Najaf

rted to Najaf for burial close to Ali’s mausoleum. Five generations of my family are buried there thanks to a tradition that began in the 17th century.

Death is at the centre of life here. Tens of thousands of grave-diggers, undertakers, masters of funeral ceremonies, tomb watchers, givers of prayers for the dead, intercessors, Koran reciters, mediums for communication with the departed, and so on make up the bulk of the workforce.

While Najaf’s chief import is corpses, its major export is mullahs. The city hosts the most eminent of Shia seminaries which, at the height of its theological boom in the 1950s, boasted 124 madrassahs with 40,000 trainee mullahs. All the grand ayatollahs of the past 150 years either studied or taught there. […]

Najaf’s local and national importance is complemented by a regional dimension. Once the city regains its place as the centre of Shia scholarship it could pose a threat to the mullahs who have ruled Iran since 1979. The brand of Shia Islam offered in Najaf today, especially by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is in sharp contrast to that peddled by the Khomeinist mullahs of Tehran.

While Khomeinism preaches direct rule by the mullahs, Ayatollah al-Sistani’s traditional Shia Islam distinguishes between political and religious spaces. His prestige reached a new height this week when he succeeded in preventing a full-scale battle in Najaf. His intervention showed that the cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr was nothing but a maverick with a few hundred gunmen and little popular support. It also exposed the weakness of Iyad Allawi’s American-backed interim government. […]

Ayatollah al-Sistani succeeded by deploying people’s power, something he hopes to do in January’s election when he is expected to endorse a list of “pious candidates”. The emergence of Iraq as a moderate Shia power in which the clergy act only as “consultants” for politicians could become the biggest challenge that Tehran’s Khomeinists have faced.

This is why it is hard to believe that we have heard the last of the troubles in Najaf. The mullahs of Tehran are determined to shape the new Iraq in the way that they, and not the Americans, want. The Americans, for their part, are equally determined not to allow the emergence of a Khomeinist regime in Baghdad. Hojatoleslam al-Sadr remains one wild card among the many that Tehran still holds in Iraq. On Thursday he escaped arrest thanks to Ayatollah al-Sistani. But he may well come back to make more trouble. Iraq, and Najaf, are not out of the woods yet.