Shabbut told the Israeli Arab weekly "Al-Sinnarah" in an interview published on 7 May 2004 that his party combines Islam as a cultural basis and democracy as a neutral procedural mechanism as its platform. Shabbut has been an Islamic political activist since the mid-1960s. He left Iraq in the late 1970s after the Ba'athist regime clamped down on the Islamic movement in Iraq. According to "Al-Sinnarah," Shabbut was sentenced to death in absentia for his antiregime activism, and only returned to Iraq following the fall of the Hussein regime. Shabbut claims some 40,000 Sunni, Shi'ite, and Christian members to his party, which he says does not insist on an Islamic affiliation. He told "Al-Sinnarah" that based on opinion polls inside Iraq, "We are confident that the Iraqi people are aware of the need to elect a statesmen and not a man of religion as the head of state." He added that his party is different from other Islamic parties because it "is not a religious party," and because it "officially adopt[s] democracy in its documents and considers [democracy] part of the Islamic theory" of the party. Shabbut is the author of 13 books on Islamic thought.
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