Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq [Hardcover]

The London Independent's Patrick Cockburn is simply the most important and well-informed journalist working in Iraq today. His new book Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq is crucial to understanding the new political dynamic governing today's Iraq in the aftermath of the US invasion of 2003, and the implications for Iraq's future of the newly empowered and hitherto repressed majority of the Iraq population, the Shi'a. The book's crescendo details the socio-political conditions and day-to-day events on the ground, which gave rise to the young and stern looking cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Sadrist movement's entry into the US-led coalition's sights. If you're looking for a biography of the elusive al-Sadr then you'll be disappointed, since Muqtada's personality, intentions as well as documentation of the man's rapid learning curve and steadily sharpened political instincts from the beginnings of the occupation aren't substantively addressed until two thirds into the book. This is my sole criticism since on the basis of the title alone some readers could find themselves disappointed. One can't really blame Cockburn since gaining access to Muqtada himself, extensive primary source material on his upbringing, his personal opinions and sentiments is at the present time a near impossible feat. With the materials Cockburn does have at his disposal he paints a compelling and vivid picture of Muqtada and his Sadrist forbears.

The book extensively covers documents Muqtada's pre-history, and to that end contains illuminating chapters on the Iran-Iraq War, the world-views of the Sadrists' spiritual father and leading intellectual figure, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, and Muqtada's father, Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr's successor as leader to the Sadrist movement. Both were fated to be executed by Saddam Hussein. Cockburn argues that the dispossessed and impoverished Shi'a of Iraq can't simply be dismissed and pawned off as mere emissaries of Iran. He examines Muqtada's family and personal history in depth and maps out the roots of his larger constituency and its development into a mass movement, whose ideological outlook comprises Iraqi nationalism, anti-colonialism and radical Shi'ism, posing a direct challenge to Iraq's traditionally quietist clerical establishment. The Sadrists from their inception have been sympathetic to Khomeinist doctrine and the latter's notion of velayat-e-faqih, or rule of the jurist-consult, which has deprived a great many, both inside and outside of Iraq of sleep. He also provides a trenchant assessment of Muqtada's ruthless pragmatism and great political acumen, evident merely in virtue of the fact that he has managed to survive in Iraq's turbulent political climate thus far, but also his links to the brutal slaying of his perceived rival, Abdul Majid al-Khoei, son of the late Grand Ayatollah Abul-Qassim Khoei.

Unlike important scholarly works such as Faleh A. Jabar's The Shi'ite Movement in Iraq and Yitzhak Nakash's The Shi'is of Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq is written with Cockburn's typical flair and verve and is near impossible to put down once you've started reading. If you've read Cockburn's earlier book which chronicles the vicissitudes of Iraq's political scene post-Operation Iraqi Freedom (yeah, right), The Occupation, then you know what I'm talking about. Cockburn has provided us with a compelling account of contemporary Iraq and the ascendance of a new political force in the form of Muqtada and the underbelly of the forsaken and forgotten members of Iraq's Shi'a community. He has achieved an incredible feat journalism at great personal risk, which renders his efforts praiseworthy in themselves. He has performed an immense service to anyone who wishes to get their hands on an accurate depiction of the catastrophe that has befallen Iraq and its people making, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq, a depressing and yet necessary breath of fresh air if there ever was one.

Patrick Cockburn's friend and colleague Robert Fisk once wrote that he saw journalism as `writing the first draft of history'. On the sleeve of Cockburn's latest book on Iraq it states that `this is the first book about Muqtada al-Sadr, the most important political figure in post-occupation Iraq'. The question that arises is did Cockburn have enough material to write a biography of al-Sadr? Or did the gap in knowledge and frenzy in politics surrounding the Iraqi cleric prompt the publishers into pushing Cockburn into writing a first draft instead?

Reading the book one discovers that it is indeed the later. But Cockburn knows Iraq well enough to write a decent background account of the rise of Shia in Iraq that will appeal to those who are unsatisfied with the US official rendering of Muqtada as little more than a renegade. It reads as a coherent narrative heavily laced with journalistic anecdotal evidence to provide a very readable background to one of the `new Iraq's' new politician's.

The difficulty is access to Muqtada himself. Cockburn's experience in the first chapter, where he just manages to avoid death at the hands of the Sadrists, highlights the danger in getting close to him. So despite reading an entire book nominally about him, the reader is still left wondering who the man behind the evolving myth actually is.

Cockburn covers a lot of ground very quickly in the book. He starts with a twelve page introduction to `the Shi'a of Iraq' and races on through the Iran-Iraq War, the subsequent Shia uprising and the various trials and tribulations of Muqtada's family as they walk the deadly tightrope of the Saddam era. The cornerstone of Cockburn's book is to connect the history of the Shia with its relevance today - which is an implicit critique of those who would enter Iraq from an ahistorical perspective. At one point he explains how post-invasion the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani banned chess. Why? because `Yazid was playing chess in his palace in Damascus when the head of Imam Hussein was brought to him' (p.26).

The key focus is on the rise of Muqtada. Cockburn explains his emergence as the response to a vacuum created by an ill-conceived and unimaginative US invasion. The collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime and the inability of the US to replace it allowed the Shia clergy and its mosques, repressed for so long under Saddam, to spring up and take control of vast swathes of local politics. It was the failures of the invasion plan, combined with earlier failures in the West's policy towards Iraq, that set the scene for an environment into which Muqtada would emerge. Cockburn cites the mass impoverishment of Iraqis as an essential precondition for the `swift rise of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr in the early 1990s and his son Muqtada after 2003' (p.107).

Cockburn's short chapters covering lengthy historical events argue that Muqtada was a natural and predictable consequence of the fall of Iraq. The US occupation of Iraq and the initial top-down `Coalition Provisional Authority' (CPA) run by Paul Bremer, could never accept this existence of a contesting authority figure. That Sadr's support was based on a grassroots legitimacy born from the split blood of his own family clashed with CPA's bunkered Green Zone mentality that somehow Washington staffers could build the new Iraq as they liked.

Cockburn is correct when he points out that "the Shia were not, after all, trying to break up Iraq, but get their fair share of power within it" (p.82). Ironically, considering that America considered Iraq's sovereign unity a matter of critical importance, the CPA supported the Iranian backed SCIRI and exiled based Dawa party over a homegrown Sadrist alliance. Muqtada even harnessed what was left of battered Iraqi nationalism and in 2005 offered support to the besieged insurgents in Fallujah.

There is little doubt about the importance of Muqtada al Sadr in the deeply fragmented political landscape of modern Iraq. Cockburn's work is a testimony to this importance, yet you feel that much more will and can be written on one of Iraq's most elusive figures.

James Denselow is a doctoral candidate researching Iraqi Geopolitics at Kings College London