Baghdad, Iraq – A mosque pulled down by tractors, angry protesters setting buildings on fire, and police arrests: despite their relatively small-scale, recent events across a few cities in Iraq were enough to startle the country over the last month, and all were linked to a controversial Muslim scholar – Mahmoud al-Sarkhi.
The trigger in the latest round of what has become an increasingly tense intra-Shia leaders’ dispute was an otherwise uneventful Friday sermon in early April, when Ali Masoudi, a representative of al-Sarkhi, who is a former student of the late prominent Shia scholar Mohammad Sadiq al-Sadr, demanded the demolition of shrines, or graves of Shia imams, across Iraq.
