The al-Hakim family is a sayyid family descended from Prophet Muhammad through his grandson, Imam Hasan. It traces its name to one ancestral figure, 'Ali, who was a doctor at the court of Shah 'Abbas (1587– 1629) in Isfahan until he went on a visit to Najaf and decided to stay. He became known as al-Hakim, the Arabic word for doctor. Over the centuries, the al-Hakim family built its fame as one of Najaf's most renowned families of religious scholars. In recent decades, several family members gained particular prominence. Muhsin al-Hakim was the source of emulation for the majority of the Shi'a worldwide in the 1960s. If he embodied the traditional system of transnational religious authority, the leadership of his most famous sons was of a different nature. Forced to leave Iraq, Mahdi and Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the latter being accompanied by his brother 'Abd al-'Aziz, exercised religious, philanthropic and political roles in exile. They institutionalised their leadership in separate organisations and in different places. Based in Iran, Muhammad Baqir and 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Hakim eventually returned home in 2003 at the head of the powerful SCIRI, a political organisation led since 2009 by the latter's son 'Ammar al-Hakim.

This chapter explores the structure of transnational clerical authority. It maps the informal and institutionalised networks around which the above al-Hakim family members established and maintained their leadership, both in the family's stronghold in Najaf and outside Iraq. Interpersonal ties informed the creation of these networks. The development of familial and scholarly relations in the Iraqi seminaries allowed Muhsin al-Hakim to build and later organise his marja'iyya locally and, thanks to the movement of people, transnationally. The sons of Muhsin al-Hakim also relied on interpersonal networks to establish their leadership in exile and institutionalise it in their organisations. The transnationalisation of Najaf's community of learning, a natural process exacerbated by the massive departure of scholars because of state repression under the Ba'th regime, gave them access, in their respective places of residence, to home-made networks composed of their relatives and friends, former members of their father's entourage, as well as the student circle of another renowned figure, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (d. 1980). Because the organisational appearance of political exiles is believed to invoke loyalty if it is transplanted from home, the practice of reproducing pre-existing networks in their institutions was crucial for the constitution of their leadership.