In one of the most macabre scenes of modern Iraqi history, just moments before Saddam Husayn’s execution on December 30, 2006, spectators chanted and jeered in the death chamber. Saddam mocked the crowd’s chants for Muqtada Sadr: “Is this the bravery of the Arabs?” The crowd retorted, “Long live Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr!” The viral shaky cell-phone footage of this spectacle captured onlookers celebrating the meting out of what they viewed as poetic justice. For, when challenged, the crowd deployed the powerful memory of the martyrdom of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr – the Shi‘i cleric and Iraqi intellectual executed at the hands of the Ba’th regime on April 9, 1980. Hours after Saddam met the same fate he had inflicted on Sadr in the aftermath of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Iraq’s national security adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubay‘i appeared on national television to hail a new era for Iraq, He proclaimed: “This dark page has been turned over … Saddam is gone. Today Iraq is an Iraq for all the Iraqis, and all the Iraqis are looking forward.”1 Since 2003, as Iraqis have negotiated what an Iraq for all Iraqis means, many political and social actors have called upon the thought, activism, and martyrdom of Sadr; the difficulty being that his rich oeuvre and symbolism offer a reservoir of meaning and paths forward.