Shiite Schism

The Wall Street Journal
April 7, 2003

COMMENTARY

BY AMIR TAHERI

LONDON -- Ayatollah Ali Mohammed Sistani is a happy man. For the first
time since 1988 he is not only not under house arrest but free to travel
wherever he wishes. What's more, 22 of his relatives, held hostage by
the Iraqi government since October, have returned home. A contingent of
American Marines patrols Najaf, his hometown, widely regarded as the
most sacred city in Shiite Islam. Their presence means that the Baathist
death-grip of Saddam Hussein is broken -- at least in Najaf.

The 75-year-old ayatollah is the undisputed A'alam al-ulema (the most
learned of the learned) of the mullahs who minister to the religious
needs of Shiites, 60% of Iraq's population. This week he will resume
lectures, banned by the Saddam regime for seven years, at the oldest
Shiite seminary. This follows his fatwa last week -- the first pro-U.S.
fatwa in modern political Islam -- in which he ordered Iraq's Shiites
not to resist U.S.-led coalition forces.

The news is potent, and potentially tectonic in its impact. And with
Saddam's regime disintegrating, Ayatollah Sistani is already talking of
restoring Najaf's position as "the heart of Shiism."

What does this mean? Speaking on a satellite phone to this writer, the
ayatollah said he had advised "believers not to hinder the forces of
liberation, and help bring this war against the tyrant to a successful
end for the Iraqi people." His emissaries have also gained control of
mosques and seminaries in Karbala, to the north, the second most sacred
city of Shiism. On Saturday, a delegation of his followers arrived in
Baghdad, to "guide believers on the right path." "There is good in what
happens," he said, quoting the Prophet Muhammad. "Our people need
freedom more than air [to breath]. Iraq has suffered, and it deserves
better government."

Ayatollah Sistani's close entourage goes further in its support of the
U.S.-led coalition. "We shall never forget what the coalition has done
for our people," says Hojat al-Islam Abdel Majid al-Khoi, son of the
late grand Ayatollah Khoi, who was Iraq's supreme religious leader for
almost 40 years. "A free Iraq shall be a living monument to our people's
friendship with its liberators." As Sistani's right-hand man, Khoi is
trying to create a united front of Iraqi Shiites.

At the start of the war, Iran's ruling mullahs pressed Iraqi Shiite
clerics in exile in Qom, near Tehran, to call for a boycott of coalition
forces. A meeting of more than 300 Iraqi mullahs in Qom received a
message from Iran's "supreme guide," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, calling for
a condemnation of both Saddam and President George Bush. The Iraqis
ignored Khamenei's advice, and ended the meeting without a statement.
Later, two Iraqi clerics in Qom, ayatollahs Hassan Jawaheri and Muhammad
Hadi Razi issued statements declaring Saddam's regime to be "in
rebellion against the authority of God," and unfit to rule a Muslim
nation.

Iraqi Shiite leaders base their support for the coalition on a
theological position that allows the faithful to cooperate with a
non-Muslim ally that is "distant but friendly" against a Muslim
adversary that is "near but hostile" in order to save Muslims from
oppression. Iran's ruling mullahs, none of whom has a senior rank within
the Shiite clergy, have accepted the position but tried to inject
anti-American rhetoric in it -- so far with little success.

The only prominent Shiite cleric to have rejected that position in the
context of Iraq is Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, spiritual leader of the
Lebanese branch of Hezbollah. He has echoed calls by the Sunni Muslim
center at Al-Azhar university in Cairo for a jihad against the coalition
and in support of Saddam. Fadlallah, however, is dismissed by most
Shiite clerics as more of a politician than a scholar. "He is leader of
a party," says Muhammad Hussein Kashef, an Iraqi cleric. "As a
politician, he is free to say what he likes." With Iraqi Shiism unable
to play its leading role because of Saddam's repressive measures,
Fadlallah has tried to promote Lebanon as a center for Arab Shiites. The
revival of Najaf's seminary, where Fadlallah studied for 20 years, could
end his Lebanese dreams.

Najaf's return to the center of Shiism is also a source of alarm for
Tehran. Under the influence of a string of great theologians, starting
with Mirza Hassan Shirazi in the 19th century and passing by Mohsen
Hakim Tabatabai and Khoi in the 20th century, Iraqi Shiism steered clear
of politics and focused on the ethics of the theological discourse. This
was in contrast with what the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the father of the
Islamic revolution in Iran, preached from the 1950s. Khomeini spent 14
years in exile in Najaf (1965-1978), where he was a lone voice among the
theologians. He argued that "only a good society can create good
believers." Khoi argued the opposite: "Only good men can create a good
society."

Khomeini believed that, left to their own devices, most people would not
live by Islam's precepts. "Man is half-angel, half-devil," he wrote in
"Tozih al-Masayel" (Explication of Issues), his magnum opus. "The devil
part is always stronger than the angel part. This is why society should
organize to combat it through laws and suitable punishments." Ayatollah
Khoi rejected that view. He asserted that the individual was capable of
taming "the devil side" and using "the angel side" to improve society,
thanks to "divine guidance rather than coercion." Khomeini believed that
mullahs should seize political power and use it to create "the perfect
society" even if that meant "purification" in the form of hundreds of
thousands of executions. Ayatollah Khoi rejected the possibility of
creating the "perfect society" in the absence of the Hidden Imam, whose
return has been awaited by the Shiites for 12 centuries.

Today, the late Ayatollah Khoi's views, continued by his disciple
Ayatollah Sistani, enjoy the widest audience among Shiites, including in
Iran, where virtually all grand ayatollahs reject Khomeini's theory of
rule by the mullahs.

For more than 20 years, Tehran has financed Iraqi Shiite exiles led by
Muhammad Baqer Hakim Tabatabai, while Syria has financed and supported a
rival group led by Muhammad Taqi Mudarressi. Both Hakim Tabatabai and
Mudarressi, however, are regarded more as politicians than as
theologians. Even if they return to Najaf, they will have to acknowledge
Ayatollah Sistani's position as primus inter pares among Shiite clerics.

For more than a decade, Khomeini warned his followers against "American
Islam" (Islam-e-Amrikai), which he defined as a system under which
"distinct spaces exist for religion and politics." Ironically, Shiism
had always recognized that distinction. In a sense, it was Khomeini who
had departed from tradition. Unlike Iran's ruling mullahs, who claim
that they have a divine right to rule, Iraq's mullahs are opposed to a
theocracy in Baghdad. "The clergy is the conscience of society,"
Ayatollah Sistani has written. "The administrative aspects of society's
life must be left to men of politics."

Iraq's liberation is certain to inspire a lively debate within Shiism
among those who, like the ayatollahs Sistani and Hussein Ali Montazeri
in Iran, argue in favor of seeking a place in the new global system and
those, like Ayatollah Khamenei and his associates, who still preach
"exporting revolution" in the hope of conquering the entire world for
their brand of Islam.

The American Marines who entered Najaf the other day did not know it,
but they were opening a new chapter -- perhaps an overdue schism in the
history of Shiism, the faith of some 180 million Muslims in more than
100 countries.

Mr. Taheri is the author, most recently, of "L'Irak: Le Dessous Des
Cartes," published last October by Editions Complexe, in France.

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