Culture : Looming Shiite Leadership Dispute May Wind Up as Tale of Two Cities : Qom in Iran and Najaf in Iraq seek primacy as holy place for the 100 million followers worldwide.

In the middle of the flat, palm-studded plains of southern Iraq, not far from the ancient banks of the Euphrates River, rises a shrine like none other in Islam.

Its sculpted gold facade and intricately inscribed walls house the body of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed whose political will to lead the Prophet’s descendants and subsequent death on these plains led to the birth of Shiite Islam.

Thus, while world headlines commonly look to Iran as the political voice of the Shiites, it is to the holy city of Najaf that Shiites around the world look as their spiritual heartland. It is to Ali’s holy shrine that Shiite pilgrims creep on their knees, kissing the floor and the shimmering gold around the tomb as they crawl in ecstasy toward the center of their faith.

For months, far from the public eye that usually focuses on Shiite activism in Lebanon and Iran, a quiet but crucial political battle has been brewing over who--and which city--will assume the leadership of the 100 million Shiites all over the world.

Rivals for preeminence are Qom, the theological center of Iran southwest of Tehran, and Najaf, whose historical dominance has been threatened in recent years by the rise of the Islamic revolution in Iran since 1979 and the growing perception that the Shiite clergy in Iraq have fallen dangerously under the influence of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The dispute is the Shiite equivalent of arguing over how to elect a Pope and where to place the Vatican. And its outcome could be critical not only for Shiite Muslims, but for a world that has felt the far-reaching and sometimes deadly political will of Shiites in quarters as distinct as Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah organization and Iran’s Death to America crusades.

Shiite power was unquestionably vested in the hands of Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini during the early years of the Iranian revolution, but Khomeini’s death in 1989 left the community with no clear messiah. Though Ayatollah Ali Khamenei succeeded Khomeini as religious leader in Iran, lines of theological authority were handed down to the world’s remaining great and elderly Shiite scholars, many of whom far exceeded even Khomeini in religious scholarship.

The recent power vacuum was created by the deaths of three venerable Shiite leaders in the last two years: First, in Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Abdul Qassem Khoei, who died in August, 1992, at the age of 93; Grand Ayatollah Abdul Aala Sabzawari, whose death at age 83 a year later was another blow to the clerical hierarchy at Najaf, and then Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Reza Golpayegani, whose death at age 96 in Qom on Dec. 9 finally left the Shiite leadership with no clear heir apparent.

It was Golpayegani who had held the title Supreme Marja of the Shiites, and after his death Iranian political leaders immediately named a successor in Qom, Ayatollah Mohammed Ali Araki.

But with Araki already well into his 90s, indications are that Iran plans to replace him when he dies with their national religious leader, Khamenei, setting the stage for Tehran to consolidate its hold on the Shiite theocracy around the world, in addition to its political arm.

The movement has caused a backlash in Shiite communities in Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and parts of Pakistan and India, which are pushing for restoring the Supreme Marja to Najaf, the traditional center of Shiite scholarship.

Najaf’s 1,000-year-old howzat , or centers of theological learning, have produced most of the world’s most important living Shiite scholars, including many of those now living in Qom, they argue. Most of those advocating the reseating of power in Najaf have mentioned as a candidate Ayatollah Ali Hussein Sistani as supreme Shiite leader.

In Qom, many supporters are lining up behind Ayatollah Mohammed Rohani--viewed by some as an opponent to the regime in Tehran--to replace Araki when he dies.

And the battle lines are forming.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that old Arab-Persian rivalries, and the very bitter recent memory of the Iran-Iraq war, stand just in the shadows of this theological debate.

Nor is the battle without intrigue, most of it linked to Saddam Hussein’s violent crackdown on Iraqi Shiites after their attempted uprising at the end of the Gulf War.

When Khoei died in 1992, he was supposed to have left a will designating a successor to the Shiite leadership. But no such will was found. Moreover, Iraqi authorities ordered Khoei’s rapid burial without a doctor’s examination to indicate why he died. His nephew said Khoei had seemed fine when they spoke on the telephone the day before his death.

Officials in Iran have used Hussein’s campaign against the Shiites as evidence that the Supreme Marja cannot operate independently in Najaf and should instead be located in Qom.

