There has been some very original work done by Iraq scholars recently and Patel David Sidhartha’s Order Out Of Chaos, Islam, Information, And The Rise And Fall Of Social Order In Iraq can be counted as one of them. Patel spent time in Basra City in 2003-04 and 2011 doing research and interviews with locals. He wanted to explain how social order was created in Iraq immediately after the invasion when the government collapsed and the Coalition was barely present. He argues that mosques run by Ayatollah Sistani and Moqtada al-Sadr were able to form community out of their followers where one had not existed before.
The book is based upon a thesis so it follows the standard academic organization. It starts with going over the literature on the subject, a review of the research, its findings and then tries to tie it to theory.
One interesting point that Patel found was that while there was a revival of religion in Iraq during the 1990s mosques and clerics were not looked towards as leaders. That position was held by the Baathist state and Saddam. Not only that Patel didn’t even find evidence of community before 2003 in Basra. The government had atomized society so much that people did not trust each other for fear that they were informers.
The author argues that the reason why mosques were able to step into this vacuum after the fall of the regime was that they were able to create common knowledge amongst their followers. Sistani and Sadr had their clerics repeat similar messages across Basra and other parts of Iraq. Their parishioners knew that other people had received the same message every Friday. When these networks began calling for people to set up community garbage clean ups when waste had been building up on the streets because there was no government services anymore people began to comply. These were low risk calls to action which people benefited from.
There were limits to this influence however. Patel goes into several examples of how Ayatollah Sistani made calls that his followers ignored. In 2003 he told people to not kill Baathists, in 2006 he implored his followers not to carry out revenge killings of Sunnis when a famed mosque was bombed by Al Qaeda in Iraq, in 2014 he told able bodied men to join the Iraqi Security forces to fight the Islamic State, and in 2019 he called on the security forces to halt violence against protesters. All of these were ignored. That’s because to follow them would have cost people one way or the other more than they were willing to pay. After the 2006 bombing for instance there was widespread anger and Iraqis were not going to stand up to the militias and try to stop them from attacking Sunnis. Sadr on the other hand quickly turned to coercion with his Mahdi Army to make his followers comply with his orders.
In comparison Sunnis had no hierarchical system to turn to after 2003. Sunni clerics and mosques were not organized like Shiite ones into networks and they had been much more controlled by the state under Saddam as well. That left Sunnis rudderless after the invasion which proved to be a dramatic detriment to them socially and politically as they were not able to organize and unify like other ethnosectarian groups.
Order Out Of Chaos breaks new ground on how Iraqis were able to create community after 2003. With the state having collapsed and the Coalition largely non-existent in Basra City, Iraqis found their local mosques as a place where they could meet and find leadership. The book adds to and also breaks with conventional wisdom about how important religion was for Iraqis during this period. It’s well written and easy to comprehend not getting lost in theory or statistical correlations as some theses can be. It’s another important piece in trying to understand what happened to Iraqis after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Link to all of Musings On Iraq’s book reviews listed by topic
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