ANALYSIS: Inside the minds of Iraq's grand ayatollahs

Whether the stated reason was genuine or it was a deliberate snub, the ayatollah’s unreadiness to meet the prime minister raised important questions about whether he was interfering in politics in an unprecedented way.

Unlike their Shia counterparts in Iran, who openly control politics as well as the judiciary, Iraq’s clerics have followed a "quiet" tradition. They give advice on private morals and promulgate general principles for public life, but steer clear of day-to-day politics. Was this changing, some Iraqis wondered.

Because they represented occupying powers, Sistani refused to meet US or British officials as a matter of principle. He further annoyed them by issuing a fatwa calling for elections to choose the men who would write Iraq’s constitution, thereby undermining US plans to have it drafted by Washington’s hand-picked men. 

But declining to see an elected Iraqi prime minister seemed a more controversial step. Where was the issue of principle? Did it signify a switch towards direct clerical activism?

In the factional squabbling after last year’s parliamentary elections, Sistani had offered an unmistakable dig at Nouri al-Maliki’s desire for a third term, by warning officials not to cling to their jobs. This was a first step in confronting a national as opposed to a foreign official. 

Unprecedented decisions

Last month came the humiliation of Abadi’s trip to Najaf at a time when Abadi could have expected Sistani’s support. The Iraqi parliament had just blocked Abadi’s reforms and the grand ayatollah was on record as endorsing a public protest movement which emerged this summer denouncing corruption among senior officials and demanding reforms. 

Sistani’s decision not to receive Abadi came a year after another big step: Sistani’s call for the creation of paramilitary brigades run by authorities for the two holiest Shia shrines in Karbala and Najaf to defend against the menace of the Islamic State group. This too was unprecedented.

Religious officials in southern Iraq told MEE not to read too much significance into Abadi’s failure to see Sistani. He was busier than the other grand ayatollahs, they said, and the prime minister’s visit to Najaf was at very short notice.

But secular Iraqi analysts say Sistani was caught on the horns of a dilemma. If he received Abadi, it could have lost the ayatollah some respect among the Shia public, given that the reform process has been disappointingly slow. If he shunned Abadi, it might weaken the prime minister fatally.

For a journalist to obtain an interview with grand ayatollahs on this or any other subject is impossible, though they are willing to receive reporters and give opinions in words that cannot be quoted.

I was ushered in to see the 85-year-old Sayyed Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim as he sat on a sofa with two other clerics in a modest room in Najaf. His aides had told me to withdraw after shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries.

A few hours later I squeezed through an ante-room full of Pakistani Shias and was directed in the next room to a patch of carpet beside 73-year-old Sheikh Basheer al-Najafi, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Born in India in the last years of Britain’s occupation, Najafi was educated in Pakistan before becoming one of the first south Asians to reach the eminence of being an ayatollah.

With his white turban tilted at a rakish angle, he gestured vigorously as he lectured me on the moral responsibilities of journalists and wondered aloud why, if Nato opposed IS, it did not act more decisively against Turkey for letting advanced weapons and other supplies come across the Turkish border to the group’s headquarters in Raqqa. He then turned his ire against Saudi Arabia for its bombing campaign in Yemen.

While grand ayatollahs remain unquotable, they let their sons speak to the media on their behalf. The two sons I met talked about politics animatedly and in detail in spite of the allegedly non-political role of Shia clerics.

Najafi’s son, Ali al-Najafi, was proud of the progress that the Shia militia, the Hashd al-Shaabi, had made against IS alongside the Iraqi army and police over the last year and a half, though he said it was not as successful as they had hoped.

He praised the Russians for their contribution in Syria but blamed what he saw as the duplicity and weakness of Western governments.

"The West supports Jabhat al-Nusra but refers to IS as terrorist. It’s true that they sometimes clash but their ideology is the same. We feel the international community is not serious in defeating IS," he told Middle East Eye.

"In order to eradicate terrorism in their own countries, Europe sends them to Iraq and Syria. Some say the US is funding IS directly. That’s what I hear."

He praised Iran for sending weapons and advisers to Iraq "in less than 24 hours" when IS seized Mosul, swept through the Nineveh valley and almost reached Erbil last year.

But he seemed to prefer the US to the Iranians. "If the US took its security agreement with Iraq seriously there would be no need for Iran to intervene and Iraq wouldn’t ask for the help of Iran’s experts. We think Iraq should be independent and have respectful relations with other countries," he said.

