Saddam Hussein and Islam, 1968 2003, offers an intellectual history of the Ba`thi Party from the 1940s through 2003. Amatzia Baram focuses on the transition from its early insistence on "unity, freedom, and socialism" to its Islamization by the time it was toppled by U.S. forces in 2003, a change largely impelled by the need to rally Iraqis against Iran during their war of 1980 88. Baram reveals signs that Saddam Hussein himself became some sort of born-again Muslim, though these signs are inconclusive.
Sources include open source material but also internal secret files and highly classified audiotapes of Saddam Hussein that were made available to researchers at the Conflict Records Research Center at National Defense University and some documents at the Hoover Institution.