ABSTRACT
The Conclusion discusses how my findings make the puzzle of the Baʿthist Sufi insurgency group after 2003 more comprehensible. It is the latest expression in a long history of the Baʿth regime’s gradual incorporation of Sufism and the Sufis into its policies and its strong personal entanglement with Sufi circles. Previous scholarship has neglected the importance of several leading regime members other than Ṣaddām Ḥusayn and their personal entanglement with local Sufi Islam. In the course of its rule, the Baʿth regime did neither fully give up its secular principles and surrender to Islamism nor did it continuously promote the original abstract Baʿthist ideological understanding of Islam. Threatened by the growing Shīʿī and Sunnī Islamist challenges in Iraq, the state turned to the given local Sufi traditions that were familiar to many Baʿth leaders in order to establish an ecumenical and “moderate Islam” as a counterbalance to political Islam. The case of the Iraqi Baʿth regime must be seen as part of a larger political phenomenon in the Middle East and North Africa to search for a “moderate Islam” in response to the general Islamic resurgence in the second half of the twentieth century.
