Najaf's dominant scholarly tradition holds that clergy should generally stay outside direct political rule, offering guidance rather than governing, a position often called quietist and associated in recent decades with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. That stance stands in genuine and ongoing tension with the doctrine of direct clerical rule taught in Qom, and the two cities represent competing understandings of Shia religious authority rather than a single settled model, a difference this record states rather than resolves.
Najaf's seminaries suffered severely under Saddam Hussein's Baathist government from the 1970s through the 1990s, which saw the hawza's independent religious authority as a rival center of power and responded with executions, forced expulsions and tight surveillance that drove much of Najaf's teaching activity abroad, particularly to Qom itself. The fall of the Baathist government in 2003 allowed Najaf's seminaries to recover quickly, drawing back students and scholars and reasserting the city's claim to seniority within Shia religious learning even as questions about its future relationship to Iraqi and regional politics remain unresolved.
The 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein following the Gulf War brought heavy fighting into Najaf itself, and the government's suppression of the revolt further damaged a hawza already weakened by years of prior persecution, driving still more scholars into exile before any recovery could begin. The years after 2003 saw not only a return of students and teachers but renewed debate, inside and outside Najaf, over what role, if any, its senior clergy should take in Iraq's postwar politics, a question the quietist tradition's own principles leave deliberately unresolved.