Samuel Helftont’s new book, Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq, advances our understanding of the connections between religious policy under the Ba’athists and the insurgencies that engulfed the country since the US invasion in 2003. For scholars of religion and politics, the work provides a case study of a unique combination of strategies embraced by an authoritarian ruler to control and ultimately transform the religious landscape. For scholars of authoritarianism, the work is rich. Helfont effectively argues that what sometimes appears to be policy shifts are actually not changes but rather are the result of new possibilities opened up by authoritarian consolidation, an idea worthy of more systematic treatment by other scholars. Bringing these two streams together, Helfont illustrates the catastrophic consequences of the abrupt removal of an authoritarian regime that had a carefully constructed bureaucracy to control religion. It is thus an important work for a broad range of scholars in the discipline.

The book’s 11 short chapters make for a quick-paced and pleasant read. Part I analyzes Saddam’s penetration of the Iraqi religious landscape, Part II examines how that landscape was then used to defend state actions during the Gulf Crisis, and Part III examines Saddam’s Faith Campaign, the regime’s most explicit statement of its religious policy, which lasted from the end of the Gulf War until the regime’s removal in 2003. Part IV analyzes how the abrupt removal of institutions constructed to constrain religious actors facilitated the rise of insurgent groups after the US invasion.

The primary source materials for the work are documents from the Ba’athist archives, which are currently housed at Stanford University. Although this book is exceptional in its sources and analysis, it is not a work of political science. It is therefore only weakly engaged with the most important literature and debates of the three fields to which it is most relevant for political scientists: comparative politics, religion and politics, and Middle East politics. Nevertheless, the importance of this case geopolitically and the Ba’athists’ unique approach to managing religion warrant broad scholarly engagement with the text.

Despite its distance from the political science literature per se, Compulsion in Religion is theoretically timely. Scholarship on religion and politics in the Middle East has already illustrated how the various arrangements of the state’s institutionalization of religion shape the religious landscape and religious opposition in particular countries (see, for example, the work of Stéphane LaCroix on Saudi Arabia, Thomas Pierret on Syria, and my own work on Morocco). Helfont steps into this conversation effectively if not self-consciously. In fact, the work does not engage explicitly with any of the major works of religion and politics with which it has the most in common theoretically, limiting the discursive impact of what otherwise could have been a truly landmark work in the study of religion and authoritarianism. Nevertheless, for scholars willing to go searching for the theoretical insights peppered throughout the work, the treasure hunt yields results.

Helfont’s work effectively expands on the insights of other scholars. In Syria under Hafez al-Asad, the absence of a state-supported clerical establishment meant that clerics did not have to choose whether to align with the regime, as they do in many other Muslim countries. Rather, they factionalized with “varying degrees of proximity to the state” (Thomas Pierret, Religion and State in Syria: The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution, 2013, p. 20). The regime thus “subcontracted” with loyal clerics, who remained technically independent of state structures. In Morocco, by contrast, the state’s virtual monopoly on religious institutions has resulted in an incentive structure that encourages religious elites to align with (and be employed by) the state (Ann Wainscott, Bureaucratizing Islam: Morocco and the War on Terror, 2017). In Saudi Arabia, the bureaucratization of religious elites did not necessarily lead to co-optation, as it has in Morocco, because political authorities had strong incentives to respect the autonomy of the religious field, thereby discouraging the involvement of religious actors in the political field (Stéphane LaCroix. Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia, 2011). And even when loyal clerics were put in positions of authority, they did not necessarily function as expected. For example, senior Saudi functionaries did not always act to defend the state’s political interests, thereby creating spaces of freedom for a broad range of religious actors.

Helfont’s work considers both when religious elites are co-opted through bureaucratization and when they are allowed to remain independent but are called on at strategic moments to defend state interests—with an eye toward understanding how authoritarian consolidation allows for an evolution in strategy as the state increasingly dominates the religious sphere. To that end, chapter 3 identifies contextual factors—the financing of seminaries, the prestige of particular educational institutions, the nature of rituals, the structure of the religious bureaucracy, and so on—that shaped whether religious leaders were more or less easily co-opted by the regime. Once the Ba’athists were confident that they had dominated the religious field, they began to use it to deploy a religious ideology to garner support for political policies (for the basis of that ideology in the work of Michel Aflaq, see chap. 1; for institutions, see chap. 2; and for the regime’s strategy against Islamists, see chap. 4). The timing of the change is significant; it is only once the religious field is sufficiently domesticated that Saddam invades Kuwait (chap. 5) and then the regime deploys this same religious establishment to defend state actions.

Methodologically, the work makes a “critical juncture argument,” yet without the rigor of historical institutionalism. In fact, it would be an interesting work to consult in a course on methods as an example of what is lost when a methodological framework is left implicit, rather than used to systematically structure analysis. Despite these frustrations, however, the source base is strong, and Helfont consistently marshals convincing evidence of changes (and stasis) in Ba’athist policy, especially in chapter 6. The book is also a useful resource for those analyzing authoritarian archives. Helfont compares intelligence reports about religious movements over time to illustrate what Saddam’s regime knew about those groups, whom they viewed as a threat, and how those perceptions changed over time. The work makes creative use of regime documents to see when particular ideas enter regime consciousness. In chapter 7, for example, Helfont identifies the first instance (August 1990) when Wahhabi infiltration is discussed as a threat to the regime.

In sum, this work is indispensable for scholars of religion and authoritarianism as a hypothesis-generating case study and is a welcome contribution to the field of religion and politics in particular.