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As the world focuses on the conflict in Iraq, the most important political players in that country today are not the Sunni insurgents. Instead, they are Iraq's Shi'I majority--part of the Middle East's ninety million Shi'I Muslims who hold the key to the future of the region and the relations between Muslim and Western societies. So contends Yitzhak Nakash, one of the world's foremost experts on Shi'ism. With his characteristic verve and style, Nakash traces the role of the Shi'is in the struggle that is raging today among Muslims for the soul of Islam. He shows that in contrast to the grow

Discusses political relations between the Shiite majority and Sunni minority, nationalism, and the post-Saddam Hussein government; since 1921.

This article focuses on two major aspects of the Mahdist political economy, i.e., its fiscal and monetary systems. It attempts to integrate an analysis of their structure with that of the political behavior of the Mahdist rulers in order to show how the Mahdist rulers' political power and personal aspirations affected the development of both systems. In doing so, the article will be primarily concerned with the struggle of the successors of the Mahdi for resource control; it will examine the efforts of the ruling group to control and manipulate the fiscal and monetary systems in order to turn these—and indeed the economy as a whole—into a power base so as to preserve the established political order.