Iraq

Just who is this maverick cleric?

BAGHDAD, Iraq - His religious credentials are substandard. His youth denies him the reverence accorded older clerics. His political vision for Iraq is unclear.

Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr lacks the attributes of a serious religious leader. Still, over the past six months he has used his lineage and a shrewd blend of street politics and fiery rhetoric to grab the limelight as Iraq's loudest voice against U.S. occupation and a symbol of Shiite Muslim empowerment.

Al-Sadr followers clashed last week with the U.S. military in Baghdad's Sadr City, a 2-million-resident slum and Iraq's largest Shiite enclave, where the young cleric holds sway. Sadr's newly founded militia, Imam al-Mahdi Army, challenges a U.S. military ban on carrying arms in public without a license.

The cleric's rise began with the April fall of Saddam Hussein, when his followers swiftly filled the leadership void in Shiite areas, restoring services and providing medical and financial assistance during the period of lawlessness and chaos.

The work resonated in a community smarting from 23 years of Hussein's tyranny and centuries of domination by a Sunni Muslim minority.

Six months later, Sadr's movement appears to have taken shape as a radical fringe group. Any appeal he had in the larger Shiite community is dissipating.

His movement, according to experts, has failed to attract secular-minded Shiites or the millions of pious Shiites who find the moderation of older and more-established clerics a reassuring proposition compared to the radical politics of the inexperienced Sadr.

These realities leave the 30-year-old cleric with support largely among the young and mostly unemployed residents of Sadr City and other Shiite-dominated areas in southern Iraq. More educated and professional Shiites - after decades of wars, internal turmoil and economic hardships - might be seeking a reprieve and a more comfortable, or a quieter, life.

Beyond his militant rhetoric, Sadr might have failed to recruit more widely because of his muddled ideology, coupled with his lack of religious pedigree.

Since the overthrow of Hussein, the young cleric has variously denied having any political ambitions. On the one hand, he's called for an Islamic government, while on the other, urged a strictly supervisory role for clerics and an administration under al-Hawza al-Ilmiyah, the Shiite seat of learning in the holy city of Najaf.

Sadr is the son of Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, a prominent and widely respected religious leader killed in 1999 by suspected Hussein agents. The father, however, did not anoint the son as his successor, handing that mantle to Kazim al-Haeri, a senior cleric who has been living in exile in Iran for more than 20 years.

Sadr says he serves as Haeri's deputy in Iraq, but many of his critics say he does not want the more senior cleric to return to Iraq and take over the movement.

Sadr has deliberately avoided calling on his followers to take up arms against the Americans, something that would provide legal grounds for his arrest. But Iraqi and U.S. investigators pursued leads in the summer linking his group to the April murder in Najaf of a senior Shiite cleric.

Sadr's movement, however, is losing ground in some areas. Its self-styled local councils in parts of Iraq are being pushed aside by rival, U.S.-backed councils - including the one in Sadr City, once called "Saddam City" but renamed after Sadr's father.

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