Muhsin Al-Hakim - Other Point of View

Other Point of View

There were some within the hawza who were less enamored of Hakim's stance respecting political authority. Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, for example, a more junior member of the hawza during Hakim's time, sought a series of reforms to the hawza to make it more politically palatable and appealing to the Shi'i masses who were proving susceptible to Communism. Sadr therefore tried to unify and centralize the hawza, placing more power in the hands of the senior scholar, and sought to make its materials more accessible and understandable to the lay community, filled as it was with arcane and obscure language, often on minutiae of no interest to the broader Shi'i masses. He helped found the Da'wa party as well, an Islamist party that Sadr imagined would give the hawza political influence in Baghdad.

While Hakim had a great deal of respect for the intelligence and enthusiasm of Sadr, he viewed his political activism as contrary to its principles and interests. Hakim therefore asked Sadr to dissociate his relationship with Da'wa and generally discouraged his efforts to reform large parts of the hawza curriculum, though some important reforms were undertaken. Hakim therefore maintained the quietist balance through very difficult times, and ultimately projected a stance on politics and religion in the Shi'i community that remains influential today.

With Hakim's death, Sadr's activism increased and ultimately his ideas proved too threatening to the Saddam and his government. In 1980, he and his sister were killed by Saddam Hussein's interrogators, as were any members of the hawza who were inclined to take Sadr's politically active position. With the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime, however, Shi'ism has reached a considerable period of ferment, with the religious community attempting to achieve some form of balance between the political activism announced by Sadr and the quietist stance embodied most clearly in the form of Muhsim al-Hakim.

He was buried in the great and modern library he had established.