Today's Edition
By: Imam Mohammad Tawhidi*
There is a version of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani that his admirers like to describe: serene, wise, above the fray. I’d like to describe the one I actually see, which is a Grand Ayatollah who has become so absent that his silence is now the main thing people talk about.
Start with the basics. A marja’ is supposed to be a teacher, someone you can see, hear and learn from. Millions of people follow Ali al-Sistani as their source of emulation, which is a serious act of trust.
What do they get in return? No public lessons worth the name, no leading of prayers where ordinary people can stand behind him, no sermons delivered in his own voice. When he does communicate, it is through an office, a spokesman, a carefully worded-written reply.
A leader who cannot be seen or heard is not leading. He is being consulted, like an oracle, and oracles don’t have to answer for anything. That is the part that bothers me most. The ambiguity is not an accident, it is a method.
Nothing he says is allowed to be pinned down. Ask a hard question and you get a statement so balanced that every faction can claim it. His camp calls this wisdom. I call it the most comfortable position in Iraqi politics: all of the authority and none of the accountability.
Look at the record. In 2014, when ISIS was at the gates, he issued the call that sent tens of thousands to fight. Say what you like about that moment, it was a decision.
And then what? The militias that grew out of that mobilisation became armed, politically connected power centres that now sit above the state they were meant to defend.
Did he say clearly, in plain words, that this is not what he meant? Did he draw a line and defend it? Or did he let his supporters and his critics each read what they wanted into the haze?
The same goes for corruption. He has complained about it for years, and in 2015 his words helped push a reform campaign. But complaining is cheap. Iraq’s political class has looted the country for twenty years, and the man with the single most moral authority in the nation has offered, in effect, the occasional sigh.
Governments are formed, ministries are carved up, protesters are shot in the streets, and the response is a carefully timed statement or none at all.
During the 2019 uprising, young Iraqis were killed by the thousand-odd. Where was the voice that could have shamed the killers into stopping, every single day, until they did?
Is Sistani with the United States or against it? Nobody knows. Is Sistani with the regime in Iran or against it? Nobody knows. Is Sistani with the Iraqi government or against it? Nobody knows.
Three questions that go to the heart of Iraq’s fate, put to the most powerful religious figure in the country, and after more than twenty years the honest answer to all three is the same. That is not a mystery. It is a failure.
And then there is the regional question, which his defenders pretend does not exist. Iran’s protests, the Syrian war, Palestine, the great moral crises of the Shia world: on most of them he is either quiet or vague. When comments circulated in 2022 that were attributed to his son-in-law about the Iranian protests, the office’s answer was that he has no representative to express his opinion on political matters.
Fine. But then say what his opinion is. If a cleric of this stature has none, that is a strange thing to admit. If he has one and won’t say it, that is worse.
I know the defence. He is a quietist, they say. He believes the clergy should not rule, and he guards the independence of the Hawza/Seminary from the state. That is a real position, and there is something to respect in it.
Iraq has seen what happens when turbaned men run the government next door. But quietism does not require disappearing. Refusing to govern is one thing; refusing to speak is another. You can reject Welayat-e faqih and still tell a corrupt minister he is corrupt. You can keep the clergy out of power and still stand in a mosque and say something to the people who pay you their khums.
Which brings up another uncomfortable matter. His network reportedly handles enormous sums of religious money, and the transparency around it is minimal. A man who asks for trust should be willing to be seen. Instead we get distance, mystique and an institution that explains nothing.
I am not asking Sistani to become a politician. I am asking him to be a teacher and a witness. To appear. To teach in public. To lead prayer where people can find him.
To say, in his own voice, what is right and what is wrong, and to keep saying it when it is inconvenient. Silence when the stakes are low is a virtue. Silence when children are dying in the streets and the powerful are laughing is just absence dressed up as piety.
The Shia world is losing respect for Ayatollah al-Sistani, and they have the right to hold their clergy accountable. If the answer is only more silence, we should stop calling it wisdom.
*Parliamentary Adviser and Research Partner with TRENDS Research & Advisory
