The trick behind connecting the disbanding of Mahdi Army to the senior clerics

You can feel Hizballah’s influ­ence in every word in Muq­tada Al-Sadr new mes­sage to his fol­low­ers, take this line for example:

You know one of the most promi­nent mem­bers of the recent gov­ern­ment [Al-Hakim] threat­ened in the past year to orga­nize a demon­stra­tion of mil­lions to sup­port the occu­pa­tion, to counter your demon­stra­tion of mil­lions against the occu­pa­tion; here I chal­lenge him to put his words in practice.

Com­pare it to this speech by Nas­raal­lah, in Feb. 2008:

They said they can mobi­lize 1.5 mil­lion in a rally as evi­dence for their lead major­ity, I chal­lenge this with a counter demon­stra­tion and we can see who can mobi­lize more.

News cir­cu­lat­ing say that Al-Sadr said: the issue of dis­bands the Mahdi Army is a mat­ter can be solved by the High-Guidance cler­ics [Shi­ite high ref­er­ences], it is a very good maneu­ver [as Al-Akhbar put it] but some peo­ple mis­un­der­stood this asso­ciate the word cler­ics to Sis­tani only, but it is much more com­pli­cated than this:

The Shi­ite high ref­er­ences are five, one of the extreme ref­er­ences is Aya­tol­lah Al-Ha’ari, because of his ide­ol­ogy of polit­i­cal Islam, Al-Ha’ari is the one behind the for­ma­tion of Mahdi Army and he is Al-Sadr guid­ance [Moq­tada Al-Sadr said many times that his father told him to take Al-Ha’ari as guid­ance, last time was on Al-Jazeera inter­view a week ago].

Years ago Al-Ha’ari, Moham­mad Al-Sadr [father], Taskhiri and Aasfi formed the “High Fiqh Coun­cil”, an orga­ni­za­tion that links pol­i­tics to reli­gion which is totally inde­pen­dent from the “Hawza” [the High Shi­ite author­ity] and to stand against the other mem­bers of the Hawza who refused this link [Sis­tani and the oth­ers], after the death of Moham­mad Al-Sadr because of this ide­ol­ogy, Al-Ha’ari fled the coun­try to Iran where he lives until today.

Recent Al-Sadr maneu­ver is to cre­ate Ayatollahs-war, Al-Sistani can not issue a fatwa to dis­band Mahdi Army because it is approved by Al-Ha’ari, and Al-Ha’ari can not issue the same fatwa because he can not aban­doned his believes of the polit­i­cal Islam.

For this rea­son Al-Sistani spokesman refused to com­ment on Al-Sadr request, but the Sadrists spokesman said: the cler­ics refused to dis­band the MA, in other words Al-Ha’ari refused.