Abstract
For twenty-five years the Islamic Republic of Iran worked assiduously to export the Islamic revolution to Iraq via the Iraqi Shi‘i population, but to no avail. Ironically, it was in the final analysis a foreign Christian power, the United States, which triggered, maybe inadvertently, such a revolution in the aftermath of the 2003 Gulf War. However, the Iraqi revolution differed from the Iranian one in many respects: it was carried out from without, not from within; it did not have one accepted Iraqi charismatic leader, such as Khomeini, and it was not spontaneous. The results were, nonetheless, revolutionary in the sense that Islamic political movements came to reign in Iraq and that the Shi‘is ascended to power for the first time since the establishment of modern Iraq in 1920.
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Notes
Samir Khalil, Republic of Fear (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990).
Hasan al-‘Alawi, Al-Shi‘a wal-Dawla al-Qawmiyya fi al-‘Iraq 1914–1990 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990). This was the second print of the book.
Salim Matar, Al-Dhat al-Jariha (Beirut: Al-Mu’assasa Al-‘Arabiyya lil-Dirasat Wal-Nashr, 1997).
Graham Fuller and Rend Rahim Francke, The Arab Shi‘a: The Forgotten Muslims (London: Palgrave, 1999).
Graham Fuller and Rend Rahim Francke, The Arab Shi‘a: The Forgotten Muslims (London: Palgrave Press, 2001), pp. 4–5.
Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), p. 17.
See Ofra Bengio, Saddams Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 98–108; 139–145.
Fredrik Barth, “Introduction,” in Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969), pp. 277–88. Martin Van Bruinessen develops Barth‘s thesis with regard to the Kurds, “Kurdish Paths to Nation,” in Faleh A. Jabar and Hosham Dawod (eds.), The Kurds (London: Saqi, 2006), pp. 21–49.
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© 2011 Ofra Bengio and Meir Litvak
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Bengio, O. (2011). Quietists Turned Activists: the Shi‘i Revolution in Iraq. In: Bengio, O., Litvak, M. (eds) The Sunna and Shi’a in History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137495068_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137495068_8
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