Be it fighting the occupation, sectarian bloodletting, or internecine squabbling with his fellow Shia, the fiery cleric Moqtada Al Sadr has waged war on almost every front in Iraq’s turbulent past five years.
Now, though, the leader of the Mahdi Army militia is far away from the battlefield, having swapped Iraq for the peace of a seminary in neighbouring Iran.
Al Sadr, who at 35 is still a relative novice in clerical terms, has begun studying in the holy city of Qom, a centre of religious authority for 500 years and one that has produced some of the Shias’ most revered — and feared — leaders.
It was within Qom’s gleaming mosques that Ayatollah Khomeini lived for 10 years after leading Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979, and here that the cleric Hassan Nasrallah studied before heading the feared Lebanese militia, Hezbollah.
Coalition officials believe Al Sadr has been visiting Qom on and off for much of the past 12 months, commuting twice a week with his bodyguards from a wealthy Tehran suburb.
Neither Al Sadr’s followers nor the Iranian government have officially confirmed his presence there, but he has not been in public since May last year — a marked change from his previous leadership style in which he regularly said prayers before vast gatherings of followers.
While some claim he moved to Iran to escape either arrest by US forces or assassination by his many political enemies, others believe it marks a genuine attempt to consolidate his theological credentials.
In Muqtada: Muqtada Al Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq, author Patrick Cockburn says: “It was the strength of Moqtada that he could mobilise the Shia masses, the millions of angry and very poor young men whom nobody else in Iraq represented. His weakness was that he could not control them and he knew the risk of being denigrated as a dangerous and destructive troublemaker.”
Moqtada was born the son of Ayatollah Mohammad Sadeq Al Sadr, a greatly respected cleric from an influential Shia dynasty who was assassinated during the regime of Saddam Hussain. When the regime collapsed, Moqtada Al Sadr inherited much of his father’s following, a constituency he has nurtured deftly through an aptitude for street politics.
But in the wider Shia hierarchy, where respect and power is directly related to the years spent studying the Quran, he has always been considered too inexperienced to be a convincing leader.
The course in Qom is designed to change that, elevating him from relative novice to full-fledged ayatollah. It may take anything up to five years, although that, by Shia theological standards, is a relative crash course.
The recasting of Al Sadr as the pious man of books could not be further from his old role as a militia leader. Many hope it signals a move into more peaceful politics, a hunch backed by his continuing declaration of a ceasefire for his Mahdi Army.
But should an Ayotollah Moqtada emerge from Qom in a few years, he will be a much more powerful figure than before, and a contender to take over from the ageing Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani as Iraq’s foremost Shia potentate.
Nor will Al Sadr be the only one to benefit. In return for hosting him, Iran’s political leaders will be hoping that he always picks up the phone when they call.
