Social Crisis and Islamist Transformation: Iraq’s Sadrism Through Bourdieu’s Homology

Abstract

Abstract This article theorizes Islamist transformations by mapping the evolution of Sadrism in contemporary Iraq through a period of state collapse, war, and political consolidation. Using Pierre Bourdieu, this perspective emphasizes how field-based crises can synchronize and amplify homological relations between the deep-lying structures which differentiate religious from political spheres of Islamist activity. The article identifies these homological processes and structures and explains how they have patterned underlying morphologies of Sadrist politics. This differs from existing literature on Islamist movements where religion has often been contextualized in terms of material social conditions, or priority ascribed to political struggles and structures and emphasis placed on surface-level symbolic practices. By contrast, a Bourdieusian lens provides a theoretically robust approach to study the relationship between religion and politics, and an evaluative framework for Islamist transformations which is less normative than some alternatives and more generalizable beyond the context of Islamism and Islam.