BAGHDAD — After almost five years of war, many young people in Iraq, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach. In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives. ‘I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us,’ said Sara, a high school student in Basra. ‘Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.’ Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: ‘The religion men are liars. Young people don’t believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore.’ The shift in Iraq runs counter to trends of rising religious practice among young people across much of the Middle East, where religion has replaced nationalism as a unifying ideology. While […]