Often overlooked – and under-studied – in favour of a focus on elite competition, the Sadrist base has an impact on Sadrist politics, by way of a ‘bottom-up’ dynamic. Thus, to build an understanding of Sadr it is necessary not only to analyse his political motivations, statements, and tactical moves vis-à-vis other elite actors, but also to study his primary audience – the millions of poor urban Iraqis who comprise his core support. The survey commissioned by Chatham House generates new insights into the movement’s social base.
As the Sadrist base has grown in strength, it has become one of the largest Islamist movements in the Middle East. Its considerable mobilization potential, together with the apparent flexibility of its leaders, has proven attractive to actors of many different types, each of which has sought unsuccessfully to co-opt the movement’s social power for its own purposes. However, such attempts have backfired on every occasion, and the Sadrist movement has been able to maintain its own agenda at the expense of that of its allies.
In part, the reason lies in misreadings of the Sadrist base. For example, between 2015 and 2018 sections of Iraq’s leftist and liberal elites sought to join forces with the Sadrists. These groups hoped to use the Sadrists’ electoral base to break into the political system and advance their own reform agenda. They also believed that they could influence the Sadrist base and shift its ideological orientation towards their own. More recently, US policymakers believed that the base’s ‘Iraq-first’, nationalist tendencies could be weaponized against Iran. Meanwhile, the Iranian government itself has deployed military and financial muscle to try and co-opt Sadrist networks to serve its own ends.
However, in most cases, those who have tried to make use of the Sadrist base have ended up becoming instruments of Sadrist power. Iranian actors (notably the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – IRGC) have had more success than most, but even the IRGC failed to make inroads into the core Sadrist supporter base, succeeding only in co-opting networks within the movement’s clerical and paramilitary strata.
Religion and politics: trust and agents of change
The survey conducted by Chatham House among inhabitants of Sadr City in June 2022 revealed that Sadrists hold diverse views on the relationship between religion and politics. This complexity cannot be easily captured in terms of simple binaries such as Islamist/secular or support for an Islamic vs a madani (civic) state. Moreover, this diversity has a generational aspect. Perhaps surprisingly, Sadrists aged under 45 years demonstrated relatively more faith than older generations in religious leaders’ ability to achieve political change (see Figure 3a, below). Similarly, younger respondents showed greater inclination towards some positions associated with stronger religious and Islamist tendencies (see Figures 3c to 3e). This has important implications, not only for the nature of Sadrist politics in general and the ways in which Sadrist leaders will seek to appeal to the movement’s base, but also for those in the madani and Tishreeni camps who seek to compete for leadership within the Sadrist base, or at its fringes.
Religious leaders were identified as the most trusted agents of political change by 36 per cent of all respondents, compared with 30 per cent and 28 per cent for new political parties and conventional political parties respectively (see Figure 3a). This figure may seem low, but it is significant given that Sadrist clerics play no role in formal politics (i.e. they are not party leaders, politicians, ministers or prime ministers). It is this absence from the formal political sphere that lends Sadrist clerics an edge in credibility with the base when it comes to political leadership. Ordinary Sadrists typically interact with the movement’s clerics within everyday non-political contexts. Consequently, they are not as tainted by political governance failures notwithstanding the Sadrists’ deep systemic involvement as a governing party.
By contrast, as shown in Figure 4, trust in political institutions (the Council of Ministers – as the Iraqi cabinet is known – or the parliament – the Council of Representatives) is extremely low, with 49 per cent and 54 per cent of all respondents claiming to have ‘absolutely no trust’ in these respective institutions. When those reporting ‘limited trust’ are added in, this means that the Council of Ministers and Council of Representatives were distrusted by 72 per cent and 75 per cent of all respondents respectively. This leaves religious leadership, civil society institutions (mainly mediated through the Sadrists’ religious networks), and the Iraqi security forces (excluding the PMF) as the main repositories of trust, among those institutions upon which respondents were asked to give their views.
A different pattern was observed, however, in the case of respondents aged 45 years and over, who favoured conventional political parties as most capable of realizing political change, over religious leaders and new political parties. (Figure 3a gives the respective preferences as 55 per cent, 30 per cent and 15 per cent of responses in this age group.) Variation in views across the age groups was highly apparent in responses to the survey questions on levels of trust in political institutions (Figure 4), where levels of distrust were highest among the youngest respondents, aged under 25 years. Lower levels of trust in the political institutions seem broadly to correlate with higher levels of trust in religious leadership.
