Millions of Shiite Muslims – both here in Iraq and next door in Iran – are mourning Seyyid Abdel Aziz al Hakim, who died Wednesday of lung cancer in Tehran. His public funeral was today in Baghdad, and he’s supposed to be buried Saturday in the southern holy city of Najaf. He was 59.

Hakim, who hailed from a revered and accomplished line of Shiite religious scholars, was a cleric/politician who returned to Iraq with the U.S.-led invasion after spending a long exile in Iran. He was a backbone of the exiled opposition under Saddam and, by all accounts, worked tirelessly to help oust the Sunni dictator and introduce majority rule (ie. Shiite rule) to Iraq. Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s message of condolences called Hakim “a big brother and a strong supporter during the struggle against the former regime.”

Hakim’s political party, which was founded in Iran, helped to usher in the remarkable Shiite renaissance in Iraq. The Supreme Council, shorthand for Hakim’s party, recruited other groups to form the Shiite juggernaut ticket that swept the 2005 elections. Look through the many obituaries out there for more on his dedication and sacrifice to build the post-Saddam Iraq.

However, Hakim was not without his critics. I’ve noticed an unusually laudatory tone in the Hakim obituaries in Western newspapers and TV channels. Even the venerated Sen. Ted Kennedy, who died the same day as Hakim, wasn’t spared mention of Chappaquiddick in the myriad tributes to his service.

So, as Hakim’s party – the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq – determines a successor and cements a strategy for the upcoming parliamentary elections, I think it’s good to keep in mind not only Hakim’s virtues, but also the criticism against him. I’d like to reiterate that this is not a personal attack on Hakim, who was a gracious host to the many McClatchy correspondents who have interviewed him in Baghdad. But some of these issues are likely to surface again in the election season, especially with the fragmenting of the Shiite bloc into Islamist versus nationalist camps.

In any case, let’s take a closer look at Hakim's legacy:

-- CNN and other news organizations reported that Hakim was a behind-the-scenes operator who never held a political position in Iraq. That’s not entirely true – Hakim was on the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, the interim government under the U.S. occupation authority. In fact, Hakim quickly infuriated Iraqi women’s advocates by using his position on the council to try to repeal the country’s secular family and inheritance laws, which were considered to be among the most progressive in the Middle East. The old laws made polygamy difficult and guaranteed women custody rights in divorce cases. Hakim favored implementing a strict interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence. Hundreds of Iraqi women marched in protest in Baghdad and Kurdistan, and it took then-U.S. viceroy Paul Bremer’s veto to kill the plan.

-- Hakim favored carving the oil-rich, majority-Shiite southern part of Iraq into a confederacy, in the style of the mostly autonomous Kurdish north. Voters rejected the plan in January 2009.

-- During his exile in Iran, Hakim led the Badr Corps, which was then the military wing of the Supreme Council. The goal was to overthrow Saddam and install an Iran-like Shiite theocracy. After coming to power in Iraq, the party said it had disarmed the Badr Corps and turned it into a self-proclaimed social services agency. Anybody skeptical that a paramilitary force trained and funded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps could suddenly morph into an NGO? You’re not alone. Iraqis didn’t buy it, either, especially when they saw Badr forces continue to fight in the south, where their supremacy was challenged by the Sadrist movement and other Shiite subsets. And in our reporting of the past few years, we had confirmation from several trusted Iraqi and U.S. military sources that elite members of the Badr Corps were carrying out what were described as “surgical strikes” against members of the former regime, oftentimes at the request of Iran. That’s fancy talk for “death squads.” Hakim’s party has denied involvement in sectarian bloodshed.

 -- Before he returned to Iraq, Hakim was widely known to have been a supporter of walayat al faqih, the Iranian model of Shiite governance with clerical rule at the top. In Iran, for example, supreme leader Ali Khamenei has the final authority on matters of the state. Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has rejected the Iranian interpretation of walayat al faqih for Iraq, preferring instead a limited version with clerical say on some social but not political affairs. Upon arrival from Tehran, Hakim changed his tune on walayat al faqih, bringing it more in line with Sistani’s views.

Consider this passage from a story I wrote on the subject in December 2004, when McClatchy was Knight Ridder:

In an interview with Knight Ridder, al Hakim played down the disagreement, likening it to “a tempest in a teacup.”
Walayat al faqih “hasn’t been found in Iraq, not in the past or the present and I don’t know anyone calling for it,” al Hakim said, adding that he opposed it. “People are using this provocative issue to scare European and Arab countries.”
Other leading Shiite candidates, including several of al Hakim's allies on the slate, suggested that he was at the very least disingenuous in refusing to acknowledge his well-known support of the Iranian model. When moderate Shiite politicians who belong to the Hezbollah group were told of al Hakim's remarks, they looked incredulous.
"Well, it's good if it's true," said one smirking candidate, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of backlash from al Hakim's group. "Hmm, will he also go on TV and say this? I don't think so."