The Ideological Transformation of the Da'wa Party

• In Event: The Future of Political Islam: Behavior and Ideology

Abstract

This project explores the ideological transformation of the Islamic Daʿwa Party. Daʿwa is one of the oldest Islamist parties in the Middle East and the oldest Shiʿa Political Party. Despite years of persecution under the Baathist regime, it has endured for six decades and occupied the highest government posts in democratizing Iraq. At the time of its inception by a group of Shiʿa clerics in 1958, Hizb Al-Daʿwa was influenced by Sunni Islamists like Sayyed Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood. Its pan-Islamist, anti-communist views rendered it non-sectarian and yet, six decades later, Hizb Al-Daʿwa is considered to be one of the causes of Iraq’s sectarian woes. How did Al-Daʿwa’s ideology disintegrate so much from its original basis and what factors led to this transformation over time?

To answer this question, I draw upon internal Daʿwa documents, academic histories of the party, biographies of its key figures as well as interviews with current and former members at the elite and local levels (conducted in Iraq, the US and the UK). I use this data to test pre-existing social scientific theories – like the inclusion moderation hypothesis – on an understudied yet extremely important Islamist party.

Author

• Marsin Rahim Alshamary, Harvard Kennedy School