Najaf

Formal teaching at Najaf is usually traced to the scholar Shaykh al-Tusi, who relocated there in the eleventh century and helped establish the city as a center of Shia jurisprudence and theology independent of the Abbasid court at Baghdad. Over the following centuries Najaf's hawza developed its own distinctive methods of legal reasoning, training the scholars who would go on to staff seminaries and mosques across the wider Shia world, from Lebanon to South Asia. Its standing rests less on any single building than on an unbroken chain of teacher and student relationships stretching back nearly a thousand years, which many within the tradition regard as giving it a seniority that younger centers, including Qom, have not matched.

The city's marja al-taqlid, senior clerics recognized as authoritative sources of religious guidance, have historically held that position through scholarly reputation earned inside this teaching lineage rather than through any formal appointment, a structure that leaves real authority distributed among whichever living scholars the wider community chooses, at any given time, to follow.

Najaf was also where Twelver Shia jurisprudence settled one of its own longest running internal disputes, between the Usuli school, which holds that qualified jurists may exercise independent legal reasoning, and the Akhbari school, which favored relying directly on the sayings of the Imams. Scholars based in Najaf, including Muhammad Baqir Behbahani in the eighteenth century, argued the Usuli position to eventual dominance across nearly the whole Shia world, a shift that gave the marja system much of its later authority to issue independent rulings.

Najaf's dominant scholarly tradition holds that clergy should generally stay outside direct political rule, offering guidance rather than governing, a position often called quietist and associated in recent decades with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. That stance stands in genuine and ongoing tension with the doctrine of direct clerical rule taught in Qom, and the two cities represent competing understandings of Shia religious authority rather than a single settled model, a difference this record states rather than resolves.

Najaf's seminaries suffered severely under Saddam Hussein's Baathist government from the 1970s through the 1990s, which saw the hawza's independent religious authority as a rival center of power and responded with executions, forced expulsions and tight surveillance that drove much of Najaf's teaching activity abroad, particularly to Qom itself. The fall of the Baathist government in 2003 allowed Najaf's seminaries to recover quickly, drawing back students and scholars and reasserting the city's claim to seniority within Shia religious learning even as questions about its future relationship to Iraqi and regional politics remain unresolved.

The 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein following the Gulf War brought heavy fighting into Najaf itself, and the government's suppression of the revolt further damaged a hawza already weakened by years of prior persecution, driving still more scholars into exile before any recovery could begin. The years after 2003 saw not only a return of students and teachers but renewed debate, inside and outside Najaf, over what role, if any, its senior clergy should take in Iraq's postwar politics, a question the quietist tradition's own principles leave deliberately unresolved.