What is Al-Hawza?

This is the first part of series arti­cles, explain what is Al-Hawza, who are the supreme-clerics and what is their reli­gious and non­re­li­gious role.

I am writ­ing this because I noticed that many west­ern­ers have no idea what exactly this reli­gious insti­tu­tion means and how it functions.

Also in the com­ing arti­cles we will see how the prob­lem between the Al-Sadr and Al-Hakim started back in the 90’s.

Najaf played a major role in the polit­i­cal his­tory of Hawza, noth­ing in Islam/Arab coun­tries played a sim­i­lar role, not Al-Azhar in Egypt or Al-Zaitouna Mosque in Tunisia in terms of power, spir­i­tual influ­ence and finan­cial power com­pared to Al-Hawza.

The power of the author­i­ties in Najaf even forced the Ottoman Sul­tan Abdul Hamid to flirt with the reli­gious author­i­ties in Najaf. By issu­ing a series of admin­is­tra­tive orders “Fara­manat” in favor of the pow­er­ful cler­ics to expand their oppor­tu­ni­ties and improve and develop Shi­ite reli­gious schools of Jaafari-doctrine, open libraries and pub­lish­ing houses. Books and mag­a­zines began to flow to Najaf from Egypt and Lebanon.

The Sul­tan hoped at least to neu­tral­ize the Hawza in spe­cific and the Shi­ites in gen­eral from being a hos­tile power against the empire in it’s strug­gle against the Euro­pean coun­tries [Ali al-Wardi: Social Glimpses of the His­tory of Mod­ern Iraq].

Through the his­tory of mod­ern Iraq, Hawza played a big role in shap­ing the Shi­ite pub­lic opin­ion and posi­tion against dif­fer­ent governments.

Since at for­ma­tion of the Iraq state in the twen­ties Hawza reacted against it in a series of hos­tile fat­was, for­bid­ding Shi­ites to join pub­lic [gov­ern­ment] schools or start a career in the gov­ern­men­tal offices. That was the begin­ning of the “political-Shiite” in mod­ern history.

Through­out the his­tory, there were three fac­tors that kept the Hawza role in Najaf the major Shi­ite insti­tu­tion and con­trolled it’s evo­lu­tion [or bet­ter to say non-evolution]:

Reli­gious tyranny

To pre­vent any attempts to mod­ern­ize the classical,traditional Shi­ites reli­gious edu­ca­tion system.

Some attempts to retake the idea of “Shiaism“and “supreme cler­ics” back to its roots crit­i­ciz­ing al-Hawza prac­tices are looked upon as an emi­nent dan­ger and threat to Hawza exis­tence, these ideas were silenced in a hos­tile man­ner [Aya­tol­lah Muham­mad Hus­sein Fad­lal­lah is a good exam­ple, when he tried to mod­ern­ize Hawza and reject­ing it’s prac­tices, he is pun­ished and removed from Najaf by other supreme-clerics and forced to flee the coun­try to Lebanon].

Finan­cial corruption

Because of the absence of any form of insight in the spend­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion of money, finan­cial cor­rup­tion is the old­est prob­lem in Al-Hawza and it still raises a lot of controversy.

For­eign interventions

Due to the exis­tence of hid­den roles of exter­nal pow­ers, there was always a grow­ing influ­ence by the Iran­ian reli­gious author­i­ties inside Al-Hawza.

Later there was the dou­ble role of the Iran — British roles under Daoud Pasha, Shah Reza Khan and his son Moham­mad Reza,’till the recent Amer­i­can inter­ven­tion in Al-Hawza affairs which is a flash­back from 1914 — 1917 when Hawza coop­er­ated with the British occu­pa­tion against the Ottoman “tyrants”.

These three fac­tors have influ­enced the his­tory of Al-Hawza and cre­ated the huge polit­i­cal role of this institution.

For cen­turies money has been flow­ing from every cor­ner on earth to this insti­tu­tion which made Al-Hawza a dom­i­nant force, its power has grown beyond its role as a Shi­ite spir­i­tual reli­gious center.

Each Shi­ite [indi­vid­ual, insti­tu­tion, orga­ni­za­tion, coun­try] must give 1/5, called [Al-Khumus], to the Hawza. Then the 3/4 of the 1/5 will go to the Aya­tol­lahs called [mal Al-Sayed = the supreme-cleric’s share].

For this rea­son, Al-Hawza ensure the exis­tence of some sort of Antag­o­nism with the state, related to the supreme-clerics fear that might lead to a halt the flow of [1/5 Al-Khumus sys­tem and the 3/4 sys­tem] money [Big part of this post, is taken from Fad­hil Al-Rubai’i book: After ori­en­tal­ism].