Shiite Islam: The Grand Ayatollah Sistani Wants Najaf as the Capital
The bombs of Karbala reignite the struggle between Sunnis and Shiites. And, within the latter group, the struggle between the theocratic model of Khomeini and the "quietist" one preferred in Iraq
by Sandro Magister
ROMA - The bloody attacks on March 2 in Karbala, Baghdad, and Quetta struck the Shiite Muslims at the core of their religious identity, during the ashura, the culminating moment of the liturgy that represents the martyrdom of their imam, Hussein, the nephew of Mohammed, which took place at Karbala itself in the month of muharram, 10, during year 61 of the hegira, which corresponds to the year 680 in the Christian calendar.
The hundreds of victims of the attacks - women, children, ordinary faithful - have reopened a double fault line within Islam.
The first, and the deeper of the two, is the one between Shiites and Sunnis.
The second is the one among the Shiites themselves. And it involves doctrine and leadership.
* * *The first fracture dates back to the beginning of Islam. At the death of Mohammed, there was a dispute over who should assume the command of the community. For some, the power should have been entrusted to one of the prophet´s descendants: these were of the party - the shia - of Ali, the husband of Mohammed´s daughter, Fatima. The others thought the caliph should be elected.
The latter group prevailed, and they were later called the Sunnis, the upholders of the sunna (tradition). But the Shiites, since then, have always considered the power of the caliph as usurped an illegitimate. And they interpreted their story as one of passion and martyrdom, celebrated annually in a collective sacred drama, the taziyeh, during the first ten days of the month of muharram.
Today, the Shiites make up 15 percent of the Muslims in the world, and number approximately 180 million in over 100 countries. They form a majority in Iran and Iraq. In the latter country, they regained their freedom with the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein, who had harshly repressed them. And they are putting themselves forward as the strongest component of the new state.
But it is precisely for this that they are the first to be targeted by terrorist attacks. After the capture of Saddam Hussein, more than half the attacks in Iraq have struck the Shiite population and holy places.
The ideology of Al Qaeda and other Islamic groups feeds itself on the fracture between legitimate and illegitimate Islam. Wahhabism, which is dominant in Saudi Arabia and inspires a large part of Muslim terrorism, rejects Shiite Islam as heretical and schismatic. And it´s doing all it can to prevent its resurgence in Iraq.
The changes in Iraq, in fact, set in motion processes of change throughout the Middle East and the Muslim world, wherever important Shiite minorities exist: from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, from Syria to Lebanon to Maghreb.
Europe, too, has passed through wars of religion among Christians, and emerged from them through relations among states and ecumenical thought capable of governing peacefully over diversity.
Islam, however, has not yet elaborated an analogous ecumenism for making peace between Sunnis and Shiites. In this sense, too, nation-building in Iraq is a crucial proving ground.
* * *The second fracture opened by the March 2 attacks has its epicenter in the Shiite holy places.
Most of the victims were struck in Karbala, where Imam Hussein is buried. And other attacks, discovered ahead of time and prevented, were planned for nearby Najaf, the site of Ali´s tomb.
Karbala and Najaf are the two holy cities of Shiite Islam. Up until the 1980´s, when Saddam Hussein intensified the repression, forbade the taziyeh rituals, and drastically restricted the access of pilgrims, Najaf was the greatest worldwide center of formation for Shiite Islam. The most respected ayatollahs studied and taught there.
In recent decades, the world center for Shiite formation was shifted to Qom, in Iran. But after the liberation of Iraq, the project of restoring the primacy to Najaf has found new life, and has a recognized leader in the grand ayatollah Sayyid Ali Husaini Sistani (see photo).
Sistani was born 73 years ago in Iran, in a village near Mashad. By five years of age he had learned the entire Koran by heart; at eleven he entered the seminary; at twenty he continued his studies at Qom, and in 1952 he emigrated to Najaf and rapidly became the protege of the great ayatollah Abul Qassim Khoei, who for forty years was the highest worldwide authority of Shiite Islam.
Khoei died in 1992, after Saddam Hussein had placed him under house arrest, and Sistani was recognized as his successor and the administrator of his foundation. But meanwhile the Baghdad regime had closed the schools, killed and arrested many teachers, and decimated the students, reducing them from 7,000 to fewer than 1,000. Sistani was also arrested and was barred from spending in Iraq the money offered by his followers, which constituted up to 20 percent of the revenue, for the formation of clerics.
