What Sistani Realy Wants.

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What Sistani Wants

 

He refuses a new air conditioner, yet his office is Internet-wired. He wants women to take political office, but not to shake the hands of men outside their families. He is easily the most powerful man in Iraq. Yet he's an Iranian.

 

Feb. 14 issue - It's interesting that most published accounts describe Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani as a tall, slender man, towering over his aides and visitors. Actually he's on the short side, about 5 feet 8, but the error is understandable. The housebound cleric has hardly set foot out of his tiny abode in the slums of Najaf in six years. He never gives speeches, never even presides at Friday prayers at the golden-domed Imam Ali shrine, the holiest place in Shiite Islam, only a few hundred feet from his home. But he does receive visitors, hundreds a day, normally, always seated on a thin cushion on the floor of his barrani, or receiving room, wearing a gray robe that is often threadbare, and a large black turban. He won't be photographed (the few grainy images of him were taken without official permission), and he never gives interviews. He is the very picture of an ascetic Islamic prelate, a picture that would not have looked much different if it had been painted five centuries ago. His visitors invariably leave impressed, often describing the encounter in mystic terms; small wonder they remember him as tall.

 

This is the image that Sistani has carefully crafted over the years, but there's another side to it. He may live humbly and poor, but he also presides over a multimillion-dollar network of charities and religious foundations from Pakistan to England. He may not get out very much, but he has a highly developed network of representatives in every Shia neighborhood in Iraq. One of his sons-in-law runs an Internet company with 66 employees in the Iranian city of Qom, and Sistani's own office is one of the best-wired in Iraq. The interim government installed a T-1 connection to the Internet, so his representatives can stay in touch by e-mail. When he has new visitors, his staff Googles them and prints out a briefing paper. When folks in Baghdad, 90 miles north, need to call his office, they dial a local number that patches through. And he may refuse to have his photo taken, but he doesn't object to his followers' plastering the few available grainy shots on campaign posters and mosques around the country.

 

All that makes sense. Al-Sayid Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani is now indisputably the most powerful man in Iraq. The elections he demanded, on the terms he insisted upon, were an unexpected success; the party he crafted, and then blessed, has won a landslide victory. The United Iraqi Alliance, better known as the Shia List, racked up more than 65 percent of the votes counted as of last weekend. That's at least enough to choose the leaders of the new government, and when final results come in, it may come close to the two-thirds margin necessary to dictate the terms of Iraq's new constitution. "Ayatollah Sistani is very elated," says Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a member of the United Iraqi Alliance and national-security adviser to the interim government, who spoke to him by phone as results came in last week.

 

But it raises the question: who is Ali Sistani, really? Is he the ayatollah with a 20-page bibliography of arcane Shia theology to his credit, whose conservative views on the role of Islam in society will reshape the new Iraq? Or a great modernizer who issued a fatwa saying women should vote even if their husbands objected? "The language that Sistani uses in Arabic is quite distinctly drawn from the Enlightenment, from Rousseau and from Jefferson: a legitimate government derives from the choice of its people," says Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, an expert on the Shia.

 

But the ayatollah also has insisted that Iraq's new constitution must be in line with Islamic principles, and recognize Islam as the nation's religion. Iraq's women are encouraged to vote as they want but, under Sistani's teachings, they won't be able to shake the hand of any man other than a father, brother or husband. (Sistani also forbids music for entertainment, dancing and playing chess.) "It's the Shiite equivalent of the Christian Coalition," says Cole. "The Christian Coalition doesn't want pastors to rule America, but it does want Christian ideals to govern policy."

 

Sistani is both a savior and a frustration to American policymakers. "Yes, he's a kingmaker. Yes, he's powerful," says one U.S. official. "But he won't meet face to face." No American official has ever been able to see Sistani, whose aides say he thinks such a meeting would justify the U.S. occupation. But while he has condemned the occupation, he has never issued a fatwa against it—something that would be certain to bring millions of Shia into the streets. The Sunni-based rebellion has been difficult enough, but hardly a mass movement, and Sistani actually helped end the brief Shia rebellion led by Moqtada al-Sadr. "It's masterful," said the U.S. official, with grudging admiration. "Frankly, I have a lot of respect for his political savvy."

