In April, The New York Times reported: "Ayatollah Sistani's supporters want Islam to govern such matters as family law, divorce and women's rights."
Where does Sistani stand on these issues? Postings on his Web site include prescriptions for temporary marriage ("In a fixed time marriage, the period of matrimony is fixed, for example, matrimonial relation is contracted with a woman for an hour, or a day, or a month, or a year, or more."); keeping wives indoors ("It is forbidden for the wife of a permanent marriage to go out without her husband's permission."); and multiple marriages and divorces ("A man is not permitted to marry more than four women by way of permanent marriage. He also has the right to divorce his wives.")
Khomeini may have shared Sistani's values here, but his pre-revolutionary propaganda was better packaged for the West.
In November 1978, for example, Dorothy Gilliam of The Washington Post "Style" section interviewed Khomeini, who was then living in exile in France. While noting that Khomeini's aides "order Western women journalists to cover their heads and shoulders" before meeting him, she dutifully recorded that the ayatollah himself said, "In Islamic society women will be free to choose their own destiny and activity. God created us equally."
That same month, Washington Post correspondent Ronald Koven also interviewed Khomeini and some of Khomeini's aides. "The aides say he rejects the authoritarian models of Islamic republicanism in much of the Arab world. Iran is not an Arab country," wrote Koven. "The aide quoted Khomeini as saying, 'In the history of Islam, those who denied God were free to express themselves.' This, said the aide, is Khomeini's way of saying all political parties would be legal in his vision of an Islamic republic to be established in a national referendum."
Why did the man who installed a theocracy in Iran in 1979 say these things in France in 1978? Perhaps he was practicing "taqiyya," the Shiite doctrine that Grand Ayatollah Sistani blandly defines on his Web site as: "Dissimulation about one's beliefs in order to protect oneself, family, or property from harm." Sistani has written an unpublished treatise on this doctrine. Is it wise to assume he is not practicing it today in his dealings with a U.S. occupational force?
Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute, a strong advocate of installing democracy in Iraq, wrote in The Weekly Standard last month that Sistani "virtually has a de facto veto over American actions" there. If so, it's the wrong veto in the wrong hands.
If we want to leave an Iraq that is at peace with itself and the world, we will need to find a way to give Iraqis who oppose the ayatollah's theocratic vision a veto over him.