Jaafar al-Sadr


Jaafar Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr is an Iraqi politician with the Shiite Islamist Islamic Dawa Party.

Early life

Al-Sadr is the only son of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, an Iraqi Shia cleric who was imprisoned, tortured and then executed by the government of Saddam Hussein in 1980, after he published a defense of the Iranian Revolution. Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr is said to have been the ideological father of the Islamic Dawa Party.
Jaafar al-Sadr is the brother-in-law of Muqtada al-Sadr, who married his sister. He also has family ties to Mohammad Khatami, the former reformists President of Iran.
Al-Sadr studied in Baghdad and then Najaf, where he studied under his relative Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr. He moved to Qom, in Iran, in 1999 where he studied under Ayatollah Kazem al-Haeri; In 1998 he was arrested and his office closed down. He was put under house arrest and jailed for six months. After Iran he moved to Beirut where he obtained a degree in Sociology and Anthropology.

Political life

He returned to Iraq in 2009, six years after the invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein. Jaafar al-Sadr was elected in 2010 as a member of the Council of Representatives within Baghdad Province for the State of Law Coalition of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. He said he refused to join the Islamic Dawa Party founded by his father because he disagreed with the Islamist ideology but liked Maliki's platform of non-sectarianism and the rule of law. He said that years of studying Islam had convinced him that religion and politics don't mix and that he disagreed with his brother-in-law Muqtader al-Sadr on the use of violence to achieve political goals.
He received 28,779 personal votes in the election, the second largest number of votes on this list after the Prime Minister. Following the election, we was touted as a potential prime minister. Whilst negotiations were on-going on the formation of a new government, the Sadrists conducted a "referendum" among Sadrist supporters on who should become the Prime Minister; Jaafar came second, receiving support from 23% of the 1.2 million people who voted.
He resigned from parliament in February 2011, to protest at the deterioration in services and the system of "patronage and cronyism".
Al-Sadr was again cited as a potential Prime Minister following the 2018 election, where the list headed by his brother-in-law, Muqtada al-Sadr, was the surprise winner with 54 seats.