Word: sistani
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Distinguishing Iraqis from Iranians can be hard. Iraq's most revered cleric, Grand Ayatullah Husaini Sistani, speaks Arabic with a thick Persian accent. (Sistan-Baluchestan is the name of a province in southeastern Iran.) Meanwhile, across the border, Iran's top judge, Ayatullah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, struggles with Persian, the residue of an Iraqi birth. Theological cross-pollination and political exile have created deep ties between the two Shi'ite communities--and that's exactly what the U.S. is afraid of. In his speech last week announcing plans to send more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq, President Bush...
...from his key patron - Sadr, whose militia is in the thick of much of the sectarian violence - or else persuade Shi'ite rivals such as Abdulaziz al-Hakim to form a new coalition with the Sunnis and Kurds, excluding Maliki and Sadr, appear to be floundering. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the supreme Shi'ite spiritual leader whose expressed will neither Maliki nor Hakim can cross, has made clear that he will not tolerate any moves that break the unity of the ruling Shi'ite coalition that includes Maliki, Hakim and Sadr...
...Bush Administration memo written by National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley wondered somewhat naively whether Maliki might be a "witting participant" in "an aggressive push to consolidate Shia power and influence" in Baghdad. Shi'ite power, after all, is the raison d'etre of the ruling Shi'ite alliance; Sistani ensured that all the major Shi'ite parties contested the election as a bloc in order to guarantee the Shi'ites a share of political power congruent with their demographic majority. Shi'ite-power, far from a hidden agenda, was the winning ticket in both of Iraq's democratic elections...
...Saddam Hussein in 2003, parties based in the Shi'ite majority - brutally suppressed for decades - were quick to stake their claim to the shape country's future. They embraced the American promise of democracy and, ordered to vote by their most respected spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, they turned out in their millions at the polling booths to elect the Arab-world's first Shi'ite government. And that inspired Shi'ites across the region to clamor for more rights and influence, challenging centuries-old arrangements that had kept them on the margins...
...Sunnis do not have a single dominant cleric in the way that the Shi'ites have in the person of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Al-Dari may head the AMS, which claims to include the imams of over 3,000 mosques, but unlike Sistani, he has never been able to mobilize the Sunni street. Despite the AMS's call for a boycott of the general election last December, Sunnis voted in large numbers. And even though al-Dari has heaped condemnation on the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), it has emerged as an important force in Sunni politics. An IIP leader...