 

Those who suspect Sistani's true intentions are quick to note that the country's most powerful man is not even an Iraqi, but an Iranian. He came to Najaf, Shiite Islam's holiest city, more than 50 years ago as a disciple of the then Grand Ayatollah Abul Qasim al-Khoei. Until last August, Sistani never left, nor did he give up his Iranian citizenship. Al-Rubaie said he offered to get him an Iraqi passport after Saddam's regime fell, but Sistani's response was characteristic: "He said, 'Dr. Rubaie, what would I do with this? I'm a man going to his grave. I haven't left Najaf for 13 years. Why do I need it?' " When he developed heart trouble last August, he went to London for treatment on his Iranian passport. Although Sistani made it a religious obligation to vote in Iraq's elections, he wasn't qualified to cast a ballot himself. His followers say he's above nationality, as the Roman Catholic pope would be. "He's the spiritual leader of all the Shia in the world," says Sheik Jalaladin al-Saghir, imam of an important mosque in Baghdad. "Iranians as much as Iraqis."

 

Sistani was a contemporary in Najaf of the then far more famous Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran. Khomeini spent many years there in exile, crafting his philosophy of velayat al-faqih, or "rule of the jurisprudent," which laid the foundation for the theocracy Khomeini established after the Iranian revolution. The concept was that clerics should create a perfect Muslim state, which would make their followers perfect Muslims. Sistani followed a different, quietist philosophy, whereby clerics kept their distance from politics. He was elevated to the status of mujtahid at the unheard-of age of 31, meaning he was able to make religious rulings, something usually reserved for older clerics. But by all accounts, Sistani and Khomeini were never friends.

 

Sistani's power is partly financial. As one of only a handful of grand ayatollahs, he is revered throughout the Islamic world and has far more personal followers in Iran than the theocratic hard-liners there. Shia pledge a fifth of their disposable income to their personal marja, or "object of emulation," and such support translates into a huge income—one that has flowed far more freely to Sistani since the end of Saddam's regime.

 

It has had no effect on the ayatollah's austerity. He rarely eats meat, insisting on a peasant diet of yogurt and rice. Once when he was sick, says Sheik al-Saghir, an aide brought him fruit juice to drink. "He refused. He said, 'People are not finding potable water and you're bringing me juice? No'." When his air conditioner broke down, goes an oft-told story in Najaf, aides brought him a new one that wouldn't be as noisy. Instead, he insisted on repairing the old one and giving the new one to a poor family. When the 74-year-old Sistani went to London for heart treatment, the well-heeled Al-Khoei Foundation there (which Sistani is said to control) put him up in a comfortable Mayfair town house; he had the double bed removed and slept on a mattress on the floor. All of that gives him enormous credibility with Iraq's Shia, who had little power in Saddam's regime and were overwhelmingly poor.

 

The Sunni insurgents, both foreign extremists like Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi and their Iraqi allies, have targeted Shias and their leaders just as much as the Iraqi government and American troops, even setting up highway checkpoints on roads leading to Najaf and killing any Shia they find. Mohammed Bahr Aluloom, a Shia politician, was so incensed by the wave of sectarian murders last November that he went to Sistani to argue for a Shia militia to fight back. "We're not going to have our families attacked by terrorists," Aluloom still insists, banging his wooden cane on the floor. "Everything has its limits. Once that limit is passed, all that's left is God and your weapon." But Sistani spoke very quietly to him. "Please don't do this," he said. "Please be civilized. We don't want to start a civil war. This is the most important point." Aluloom obeyed.

 

Sistani himself has been tested repeatedly, losing close aides and followers to assassins and narrowly missing assassination attempts several times. On Shiite Islam's holiest occasion—the Ashoura festival, which marks the death of Imam Hussein—terrorists set off suicide car bombs in the midst of crowded pilgrims, killing hundreds. But Sistani ordered no retribution. "It's enough [for him] to say, 'Don't do such a thing,' and they don't," says al-Saghir, who can tick off 21 assassination attempts that he himself has survived in the past 18 months.

