Najaf

The city of Najaf in Iraq has been a religious center of the Shi'i branch of Islam since the eighth century. A popular destination for pilgrims, Najaf is located south of Baghdad and 6 miles west of Kufa (1 mile = 1.609 kilometers). It is the site of the mausoleum of the first Shi'a imam, Alī ibn Abī Talīb, whose gravesite was revealed to the public in the early ‚Abbāsid period by Ja'far al-Ṣādiq (d. 765) during one of his visits to Kufa. Under al-Sādiq and his disciples, Najaf also became heir to the Shi'a learning that had flourished in Kufa, where, in the grand mosque, al-Ṣädiq's narrations were disseminated among some 900 teachers of traditions.

Muslim armies entered the Najaf region in the year 633. Four years later, they chose the adjacent city of Kufa as a garrison city. The army took up permanent residence in Kufa and its environs in the direction of Najaf (then called the “Back of Kufa”). The main mosque in Kufa was built in 637, around which the Arab tribes soon began to gather. Kufa flourished in no time, particularly following the year 656, when ‘Al? took up residence in the city. ‘Al? found the city agreeable and moved the seat of the caliphate from Medina. According to Muslim tradition, the prophets Adam, Noah, Hud, and Salih are buried in Najaf. At one stage, ‘Al? informed his household of his impending martyrdom and willed to have his body buried at a specified place in the valley, which he pointed out to them. His sons, al-Hasan and al-Husayn, buried him in that spot, which now lies inside the city of Najaf.

Following the founding of Baghdad (754–775), a number of Shi'i scholars from Kufa migrated to this new capital. Some others chose the mausoleum at Najaf as the base from which to teach and spread Shi'a traditions. Although Kufa retained its importance as the locus of Shi'a activities until the 15th century, Najaf gradually replaced it. During this transition, Najaf's shrine and the seminary attached to it received much needed patronage from Shi'i rulers. The ruler of Tabaristan, Muhammad ibn Zayd al-‘Alawī (d. 900), ordered the construction of the dome and the Sufi zāawiyah (cells). The Buyid sulta added the arched halls and hospices that provided residence for the students who came to study in Najaf. During his visit to Najaf in 1336, Ibn Batutah, the famous traveler, noted the existence of a number of seminaries, hospices, and Sufi convents attached to the shrine.

In the 11th century, Muhammad bin al-Hasan al-Tusi (d. 1067), a great Shi'a scholar and leader of the community, migrated from the Karkh region of Baghdad to Najaf in 1057, following the Sunn-Shi'i riots and destruction of his library, and established his own school based on a text-oriented Shi'a curriculum. The present-day Shi'i mujtahids regard themselves as the intellectual heirs of al-Tūsī's school, but in the 20th century, Najaf lost its leadership of Shi'a learning. With the establishment of Shi'ism as the state religion of Iran under the Safavids in the early 1500s, there was a flow of Shi'i scholars from Iraq and Lebanon to Isfahan and other places in Iran. In the 19th century, Iraq and Iran witnessed the modernization of educational and political institutions along with the development of an intense nationalism that created a different challenge [Page 866]for the jurists in Iran. Under the leadership of Ayatullah ‘Abd al-Karīm Hä'irī Yazdī (d. 1937), the religious hierarchy in Iran found it appropriate to establish a seminary in Qum that would respond to the growing needs of the times and would equal and even surpass Najaf as the hub of Shi'a religious sciences. Moreover, the highly centralized religious leadership of the marja’ al-taqlīd (supreme religious authority) had passed on to prominent jurists of Qum, overshadowing the apolitical leadership of Najaf in the growing turmoil of the 1950s and 1960s. It was not until the rise of Ayatullah Khomeini (d. 1989) and Muhammad Bāqir al-Sadr (executed 1980) that Najaf reversed its tradition of shunning politics and actively sought to combat the secular ideology of the Baathists in Iraq. Today, Muqtada al-Sadr wields enormous political influence among the downtrodden in the city; whereas Ayatullah Sayyid ‘Ali al-Sistani remains influential among the secularists and well-to-do Iraqis.

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