New Visser paper on Sistani’s role

I’ve just gotten the time to read this paper, which Iraqi-Shiite affairs expert Reidar Visser sent me. It is his assessment of the role that Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has played in Iraqi politics in recent years– and of the role that Sistani might be expected to continue to play in the future.
Visser is a careful, apparently very knowledgeable historian. This paper, which runs 33 pages of PDF file, single-spaced, is thoroughly documented and (for me) well worth the time it took to give it a fairly careful read. Long-time JWN readers will know that I’ve long been intrigued with trying to understand Sistani’s role– and I’ve made a few of my own guesses, some probably fairly wrong-headed, along the way. (That’s why I really appreciate being able to profit from Visser’s careful scholarship.)
He is fairly adamant about his methodology. In an atmosphere where many people claim on occasion to speak for Sistani, Visser tries to restrict himself to a consideration of the bayans that are issued directly by the Ayatollah himself, usually through his own website. (Interestingly, we learn toward the end of Visser’s paper that the site is maintained by Jawad Shahristani, who is the head of Sistani’s office in Qom, Iran. Visser notes that this “entails certain editorial prerogatives, and asks the “heretical but necessary question” as to whether these prerogatives have allowed Shahristani “to pursue a Sistani policy of his own… [O]nce a pronouncement is produced, the decision whether to publish it or not may well have been controlled from Iran as much as from Iraq.” But he concludes that, “As of today there is however no convincing documentary basis for insinuations of this kind.”– pp.26-27.)
So the main thrust of Visser’s careful study of the website material reveals to him three distinct periods in Sistani’s engagement with overt Iraqi politics: first, a period of general quietism toward political affairs, which lasted from the Saddam era and through around June 2003; then a period of much greater engagement, between June 2003 and October 2004; and finally, from November 2004 until today, “there has been evidence of a return to seclusion and a renewed preoccupation with matters concerning the Shiite faith and the protection of its religious infrastructure.” — p.7.
Visser documents these shifts– and in particular, the strong role that Sistani played in 2004 in overthrowing Bremer’s original “caucus” plan for a transitional government and insisting on the holding of one-person, one-vote elections for both the transitional government and the final government. At the same time, he was making many pronouncements and interventions in favor of Iraq remaining a unitary state, and in favor of the shari’ religious law having a strong role in the Constitution.
In that period, too, Sistani came to issue some interesting bayans on the issue of the wilayat al-faqih (the Rule of the Jurisprudent) in which he seemed to stray very far from the opposition that his own earlier religious mentor, Ayatollah Abul-Qasim Khoei, had evinced toward the concept. Visser writes that though Sistani’s apparent embrace of the concept was greeted with jubilation in Teheran, where many regime people assumed that meant he was bowing to the supremacy of their own faqih there, Ayataollah Khamenei, in fact Sistani never gave any explicit recognition to the identification of Khamanei as faqih. When asked, Who is this faqih? Sistani merely answered, “The just jurisprudent acceptable to all the believers.” Which, Visser says, could even be interpreted as possibly referring to Sistani himself…
But, Visser notes, the period of active (and remarkably effective) engagement in Iraqi politics came to an end at the end of November 2004, and since then Sistani has returned to being a sort of delphic figure who concerns himself mostly with arcane matters of ritual and observance, leaving his followers to guess, and make claims and counter-claims, when it comes to questions of concrete political guidance:

The statistics of public statements by Sistani in the period after December 2004 show how the ayatollah gradually resumed a much more passive and reluctant attitude to the Iraqi political process. In the 17 months preceding that period, he issued 40 bayans, of which at least 14 explicitly tackled transitional issues in Iraqi politics; in the subsequent 14 months the total figure was down to 15, and no more than 3 dealt with the process of creating a new political system for the country. Beyond statistics, the very manner in which these pronouncements were delivered had changed. Gone was the assertive Sistani, now he appeared terse and dragging his heels.
Many had expected Sistani to issue another fatwa for the January 2005 elections, to provide guidance for the Shiites in this first exercise in democracy in Iraq since the 1950s. In the end none materialised.

