PRESIDENT Bush is desperate to transfer power to an Iraqi government and start withdrawing troops before the presidential election in November. But whether he succeeds depends largely on a venerable, self-deprecating 75-year-old cleric who gives no interviews, never appears on television and has not left his spartan home in the backstreets of Najaf, central Iraq, since Saddam Hussein’s agents tried to kill him ten years ago.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is the spiritual leader of Iraq’s 15 million Shia Muslims and wields an extraordinary moral authority over his flock. In recent months it has become increasingly clear that his veto of the US scheme to foist an unelected government of favoured allies on Iraq cannot be negotiated. Washington has already been forced to change its withdrawal plans twice in deference to his demands, but still he insists on direct elections.
The trouble with those, from the American point of view, is that they would not be able to control the outcome.
The US paid little attention, initially, to this reclusive septuagenarian, according to Hussain Shahristani, a nuclear scientist and confidante of the Ayatollah’s who was imprisoned for ten years for refusing to build Saddam’s bomb. “They just didn’t understand.”
But there were plenty of signs that this was a man to be reckoned with. For example, even as Saddam’s statues were toppling in Baghdad, the BBC World Service reported (erroneously) that Ayatollah al-Sistani’s modest house in Najaf was under threat from a hostile mob. The news spread like wildfire.
“I was sleeping in a village near Basra that night,” said the scientist. “Suddenly I saw the villagers grabbing guns and preparing to rush to Najaf, hundreds of miles away. ‘Sistani is under attack’, they told me. That was all they needed to know. The same thing happened all over Iraq.”
After the fall of Saddam, Ayatollah al-Sistani denounced looting, which rapidly died down in Shia towns and cities.
His representatives helped to organise local councils to enforce law and order and restore basic services. He issued a more controversial edict prohibiting lethal reprisals against former officials of the Baathist regime. “People even respected that, at least for a while,” one Shia politician said.
Such stature seems all the more remarkable given that the Ayatollah himself is not Iraqi but a native of Mashad in northeast Iran.
A prodigy from a religious family who began learning the Koran at the age of five, he has spent almost his entire life in the intellectually rigorous atmosphere of Shia scholastic institutions, first in Iran and then, from his early twenties, in Najaf, the centre of Shia learning for the past thousand years.
Promising scholars would be expected to master philosophy and jurisprudence, mostly through debate, and Ayatollah al-Sistani also pursued a keen interest in modern science. Years studying grammar and rhetoric are reflected in his elegantly pure classical Arabic, although he has never lost his thick Iranian accent.
Leaders in the Shia hierarchy emerge, in part, on their ability to gain a following by virtue of their pronouncements on questions of religious law. Ayatollah al-Sistani also enjoyed the powerful support of the widely revered Grand Ayatollah al-Khoei, his teacher and predecessor as supreme religious authority. He shared his mentor’s distaste for the political philosophy of Ayatollah Khomeini, who spent years of exile in Najaf before returning to Iran.
Grand Ayatollah al-Khoei died in 1992, and Ayatollah al-Sistani assumed responsibility for a flock devastated by Saddam’s bloody reprisals for the Shia uprising after the 1991 Gulf War. Taking a low profile, he eschewed politics but still attracted a large following, thanks to the popularity of his rulings on law and personal behaviour.
Combining high and low technology, his followers around the world would e-mail requests for rulings to an office in the Iranian city of Qom. Such queries were then printed out and smuggled across the border to the Ayatollah’s house in Najaf, and his answers smuggled back to Qom for posting on the Sistani.org website.
His moral authority among the poverty-stricken Shia masses was bolstered further by his generous distribution of financial contributions, while his own lifestyle remained rigorously austere. “You get just one glass of tea, and the mattresses you sit on are very thin,” said a recent visitor.
Ayatollah al-Sistani remained politically aloof during last year’s war, declining either to condemn or endorse the coalition’s presence in Iraq. But in June he dropped a bombshell, issuing a ruling that declared the American plan to have a new constitution written by an unelected committee unacceptable and demanding that any new constitution be written by an elected assembly.
Eventually persuaded that this edict might be serious, Paul Bremer, Iraq’s American administrator, requested a meeting with Ayatollah al-Sistani, which was refused.
Mr Bremer then requested that the Ayatollah nominate representatives to meet his officials to negotiate a compromise. “Mr Bremer, you are American. I am Iranian. I suggest we leave it to the Iraqis to devise their constitution,” the Ayatollah replied.
Subsequent US efforts to find a way to hand power to a malleable Iraqi government have elicited unwavering demands from Ayatollah al-Sistani for one man, one vote.
“The Americans still don’t understand Sistani,” said one observer. “They treat him like a standard politician — ‘What will it take to make a deal?’— whereas he’s more of a law professor than a politician.”
Frustrated by the obstacle of the venerable cleric, some among the Iraqi Governing Council spread the word that the Ayatollah’s stance was dictated by his dogged opposition to full rights for women, and to other human rights principles that Mr Bush has promised Iraq. Supporters dismiss this as a “blatant lie”.
It is clear that Ayatollah al-Sistani could seriously derail coalition ambitions for the region by calling on his followers to protest en masse.
Should the US authorities remain in any doubt about his ability to get results, they might consider his impact on Iraqi petrol queues. Fuel shortages have been exacerbated by black marketeers cornering supplies, leading to enormous queues at petrol stations.
Finally, Ayatollah al-Sistani issued a fatwa against black market profiteering in petrol. The lines shrank by 75 per cent. It is an example President Bush would do well to remember.
