According to this BBC article, Muqtada Sadr is losing his thin veneer of religious legitimacy supplied by Ayatollah Haeri in Iran. Unlike Sistani, Haeri has been giving Muqtada support religiously for his activities. I’m not sure what to make of his about face, except perhaps to make it easier for him to be more active in Iraq, either directly or through other proxies. On the surface, this is an important development, because if every Ayatollah now denounces the attacks on US and UK troops, it theoretically becomes easier to isolate those Shi’ah, and to a certain extent Sunnis, who do carry out attacks. I’m hopeful that the attacks in Sadr city will settle down, and more importantly that the city itself will be less likely to serve as a launching ground for others in Iraq.
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In the last month three articles have come out regarding the Muslim attack on Islamist ideologues. Chris Dickey came out in Newsweek with a few good examples in the Muslim majority world. My two (minor) gripes are that he didn’t mention the stuff happening here in the US, for example, that’s been going on much longer, and the gates of ijtihad never closed for the Shi’ah, so the debate is very different. Lawrence Wright has a wonderful piece in The New Yorker that highlights the nuances involved in the ideological dispute happening in AQ now. Most importantly what emerges is…
Friedman on Sistani and the Nobel
See here. Friedman, like most commentators, acknowledges Sistani’s Shi’ism, but fails to understand what that means. “People power” as he describes is what the Ithna’shari conception of the state was/is prior to Khomeinism taking center stage. The idea of jurists leading the state, vilayat-e faqih, is a relatively new concept, but it’s already become normative for even op-ed writers who supposedly have the time to be able to think.