Revisiting the History of the Shia Marjayah under the Baath Regime in Iraq

he Middle East Institute (MEI) is pleased to host a conversation with Abbas Kadhim, the author of Reclaiming Iraq: The 1920 Revolution and the Founding of the Modern State, senior adviser to the UNESCO Chair at Kufa University in Iraq and former senior fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS Foreign Policy Institute. In his book The Hawza Under Siege: Studies in the Ba’ath Party Archive, Kadhim delves into formerly highly-classified documents surrounding the positions of the Marja’iya toward the Ba’athist authorities. The documents correct the record on the history of Shi’a activism and resistance to the Baathist regime, and reveal new information about how the Saddam Hussein regime viewed the Hawza, the relations between the regime and Ayatollah Al Khoei, and the role Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq Al Sadr played through his Friday prayers at the Grand Mosque in Kufa 1998-1999 in giving birth to a new form of Shi’a activism in Iraq. How have these historical dynamics influenced the evolution of