The Market for Ayatollahs: Competition and Religious Authority in Shi‘i Islam

• In Event: Islamism and Islamist Politics in the Middle East

Abstract

The Usuli school that dominates Twelver Shi‘ism today is extremely hierarchical: Clerics are arrayed in pyramid-like networks, and doctrine requires laypeople to select and then blindly follow the religious rulings of one of the seniormost clerics. These grand ayatollahs are concentrated in two shrine cities – Najaf in Iraq and Qom in Iran – that are typically described as in competition with one another. This paper employs theories from the economics of religion to offer a different interpretation of religious authority in Shi‘i Islam and how it is changing. Usuli Shi‘ism is analyzed as an oligopoly in which seminaries collude to limit competition and preserve clerics’ sole authority to extract religious rents from believers. But the deregulation of religion in Iraq, demographic changes, and imminent transitions within each of the leading “firms” (i.e., the looming successions to Sistani and Khamenei) are lowering the barriers to entry in the religious marketplace of Shi‘ism. This is likely to lead to greater product differentiation and a general weakening of clerics’ religious authority and privileged access to rents.

Author

• David Siddhartha Patel, Harvard Kennedy School