Tale of Two Centers: Najaf and/or Qom………..
“The city of Najaf in Iraq is thriving as a religious tourist destination for Shia Muslims, with thousands of Iranians making a weekly pilgrimage to the sacred Imam Ali shrine. Could it be challenging the Iranian city of Qom as the centre of Shia religious authority? "The city has never lost its significance," he said, sitting in his book-lined study, his hands folded calmly in his lap, his white turban and white beard offset by a long brown robe. "Other cities may compete with Najaf," he said, "its role may have been minimised, but Najaf's importance has never been diminished." Ayatollah Yaqubi seems quietly confident that Najaf is now regaining its status as the gravitational centre of the Shia faith. There is more to this tug of war than a battle for influence between ayatollahs. To ask the question, "Najaf or Qom?", is to make a choice between two fundamentally different world views. The clerics of Iran, with their power base in Qom, preside over a direct line of influence that runs from religion into politics. Ayatollah Yaqubi, on the other hand, says that the religious authority at Najaf, does all it can to steer clear of politics, what he calls the "struggle for power"………”
There is no doubt to a layman like myself that Najaf has always been the center to the overwhelming majority of Shi’as. There was a long period of inaccessibility from 1979 through 2003, but that is gone. There is nobody, for example, above Ayatollah Ali Sistani in the Shi’a world today in terms of theology and he is in Najaf. Ayatollah Khamenei is an Iranian phenomenon, not a universal Shi’a leader.
The actual birthplace of Shi’ism is in Madinah (Medina) in Hejaz. That is where the split occurred, where Hassan died (suspiciously), where Hussein set from to Kufa. But it was in Iraq that the battle of Karbala occurred, and that defining massacre and its aftermath of persecutions hardened the Shi’a split from the Sunni orthodoxy.
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mhg
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