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

Abstract

In 2010 two US-held archives of the Iraqi Ba th regime were open to researchers The Ba th 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 Ba thi Iraq This article reviews mainly those books through one lens state-mosque including regime-Shi a relations in Ba thi 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 Either way the Alladin Cave of the archives brought three of the seven to regard the regime s open media on which their predecessors base their conclusions as deceptive In other words they believe that the regime had at the same time a false public and a true secret ideology The archives convinced one of the seven also that regime-Shi a relations were substantially better than what his pre-archives predecessors described This article argues first that there is truth and deception in both types of sources The challenge is to tell truthfulness from deceit Second the high value of the archives notwithstanding it is the regime s public media that should be the historian s main source for regime ideology Third some contradictions that three of the seven scholas found between the archives and the regime s public media are no contradictions others are not changing the big picture This article s conclusion is therefore that the old views that in the 1990s Saddam did perform an ideological U-turn and that regime-Shi a relations were extremely difficult are correct Namely that the archives do not change the big picture