White God won the Prize Un Certain Regard at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and the Octopus d’Or at the Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival for the Best International Feature Film. Mithun Chakraborty played a supporting role in the film. The Shia were generally less well-off economically and socially, and as a result, they supported leftist parties, such as Iraqi Communist Party which was founded by Husain al-Rahhal in 1934, and the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party in Iraq, which was also founded by a Shia, Fuad al-Rikabi. In 1963, a coalition of military officers and others led by the Arab nationalist and socialist Ba’ath Party seized power in a coup. In the south, the rebels seized the shrine as Ba’ath Party officials fled the city or were killed. Subsequently, the regime banned annual Marad al-ras processions during the Mourning of Muharram in the shrine cities, where mass discontent had been evident in 1974 and 1975. In 1977, tens of thousands of Dawa activists held the processions in defiance of the ban, leading to large-scale clashes known as the Safar Intifada that the regime quelled with the use of helicopter gunships. Many of the people killed were buried in mass graves.

People often depicted him as a skeletal figure wearing a skull mask. One of the most famous forms is the Grim Reaper, which is a skeletal figure in a black robe holding a scythe who comes to claim the souls of the dead. Hubbard also liked to say he was an elite commander who captained a fleet of ships. For example, figures such as Saladin, Harun al-Rashid or Omar ibn al-Khattab who were venerated by Arab nationalists are viewed with suspicion in Shia folklore. These events and experiences can serve as crucial opportunities for those who have left their childhood faith to reconnect to a religious community. 7 He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap. After the fall of the Emirate of Muhammara, an autonomous emirate of the Shia Banu Kaab between 1812 and 1925 in modern-day Khuzestan province, many Iranian Arabs fled to southern Iraq, further inflating the Shia population in the south. Due to discrimination by the Sunni government, the Shia became increasingly disaffected during the last 1960s and 1970s. By 1968, Dawa could claim a mass following, and the Baath began to consider it a threat.

Of the 200 mass graves the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry had registered between 2003 and 2006, the majority were in the South, including one believed to hold as many as 10,000 victims. To counter the intellectual hold of the left, a group of clerics in Najaf created a movement that eventually evolved into the Dawa party. In 1982, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq was formed in Iran by Iraqi cleric Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim as an umbrella group to overthrow Iraq’s Sunni-dominated regime. Under the Kingdom of Iraq, the Shia tribes of the mid-Euphrates region saw themselves increasingly under-represented in the Sunni-dominated Iraqi government, which further deteriorated with the exclusion of key Shia sheikhs from the Iraqi parliament in 1934 elections. The region experienced turbulence for many years as Arab countries fell within the cultural and colonial sphere of European nations. Until the 1990s migration from the European sector to Siberia was the primary cause of regional variations in population growth rates. Indeed, fertility differences between religious groups are one of the key factors behind current population trends and will be important for future growth. The CIA World Factbook reports a 2015 estimate according to which 29-34% are Sunni Muslims and 61-64% Shia Muslims.

A short period of rest once again occurred during the 1999 Shia uprising in Iraq after the killing of Muhammad-Sadiq al-Sadr in the Shia neighborhoods of Baghdad, as well as southern majority Shiite cities of Karbala, Nasiriyah, Kufa, Najaf, and Basra. Yet, we rarely talk about Iraq when analyzing regional commonalities and divergences; Iraqi Islamists are largely absent from comparative discussions. Large Shiite minority communities are also in Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and Lebanon. Unrest renewed with the 1991 Iraqi uprisings throughout Iraq, which took place in the Shiite and Kurdish areas of the country. In 1974, amid rising discontent due to casualties in the Kurdish insurgency, the regime executed five leading Dawa members. Abdul Salam Arif, president from the 1963 coup until his death in 1966, used derogatory terms in leadership meetings to describe Iraqi Shia and opposed his predecessor Abd al-Karim Qasim’s policy of bringing all citizens into the regime regardless of ethnicity or religion.