People gathered on the streets around the Shiite Ali al-Musal mosque said it would be a disaster for Iraq if the country went the way of neighbouring Iran, where the ayatollahs hold the whip hand.

"The clerics know about the Koran and all things attached to Islam, but the government must know about politics and the needs of the people," said civil engineer Nasser Hashem.

In Nasiriyah, some 20,000 protesters Tuesday protested against a meeting of the Iraqi opposition organised by the United States, insisting that Shiite religious leaders should have a decisive say on who becomes Iraq's next leader.

But people here said that such views reflected a narrow-mindedness at odds with the prevailing opinion in Iraq's two major cities, Baghdad and Basra.

"It's not important whether our leader is Shiite or Sunni," said seaman Ahmed Abdul Salam. "There's no difference between Shiite and Sunni In Iraq. We follow the same religion, the same Koran. Do we want a government like Iran's? No, no, no!"

Shiites constitute well over 80 percent of the population in Iran and account for a little over half in Iraq, which also has a large Sunni population and a small Christian community.

Similar opposition to religious rule was expressed at the Sunni al-Arab mosque in the centre of Basra.

"We are all Muslims, but we also respect every religion, like the Christians," said Abdul Karim, who is a doctor of Islamic studies at the University of Basra.

"We want the new government to be a national leadership for all the people -- the Kurds, Arabs, Sunnis and Shiites."

Residents said it was important that any new government respected the views of all religions and not continue Saddam's policy of persecuting religious leaders.

Saddam pursued a policy of imprisoning and executing Muslim leaders, particularly Shiites.

But Karim noted that Saddam, a Sunni, also imprisoned clerics from his own branch of the Muslim faith.

"It is not true that because Saddam was Sunni that he hated the Shiites, because many Sunni leaders were killed in his time. Some Sunni leaders were put in prison here," Karim said.

The Islamic scholar said Saddam had been especially brutal towards Muslim leaders in the 1980s. Ironically, the stark contrast between Saddam's secularism and the fundamentalism of the ayatollahs in Iran won him backing from the United States during the Iran-Iraq war which persisted for most of the 1980s.

"But after 1990, there was a change by Saddam. He helped build the mosques, he changed the books in schools and he printed new Korans."

Saddam made concerted efforts in the last years of his regime to portray himself as an Islamic leader.

Portraits of the dictator which once saw him dressed only in Western clothing or military uniform were frequently replaced by ones in which he wore more traditional attire.

And the tricolour Iraqi flag was blazened with the Muslim religious saying "Allahu Akbar," or "God is Greatest."

SPACE.WIRE