"There’s a Western fear of the Shia, sometimes because of Iran, sometimes because of Hezbollah. But Shia communities are closer to peace than any other major Islamic sect. If we put all the acts of terrorism in the world side by side, by Shia and IS types, you’ll find the numbers are nowhere near being close.

"Look at the way the West dealt with Egypt, Tunis and Libya during the Arab Spring. They dealt differently in Bahrain,” he added, alluding to the support the West gave protesters in the first three countries and the lack of support it gave in Bahrain where the protesters were mainly Shia.

'The Hashd are not just for Shia Muslims'

Most Western analysts argue that because of the legacy of sectarian killings in Iraq in recent years, as well as Sunni fears of Iranian hegemony, Shia majority forces cannot liberate Sunni areas of Iraq from IS. They also claim that without concessions to Sunni communities Abadi cannot win their confidence.

Najafi rejected the notion that the Shia militia were a sectarian army controlled by Iran or Iraq’s Shia clergy, and saw no reason why they could not liberate Sunni areas.

"The Hashd are working under the authority of the government, and they’re doing it not just for Shia. It’s for Christians, Shabak, Sunnis," he said, adding that all "objective and fair readers" would see the supreme religious authority's creation of the militias "was acting for all Iraqis".

He put the issue in a regional context, describing the Hashd not as Shia but as "sons of the south" who "braved Sunni areas. They helped to give land back to their Sunni brothers in Tikrit". Indeed, Sunnis fighters had joined them in several battles in the areas north of Baghdad.

Najafi's father, the grand ayatollah, had received Abadi last month, so the prime minister’s failure to meet Sistani was no snub. Najafi compared Abadi favourably to his powerful predecessor Nouri al-Maliki, who remains head of the Dawa party and is a vocal critic of Abadi.

"Abadi is more understanding than Maliki. He tries to find a balance in what we believe is one of the hardest jobs on the planet. His way of thinking is completely different from Maliki’s.",

This year’s anti-corruption street protests which the religious authorities back were not against Abadi but in support of his reforms and against the corruption which previous governments had fostered, Najafi said. 

Mohammed Hussein al-Hakim, the son of Grand Ayatollah al-Hakim, was equally clear that the religious authorities back Abadi. 

His father had told that to Abadi when he came to Najaf. "My father told him the government must solve its own security and social problems through appropriate administration and planning. The nation will not develop without this," he said.

Hakim partially blamed the Americans for the weakness of the Iraqi army. They had always insisted that Iraq’s defence minister should be a Sunni, he said, the result being a minister had no incentive to create a strong army because developing a credible force meant giving top jobs to Shias.

Asked if he saw any chance of a powerful anti-IS movement emerging among the Sunnis of Anbar province along the lines of the Sahwa (Awakening) movement which confronted al-Qaeda a decade ago, he said he did not.

At that time there was a variety of armed insurgent groups in Anbar who could turn against al-Qaeda and be paid and armed by the Americans, he recalled. Nor was al-Qaeda as ruthless as IS, which massacres anyone who resists them. That was why the Hashd had to do the main job of confronting IS, he said.

Move toward Iranian system?

There remains the issue of whether, as a result of the country’s political tensions and the difficulties of resisting IS, Iraq’s Shia religious authorities are becoming more interventionist in their approach to the way the country is run.

Are they moving towards vilayet-e faqih, the Iranian system whereby clerics are in charge of the country, vetting candidates for parliament and taking all key political decisions? 

"The vilayat-e faqih rules an entire country whereas the marja, Iraq’s religious leadership, is not the top authority in Iraq,” said Sayyed Afdhal al-Shamy, the deputy secretary general of Karbala’s Imam Hussein shrine. "All it does is to guide the people and the government to be a better nation." 

As for the Hashd al-Shaabi, Shamy insisted it was no more than a temporary response to a national emergency. "If the Iraqi army was sufficient to protect the country, there would be no need for Hashd. As long as IS is in Iraq, the Hashd will continue. If it is defeated, there will be no more need for Hashd,” he said.

"The Hashd mobilises and assists the fighters but they don’t own an army. The fighters are under the command of the prime minister. He decides where they should go. It was the government that told the Hashd to start by going to Jurf al-Sakhar [a town near Baghdad seized by IS last year] and then go to Tikrit."

As for the pro-reform protests, Shamy insisted they were independent of the clergy. "Some clerics speak at the protests but they do so on their own behalf, calling for their own rights to be respected, as citizens like anyone else," he said.