Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq

Whatever else the United States intended when it invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003, it was not to hand the country over to a 32-year-old militant cleric who fought against their presence from the start and whom former Iraqi administrator L. Paul Bremer III described as a "Bolshevik Islamist." Yet, as the occupation steadily disintegrates, the likelihood grows ever stronger that Muqtada al-Sadr, the black-turbaned leader of Iraq's poor Shiites, will take power when the Americans finally lea...