In Iraq, on June 26, 2003, “Two weeks before [Director of the Coalition Provisional Authority L. Paul] Bremer announced the formation of the Governing Council, [Ayatollah Ali] al-Sistani made an announcement of his own. He issued a fatwa, a religious decree, stating that Iraq’s constitution had to be written by elected representatives. An American-selected drafting committee was ‘unacceptable,’ he said, because there was ‘no guarantee that such a committee will draft a constitution upholding the Iraqi people’s interests and expressing their national identity and lofty social values.’ Al-Sistani’s fatwa was all but ignored by the CPA. ‘It didn’t register,’ one of Bremer’s senior aides said later. ‘The view was, *We’ll just get someone to write another fatwa.* ‘ ”
– Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Pages 79-80