Abstract This essay considers insurgent mobilizations against British and Ottoman rule in southern Iraq during World War I, along with conflicts and disjunctures within these mobilizations. Departing from analyses that read acts of resistance as codes for identity or as historicizing markers of agents’ location in time, the author follows archival marks left by heterogeneous forms of life—institutions, laws, discursive traditions—that bound members of communities to sometimes conflicting obligations in a time of precarity, occupation, and war. The essay also shows how the failure of these mobilizations led to constitutions of new kinds of community—including by actors invoking a modern constitutionalist tradition outside any direct relation to a state—without providing any justifiable cause for a redemption narrative. Drawing mainly from the writings of one actor in these events, a mid-level Shiʿi religious scholar named Hibat al-Din al-Shahrastani, the article considers local and irregular (non-state) participation in the 1914 Ottoman call for jihad against the British invasion; the “time of fitna,” or a series of anti-Ottoman rebellions in the Shiʿi shrine cities that disobeyed the guidance of religious authorities; and a failed 1918 uprising in Najaf against the British occupation.
Sara Pursley (2026) studied this question.