ABSTRACT
The state’s religious propaganda campaign during the 1980s had a tremendous impact on all religious establishments, including mosques, shrines, and Sufi takāyā in Iraq. With the start of the Iran–Iraq War, the regime further expanded and increased its mechanisms of control against independent religious establishments in parallel with its inauguration of a huge construction and restoration campaign for religious institutions all over Iraq. Despite the devastating war and the still growing state repression, the regime’s religious policies led to an unprecedented architectural renaissance of the country’s Islamic and particularly its Sufi heritage after decades of ongoing decay and neglect. Sufi orders received strong support from the regime in the form of a lavish sponsorship of mosques and shrines across the country. In particular, one homegrown Kurdish Sufi order, which has not yet received scholarly attention, the Kasnazāniyya, relocated its spiritual center to the capital in 1982, a move that marked this order’s unparalleled growth as the most successful Sufi order in Iraq. During the war years, Baghdad in this way turned into a safe haven for Sufis from the whole region, with the regime hosting leading Sufi shaykhs who had fled political persecution in Iran or Syria.
