Ayatollah

'in the worlds', plural form)[13] and ʾāyatu llāhi fī l-warā (Arabic: آية الله في الورى, lit.

[16]According to Michael M. J. Fischer, the Iranian Revolution led to "rapid inflation of religious titles", so that almost every senior cleric began to be called an Ayatollah.

[15] An unwritten rule of addressing for Shia clerics has been developed after the 1980s as a result of Iranian Revolution,[12] despite the fact no official institutional way of conferring titles is available.

[5] Another post-revolutionary change in what makes an ayatollah has been the falling away (at least in many important situations), of purely religious credentials and informal acclamation, and its replacement by political criteria.

[18] Certain clerics, such as Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari[2] and Hussein-Ali Montazeri,[20] who had fallen out of favor with the rulers were downgraded by not being addressed as an Ayatollah.

[2] Mirza Ali Aqa Tabrizi was the first one to use the term Ayatullah for the sources of emulation in Najaf, especially Akhund Khurasani (1839–1911), to distinguish them from the clerics of lower rank in Tehran, during the 1905-1911 Persian Constitutional Revolution.

[21] (Mirza Sayyed Mohammad Tabatabai and Seyyed Abdollah Behbahani were also given that honorific by constitutionalists according to Loghatnameh Dehkhoda.

)[22] Hamid Algar maintains that this title entered general usage possibly because it was an "indirect result of the reform and strengthening of the religious institution in Qom".

[24] Usually as a prelude to such status, a mujtahid[note 1] is asked to publish a juristic treatise in which he answers questions about the application of Islam to present-time daily affairs.

Unlike many religious leaders of other religions, a grand ayatollah is often involved in state affairs, especially in countries with large Shia populations such as Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon.

For example, in the United States, former jurist and lawyer Roy Moore has been called the "Ayatollah of Alabama" by his critics due to espousing Christian nationalism, opposition to secularism, and far-right politics.