Islamic Dawa Party - History

History

Al-Dawa was formed in 1957 by a group of Shi'ite leaders including Mohammed Salih Al-Adeeb, Sayid Murtadha Alaskary, Abdul Sahib Dukheil, Sayid Mohammed Mahdi Al-Hakim, Sayid Mohammed Baqir Al-Hakim, Mohammed Sadiq Al-Qamoosee and Sayid Talib Al-Rafa’ee. Their aim was to create a party and a movement which would promote Islamic values and ethics, political awareness, combat secularism, and create an Islamic state in Iraq. This came at a time when politics in Iraq was dominated by secularist Arab nationalist and socialist ideas. Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr – who was widely recognised as a leading philosopher, theologian, and political theorist – quickly emerged as the leading member. It was he who laid out the foundations for the party and its political ideology, based on Wilayat Al-Umma (Governance of the people). A "twin" Islamic Dawa Party was also founded in Lebanon by clerics who had studied in Najaf and supported Muhammad Baqr al-Sadr's vision of a resurgent Islam.

Al-Dawa gained strength in the 1970s recruiting from among the Shia ulama and youth. It waged an armed insurgency against the Iraqi government which initiated a crackdown on Shi'a political activism, driven in part by the secular nature of the Ba'thist ideology and in part by their view of a politicized Shi'a as a threat to the stability of the regime. During the 1970s, the government shutdown the Shi'a journal Risalat al-Islam and closed several religious educational institutions. The government passed a law obligating Iraqi students of the hawza to undertake national military service. The Ba'thists then began specifically targeting al-Da'wa members, arresting and imprisoning them from 1972 onwards. In 1973, someone killed the alleged head of al-Da'wa's Baghdad branch in prison. In 1974, 75 al-Da'wa members were arrested and sentenced to death by the Ba'thist revolutionary court. In 1975, the government canceled the annual procession from Najaf to Karbala, known as marad al-ras. Although subject to repressive measures throughout the 1970s, large-scale opposition to the government by al-Da'wa goes back to the Safar Intifada of February 1977. Despite the government's ban on the celebration of marad al-ras, al-Da'wa organized the procession in 1977. They were subsequently attacked by police. After this period it also interacted with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the future spiritual leader of Iran, during his exile in Najaf in Iraq.