NEWS ANALYSIS : Hussein Invokes Islamic Fervor in Political Bid to Win the War : Strategy: He built modern Iraq on secular values. But now, out of shrewdness or desperation, he’s turning to faith.

It was midday prayers Friday at the Great Mosque of Kadhamiya, the holiest shrine of Baghdad. But the mood was hardly that of President Saddam Hussein’s carefully crafted modern, secular state.

It recalled a different time, a different place and a different man who once held American hostages.

“The Muslims must fight the jihad (holy war),” the Iraqi imam, or prayer leader, was shouting through speakers inside the gold-and-tile minarets, “the jihad that will happen, the jihad against the enemies of Islam, of the Arab homeland, of all the Muslims and our brothers.

“There is only one religion, one Islam, one jihad--against America and her allies. . . . Our jihad . . . O Allah . . . Our right . . . O Allah . . . our great leader . . . O Allah.”

Outside, plastered on the walls of the great mosque, were posters of Iraq’s Great Leader, the man who set the tone for the imam’s Friday sermon, a man in military uniform and beret, kneeling and kissing the holy shrine at Mecca.

And in the midst of the wall posters, a prominent banner had been freshly hung announcing the start of special study sessions in the holy book of Islam later this month at “The Saddam Center for the Reading of the Koran.”

All this for a man whose ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party was founded by a Christian, whose party constitution advocates in its preamble the creation of “a new Arab generation . . . which welcomes scientific thought and which is free of the bonds of superstition and of retrograde tradition,” and whose brutal eight-year war against Iran and its ayatollah was fought largely to defeat the very imagery he is now evoking.

The reason for the apparent contradiction: Just two days before the Friday prayers, amid the most serious crisis in his 13 years in power, Saddam Hussein played one of his strategic cards.

In a half-hour speech to the world and his nation, the Iraqi president repeatedly called on “the faithful” Muslims of the world to unite against the Western “infidel” armies that now surround him, and he declared, “A sacred jihad is right for us, all of us, to liberate from evil and occupation the two sacred sites” of Saudi Arabia, where the multinational forces are now just a few dozen miles from his own troops.

For many in the West, it was blatant hypocrisy, an almost total betrayal of the basic tenets of Hussein’s party, which has built Iraq into a modern state largely through its devout adherence to technology over theocracy. Western analysts described him as a born-again Muslim, an ayatollah of opportunity.

Such analysts added that, by playing the so-called “Islamic card,” the Iraqi president signaled that he was so desperate to find international support in a world now spending billions of dollars to isolate him that he has had to sacrifice even the basic principles that have guided Iraq since his Baathist party overthrew the Iraqi monarchy 22 years ago.

But to political and religious analysts in Baghdad who have studied the president for months or years, this week’s call for the holy war against America and the West was simply vintage Saddam Hussein--yet another shrewd and carefully timed political move to find a way out of the international stranglehold increasingly crippling his nation.

“You could say desperation, or you could say very clever,” one veteran Western diplomat in Baghdad said of the fundamentalist overtones of Hussein’s new line. “After all, doesn’t it appeal to every Muslim at the basic level?”

What is more, he added, such rhetoric has inherent intimidation value against a nation such as America, which endured 444 days of humiliation while its hostages were kept by Muslim fundamentalists in Iran a decade ago.

“Isn’t he also raising a specter we all should be afraid of--wild-eyed Arabs and Muslims raising daggers at night and slashing through their infidel enemies?” the diplomat added.

“But, clearly, the tone was deeply religious and uncharacteristic for Hussein. He really sounded almost like a mullah . . . and Baathism was to unite the Arabs, not divide them, over religion.”

Officially, the Iraqi government said it saw no contradictions in the radical change in tone of its leader on the issue of religion.

“In principle, the Baath Party is not neutral on the question of faith versus atheism,” said Naji Hadithi, the top government spokesman. “Our attitude, however, is that religion should not be used as a base for regimes.”

