The BaʿTh Archives - The End of Histories of Dictatorships? Revisiting State-Mosque Relations in BaʿTh Ideology as a Test Case

In 2010, two US-held archives of the Iraqi Baʿth regime were open to researchers: The Baʿth Regional Command Collection (BRCC) at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) at the National Defense University. By late 2024 seven books, a few Ph.D. dissertations, and a few articles, largely or mainly based on those archives, came out. All seven books are very valuable, each making an important contribution to our understanding of Baʿthi Iraq. This article reviews mainly those books through one lens: statemosque, including regime-Shi’a relations in Baʿthi ideology and practice. As part of this review, this article re-visits the party’s rhetorical and operational ideology on state-mosque relations between its inception in the 1940s and its demise in 2003. Before the archives became accessible to researchers, most historians of Iraq defined Saddam’s Islamization “Faith Campaign” (1993-2003) as an ideological shift if not metamorphosis from secularism to Islam. Four, arguably five of the seven historians reviewed here believe that the archival information refutes this conclusion. Two of them see six decades of continuous, unbroken enmity to Islam, while three others see continuous, unbroken “deep love for Islam”.