Slutboat

By Rod Nordland and Babak Dehghanpisheh
Newsweek

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Feb. 14 issue ? It's interesting that most published accounts describe Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani as a tall, slender man, towering over his aides and visitors. Actually he's on the short side, about 5 feet 8, but the error is understandable. The housebound cleric has hardly set foot out of his tiny abode in the slums of Najaf in six years. He never gives speeches, never even presides at Friday prayers at the golden-domed Imam Ali shrine, the holiest place in Shiite Islam, only a few hundred feet from his home. But he does receive visitors, hundreds a day, normally, always seated on a thin cushion on the floor of his barrani, or receiving room, wearing a gray robe that is often threadbare, and a large black turban. He won't be photographed (the few grainy images of him were taken without official permission), and he never gives interviews. He is the very picture of an ascetic Islamic prelate, a picture that would not have looked much different if it had been painted five centuries ago. His visitors invariably leave impressed, often describing the encounter in mystic terms; small wonder they remember him as tall.
This is the image that Sistani has carefully crafted over the years, but there's another side to it. He may live humbly and poor, but he also presides over a multimillion-dollar network of charities and religious foundations from Pakistan to England. He may not get out very much, but he has a highly developed network of representatives in every Shia neighborhood in Iraq. One of his sons-in-law runs an Internet company with 66 employees in the Iranian city of Qom, and Sistani's own office is one of the best-wired in Iraq. The interim government installed a T-1 connection to the Internet, so his representatives can stay in touch by e-mail. When he has new visitors, his staff Googles them and prints out a briefing paper. When folks in Baghdad, 90 miles north, need to call his office, they dial a local number that patches through. And he may refuse to have his photo taken, but he doesn't object to his followers' plastering the few available grainy shots on campaign posters and mosques around the country.
All that makes sense. Al-Sayid Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani is now indisputably the most powerful man in Iraq. The elections he demanded, on the terms he insisted upon, were an unexpected success; the party he crafted, and then blessed, has won a landslide victory. The United Iraqi Alliance, better known as the Shia List, racked up more than 65 percent of the votes counted as of last weekend. That's at least enough to choose the leaders of the new government, and when final results come in, it may come close to the two-thirds margin necessary to dictate the terms of Iraq's new constitution. "Ayatollah Sistani is very elated," says Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a member of the United Iraqi Alliance and national-security adviser to the interim government, who spoke to him by phone as results came in last week.
But it raises the question: who is Ali Sistani, really? Is he the ayatollah with a 20-page bibliography of arcane Shia theology to his credit, whose conservative views on the role of Islam in society will reshape the new Iraq? Or a great modernizer who issued a fatwa saying women should vote even if their husbands objected? "The language that Sistani uses in Arabic is quite distinctly drawn from the Enlightenment, from Rousseau and from Jefferson: a legitimate government derives from the choice of its people," says Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, an expert on the Shia.
But the ayatollah also has insisted that Iraq's new constitution must be in line with Islamic principles, and recognize Islam as the nation's religion. Iraq's women are encouraged to vote as they want but, under Sistani's teachings, they won't be able to shake the hand of any man other than a father, brother or husband. (Sistani also forbids music for entertainment, dancing and playing chess.) "It's the Shiite equivalent of the Christian Coalition," says Cole. "The Christian Coalition doesn't want pastors to rule America, but it does want Christian ideals to govern policy."
Sistani is both a savior and a frustration to American policymakers. "Yes, he's a kingmaker. Yes, he's powerful," says one U.S. official. "But he won't meet face to face." No American official has ever been able to see Sistani, whose aides say he thinks such a meeting would justify the U.S. occupation. But while he has condemned the occupation, he has never issued a fatwa against it?something that would be certain to bring millions of Shia into the streets. The Sunni-based rebellion has been difficult enough, but hardly a mass movement, and Sistani actually helped end the brief Shia rebellion led by Moqtada al-Sadr. "It's masterful," said the U.S. official, with grudging admiration. "Frankly, I have a lot of respect for his political savvy."

Those who suspect Sistani's true intentions are quick to note that the country's most powerful man is not even an Iraqi, but an Iranian. He came to Najaf, Shiite Islam's holiest city, more than 50 years ago as a disciple of the then Grand Ayatollah Abul Qasim al-Khoei. Until last August, Sistani never left, nor did he give up his Iranian citizenship. Al-Rubaie said he offered to get him an Iraqi passport after Saddam's regime fell, but Sistani's response was characteristic: "He said, 'Dr. Rubaie, what would I do with this? I'm a man going to his grave. I haven't left Najaf for 13 years. Why do I need it?' " When he developed heart trouble last August, he went to London for treatment on his Iranian passport. Although Sistani made it a religious obligation to vote in Iraq's elections, he wasn't qualified to cast a ballot himself. His followers say he's above nationality, as the Roman Catholic pope would be. "He's the spiritual leader of all the Shia in the world," says Sheik Jalaladin al-Saghir, imam of an important mosque in Baghdad. "Iranians as much as Iraqis."

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