Theocracy and Democracy: The Cleric Spoiling U.S. Plans:
"The most important political figure in Iraq today is Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, an elderly Shiite Muslim cleric. He has not set foot outside his home in six years, yet the white-bearded ayatollah has effectively commandeered the Bush administration's planning for postwar democracy."

His pronouncement on who may write a new constitution (only Iraqis elected by Iraqis) forced Washington to upend its timetable for granting the country its independence. Last week, the ayatollah rejected the American proposal for choosing an interim legislature through caucuses, immobilizing the transition. His backers took to the streets to support him.

The ayatollah's influence recalls that of another once-reclusive Shiite cleric, Ruhollah Khomeini, who 25 years ago took the helm of the Iranian revolution and created an Islamic republic implacably hostile to the United States.

Ayatollah Sistani, though, is no Khomeini. At least that is what his own background and the recent history of Iraq's Shiites would indicate. His teachings have always reflected what is often called the quietist school of thought in modern Shiism, one that says that clerics should not run governments. Iran's system, the diametric opposite, invests clerics with absolute legal and political authority.…

In Iran, reformers have boldly challenged the Khomeini legacy by demanding that clerics accept truly free elections by giving up their power to disqualify candidates for the coming parliamentary vote. At the same time, in Iraq, where the long-oppressed Shiite majority is clamoring for power, Ayatollah Sistani is being drawn deeper and deeper into the fray.

"Sistani is incredibly sensitive to public opinion and what people say about him," said a Shiite member of the Iraqi Governing Council. "He renounces political power and yet, at the same time, he has to respond to the fact that people are hungry for a leader."

Although most of Iran's Shiites are of Persian descent and Iraq's are Arabs, religious teachers and students flowed back and forth between the two countries for centuries. Ayatollah Sistani, for example, was born in Iran but pursued his religious studies in Iraq. Until the Iranian revolution in 1979, Iranian pilgrims came to Iraq in droves to visit the Shiite shrines in Najaf and Karbala.

Ayatollah Khomeini himself spent the 15 years before the revolution in Najaf, and it was there that he refined his theory of "wilayat al-faqih," or the rule of the jurist. The theory, that an eminent Shiite cleric can be the absolute legal authority, is the foundation of Iran's present political system.

Even then, in his adopted city, his was the minority view. Ayatollah Sistani's teacher and the highest-ranking cleric in Iraq at the time, Grand Ayatollah Abu al Qassim al-Khoei, firmly believed that even the most learned of Shia scholars have no right to rule.

Still, many religious Iraqi Shiites, denied political power for more than 500 years by the Sunni minority, recall feeling thrilled at the birth of Iran's Islamic government.

The feeling did not last long. Fearing for his rule, Saddam Hussein intensified his persecution of Iraq's Shiites, imprisoning and executing anyone suspected of sympathizing with Iran. With the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, the image of Iran's mullahs was further poisoned.

As a result, many Iraqis say, the Iranian experience with clerical rule never developed a real following, except as a theory.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/weekinreview/18sach.html?pagewanted=all&position=