Word: qom
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...congratulated Ahmadinejad on his re-election. There were congratulatory messages, too, from top Shi'ite leaders Abdel Aziz al-Hakim and Moqtada al-Sadr. Hakim is in Tehran, receiving treatment for cancer, and Sadr is believed to be training to become an ayatullah in the Iranian holy city of Qom...
...truth is that no one really understands Sadr's thinking and doings aside from the cleric himself and presumably his innermost circle of followers. The most common assumption in Baghdad about Sadr is that his long absence from sight means that he has been undergoing intensive religious instruction in Qom, Iran, the leading center for Shi'ite Islamic scholars. Through his studies in Qom, Sadr could rise from a cleric to the rank of ayatollah, giving him the authority to issue edicts taken as law by many Shi'ites. With that power, Sadr could eventually position himself to replace Iraq...
...ambition to be the grand ayatollah of Iraq is taken as a given by many observers in Baghdad. But whether the Shi'ite clergy in Iran will allow this remains murky. Some observers figure that Sadr, who has a reputation as a dullard, simply does not have the intellect Qom's religious instructors demand in would-be ayatollahs. In other words, Sadr may flunk out of ayatollah school and never attain the kind of religious authority many believe he hopes to wield in Iraq in future years...
...parliamentary elections were something of a warm-up for the presidential election. Another potential presidential candidate, Ali Larijani, Iran's former negotiator on its nuclear program, won a landslide victory in the city of Qom. A pragmatic conservative, he resigned from the nuclear brief last year after clashing with Ahmadinejad. Larijani had reportedly agreed to a temporary freeze of Iran's uranium-enrichment program as a good-faith gesture in talks with the West. Ahmadinejad publicly rejected the move, and the U.N. Security Council imposed three rounds of sanctions on Iran...
...most impact on me, certainly in my professional life, is Shahid Beheshti [one of the founding members of the Islamic Republic and its leading jurist and constitutionalist; assassinated in 1981]. He was someone who had lived both in the West as well as in the Qom seminaries. He was an open-minded intellectual fully confident in Islamic teachings as well as Western matters. He was also a very attractive man, both on the inside and the outside. His face and words were both captivating...