The BaTh Archives – The End of Histories of Dictatorships Revisiting State-Mosque Relations in BaTh 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: state-mosque, 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”. 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.