ABSTRACT
In the Islamic world did the success of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran have an immediate and profound impact as among the Shi’a of Iraq. According to the various radical Shi’i opposition organizations, and judging by the extreme reactions of the Ba’th regime, it galvanized large segments of the Shi’i population of Iraq and posed a significant threat to the regime’s stability, or so it seemed to the regime at the time. But just over a year later, the regime was still very much there, while the radical Shi’i opposition was a shambles. The decline of religious Shi’i life in Iraq since the 1940s is well-known today. As long as Abd al-Karim Qasim was in power, an important feature of the modus operandi of the Da’wa Islamic Party and of Hakim was that for all their relentless struggle against the Communist party, they kept a line open in the direction of Qasim.