Visser’s explanation for this shift is really interesting. He suggests that we would all do well to remember that Sistani is not just more Iraqi political figure, but rather an esteemed figure in a particular kind of religious-theological institution that has a decidedly global purview…. So the implication is that Sistani intervened in Iraqi politics when that seemed to serve his other, broader goals, and abstained from doing so when such intervention no longer seemed necessary to secure those other goals.
In conjunction with Sistani’s withdrawal since december 2004, of course, within Iraqi politics we have seen protracted standoffs and lack of decisiveness within the predominating Shiite UIA coalition– both last year, and this year– with a resulting deadlock in much of the national politics. Most notably this year, we’ve seen the standoff between SCIRI and the Sadrists, two trends that, as I understand it, support very different visions of the poltical shape of the country. (SCIRI has earlier expressed strong support for deep decentralization of rule in the country, while the Sadrists have expressed support for Iraq-wide national unity.)
Now, if we are to take seriously the bayans that Sistani issued in 2004– and there’s no reason not to– then he is also a strong supporter of Iraq remaining as much as possible a unitary state. So he would seem to be in Moqtada Sadr’s camp on this. But at the same time, Sadr is still considered in so many, very important ways to be “still an upstart”– and this, within the context of Sistani’s presumably strong support for the integrity of the strict religious hierarchy atop which he now sits. So it would be hard for Sistani to give strong support to Sadr against SCIRI, whose leader Abdel-Aziz Hakim outranks Sadr exponentially within the religious hierarchy.
This could also perhaps provide a reason for Sistani to be sitting out the longstanding battle for power between SCIRI and Moqtada? Anyway, Visser points to a key “e-mail fatwa” that Sistani allegedly distributed last October, in the lead-up to the referendum on the Constitution, in which he seemed to back away from his earlier strong opposition to the decentralization (or as Visser and many others describe it, “federal”) approach to Iraqi governance.
It is also possible that Sistani, who is 75 years old and already in August 2004 had to take the (for him) drastic step of traveling to London for angioplasty, is quite simply losing some of his physical strength. (A possibility that should lead to some concern about “succession” issues, except that as Visser notes, the emergence of a marja’ al–taqlid is not a question of straightforward designation, as with a new Pope, but much more organic and less well-defined.)
In the wake of last month’s bombing in Samarra, however, Sistani issued a statement (handwritten Arabic there) with a number of interesting points. He called on his followers not to retaliate against Sunni mosques, but rather to demonstrate peacefully in the streets. He also said that the givernment security forces should shoulder their full responsibilities– but if they couldn’t, then “the believers” would have to ensure public security. (Which reads like a green light to the two big and many smaller Shiite militias… )
Anyway, Visser has some additional arguments in his paper indicating that the role of the marja’iya in Iraqi politics will most likely be a long and strong one– especially if the mujtahids get to have a big say in who gets onto the Constitutional Court, which is a distinct possibility. He judges that the Western powers,

may have underestimated the desire for Islamic legislation that is shared by a broad section of Iraq’s Shiites – from Muqtada al-Sadr supporters to adherents of Sistani. They may also have exaggerated the difference between a system controlled by a single cleric (dismissed as “the Iranian theocratic dictatorship”) and a polity whose legislation may ultimately be controlled by a body of clerics (praised as the “fundamentally different Iraqi democracy”, even though its supreme constitutional court may well be nonelected and dependent on an extra-systemic and latent supreme faqih, with secular judges reduced to an appendage). Overlooked is the fact that the majority population in both these countries share the ultimate goal of a society governed according to Islamic law; it is on the finesse of the methods for reaching the goal that varying interpretations of wilayat al-faqih come into play. Thus, instead of maintaining the fictitious model of Iran and Iraq as being two worlds apart with regard to Islamic politics, it may be useful for Western powers to prepare for cooperation with a regime in Iraq which will share many features with its Iranian neighbour – and that without being in conflict with its so-called “quietist” ayatollahs in Najaf. (p.33)

One last footnote is in order, I think. Visser probably finished this paper largely before the samarra explosions, at a time when it looked probably much more likely than it does today that the US-designed transitional “project” might proceed, however creakily, to somewhere near its intended destination. That is in much greater doubt now. Even if the squabbling pols and Amb. Zal Khalilzad succeed in cobbling together something called an “Iraqi government”, will it really be able to exercize any meaningful degree of governance over the country at this point? I’m not sure about that. It strikes me as equally likely that the whole US transition “project” will just fizzle, with or without an Iraqi “government” at the helm.
If the project fizzles, then a much greater degree of uncertainty, civil strife, and civil disorder may well loom. And in those circumstances, the socio-political power of the religious hierarcgies and their associated militias will be much greater than they are now. And they are already pretty powerful. I guess we westerners all need to learn as much as we can at this point about how these hierarchies actually work, and how their participants and leaders view the world. Once again, Reidar Visser does a good job of illuminating these points for us.