It produces the peculiar irony of an unelected mullah pressuring the world’s self-styled greatest democracy to implement the self-determination it ostensibly invaded Iraq to bring. Sistani has said that no law in Iraq should conflict with Islamic principles, and he wants Islam to be recognised in law as the religion of the majority of Iraqis. But he wants to secure a model which will mean that a future secular regime cannot pass laws that contradict Islam rather than establishing a state along the Iranian model.The best way of ensuring this, he sees, is through the pure democracy of “one person, one vote”. Sistani summed that up in a recent letter to the US administrator which said: “Mr Bremer, you are American I am Iranian.

“The administrative aspects of society’s life must be left to men of politics.” Yet he believes that at present Iraqi Shia need some leadership, which can come only from their clerics, to develop the political framework in which religion and politics can have their distinct spaces.There is clearly scope for much confusion here. His theological position insists clerics should not interfere in government “The clergy are the conscience of society,” he has written. By contrast Sistani repeatedly stresses that religion has to be separated from government.Where Khomeini in his 14 years in exile in Najaf argued that “only a good society can create good believers”, Sistani insisted the opposite: “Only good men can create a good society.” Today, about a third of Iraq’s 15 million Shia follow the Khomeini line; the majority follows Sistani.This is obviously of considerable political significance It highlights Sistani’s current dilemma. All of which is some distance from current Western values but which at least offers the possibility of engagement with the West in a way which is inconceivable with such Sunni fundamentalists the Taliban, al-Qa’ida or the Wahhabi puritans of Saudi Arabia.There is another interesting strand in his thinking. One of Sistani’s fellow students in his early days in Najaf was Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini who believed that, left to their own devices, most people would not live by Islam’s precepts and so developed a doctrine of clerical dictatorship – velayet-e faqih (the Regency of the Jurist), which was the basis for the Iranian revolution. (The “gates of ijtihad” were closed to Sunni Muslims 1,000 years ago.) This allows Islam to be reinterpreted in light of changing circumstances.Thus Sistani’s website concerns itself with such contemporary obsessions as whether Muslims can use perfume which contains alcohol (yes), use interest-bearing investments (in some circumstances), gamble (on horses but not lotteries), masturbate (no), perform anal sex (yes, though it is “strongly undesirable”) or oral sex (yes, so long as no fluid gets into the mouth).

He has lived immersed in Islamic study ever since, first as a student in Qom and then for the past four decades in Najaf which has been the centre of Shia learning for 1,000 years. He has studied philosophy, rhetoric and law under the great scholars of his day and has developed a reputation for penetrating to the “real meaning” behind the words of key Islamic texts. His followers speak of his holiness, personal asceticism and intellectual rigour characterised by a keen interest in modern science, economics and international politics.Most revealingly he is a specialist in ijtihad, the use of reason to apply Koranic values to contemporary situations – a discipline which only the most distinguished Shia clerics are allowed to practise. The leader of the other great clerical family, 30-year-old Muqtada al-Sadr, son of the great Ayatollah al-Sadr famed for preaching in a shroud, who was killed by Saddam in 1999, does not have the religious credentials to be a serious rival.Ayatollah Sistani’s prime influence comes from his status as Shi’ism’s leading marjah al-taqlid, the title (literally object of emulation) given to a cleric whom Iraq’s 15 million Shia Muslims regard as a guide in every aspect of their lives.Born in Mashad, Iran, 75 years ago, the young Ali began studying the Koran as a youthful prodigy at the age of five.