The Epistemic Modes of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Charisma Production on Hybrid Media

Abstract Muqtada al-Sadr’s charismatic authority helps enable his power to emotionally motivate millions from the religious populist Sadri movement to partake in elections, protests, and armed struggle in Iraq. Hybrid media is a significant space that promotes his charisma via ‘epistemic modes’, which are contestations over what types of knowledge are deemed true. This paper conducts a virtual ethnography of Sadri hybrid media, whilst contending for the ‘affective bond’ as a suitable conceptual framework to analyse content that propagates al-Sadr’s image. The affective bond treats charisma as absolute trust, premised upon followers’ recognition of their leader as a symbol of legitimacy, hope, and authenticity. This highlights the interrelationship between these perceptions in creating charisma. Concurrently, the affective bond renders visible how everyday online communicative and interpretive practices transform Sadri hybrid media into a space whereby performance, culture, stories, narratives, structural circumstances, and religio-populist identity, intersect to produce Muqtada’s charisma through audiovisual materials.