When Iranians take to the streets in mass protest, as they have once again since Dec. 28, they often cite the soft role that Islam plays in Iraq, a real democracy right next door. A good example happened in Iraq on Jan. 11, or about the time that soldiers and police in Iran reportedly began shooting thousands of protesters to preserve the Islamic Republic – and its self-presumed mantle as leader of the Muslim world.
On that day, Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, gave his response to a request from leading politicians in Baghdad to endorse a particular candidate for prime minister. They looked to this learned and revered figure, who lives quietly in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, to end months of political infighting. In the minority branch of Islam called Shiism, Mr. al-Sistani carries even more religious heft than the top religious authority in Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Both Iran and Iraq are majority Shiite.
Here is Mr. al-Sistani’s response to the squabbling politicians:
The highest religious authority has already made it clear that it refuses to have the names of candidates for the position of Prime Minister presented to it.
So why try again?!
May God protect you.
Mr. al-Sistani does not see clerical rule as feasible for Iraq, a religiously diverse nation. “As long as I am alive, the Iranian experience will not be repeated in Iraq,” Mr. al-Sistani has said. It is the people who must live up to their civic and religious ideals, he indicates, expressed through fair elections under a popular constitution.
For decades, Mr. al-Sistani and Mr. Khamenei have differed on this point – a contest of ideas over “political Islam” that has played out across the Middle East, often violently. The two men also differ over whether the spiritual capital of Shiite Islam should lie solely in Iraq or Iran.
The latest protests, if they eventually provoke regime change in Tehran, might settle such questions. Particularly notable is that large protests erupted in Qom, Iran’s seat of Shiite learning, where clerics favor national rule by clerics. The protests there signaled “a major symbolic breach in a city long seen as politically untouchable,” stated the Iran International news site. In another holy city, Mashhad, a seminary was set on fire. Such protests have made a clear link between clerical misrule and economic mismanagement.
Polls indicate that most Iranians now support a separation of politics and religion. Meanwhile, in Iraq, the top cleric has now dashed the hopes of political leaders that he would endorse their candidate. As Mr. al-Sistani advised, with perhaps a wink toward spiritual reflection: “May God protect you.”
