BASRA, Iraq — Along Basra's bustling Algeria Street, Adnan Abu Tariq hurried to his trading-company office Monday and whispered his plans for Sunday's elections.

"I will choose anyone who believes in freedom," the 53-year-old businessman insisted.

Furtively, Abu Tariq then looked both ways — out at traffic snarled along a muddy street with buckling pavement, and into an arcade of dusty shops cloaked in the darkness of a blackout that had stretched 24 hours. And in a murmur, he spoke again: "Anyone but the religious parties."

Among the fault lines that define Sunday's vote for an Iraqi parliament, the divide between religious and secular is one of the most decisive. The slate that has attracted the most attention is a coalition known as the United Iraqi Alliance, which brings together Iraq's most prominent Shiite parties and, many Iraqis believe, has the blessing of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

Its campaign is steeped in religious imagery, and its success in the election would ensure a voice for the country's conservative clergy in the writing of a new constitution.

A troubled experiment

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, those parties have effectively run Basra. Under their leadership, power and water supplies remain sporadic, city officials have been accused of corruption, and political killings have sown fear in the city. Judging by the opinions of residents, what may be postwar Iraq's first experiment in Islamic rule may also be its first failure.

"How long has it been? Two years?" Salah Abdullah, 34, asked while shopping at a cellphone store downtown. "Show me one person from the parties who has paved the road. Either you're a thief working for them or you are on your own."

"They failed," he said dismissively, jabbing his finger. "They're riffraff, and they've used religion as a cover."

Basra, a one-time jewel of the Middle East scarred by three wars in 25 years, has become a surprising, unintended laboratory for the marriage of political Islam and democracy in the Arab world.

In Egypt, Syria, Persian Gulf states and elsewhere, authoritarian rulers have often cited the popular support for Islamic parties and their grass-roots networks as an argument against democracy. But here in Basra, simply being in authority appears to have sapped that support.

The biggest challenge those parties faced was not taking power, residents said, but what to do once they were in charge and saddled with the unenviable task of making sense of postwar Iraq.

"They had an opportunity and they didn't seize it," said Amar Abdel-Ali, another customer at the phone store. "They could have done good work and gained votes, but they didn't prove anything — not even a quarter of what we wanted."

The ruling clique

The party at the center of Basra politics is the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose leader, Abdul Aziz Hakim, sits atop the electoral slate of the United Iraqi Alliance. Founded by Iraqi exiles in neighboring Iran in 1982, the party returned to southern Iraq and Baghdad after the U.S. invasion.

In Basra, whose majority Shiite population has been largely spared the carnage of Baghdad, Hakim's movement soon emerged as the best-organized, best-funded and most influential organization among 25 or so contenders in the city. The group is now seen as the dominant force on the city council, and leaders of the Badr Organization, its militia, hold the office of mayor and powerful positions within the city's security forces.

With some other Islamic groups perceived by residents as little more than gangs, the party oversaw a growing conservatism in a city long famed as the most libertine in the region. Liquor stores, once in the dozens, have shuttered. Shadowy, vigilante justice was meted out to former members of Saddam's Baath party. At high schools and at Basra University, women were encouraged — often by force — to wear veils.

"Those who control the power in the administration are the Islamic parties, so they should take responsibility for the situation," said Majid Sari, the leader of a small party in Basra who is running on a secular slate known as the National Democratic Coalition.

As Sari spoke, the lights went out in his office. "This is one of the new government improvements," he quipped.

A friend in the office chimed in: "And the sewage in the streets!"

The grim reality of Basra has proved a boon for opposition candidates. Over the four-day Eid al-Adha Muslim holiday that ended Sunday, some neighborhoods had electricity for an hour, if at all. Water quality has improved, thanks to a multimillion-dollar reconstruction project, but a dilapidated delivery network means it is still scarce in some areas.

Complaints about graft are rife, and residents say a fuel crisis that has gripped much of Iraq is exacerbated by the smuggling of oil to the Persian Gulf.

But it's a prevailing sense of insecurity that nags at many Basra residents. Unlike the car bombs and mortars that have become a routine part of life in Baghdad, Basra is unsettled by a murky campaign of killings.

Two men running in Sunday's election in the coalition of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi were killed this month, and an elementary-school teacher, Iman Jawair, was shot dead in front of her house 10 days ago, apparently for not wearing a veil.

Khairallah Malaki, a police brigadier who serves as the local government's security adviser, estimated that as many as 10 percent of the city's 13,000 policemen were loyal to religious parties rather than the civil leadership, a figure deemed low by opposition parties.

"You can't raise your voice unless you can back it up by firing a bullet," said Abdel-Khaleq Karim, the producer of a call-in show on Basra's Nahrein Radio that runs daily from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m.

Shifting the blame

Islamic activists bristle at the complaints and insist the problem is not their own mismanagement. Rather, they say the interim government in Baghdad, the British forces occupying Basra and the law as it stands deprive them of the power they need to be effective.

"There is no authority in the city council to carry out its work," said Salah Battat, a councilman.

Despite having too little money and too little authority, he said, he still takes pride in what the city council has done over the past year: providing $100 monthly stipends to 5,000 families in Basra with members who were killed by Saddam's government; delivering houses to 20 of those families; barring Baath Party members from working in the city government; and repaving and repairing some streets and bridges.

Then, in an unsolicited comment, Battat denied his party had any role in corruption or in doing the bidding of Iran's Islamic government, which Western diplomats say still generously funds the movement.

The question of Iranian support is a debilitating one for Basra's Islamic parties, in particular for the Supreme Council, which fought on the Iranian side during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and, as is bitterly recalled by some Iraqi veterans, oversaw prisoner-of-war camps.

One rival Islamic party is campaigning on a slogan that is a not-too-subtle jab at the Supreme Council's perceived leanings: "Born in Iraq, Iraqi financed, with Iraqi leadership."

Despite the disenchantment, the Supreme Council and allied parties still have a powerful card to play: the stature of Sistani, whose leadership is known as the marja.

While the ayatollah has not formally endorsed the United Iraqi Alliance in the parliamentary vote or the Supreme Council's list in local elections, the party has emblazoned his portrait on campaign literature. In sympathetic mosques, preachers have insisted voting for the alliance is equivalent to a religious duty.

Opposition candidates suggest that while secular groups such as the Communist Party-backed People's Union and Allawi's coalition will fare well in Basra, religious parties will still find success in the countryside, which is far more conservative and religious. In their view, rural Iraqis are more willing to follow the lead of the clergy and tribal leaders historically loyal to the Shiite leadership in Najaf.

Demythologizing

In the city, though, there is a process under way that might be called a demystification of authority, a narrowing of the distance between ruler and ruled so ingrained under Saddam. The election's greatest success may prove to be the degree to which Basra's residents now hold the government accountable, whatever its leaning, voicing criticism never heard in 25 years.

Often the talk comes furiously.

"None of the parties has done anything," said Saad Fatlawi, standing in an appliance store along Algeria Street. "They steal, they loot, they use force, and those who don't serve them, they'll break their back."

His colleague, Khaled Hassan, interrupted, saying Sistani had "blessed" the Supreme Council's list.

"There's no life in Iraq," Fatlawi answered. "This is the way we're going to live? This is not a life."

The secular parties are counting on that sentiment, in the city at least, to improve their fortunes.