State and Sufism in Iraq: Building a "Moderate Islam" Under Saddam Husayn : Routledge : 9781032118208 : 1032118202 : 31 Dec 2021 : State and Sufism in Iraq is the first comprehensive study of the Iraqi Ba?th regime's (r. 1968?2003) entanglement with Sufis and of Sunni Sufi Islam in Iraq from the late Ottoman period until 2003 and beyond. For far too long, the secular and authoritarian Ba?th regime has been reduced to the dictator Saddam Husayn and portrayed as antireligious. Its growing political employment of Islam during the 1990s, in turn, has been interpreted either as an abstract Ba?thist-nationalist Islam or as an ideological U-turn from secularism to a form of Islamism that ultimately contributed to the spread of Islamist terrorism after 2003. Broadening the narrow focus on Saddam Husayn, this book analyses other leading regime figures, their close entanglement with Sufis, and Ba?th religious politics of a state-sponsored revival of Sufi Islam and Iraq's broad and distinct Sufi