In Iraq, the sense of apocalypse was closer to home as
chaos followed the American invasion of 2003. The
radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr could not have chosen a
more powerfully emotive name for his Mahdi Army. The
name itself is a call to action that goes far beyond
Muqtada’s declared aims of freeing Iraq from American
occupation and battling Sunni extremism, and he made
this crystal clear when he announced the formation of
the social and political wing of his movement in 2008. It
was to be called Mumahdiun, “those who prepare the
way for the Mahdi.”
But if faith can be used as a way to channel hope for
the future, it can also be used against that hope. That
was what happened in February 2006, when somebody
—most likely the extremist Sunni group Al Qaida in Iraq
—placed explosives throughout the Askariya Mosque in
Samarra. The magniɹcent golden dome collapsed,
setting oʃ a vicious cycle of Shia reprisals and Sunni
counterreprisals just when it seemed that the civil war
was ɹnally calming down—a cycle made yet worse
when the two gold minarets that had survived the ɹrst
bombing were blown up and destroyed the following
year.
Al Qaida in Iraq could not have made a stronger
statement. No Shia missed the signiɹcance of this
wholesale destruction, for the Askariya Mosque
contained not only the tombs of the tenth and eleventh
Imams but also the shrine built over Bir al-Ghayba—the