The death of grand Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Araki, with no obvious candidate to succeed him as the spiritual guide of Shiite Muslims, poses tough questions for Iran's Islamic leadership.
Araki died Tuesday at age 100, more than a month after he was admitted to a Tehran hospital following what Iran's IRNA news agency described as a "cerebral vascular accident."The government declared Wednesday a holiday, followed by a week of mourning for Araki, who had a been a teacher of Iran's late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the last of the senior Shiite scholars of his generation.
Now, one or more younger clerics must step up to the position of marja taqlid (source of emulation), which according to Shiite teachings acts as a guide interpreting religious regulations for ordinary Shiites.
As Araki lay in his death bed, senior clerics in the holy city of Qom and Tehran deliberated behind closed doors about the marja. What transpired from their discussions underlined lack of agreement on a successor and a feeling of threat to Iran's militant interpretation of the faith from apolitical contenders.
Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati cautioned in a Friday prayer sermon that enemies were plotting to set up an apolitical marja outside Iran and pit it against the Islamic republic.
"Someone who believes in separation of religion and politics is not fit to become marja. . . . We understand the clerics outside Iran believe religion should be separate from politics," said parliamentary speaker Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, him-self a cleric.
The reference was to clerics based in Najaf, Iraq, such as Ayatollah Mohammad Hosseini Sis-tani.
The radical Salam newspaper criticized Jannati's remarks, saying it amounted to insulting Shiites living abroad and was at odds with Shiism's mission as an international faith.
Shiites form about 10 percent of the world's estimated 1 billion Muslims.