Sheik Azri Qommi, a student of the late Khomeini and an opponent of Qom’s own nominee, Rohani, told the London-based Arabic daily Al-Wasat that he nonetheless opposes Najaf’s Sistani as well, “because he lives in Najaf under the authority of Saddam Hussein, whereas the Marja should live under no pressure.” Hussein’s power base is in the region around Baghdad, an area populated by Sunni Muslims, theological rivals of the Shiites.

Qom is not without its own political intrigues. The Iranian government last spring reportedly detained a number of senior clerics close to Rohani, who is known to oppose the concept of the “guardianship of the clergy” by which Iran installs its political and religious leadership in the same hands, in the present case those of Khamenei.

The fact that there is an argument at all is reassuring in some ways to many of those whose greatest fear is a powerful link between Shiite Iran and Iraq’s 9.6 million Shiites, who make up slightly more than half of Iraq’s population.

In the years since the end of the Gulf War, many U.S. analysts have feared that the downfall of Saddam Hussein could plunge Iraq into chaos and drive the Shiite south straight into the arms of Iran.

But the fact that even Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, spiritual leader of Iran’s main client organization in Lebanon, Hezbollah, has said he regards Najaf’s Sistani as the most qualified, is a sign that the Tehran regime’s hold on the Shiite clergy around the world is far from complete.

In Najaf these days, there is a mood of quiet determination. Most of the clerics there permitted by the government to be interviewed, along with the head of the government’s religious endowment ministry, seem to have thrown their support behind yet another candidate--presumably acceptable to the Iraqi government--Sayed Mohammed Sadr.

Sadr is the cousin of the celebrated Lebanese Shiite leader Imam Moussa Sadr, who mysteriously disappeared while on a visit to Libya in 1978.

“Any leadership of the Shiites must come from here, and if the Iranians say the Marja should not be in Najaf they are making a big mistake, because we know most of them received their religious studies here,” said Jabr Abbas Abed, religious endowments manager in Najaf.

“These rooms you see are the first school in religious studies for the whole world,” Abed said. “The successor of Imam Khoei must have qualifications to be elected here in this holy city. He must be enlightened in religious matters and highly religiously informed. For this reason, Mohammed al Sadr has been chosen. He is all Arab. He was nominated and he was chosen to be the religious source here in the holy city of Najaf, and the matter is closed.”

But what about Sistani, regarded as the leading contender from Najaf?

“I want to be very clear about this point,” responded another Najaf clerical leader, Sheik Abed Aly Moudafar. “The man who will represent the Shiia in the world must have special characteristics. He must be well-informed and enlightened, he must have characteristics which enable him to lead. Sistani is not our nominee. This name has been nominated by Iran and other countries, for their own interests.”

Asked about Qom’s nomination of Araki, both men scoffed. “Where is this man’s learning?” Moudafar said. “Where are his books? What has he done for Islam? What has he done to claim this post?”

And what about allegations that the Baghdad regime is exercising undue influence over the clergy in Najaf? Abed waved his hands impatiently. “Those who say this are liars, because the government doesn’t have the control you’re suggesting. To prove it, the government is not responsible for naming the religious clergy. What you are talking about is exactly what is going on in Iran itself.”

At that point, Jabr led his guests to a gallery of photographs, all depicting damage to the holy shrines in Najaf and neighboring Karbala. They show massive government-sponsored repairs to the gold-encrusted facades, which Jabr says were damaged by allied bombing during the Gulf War.

In fact, according to the Iraqi opposition and secret videotapes of the attack, most of the damage was done by Iraqi tanks during the attempt to put down the Shiite uprising after the war.

The tour, led by this mustachioed Hussein look-alike, had a surrealistic feel as it played out in the courtyard that was the scene of some of the fiercest resistance to Hussein only three years ago.

“This was (George) Bush’s gift to the Iraqi people during his last days,” Jabr said, pointing to a photograph of chipped tile on the wall of Ali’s sacred shrine. He bristles when a guest asked about the uprising, which he insisted “was no uprising.”

“It was an act of robbers and vandals supported by the Saudis,” he said, and goes on to the next photograph.

“As you can see,” he said, “the damage caused by our enemies did not spare even the houses of God.”