Sadrists in the Public Sphere : An Ethnography of Political Shi’ism

Abstract

This paper analyses the participation of Iraq’s Sadrist movement in the public sphere. It reveals how a secularisation of the movement’s political practices has been shaped by the interaction of the social practices of ordinary Sadrists and their political and religious leaders with Iraqi political public space as a particular context for social action. At the same time, this secularizing process is in tension with the Sadrists’ messianic mode of religious authority and the movement's distorted process of political professionalisation. The contestation of this secularising process is also linked to a wider ideological struggle between the political activist and clerical strata of the movement. This struggle relates to a factor of internal structural differentiation as the Sadrist movement became distributed across increasingly distinct sectoral boundaries. Consequently, greater ideological heterogeneity has emerged within the movement, reflecting the distinct vocations of those engaged in forms of political activism, and those whose practices belong primarily to the religious field.

Keywords

• Islamism
• Iraq
• Sadrists
• Muqtada al-Sadr
• Shi’ism
• Shi'i Islamist movements