Dec 28, 2003 By Hamza Hendawi Associated Press Writer 7 min read

NAJAF, Iraq (AP) – In this holy city of the dead, the living and the ebb and flow of countless pilgrims, politics and spirituality intersect in ways that could shape the new Iraq. In the ashes of Saddam’s regime, Najaf’s robed and elderly Shiite Muslim clerics hold sway, and the Iraq that will emerge could well fall somewhere between its Muslim neighbors – clergy-ruled Iran and secular Turkey.

For a city that has long loathed Saddam as its tormentor and executioner, seeing the former dictator humbled in U.S. custody was a cherished dream come true.

But Najaf is careful not to flaunt its new place as the spiritual capital of Iraq’s Shiite majority and the seat of its newfound political power.

It did not clamor for wholesale revenge after a bomb killed at least 80 people in August, including Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, one of the most revered Shiite religious leaders, and it seems at pains not to gloat over Saddam’s capture.

“Our joy at his capture is tinged with sadness and humiliation,” said Saad Fakhr al-Deen, who runs a small bookshop on Prophet Street. “Sadness because those who would have loved to see this moment have been killed by him. Humiliation because it’s the occupiers, not Iraqis, who found him.”

Anti-American rhetoric resounds from Najaf’s many mosques and religious seminaries, but there has been little of the violence that has plagued the Sunni areas north and west of the capital, Baghdad, like Fallujah and Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit.

Saddam’s eventual trial for genocide would be cathartic for the city and allow it to focus on a future in which it has a key role to play.

Najaf, like other Shiite areas, suffered for 35 years under the overlordship of Saddam’s Sunni Arab minority. Saddam jailed, executed or assassinated clerics and forced masses of Shiites into exile. In 1991, thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of Najaf’s Shiites were killed or disappeared following a short-lived revolt.

“The people of Iraq have suffered so much that their future must be safeguarded so the tragedy is not repeated,” said Mohammed Hussein al-Hakim, a Shiite Muslim cleric and relative of the ayatollah killed in the bombing. “The marjaiyah (theological authority) is the only safety valve and safeguard for Iraqis.”

Such faith in the guiding hand of top clerics is a defining feature of the Shiite faith and has no clear equivalent in Sunni Islam. Yet these leaders often remind their followers that a cleric’s spiritual calling comes ahead of politics.

That assertion at times rings hollow as senior clerics seem to have more and more to say about the process of preparing Iraq for democracy.

In the eight months since Saddam’s ouster, Najaf has become a regular port of call for Iraqi politicians and emissaries of L. Paul Bremer, chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, who come to consult with its four grand ayatollahs. Their views, especially those of Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, the most prominent, have proved impossible to ignore as Washington and the Governing Council it appointed chart Iraq’s future.

Still, many of Iraq’s Shiites strongly disagree with “Welayet al-Faqeeh,” or the right to rule by the most learned, as it is practised in Iran. Shiites historically have provided Iraq’s powerful Communist Party and other left-leaning groups with most of their support.

Politics aside, Najaf has transformed itself into an energetic place of learning, pilgrimage and burial – Muslim imperatives that were heavily curtailed under the dictatorship.

At its dozens of ancient seminaries, the student body is rapidly increasing now that fears of being jailed or killed by government agents has gone. Its cemetery, known as the “Valley of Peace” and thought to be the world’s largest, is reviving the local economy with a profitable “corpse traffic” of at least a 100 funerals a day.

Death is so intertwined with life that some Najafis bury their dead under their own homes.

Dead people are brought here from across Iraq, Iran and elsewhere in the Shiite world to lie close to Imam Ali, a cousin of Islam’s 7th century Prophet Muhammad, his remains enshrined in a gold-domed mosque.

“But the bodies of Saddam critics abroad were not allowed to be buried back in Iraq,” said Saad Khodeir Abu Sibia, one of Najaf’s 200 undertakers.

Saddam also curtailed the “corpse traffic” from Iran after going to war against his neighbor in 1980. It has now resumed, as have the pilgrimages that dwindled in Saddam’s time.

Saddam’s tanks and bulldozers destroyed thousands of tombstones in 1991 to flush out Shiite rebels using them for cover.

Iraqi Shiites who chose not to bury their dead in Najaf to avoid the attention of Saddam’s security agents are now exhuming loved ones and reburying them here.

Abu Sabia, whose family have been undertakers for generations, offers a 24-hour service.

“We sometime get a call at 2 a.m. and we come here to bury someone,” he said, sitting behind a bare wooden desk in a windy office. Behind him, the cemetery stretched to the horizon.

He predicted that in 10 or 20 years it would link up with the cemetery in Karbala, another holy Shiite city 40 miles north.

“Najaf is like the sun,” said Sheik Ali Bashir al-Najafi, son of another of the four grand ayatollahs. “The clouds may conceal it, but it continues to light the world.”

Many visitors come to Najaf to see Hussein Abu Saeda al-Mousawi, Iraq’s top lineage expert – a man so well versed in Arab tribal lore that he can authoritatively tell anyone who wants to know if he is descended from the Prophet Muhammad.

“It’s a dangerous job,” said al-Mousawi, 66, squatting on the floor of a damp second-story room in his small office. “People come to me and say, ‘The Prophet visited me in a dream and told me I am his descendant,’ and I tell them, “This doesn’t make you a descendant.’ Does this endear me to them? No!”

Al-Mousawi, a father of seven with a snow-white beard, is himself a “sayed,” or master, the Arabic word for a male descendant of the prophet.

A family tree that used to hang on some Shiite shrines showed Saddam as a descendant of Imam Ali.

“May Allah’s curse be upon whoever did that tree,” Al-Mousawi said angrily.

Al-Mousawi has spent 40 years collecting genealogical data. He is one of hundreds of scholars in Najaf who spend many years studying and teaching Islamic law, history and philosophy.

He speaks with pride about his professional ethics. “I only accept a query on the origins of a family from a member of the same family and I don’t accept payment for my labor so no man has power over my research.”

Iraqis claiming descent from Muhammad, a prized distinction among the pious, are believed to number in the thousands and there are many more in the rest of the Muslim world. An association of Muhammad’s descendants in Iraq has recently revoked Saddam’s claim to such distinction.

Like other members of Iraq’s long-oppressed Shiite majority, al-Mousawi has embraced new freedoms.

“I can write a book and publish it now without consulting anyone,” he says. “Under Saddam, I wrote books that I just put away on my window’s ledge.”

Taleb Kazim al-Ziyadi, a lawyer in smart business suit and tie, documents human rights violations as head of the Human Rights Society in Najaf.

His office is freshly painted with new furniture provided by coalition troops from Spain and Honduras. His task is enormous.

With Saddam’s ouster, the fate of the thousands of men rounded up in the aftermath of the 1991 revolt has become known. They were executed and buried in mass graves.

Words like “execution,” “mass graves” or “disappeared” filled every conversation al-Ziyadi had with about six people who visited his office over a 30-minute period on a recent afternoon.

In anguished voices, they told him about their tragedies and showed him documents and pictures of disappeared relatives. Some sought his advice in getting compensation or wanted tips on how to obtain an official paper that says a son, a husband or a brother died a “martyr.”

“Everyone killed by Saddam must be honored as a martyr,” said al-Ziyadi, 42.

“Mothers and fathers want to say their son is a martyr. They don’t care about compensation,” he added.

“Everyone needs a reassuring pat on the shoulder. It goes a long way in healing wounds.”