In the new Iraq , even the Communist Party has adopted the politics of religion.
Karl Marx may have denounced it as the opiate of the masses, but Iraqi communists are promoting religion as a central part of the national fabric.
"We are a country where the absolute majority are Muslims and we cannot ignore the fact that Islam could be in many ways important for us," said Minister of Culture Mofeed al-Jazaeri.
Jazaeri, a member of the Communist Party's politburo, says the priority for Iraq today is not the secular separation of religion and state, but promoting a culture of democracy that accommodates Iraq's delicate ethnic and religious mix.
"We are trying to create a new democratic Iraq," he told Reuters in an interview.
"There is an organic relationship between culture and democracy. It's impossible to develop one without the other. We can't build a democratic system without developing culture."
Iraq has changed markedly since the heyday of Communist Party power in Iraq of the 1950s and 60s. Three decades of rule by the secular Baath Party crushed the communists as well as various religious groups.
In post-Saddam Iraq religious politics have come to dominate with a vengeance and the country's long-suppressed Shi'ite majority have taken pole position in the political scene.
Washington gave Shi'ites half the seats on its transitional Governing Council, which is already replacing Arabist ideology with Islamic slogans.
This month the council said the new Iraq's nascent political system would "respect the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people."
Jazaeri says secularism in Iraq is contingent upon "full respect for the different religious groups so that they have absolute freedom just like all other political and social groups."
ATHEISM OUT OF FASHION
Many Iraqis say the presence on the Governing Council of a minister from a party seen as atheist is a sign that the U.S.-led administration is out of touch.
Communists in the cabinet are an oddity in the Arab world, where the word "secularism" is regarded with suspicion in public discourse.
"They had a role in the past, but anyone will tell you they are just in it for themselves and they are not religious," said Sadek, a Sunni Muslim, in a typical comment heard on the streets of Baghdad.
"I don't know anything about the Communist Party. The Baath experience has left a bad impression in people's minds about parties in general," he said.
Abdel-Latif al-Saadi, an editor of the communist weekly paper Tariq al-Shaab (The Path of the People), said secularists were on the run because Saddam had exploited religion.
"Our society used to be more secular than other Arab societies and we didn't have religious extremism. Then Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) exploited religion," he said, referring to the "great faith campaign" of mosque-building in the 1990s.
Iraq, like the rest of the Arab world, has been part of a great turning away from the secular Arab national politics of the 1960s to religion, he conceded.
"I used to be able to discuss the existence of God with the Islamists, now I couldn't do that," Saadi said.
Jazaeri said he didn't fear religion, only that authoritarian and charismatic politicians could exploit it.
"Our relationship with the religious parties were and are good. We were struggling together against the dictatorship," he said. "We are not afraid of religious groups because they are religious, we are afraid of extremists."