Iran promotes candidate for No. 1 Shiite ayatollah
Choice would give Tehran sway over Iraqis
NAJAF, Iraq — As the top spiritual leader in the Shiite Muslim world, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-husseini al-sistani has instructed his followers on what to eat and how to wash, how to marry and bury.
As a temporal guide, he has championed Iraqi democracy, insisting on direct elections from the earliest days of the occupation, and warned against Iranian-style clerical rule.
Frail at 81, he still greets visitors each morning at his home, only steps from the glimmering gold dome of the Imam Ali Shrine.
But the jockeying to succeed him has quietly begun, and Iran is positioning its own candidate for the post, a hard-line cleric who would give Tehran a direct line of influence over the Iraqis, heightening fears that Iran’s long-term goal is to transplant its Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
The succession, a lengthy and opaque process, could shape the interplay of Islam and democracy not only in Iraq, where Shiites are the majority, but across a Shiite Muslim world that stretches from India to Iran, Lebanon and beyond.
The ayatollah’s prescriptions for daily living are imbued with the force of law among the majority of the world’s 200 million or so Shiites who follow him, his religious teachings are sacrosanct and his political sway is powerful.
For Iraq, the contest adds another element of uncertainty in a fledgling democracy whose politics are in upheaval as its three main factions — the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — contend for power, a contest that analysts worry could tilt the country back toward authoritarianism.
“Iraq does not need this now,” said Hussein Mohammad al-eloum, a cleric from a prominent religious and political family; the ambassador to Kuwait and a former oil minister are his sons. “Sistani, may God protect him.”
Iran’s candidate, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi al-shahroudi, 63, is an Iraq-born cleric who led the Iranian judiciary for a decade and remains a top official in the government there. With Iranian financing, his representatives have been building a patronage network across Iraq for months, underwriting scholarships for students at the many seminaries there and distributing information.
“He’s there to prepare himself for after Sistani,” said Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who spent 14 years studying at seminaries in Qum, an Iranian holy city.
The move has raised fears that Iran is trying to extend its already extensive influence in the political and economic life of Iraq. A recent visit by Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-maliki, to Tehran, where he met with al-shahroudi, raised tensions further. Reidar Visser, a historian, wrote in his Iraqi politics blog that al-maliki’s visit “did nothing to kill the rumors about some kind of Iranian design on the holiest center of Iraqi Shiism.”
Choosing the next supreme spiritual leader is a tortuous and somewhat spontaneous process that relies on the will of the people, expressed in whom they choose to pay their religious taxes to — devout Shiites are expected to pay one-fifth of their discretionary income to their ayatollah, or marjah — and the validation of a spiritual leader’s religious scholarship by his clerical peers.
“The Iranian government cannot control who pious Shias will look to,” said Vali Nasr, a former State Department official, academic and author of The Shia Revival. “It’s a very democratic process.”
It could take several years before a clear successor rises.
“It will take Najaf two to three years before a strong marjah emerges,” said Sami al-askari, a Shiite politician in Iraq who lived in exile in Iran and who knows al-shahroudi from his time there. “It is not like the Vatican. In the marjaiya, it is a slow and complicated process.”
The marjaiya is the Shiite leadership body in Iraq.
The tradition in Najaf and its religious academy, called the Hawza, is to keep a measured distance from politics, to live a pious and ascetic life and to intervene only occasionally in political affairs.
Al-sistani is Iranian but was able to rise in Najaf partly because he was never involved in Iranian politics. He intervened at key moments during the U.S. occupation, including a celebrated episode in 2004 when he called hundreds of thousands of supporters into the streets to demand direct elections over the objections of the U.S. au- thorities. He was also a voice of moderation and restraint during the years of sectarian carnage.
But for more than a year he has refused to even meet with politicians — he has barely left his house for the past several years — and his health is the constant subject of rumors.
Clerics in Iraq give high marks to the quality of al-Shahroudi’s scholarship, partially because he studied under and had the validation of Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-sadr, who was assassinated in 1980 by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen and if alive today would be the father-in-law of Muqtada al-sadr, the antiAmerican cleric.
Still, the clerics in Iraq would prefer to see another Najaf-based leader rise to the level of top ayatollah to safeguard Najaf’s quietist tradition.
“Shahroudi had an official job in Iran, which was the head of the judiciary,” Eloum said. “And the important point for the Hawza in Najaf is independence, full independence from any kind of government, even if it’s the Iraqi government.”
The ayatollah emphasizes his suffering under Saddam’s government: Three of his brothers disappeared, their exact fates still unknown. He is also said to be quite wealthy, a stark contrast to the piety and simple life believers expect of their leaders and which al-sistani embodies.
“Shahroudi is one of the wealthiest men in Iran,” said Khalaji, the analyst and former student in Qum. “He imports goods, has businesses and owns many factories. His personal life is luxurious.”
Al-shahroudi has not visited Najaf since his representatives began establishing their organization here. “He wants to come and visit,” said Ibrahim al-baghdadi, an Iraqi who runs his office here. “It’s his country. He was born here.”
Al-baghdadi blames the tensions over al-shahroudi’s organizational presence in Najaf as the efforts of others in the clerical community to “disturb the streets.” He suggested an Iranian system of government would not work: “The constitution rules here, and Iraqis have voted for it.”
Outwardly espousing ambitions to succeed al-sistani would be a breach of etiquette.
“For the future, you can’t tell,” al-baghdadi said. “This is up to God.”