State Atrophy, Islamization, and the Dynamics of the Religious Field

This chapter examines the transformative shifts in Iraq’s religious field during the 1990s, highlighting how the weakening of state authority under the Baʿth regime created space for new forms of religious activism and contestation. It traces the sociopolitical conditions that facilitated the emergence of a more assertive Shiʿi clerical movement, particularly under Mohammad Mohammad Sadiq al-Sadr, whose populist strategies and challenge to the traditional Marjiʿyya reconstructed religious authority in Iraq. The chapter begins by analyzing the early responses of Shiʿi clerics to secularization and modernity and then explores the transformation of the 1990s that followed the second Gulf War in 1991 and the weakening of state authority. It details Sadr’s effort to institutionalize an activist Marjiʿyya and his construction of an alternative model of clerical leadership, provoking state surveillance and culminating in his assassination.