The Making of an Ayatollah

For nearly a millennium, a single Iraqi city has produced Shii Islam's most powerful scholars through a rigorous education that makes a Ph.D. look like a weekend workshop.

- Ahab Bdaiwi

The image shows a man reading a book.

That exactly is an Ayatollah? If you have heard the word on the news or seen it in headlines about Iran or Iraq, you might picture an elderly man in religious robes wielding political power.

But the title has a specific meaning rooted in centuries of scholarly tradition, and the path to earning it is far more demanding than most people realize.

In simple terms, an Ayatollah is a senior scholar in Shii Islam who has reached the highest level of religious law.

This is someone who can independently interpret Islamic scripture and issue legal rulings using traditional methods of analysis and reasoning.

The word itself is an honorific that dates back to the 1200s, but the system that creates these scholars stretches back even further.

The journey begins at a hawza, a Shii seminary whose name literally means "enclosed space where knowledge is guarded." The most prestigious hawza in the world sits in Najaf, Iraq, about six miles from the ancient city of Kufa. Founded in 1055, it is the oldest surviving Shii seminary on the planet.

Najaf itself holds deep spiritual significance. The city perches on a plateau above the desert, and tradition holds that it is the burial place of Imam Ali [R.A.], the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad [PBUH].