THE CANDIDATE.(Abdulaziz al-Hakim)

Tariq Aziz, who was once Saddam Hussein's most visible emissary, lived in a big brick villa in Baghdad, on an embankment above the Tigris River with a sweeping view of the water and date-palm orchards on the other side. Many of his neighbors were also senior members of Saddam's regime, or Saddam's relatives. The Jadiriyah palace complex, which belonged to Saddam's family, is a few hundred yards away. The Aziz house is sprawling and grand, with a swimming pool in the back yard, but it is curiously situated--much too close to the ugly concrete pillars of the Jadiriyah bridge, which looms over it. The ground around the pillars is untended now and full of garbage and rubble, and visiting the house after dark is spooky. To get onto the riverside drive, you have to go down an unlit road that runs between the pillars and then under the ramparts of the bridge. It seemed to me a perfect spot for ambushes, and the bridge an ideal location from which to lob rocket-propelled grenades.

Tariq Aziz is incarcerated with other leading members of Saddam's government--and perhaps even Saddam--in a prison run by the United States near the Baghdad airport, and his house is now the residence of the leader of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or sciri, the largest and best-organized Shiite group in the country. Before the war, members of sciri were hunted down and tortured and killed or imprisoned. Its leaders were based in the Iranian cities of Tehran and Qom, and its fighters operated out of secret camps along the Iran-Iraq border.

Assuming that some kind of elections will be held in Iraq this year, Abdulaziz al-Hakim, who became the head of sciri after his brother Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, was assassinated, in August, stands a good chance of becoming Iraq's next president--if he survives that long. A few days before I last visited Hakim, in early December, someone had fired a rocket at him while he was visiting a mosque.

Hakim is married and has four children. When he returned to Iraq earlier this year, after two decades of exile in Iran, his family stayed in Qom, but they are with him now, in the Tariq Aziz house. His aides work downstairs, in austere rooms furnished with desks and chairs and not much else. The floor of one of the rooms is covered with a big carpet, and they sit on it and share meals, and then sleep on the carpet when their work is done. The upstairs rooms, where Hakim meets guests, are decorated in a style that is popular in Iraq. The carpets are faux Persian, the chairs are plush and thronelike, and the couches have baroquely carved gilt backs. I was taken to a room dominated by a large conference table, where Hakim was presiding over a sort of graduation ceremony for young people who had done well in a workshop called "Loyalty and Support."

Hakim, who was dressed in the black turban and gray robe of a Shiite cleric, was at the head of the table, in front of a microphone, speaking to perhaps two dozen young Iraqi men and one woman. The woman was seated toward the back, in a chair pushed up against a wall. She appeared to be in her twenties, and wore a full-length skirt and a head scarf. Hakim was giving them a pep talk about how the Shia were at a juncture in history that was as important as the one they had experienced in 1920, after the Arab revolt against the British colonialists, which, he said, had led to a series of political decisions that determined the way Iraq has been ruled since then, and to the continued oppression of the Shia.

The oppression of the Shia in Iraq extends back at least to 1638, when an Ottoman sultan captured Baghdad. Shiism had been established as the state religion of neighboring Persia in the sixteenth century, and the Sunni Ottomans and the Shia had fought over the Mesopotamian provinces for a hundred years. The Ottomans maintained control until the First World War, and even though more than half the population embraced Shiism, Sunnis were politically dominant. The British upheld this tradition soon after they established the state of Iraq, in 1920. They installed a Sunni Hashemite king, Faisal. Following the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958, political power remained in Sunni hands, with few exceptions, until Saddam Hussein was toppled in April.

"People will be looking to you as their leaders," Hakim said to the earnest young Shiites who had excelled in the course on loyalty. "We have already made a large step forward, with the establishment of the Governing Council"--the twenty-five-member Iraqi administrative body set up by the Coalition Provisional Authority last summer--"which my late brother Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, may peace be upon him, approved. But it is now up to the rest of us to take the next steps, so that the democratic majority of Iraq"--i.e., the Shiites--"can take their place in the society in which they have been treated as second-class citizens for nearly fourteen hundred years." He was counting from 661 A.D., when Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law and, according to the Shia, his rightful successor, was assassinated. "It was the late Ayatollah's great wish that this be the case," Hakim said. Then everyone stood up, and Hakim handed out diplomas to the three top graduates. The first two were young men who inclined their heads to kiss his hand as he murmured words of praise. The third was the woman. She approached Hakim and prostrated herself on the floor at his feet. The men in the room clucked their tongues in disapproval at this display, and Hakim beckoned to her to rise. He handed her a diploma, but then she fell to the ground again, and the men in the room clucked their tongues again. She got up, her face flushed, and Hakim told her that she was an admirable example of Shia womanhood. He smiled, waved his arm in a salute, and he and his bodyguards swept out of the room.