Politics & Power Quote by Muqtada al Sadr

Al Sadr is doing two things at once: staking an unshakable claim to legitimacy and laundering ambition through the language of humility. The opening line is a refusal to be treated as a provisional actor, one who only matters under the shadow of occupation or international supervision. By insisting he is "part of the political process" regardless of "multinational forces", he recasts foreign presence as incidental to Iraqi sovereignty and to his own standing. It is a subtle power move: if politics continues with or without them, then the real center of gravity is internal, and he is already sitting at it.

The second sentence performs a familiar clerical-political maneuver, turning morality into a credential. "Serving the people" invokes a religiously inflected ethic of stewardship, while "chairs and positions" shrinks the transactional side of politics into petty furniture. The phrasing is pointed because everyone knows chairs are exactly what post-2003 Iraqi politics has been about: ministries carved up, patronage networks fed, alliances traded like currency. Al Sadr condemns that game while signaling he is not above playing it; he simply wants to be seen as the corrective to it.

Context matters: as a populist Shiite cleric with a street movement and a militia legacy, he has often positioned himself as both insider and insurgent, participating in elections while threatening withdrawal, denouncing corruption while leveraging institutions. The quote is less a sermon than a warning: he can claim the mantle of popular service, and he can delegitimize rivals as mere seat-hunters, all while reminding foreign actors that their leverage is not absolute.