Grand Ayatollah Sistani joins the fray

Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, long considered strongly committed to a “quietist” rejection of political engagement, has now taken a serious step toward endorsing opposition to US diktats in Iraq.
This is the news from Juan Cole, one of the world’s most knowledgeable and reflective experts on the politics and ideology of Iraq’s Shi-ite majority population. Earlier today (or perhaps late last night, Michigan time), Cole read an article in the liberal Iraqi daily Az-Zaman, datelined from Najaf, reporting that Sistani has issued a fatwa stating that any body that writes a new constitution for Iraq would have to be elected, not appointed by US gauleiter (my word) Paul Bremer.
If you want to find Cole’s piece, you’ll need to go to his blog; then once there, look for the July 2003 archive in the Archives listing in the lefthand sidebar. Click it, then scroll down nearly to the bottom to this particular post on July 1. It starts out:

Cole has done us all the favor of translating the Zaman report, and you can find the translated text on his site, which is a great and really informative weblog.
Sistani is insisting on two sets of nationwide elections: one to elect the constitutional commission, and one to ratify the draft constitution.
Bremer, of course, has proposed creating some kind of an appointed council that would do some governing and some constitution-writing. (Though of course it’s hard to tell exactly what he does plan, since the DoD is making up the whole governance-of-Iraq policy as it goes along.)
Sistani’s fatwa states very straightforwardly,