Professor Chibli Mallat delivered a lecture on ‘the message of Najaf to the world’ at the Al-‘Alamayn Advanced Studies Institute in the holy city on Saturday 14 March 2009. Professor Mallat spent the weekend as the guest of Ayat Allah Muhammad Bahr al-‘Ulum in Najaf, where he spoke about how the past and future were calling on Najaf. Looking at the past, he recalled three of the city’s unique messengers and their persistent message of freedom and resistance to the dictatorship: Bahr al-‘Ulum himself, an early resistant who became the first president of the Iraqi Governing Council, Mahdi al-Hakim, the son of Seyyed Muhsin al-Hakim, who was assassinated by the regime in Khartum in January 1988, and Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr, the most famous of Najaf’s leaders, who was executed without trial in April 1980. Professor Mallat also looked to a future message bridging the classical legal culture of Islam embodied in the Najaf seminaries, and the most advanced law schools in the West, especially between the discipline of usul al-fiqh that Muhsin al-Hakim, Sadr, and Sistani represent, and the philosophy of law in thinkers like John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas and Michel Troper.
Reported by al-Mowaten here