ABSTRACT
With the rise of the Arab Socialist Baʿth Party in 1968, the process of Sufism’s decline and stagnation largely continued due to the regime’s early conflict with an Islamist opposition and the nationalization of Islam. Chapter 2 portrays the early Baʿth regime’s consolidation of power during the first decade of its rule in the light of its religious policies. Striving to nationalize, bureaucratize, and control Iraq’s religious landscape, the regime soon clashed with Sunnī and Shīʿī Islamist circles and its violent repression of the religious opposition significantly affected non-Sufis and Sufis alike. Over the following years, the regime publicly marginalized religious scholars and shaykhs, reestablished a Ministry of Religious Endowments in order to gain control of mosques and shrines, turned religious employees into civil servants, and Baʿthized religious education. Scholarship has associated this attempt to gain authority over religion almost entirely with the era of Ṣaddām Ḥusayn (1979–2003) but failed to analyze it as a continuous process that began already in 1968.