So Sistani directed these funds to the outside. The flowering of Qom, in Iran, as the new worldwide center of Shiite formation, was due also to him. He came to the point of distributing an average of five million dollars a month as scholarships and stipends for the students and teachers in Qom. And he did the same for Shiite religious schools in Syria, Pakistan, India, and Azerbaijan.
But Sistani was not merely a great entrepreneur of formation. He supported - and supports to this day - a precise current of thought, the same one held by his mentor Khoei and his predecessors throughout the last two centuries: a current of the "quietist" kind, according to which the instructor teaches theology, law, and morality, and asks that the principles of Islam be respected in public life, but neither demands political power for himself nor presumes to exercise control over it.
This current of thought has always been dominant in Najaf. The Iranian ayatollah Khomeini, who lived in this city from 1965 to 1978 and supported the opposite thesis, was completely isolated.
The thesis of Khomeini, which he embodied in 1979 with his theocratic revolution in Iran, was that "only a good society can create good believers." And he granted to the clerics the political power necessary to establish the perfect society.
Khoei and Sistani, on the contrary, held that "only good citizens can create a good society." And they rejected any idea of theocracy. The Shiite doctrine taught at Najaf during the last two centuries has always distinguished the political from the religious realm. If there have been transgressors of the tradition, they are Khomeini and his followers in Iran.
Now that freedom has returned to Iraq, Sistani is giving a powerful impulse to the rebirth of Najaf as the worldwide spiritual capital of Shiite Islam. He has guaranteed a bonus of twenty-five dollars a month to theology students. His foundation distributes tens of thousands of dollars to the poor and needy throughout Iraq. He has created a publishing house that publishes the monthly "Holy Najaf," the outlet of the Hawza, which is the name that designates the city´s complex of schools and mosques. He has plans for the construction of new schools, houses for pilgrims, an Islamic university, and a satellite television station.
Sayed Mohammed Ali Alwaez, the imam of the Shiite sanctuary of Kazemiya, in Baghdad, says that he received 25,000 dollars from Sistani at the end of the last Ramadan, thanks to which he was able to distribute rice, meat, and clothing to the faithful.
And it was before the mosque of Kazemiya, in Baghdad, that four explosions went off on March 2, creating scores of victims, at the same time as the bombs in Karbala and the foiled attempt in Najaf.
On April 10, Imam Abdel Majid Khoei, son of the grand ayatollah who was Sistani´s mentor, was assassinated.
On August 29, at Najaf, a car bomb killed more than one hundred faithful who were leaving the mosque that holds the tomb of Ali. Another moderate imam, Mohammad Baqr al-Hakim, died with them.
Last month, there were rumors of a failed attempt against Sistani himself, at his house in Najaf.
And all this is taking place just as a growing number of students are preparing to leave Qom for Najaf. The emigration is not simply geographic. Sayed Montazeri, son of the Iranian grand ayatollah of quietist tendencies, Hossein Ali Montazeri, told the "Wall Street Journal": "Give it time, within a year or two, Najaf will become a free and open environment and Iranian dissident clerics will migrate there, and will begin debating the divine ruling of the clerics here."
Between Najaf and Qom, two political and theological visions are competing for primacy within Shiite Islam. The rebirth of Najaf will influence the internal equilibrium of Iranian Islam, weakening the theocratic current.
A third Shiite current, this one extremist, is that represented by Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah, the leader of the Lebanese branch of Hezbollah. He also studied in Najaf, and during the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein tried to create a center for Shiite Arabs in Lebanon, supported by Iran. But the elite clerics consider Fadlallah a mere politician, devoid of spiritual authority. The rebirth of Najaf leaves him out of the game.
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The official website, in English, of the grand ayatollah Sistani:
> sistani.org__________
On the ties between Al Qaeda and the Wahhabi current of Saudi Arabia, radically hostile to Shiite Islam, see this essay, which appeared in "Foreign Affairs." The author is a professor of Middle East studies at Princeton:
> "The Saudi Paradox", by Michael Scott Doran, "Foreign Affairs", January/February 2004__________
An examination by Iranian political analyst Amir Taheri of the rebirth of Najaf as the world center of Shiite Islam:
> "Shiite Schism", by Amir Taheri__________
On this website, Shiite Islam and its developments beginning from the case of Iraq, analyzed by Khaled Fouad Allam:
> Islam and Democracy in Iraq. The Martyrdom of the Shiite Muslims (1.9.2003)
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English translation by Matthew Sherry:
> traduttore@hotmail.comGo to the home page of
> www.chiesa.espressonline.it/english, to access the latest articles and links to other resources.
Sandro Magister´s e-mail address is
s.magister@espressoedit.it
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4.3.2004
