ABSTRACT
Given the harsh brutality of Saddam Hussein’s political career I could never have anticipated a certain measure of sympathy for the man at the end of his life. It was not only the unseemliness of executing a Muslim leader in the midst of the annual hajj pilgrimages, but the perverse insensitivity of hanging Saddam Hussein at the start of Eid al-Adha for those of Sunni persuasion. The Eid holiday, the holiest of Islamic sacred observances, is revered by devout Muslims as a solemn moment of sacrifice and forgiveness, as well as the end of the Muslim pilgrimage at Mecca. The toxic sectarian element was injected by the fact that for Sunnis Eid began at dawn on the morning that Saddam Hussein was executed, while for Shia the four-day holiday does not begin until the following day. It was on this basis that the Iraqi leadership in Baghdad secured the approval of the Shiite clerics in Najaf to go ahead with the execution, after which the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, signed the final execution order only six hours before the hanging took place.
