The Politicization of Sufism in Iraq’s Transition from Baʿthist Quasi-Secular Nationalism to Competing Sect-Centric Visions of National Unity

Since the 1980s, Iraq has witnessed an escalating politicization of Islam under Ṣaddām Ḥusayn’s Baʿth regime. After the regime’s fall in 2003, political mobilization took place along ethno- and sect-centric lines, resulting in the predominance of Shīʿī Islamist state- and nation-building, the emergence of Sunnī rejectionism, accompanied by two cycles of sect-coded civil war (2005-2007 and 2010-2013), and the rise of (Sunnī) Islamist terrorism. The consequences of Iraq’s politically promoted Islamic reawakening under the Baʿth regime for the mobilization of religious identities in the nation-building after 2003 are still not fully understood. This contribution focuses on a religious phenomenon that has been rather neglected in the research on Iraq’s nation-building process over the past twenty years: the politicization and nationalization of Sufi Islam under the Baʿth regime (1990s), during the Baʿthist Sufi insurgency (2006-2014), and recently under the Shīʿī-led government of Muḥammad Shiyāʿ al-Sūdānī (2024). A critical examination of the concept of distinct religious nationalism, as developed by Roger Friedland and criticized by Rogers Brubaker, reveals that this case study does not exemplify distinct religious nationalism, but rather an intricate intertwining of religion and nationalism. This intertwining is not solely confined to the form of nationalist rhetoric alone; it also pervades the religious content of political programs

Civil society · Islam · Mobilization · Nationalism · Politics · Rhetoric · Sufism · Vision · Islamic Studies and History · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence · Turkey's Politics and Society