Sayyid Muhammad Baqir Sadr’s Agentive Action in the Structure Originated from Iraq’s Ba‘th Party

The political-social evolutions in societies have always been under the influence of the relationship between the ‘agent’ and the ‘structure’. If the agent’s agendum preserves the status quo, the structure survives and experiences less internal challenges. But if the agent pursues a change in the status quo, the governing structure faces serious crises and internal tensions. In the present study, Ba‘th party of Iraq is considered as a ‘structure’ and the great religious authorities in those days have been displayed as ‘agents’ in relation to that party. Accordingly, we have tried to investigate the political action of Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Baqir Sadr as an agent who pursued a change in the status quo with a (comparative) glimpse at Ayatollah Khoui’s approach, who chose to preserve the status quo in Iraq under the ruling of Ba‘th Party as his strategy. In this article, we have used an analytical method to analyze the structure of the agency under the authority of Muhammad Baqir Sadr and his relation to the power structure. To do so, we first explore his mentality and his theoretical and jurisprudential foundations regarding the Shiite paradigm in the Occultation Period, and investigate some of the indices of his political thought. Then, to clarify his temporal context and background, we will study the effects of those evolutions on his mentality as an agent. Naturally, the success of the Iranian Islamic revolution had a tremendous effect on that agent’s thought. Then, we will refer to the traditional structures governing the institution of religious authority in Najaf and its priorities to clarify his differences from other contemporary agents. Among them, we may mention Ayatollah Hakim and Ayatollah Khoui, each of whom had a different model and priority in facing with the official structure of power and Ba‘th Party. In the end, we will show that Sadr’s desirable model, as an agent, was total confrontation with that structure and moving towards its total abolition, and that he used all the social assets of the religious institution for that purpose. This was while other agents were pursuing interactions with the official structure and preserving Najaf seminary as their priority.