Iraq's Shadow Ruler

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Sistani's personal history would be interesting but unimportant if the U.S. had not invaded Iraq. The fall of Saddam left the country in chaos, with a power vacuum at the top. The Shi'ite masses naturally looked to Sistani for direction, says Shahristani, and the ayatullah felt compelled by religious duty to step in. "He believes at a crisis time like this, the marja must guide the people," says al-Qurayshi. So the cleric who had shied away from politics all his life began to issue fatwas of profound political importance.

Sistani quickly emerged as a voice of restraint, urging Iraqis to be patient and eschew violence. He told Shi'ites to neither help nor hinder the U.S. invaders, although he made his opposition to foreign occupation clear by counseling citizens to ask Americans, "When are you leaving Iraq?" He advised people against revenge killings of Baathists. Iraqi and U.S. officials agree that his calming influence was critical in tamping down Shi'ite resistance. "That was the only reason there was no bloodbath in those early days," says a secular Iraqi politician. When the orgy of looting after Saddam's departure ran unchecked, Sistani stood up to label it immoral and wrong. Overnight, thieves were piling up stolen air conditioners, computers, art and relics at the doors of Shi'ite mosques.

At the same time, Sistani has forced the U.S. to abandon many of its designs for Iraq's future. When Washington laid out a lengthy timetable for returning Iraq to self-rule, Sistani's objections forced the Bush Administration to deliver a swift handover instead. He has been uncompromising in his call for prompt elections and in his determination that Iraqis write their own constitution. When the U.S. proposed a complex caucus system for voting, Sistani responded by putting 100,000 peaceful demonstrators into the streets to support his call for national one-man, one-vote elections by January 2005. With a word, he temporarily blocked the signing of the U.S.-designed interim constitution last spring because it gave too much power to minority Kurds and too little to Islamic law. When the elected assembly drafts a permanent constitution next year, he will insist it maintains Shi'ite dominance as well as strong national unity.

The critical issue, of course, is how Islamic Sistani wants Iraq to be. He has made it clear that foreign powers cannot be allowed to dictate the country's form of government, nor does he want to replicate a Western model. He has said Islamic law should govern family and personal matters. "His vision of the good state," says a Western diplomat in Baghdad, "is not where my wife and daughter would want to live." But Sistani's aides say he considers the Khomeini and Taliban experiments in theocracy failures--too extreme and rigid for modern society, especially one as demographically diverse as Iraq. And he opposes al-Sadr in large measure because the upstart is pushing to make Iraq a carbon copy of Iran, with al-Sadr at the helm.