Qom, Najaf And Rival Centers Of Authority

The two most significant centers of Twelver Shia religious scholarship, the seminary cities of Qom in Iran and Najaf in Iraq, have historically produced somewhat differing approaches to the marja's proper relationship to political authority, most sharply illustrated by the contrast between Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's doctrine of wilayat al-faqih, guardianship of the jurist, developed in Qom and implemented as the governing principle of the Islamic Republic of Iran after the 1979 revolution, under which a supreme religious jurist holds ultimate political as well as religious authority, and the considerably more traditional, politically quietist stance associated with Najaf's most senior marja in recent decades, who has generally declined direct political rule while still exercising very substantial religious and, at pivotal moments, indirect political influence in Iraq.

This divergence means that Grand Ayatollah, as a title, does not by itself indicate a uniform political stance or institutional role: a marja's actual influence and his views on the proper relationship between religious and political authority vary considerably depending on his own seminary formation, his specific followers' geography, and the particular historical and political circumstances of the country in which his following is concentrated, a genuine diversity within a single senior religious rank that outside observers unfamiliar with Twelver Shia institutional structure sometimes overlook.