Ayatollah

The most striking feature of the senior Shia clerical ranks is that there is no body that grants them: authority is recognised from below rather than conferred from above.

Recognition, not appointment

An ayatollah is a Twelver Shia jurist qualified to exercise ijtihad, independent reasoning from the sources of law, and a scholar comes to be called ayatollah when the seminaries and the scholarly community treat him as one. There is no examining board and no appointment. The grade above, grand ayatollah or marja al-taqlid, is defined by followers, since a marja is a source of emulation whom ordinary Shia choose to follow in matters of practice, and a marja with few followers is not much of a marja, which makes the structure genuinely bottom-up.

The dispute over clerical rule

The office is advisory and juridical by nature. The doctrine of wilayat al-faqih, guardianship of the jurist, developed by Ruhollah Khomeini and embedded in the Iranian constitution of 1979, gives a ranking jurist political rule, and that is a modern and internally contested position rather than the classical Shia view. Major jurists in Iraq and Iran have declined it, and the quietist tradition centred on Najaf holds that clerical rule is not the business of the jurist. The disagreement is doctrinal, current and consequential.

The developed system of following a single senior marja al-taqlid is a comparatively modern feature of Twelver Shia practice, consolidating over the nineteenth century as the Usuli school, which holds that ordinary believers must follow the rulings of a living, qualified jurist, prevailed over the rival Akhbari school, which rejected reliance on independent juristic reasoning in favour of relying directly on the transmitted sayings of the Imams. The title ayatollah itself, meaning sign of God, only came into common use as a distinguishing honorific in roughly the same period, and grand ayatollah later still.

The office today spans a real division over what its authority is for. Iran's constitution, built on Khomeini's doctrine of wilayat al-faqih, vests supreme political authority in a ranking jurist, currently exercised by Ali Khamenei. The most prominent alternative, the quietist position associated above all with Ali al-Sistani, the senior marja based in Najaf, Iraq, holds that the clergy's proper role is religious guidance and that direct political rule falls outside a jurist's mandate, and Sistani has repeatedly declined the kind of governing authority the Iranian model assigns to its supreme leader. The two positions coexist within the same clerical rank without either having authority to bind the other, since, as in the office generally, no body sits above either man to settle the disagreement.