The Islamic Movement of Iraqi Shi'as

Piecing together wisps of evidence, including first-hand materials collected during her own residence in Iraq, Wiley does an admirable job of tracing the fundamentalist activities of Iraq's silent Shi'i majority. She shows that the Islamic Call Party came into existence in 1957-58, some two decades before Iran's revolution, and developed as an indigenous institution. The party was largely the brainchild of Muhammad Baqir as-Sadr (1931-80), Iraq's leading Shi'i scholar and organizer, whose career strikingly paralleled that of his cousin Musa as-Sadr in Lebanon.

Despite intermittent state violence against it, the party adhered to nonviolent methods until forced by Saddam Husayn's brutality to abandon these in 1979. A year or so later, the party gave up on organizing within Iraq and regrouped instead in Tehran, forming in late 1982 the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. This organization expected to set up its headquarters in Basra had Iranian forces taken that city during the Iraq-Iran. The real violence began subsequently; a conservative estimate quoted by Wiley places the number of Shi'i activists killed by Baghdad in the mid-1980s at 5-10,000.

However persecuted and weak at present, Islamic Call enjoys a powerful and enduring place among Iraqi Shi'a. Analysts who wish to jump the competition and prepare themselves for a post-Saddam Iraq must read Wiley's careful study.

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