Nominations for The Muslim 500, 2024 edition are Now CLOSED

The son of the late Grand Ayatollah Moham­mad Sadiq Al-Sadr, and son-in-law of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir Al-Sadr, Muqtada is a highly influential leader who inherited con­trol over large social institutions that served mil­lions in the slums of Baghdad.

Serving the Poor: He has focussed on serving Iraq’s poor Shia Muslims and has had complete free­dom to work in many parts of Iraq, especially Sadr City, a district in Baghdad named after his father. He provides healthcare and access to food and clean water. He has raised issues of corruption, high unem­ployment and poor government services.

Politics: He gained prominence after the US in­vasion of Iraq by creating the Mahdi Army, an armed insurgency movement that formed its own courts and system of law enforcement. This is now known as Saraya Al-Salam. Through it he has concentrated on campaigning against corruption in Iraq, criticising the government openly about this. He has worked for Shia-Sunni unity, and in 2017 called for Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad to step down, and also met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

King-Maker: The Sadirist-led coalition won 73 seats in the 2021 elections, beating the Iranian backed coalition, but months later a new government had still not been formed. The principle of ‘consensus government’, meaning that all political parties are included in administration, has come under fire for this, and after Sadr withdrew his coalition and stated he would quit politics there were violent clashes between the supporters of the two coalitions. This led to fears of an all-out intra-Shia civil war, but Sadr again played a prominent role in preventing this.