Indeed, Iraq has all the trappings of a secular state. Liquor is legal and openly consumed. Mosques are full only on Fridays, the Muslim Sabbath. And many women wear Western dress, with even fundamentalist Shiite Muslim women leaving their faces exposed under their head scarves and black chadors.

Clearly, Hadithi’s reference was meant to blunt any comparisons between the new line of Saddam Hussein and that of his late, bitter enemy, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whom the Iraqi president expelled from his exile home in Iraq’s Shiite shrine city of Karbala years before their two nations locked themselves in a combat that was to last eight years.

Throughout the protracted conflict between Iran and Iraq, which left an estimated half a million dead on each side, President Hussein was particularly brutal on the issue of Islamic fundamentalism and, some sources say, on the Shiite sect that makes up about half of the Iraqi population but the overwhelming majority of Iran’s.

Even Shiite soldiers who fought for the president, himself a member of Islam’s Sunni sect, complained that they had to shave their traditional beards to avoid suspicion of collaborating with the enemy, and dark rumors of disappearances and executions of Iraqi Shiite leaders who allegedly plotted against Hussein persist in Iraq’s Shiite community.

But the war years, from the end of 1979 until 1988, also marked the first time President Hussein used the issue of religion politically and strategically. In late 1983, when Iraq’s military position against its larger neighbor appeared to be weakening, Hussein announced a billion-dollar program to refurbish the shrines of the Prophet Mohammed’s grandchildren in the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, the holiest sites for Shiite Muslims after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.

For years after the announcement, the finest Persian artisans, tile-makers and gold-dome platers spent endless days and hundreds of millions of dollars giving the two mosques their first major face lift in centuries.

The iron-hand-in-a-velvet-glove strategy apparently worked well during the Iran-Iraq War, and, through whatever means required, Hussein succeeded not only in keeping Iraq’s Shiites in check but also in raising tens of millions of dollars for his war effort against a religious extremist far more frightening than he--most of it from his onetime allies in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and even Kuwait, which Hussein has now invaded and annexed.

But now, just two years after peace between Iraq and Iran, those old-time alliances in the gulf have been flipped upside-down, and most analysts here were skeptical whether the religious card Hussein played this week will have much impact on the Islamic world as a whole.

One diplomat from a Muslim country, in analyzing the president’s new fundamentalist tone, did little to hide his cynicism.

“He thinks that, if he can present the case as a conflict between Muslims and Christians, he can have more support,” the Muslim diplomat said. “When you’re cornered, you do not hesitate to use any means.”

He concluded, however, that the governments of most Muslim nations--which are well aware of the basic tenets of an Iraqi ruling party founded by Michel Aflaq, a Christian, in 1947--will be slow to respond to Hussein’s call for a holy war in the gulf.

And if a small sampling of the reaction from among Iraq’s own faithful outside the Great Mosque of Kadhamiya on Friday was typical, the new government line may well have had as little impact at home.

Asked after prayers about their opinion of both Hussein’s speech and the imam’s sermon, most appeared confused at best.

“It is not President Saddam Hussein who calls for a jihad,” said one devout Shiite thoughtfully. “He is our political leader, and he decides what our government and our army will do, how we should live.

“The jihad can only be called by the great imam of Iraq, Abu Qasim, in Najaf. You should ask him about this.”

The worshiper, himself a former soldier who fought for four years against Iran, was then asked whether the speech and subsequent sermon inspired him to fight in a holy war against America.

“You must listen to what the imam said today very closely,” he answered. “He also spoke long about peace. He said, ‘Mohammed, the prophet, spent his life seeking peace.’

“Believe me, we want peace. We have had too much of war. . . . And now, the people are afraid that America will drop a nuclear bomb on us, and we’ll all be finished.

“Believe me, no one here wants war. Maybe, the imam was only saying what President Saddam Hussein said, and maybe it was only politics.”