 

American policymakers found how effective Sistani's edicts could be when he issued a fatwa in January 2004 condemning plans by the Coalition Provisional Authority to have a phased-in handover of power without early elections. Overnight there were demonstrations by hundreds of thousands, and though peaceful, their message was clear. "U.S. forces can't deal with large demonstrations," says Cole. "You can't shoot them, so you have to cede space, both physically and politically." Sistani also showed how pragmatic he could be; when the United Nations said quick elections were not feasible, Sistani agreed to the drafting of a transitional administrative law (TAL) that eventually led to last week's elections. Al-Rubaie remembers the all-night session when Iraqis wrote the TAL, and Sistani stayed on a satellite telephone until they hashed out the wording of a clause on the future role of Islam. "I don't think this is going to be a stumbling block now," al-Rubaie says, "because that paragraph in the TAL he has drafted himself. We read it to him, and he was crossing all the T's and dotting all the I's."

 

The real dotting and crossing begins this week as the victorious United Iraqi Alliance chooses the new government. The list is a mixture of Shia religious parties, secular groups, independents and even a few Sunnis and Kurds. There are figures as diverse as Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shiite and onetime American favorite, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Sistani chose an intimate of his, nuclear physicist Hussein Shahristani, to form a six-person committee that put the list together, with every third candidate a woman. Seats in the national assembly will be awarded based on the proportion of votes each slate gets, and the alliance will easily have a majority in the 275-member body, which then forms the government. Shahristani, one of the leading contenders for prime minister under the new government, is quick to issue assurances to Sunni Arabs in Iraq. "We do not believe in the dominance of the majority or majority rule," he says. "We insist on a government of national unity, with fair representation of Sunni Arabs."

 

Sistani will take no part in deciding exactly who will make up the government, Shahristani says. "He refuses even to meet with the alliance now," Shahristani says. "He says, 'You were elected, so it's up to you now. Don't drag me into it'." But he has set down some guidelines that will have to be followed. "He rejects any role for the clerics in the governance or administration of the country," says Shahristani. Al-Rubaie, also a member of the United Iraqi Alliance's executive committee, confirmed that. And Sistani will insist that Islam is the national religion, with no laws that contradict Islamic principles. But at the same time, as he once told a Shia politician, "there is nothing written in the Qur'an about elections." For that, he said, he reads textbooks on democracy.

 

Some of the strongest members of the alliance are religious parties who in the past have openly advocated an Islamic state on the Iranian model. Hussein al-Mousawi, who heads the Shiite Council, a secular party, called the leading members on the victorious list "extremist Shiite Islamists who believe in the rule of religious clerics." Now, however, it's hard to find any who will admit that. The leading party in the alliance is SCIRI, but even its leaders have lately adopted a moderate tone.

 

How much influence will Iran have on Iraq's new leaders? Sistani has carefully kept his distance from official Iranians, refusing, for instance, to receive a delegation from Tehran's foreign ministry last year. But Iranians have poured into Shia areas in southern Iraq, and even bought up some of the houses in Sistani's neighborhood, either to be close to him, or to keep an eye on him. Recently the Ahl ul Bait World Assembly, a religious charity closely linked to Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, opened an office in Najaf to promote the doctrine of clerical rule. "Sharia will be the foundation for the constitution," says an Iraqi representative, Sheik Bassem al-Shommari. "All the laws must be taken from Sharia because the country has a Muslim majority." Many of Iraq's defeated Sunnis are deeply worried, not so much about Islamic law as about the power of Shia ayatollahs to reinterpret it, something considered blasphemous by Sunnis. And secular Iraqis worry how much their country will change if rules of Islamic dress and social practices are imposed. Alcohol, freely available in Iraq now, will almost certainly be banned. But will minority Christians be exempt from that? Sistani will be watching. Right now, he may be the only one who knows exactly how far Iraq will go.

 

Source: Newsweek