Since the ouster of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein after the US-led invasion of the country in 2003, Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani has dominated the spiritual leadership of Iraq’s Shias and much of their politics.
The black-turbaned cleric was seen as the architect of the majority Shias’ rise to power through his contributions to the drafting of the country’s post-invasion Constitution and reshaping of its political system, which was dominated by minority Sunnis under Saddam.
But 20 years later, much water has run under the bridge in Iraq, where the dominant Shia parties of government and national politics have manipulated the system that Al-Sistani helped forge to retain their incumbency.
Today, the Shias are no longer the unitary force that Al-Sistani pushed forward, and the community is now a broad political church, with many interest groups, factions, and alliance partners, each with a separate agenda.
With his health becoming an issue and prompting fresh speculation on the Shia religious leadership’s succession, questions about Iraq’s future after Al-Sistani are on everyone’s mind.
With still enormous challenges facing its recovery, Iraq continues to be confronted by the daunting task of ensuring stability and national coherence.
Much will depend on the power of Iraq’s next top Shia spiritual leader and whether he can put the community’s house in order amid a fierce struggle over sharing power by Iraq’s Shia political elites.
To understand this, one must look at the way politics evolved following the US-led invasion in 2003 and the role Al-Sistani played in shaping the new system that empowered the Shias.
The idea that the Iranian-born Al-Sistani established himself as a powerful voice in Iraq’s politics is a main conclusion of a new book that reflects on Shia political control in post-Saddam Iraq.
The book God’s Man in Iraq: The Life and Leadership of Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani by Sajad Jiyad, also gives perspectives about the worrying possibility of seeing the legacy of Al-Sistani being chipped away after his demise.
The 94-year-old cleric made his first public appearance in months on 27 May this year, raising a fresh round of questions about who might eventually succeed him when he passes away.
In the book, a Century International project, Jiyad details how Al-Sistani used his religious authority to steer Iraq through a series of existential crises after the US-led invasion and the fall of Saddam’s regime.
To explore these questions, Jiyad examines Al-Sistani’s role since the regime change in 2003, as he wielded tremendous informal power, eventually becoming the most consequential of the Shia leaders in Iraq and looming above every other cleric and politician.
Al-Sistani’s role in transitioning Iraq through the turmoil of the US-led invasion and empowering the country’s Shias can be traced to his determination that a new constitution for the post-Saddam era should be written by the Iraqi people through an elected body.
Though he stated that the shape of the new Iraq should be determined by the Iraqi people with all their ethnicities and sects, the mechanism for the free and direct elections he insisted on was intended to ensure that the majority Shias would be in control.
His second major contribution came in 2014, when he issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, calling upon Iraqi young men to arise up to fight the Islamic State (IS) group that had seized large chunks of Iraq and threatened to overthrow the Shias’ rule.
Hundreds of thousands of Shias answered Al-Sistani’s call for Islamic jihad, and the volunteers played a vital role in the defeat of the terrorist group, along with the Iraqi and International Coalition forces, three years later.
Nevertheless, unlike Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who installed himself as the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran following the ouster of the Shah in 1979, Al-Sistani distanced himself from governance and shunned the Iranian model of the wilayat al-faqih, the rule of the religious jurist, adopted in Iran.
As Jiyad shows in his book, Al-Sistani eschewed Khomeini’s theory of the clergy being caretakers of the system and believed instead that they should not rule but should remain as reformers who can set guardrails when needed by their congregations.
Although he has been a transformational figure in Iraq’s modern history, Al-Sistani has not previously received a thorough treatment from biographers in the way that many other reformers have.
In his biography, Jiyad does not only look into Al-Sistani’s life and clerical journey, but also offers the opportunity to examine his influence in shaping Iraq’s current institutional and political structure.
Yet, for Juan Cole, a US academic who wrote an introduction to the book, Al-Sistani’s legacy is not without blemishes, and it lays bare the complex and contentious debates about his legacy.
The first thing that comes to the mind of many Iraqis is whether Al-Sistani’s passionate goal of building a stable and sovereign Iraq whose government would be representative of all religious sects and ethnicities has actually been met.
The second is whether Al-Sistani’s fatwa against IS was the vehicle to create the Popular Mobilisation Force that has since become the most powerful umbrella organisation for Shia non-state armed actors in Iraq.
Jiyad aims to revisit the debate about whether Al-Sistani succeeded in empowering the Shias and whether he failed to overcome and conquer the emerging Shia Islamists who worked to turn the “new Iraq” into a Shia-majority tyranny ruled by corrupt oligarchs and their militias.
Later Al-Sistani realised that his intervention was not effective enough to build a “civic state” in Iraq and instead opted to stay out of politics completely, reflecting a desire to protect his legacy and moral capital.
Al-Sistani’s recent preference to stay out of the limelight illustrates the widening gulf that divides him from the Shia ruling elites that have failed to address his repeated complaints about disenfranchisement, corruption, and lack of services.
Meanwhile, who will succeed Al-Sistani matters greatly to all Iraqis. Rumours about Al-Sistani’s health have cast a spotlight on the succession to the leadership of the country’s prestigious Shia religious seminary in Najaf when he passes away.
Reports abound on Iraqi social networks about the prospects of a post-Al-Sistani era amid speculation over his succession in the marja’iyya, which in the author’s words, “will be one of the most significant events in modern Iraqi history.”
Though he asserts that there is no unanimous choice for a successor to Al-Sistani, Jiyad accepts the widely circulated speculation about Afghan-born Mohamed Ishaq Al-Fayadh and Pakistani-born Bashir Al-Najafi to be his successors.
Both men are over 90, neither is considered an ideal choice by Iraqi Shias, and the acceptance of either could only be transitional until a possible candidate from a younger generation can be found.
For Jiyad, it is likely that there will never be another marja’ taqlid (“religious reference” – or the highest clerical level in Shia Islam) like Al-Sistani or “one who wields so much informal power and has a significant influence on politics in contrast to his predecessors and peers.”
Jiyad concludes that the future of the Najaf marja’iyya, or seminary, as an institution “looks to be secure” and whoever is chosen to succeed him will “adhere” to Al-Sistani’s approach.
Yet, this conclusion seems to ignore the fact that the marja’iyya historically did not need to be in the hands of a single jurist whom the lay Shias would follow out of their belief in his knowledge and personal capacity.
Two important omissions are expected to emerge after Al-Sistani’s death that could complicate his succession. Iran is expected to push for a cleric who supports its model of Shia theocracy based on the principle of wilayat faqih practised in the Islamic Republic.
And then, powerful Iraqi Shia cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr, who has recently begun to indulge in theological issues in public in the footsteps of his late father Ayatollah Mohammad Sadiq Al-Sadr, might also eye Al-Sistani’s succession.
Therefore, the most intellectually honest answer to the question of what will happen to the spiritual leadership of Iraq Shia after Al-Sistani is simply: it is as ambiguous as the future of Iraq itself.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 4 July, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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