Order out of Chaos explains why Iraqis turned to the mosque after state collapse. In 2003, the US-led invasion of Iraq destroyed the Bathist state. Despite this the citizens of Basra established predictable routines of daily life and social order as the familiar and customary structures of state-imposed order collapsed. What enabled individuals in Basra to work together to produce order amid anarchy? The answer: the Friday mosque.

A week after the regime fell, Shii imams introduced Friday congregational prayers and associated sermons for the first time in most places since the 1950s. These sermons facilitated the spread of common knowledge and coordination, both locally and nationally, and contributed to the emergence of a relatively cohesive imagined community of Iraqi Shia that came to dominate Iraq's political order.

Combining rational choice approaches, ethnographic understanding, and GIS analysis, David Siddhartha Patel reveals the interconnectedness of the enduring problem of how societies create social order in a stateless environment, the origins and limits of political authority and leadership, and the social and political salience of collective identity.

David Siddhartha Patel is Senior Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Follow him on X @davidspatel.

Patel's work succeeds in being a novel contribution to the extensive work on how occupation forces were unable to prevent the breakdown of order, along with how the tenure of the Coalition Provisional Authority presided over Iraq's descent into chaos. Scholars of Iraq across the disciplines will be particularly interested in reading. Despite the ground to cover between social order at the neighborhood level and political authority at the national level, Patel has succeeded in writing a highly readable and relatively concise book on the subject.

This is an extremely well-written interdisciplinary book with much to offer to those interested not just in Iraq, the Muslim world, sectarianism, or the Middle East, but also in the potential and limits of religious authority and its relationship to collective political action and identity.

Whereas the dismantling of the Ba'athist state clearly led to social disorder, Basra in 2003 hardly resembled a Hobbesian state of nature; that is, an institution-free zone. To what extent could they fill in for the absent state? And if they could, which ones would be most effective in producing social order? These are the principal questions that the book seeks to answer. Patel finds that these preexisting institutions could only provide a modicum of social order.

In this examination of social and political organization in Basra in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion and the subsequent collapse of the Iraqi government, Patel provides a subtle, persuasive answer in documenting the rise of Shiite political leaders and movements in the city.

Liam Anderson, Wright State University, coauthor of The Future of Iraq:

A compelling combination of rigorous ethnography and social science. David Patel was in Basra at a critical period in Iraq's recent history and his insider knowledge of it is invaluable.

Lisa Blaydes, Stanford University, author of State of Repression:

Order out of Chaos is an absorbing read reflecting David Siddhartha Patel's on-the-ground view of Iraq in the wake of the US invasion and a major contribution toward understanding how societies rebuild themselves under the most difficult of circumstances.