Browsing: Muqtada al-Sadr

“Sadr has managed to build and protect his religious power by maintaining a plurality of religious associations, benefiting from the legitimation of senior clerics while ensuring no single religious authority can rival his own within the Sadrist movement.

“Understanding Sadr’s authority primarily in religious, rather than political, terms can help here. The Sadrist base is not bound to its leader merely by transactional exchanges for material benefits, or by rationalist calculations about political utility or particular ideologies.”