Fall of Hussein Could Lead to a Shift in Center, Focus of Shiite Muslims

Iran and Iraq are predominantly Shiite. However, Hussein's regime was dominated by Sunni Muslims and regarded the rival branch of Islam as a political threat. His rule turned Najaf, the dominant Shiite center of learning for most of the last thousand years, into a backwater.

Meanwhile, the Iranian holy city Qom gained in status because of the success of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's revolution, which fused religious and political authority and exported anti-Western terror.

Many Shiite scholars, particularly in Arab countries, say they are eager to see Najaf regain its place as the most respected center of learning. They say that its religious leaders, some of whom supported the U.S. intervention to oust Hussein, are less rigid than their counterparts who dominate Iran.

The reemergence of Najaf could assist Iranian reformers and offer Shiites elsewhere a more open interpretation of the faith, the scholars say.

An important Shiite figure in Iran, Mohsen Kadivar, who spent 18 months in prison for criticizing his country's system, said that because of its own Shiite traditions, "Iraq could end up with the sort of government Iran was supposed to have -- religious, but also democratic."

Long before the rise of Osama bin Laden and his form of radical Islam, Iran's leadership of the Shiite world secured for Khomeini and his successors religious justification for their political agenda. Iran's spiritual influence has been central to its political goals in places such as Lebanon. When radical religious leaders there founded Hezbollah in the early 1980s, the Lebanese fighters also pledged religious allegiance to the ayatollah.

Iran's anti-Americanism has eased somewhat in the two decades since the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis in Tehran and the 1982 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, but Iran's support of militant Palestinian groups and Hezbollah still contribute to the violent landscape of the region.