40 Al Hawza of Najaf in Iraq Ayatollah al-‘Uzma(“great sign of God”), and it is used today to describe jurists who reach level of mujtahid( marji‘) and have books of fatwas which observant Muslims follow. Accordingly, several titles are in use today, and they rank as follows: 1. Hujjat al-Islam 2. Hujjat al-Islam wa-l-Muslimin 3. Ayatollah 4. Ayatollah al-‘Uzma or Marji‘ 5. Supreme Marji‘ Despite the grandiosity of these titles, they do not involve a special theological status. Rather, they are used to identify an individual’s status as a scholar and his influence within religious circles. They are granted by informal consensus within the Hawza, and social relationships sometimes play a major role in who receives them. THE NAJAF HAWZA – THE SISTANI ERA AND POLITICAL ASCENSION AND ROLE After the 1992 death of the supreme marji‘ in Najaf, Sayyid Abu l-Qasim al­Khoei, Sayyid Abd al-A‘la al-Sabziwari became the supreme marji‘ in Najaf. This owed more to considerations related to respect for his generation and his seniority within the Hawza than it did to his scholarship, the importance of his lessons, how many pupils he had, or the size of the network of agents who usually play a key role in a candidate’s rise to this position. On the contrary, al-Sabziwari tended toward isolation and did not build a network of agents to advocate for him. He also – and this is a point of great importance – ascribed to an intellectual orientation contrary to the one established by the Khoei school about the importance of the principles of jurisprudence and the central role of that science in the process of deriving religious rulings. As the Khoei school was dominant in the Hawza, al-Sabziwari’s chances of becoming marji‘ were almost nonexistent. Nevertheless, the reverence he enjoyed as the last member of his generation helped him to win acceptance. He did not, however, have any real opportunity to exercise his authority as marji‘, as he died soon afterward in 1993. During this period, specifically after Sayyid Muhammad al-Rouhani’s(d. 1997 AD) failed transition from Qom to Najaf, al-Sistani was seriously proposed as